I’m back, baby! Newly sun burned and with a well practiced ability to make teenagers do push ups as punishment for throwing around toilet paper packs inside the store, I have done my turn.
The only question now is where will the 500+ imps and bats led by Grandfather Earth and his Arch Devil buddies go?
LMAO! I forgot how bad my last turn was. 9 provinces left, no way to defend from some angles, lost pretender due to dome attack haha. Oh, the world of Dominions :).
If anyone’s interested in taking the helm of my nation, please PM me. I’m arguably the strongest nation in the game, with good position, good toys, good gems, research, etc. as the game is entering late game. It’s a wonderful opportunity for someone who’s always wanted to play in this kind of situation in a game that is still very much from being decided.
well in a showdown (accidental) between an air queen and an archdevil, it appears that the archdevil wins every time!
boo hoo, i knew thee well, Horatio etc
WyldRyde 3 AAR- Bogarus
WyldRyde 3, a Late age game with constrained gold, resources, and supplies. These settings would impact the game more than the previous two ages because Late Age is when armor and weapons graduated to plate armor and halberds, crossbows and longbows. Even the independent provinces have knights, and plenty of them, since the Late age provinces generally have higher population counts as well.
This, combined with the knowledge that the percentage of magic sites in the Late Age is the lowest of the three ages, meant that I could not rely on getting a good supply of gems to power my economy, once I transitioned from buying normal troops to summons. And since higher population provinces means more provinces to blood hunt in, it was easy to pick a nation with blood.
Of course, that five seconds of reasoning was done by at least two other players in the game as well. Kelan with Xiabalba, a bat nation he has previous experience with. Pyrhic went with Marignon, a mix of blood and holy power. Strato went with Death centered Ctis, and OtTheGreat played against type and with with Jomon, a vanilla build that turned out splendidly, since no one else went that route.
I picked Bogarus in part because of thier summons, their immensely powerful capital mage, and because I had recently played Vanarus in another multiplayer game, I felt comfortable with them. Other things that I liked were the utility of a sneaking, sacred B2H2 non capital mage, and that the capital had 3 command points each turn instead of 2. The Malaia Druz cavalry were excellent, but balanced by my chaff troops being abysmal, with a morale of 8 and similar combat skills.
However, experimenting in how to expand with such paltry resources was not easy. In the end, I decided to go for a Luck/Turmoil build, augmented by some of my mages who could prevent bad events, and my ability to summon firebirds to help my luck. Expansion would be handled by an awake Fire dragon. For the bless, since the only sacreds I had were Flagellants, I went with the fire explosion on a whim. I had some hope that it would be annoying, but if nothing else, it would be funny.
Instead of relying on human troops as the bulk of my meat shields, I started summoning bone devils early, as well as fire drakes from my dragon. Both of them came into their own late in the game against the bats, with the fire drakes doing a surpisingly good job.
The early game went well, until the Fire Nation atta…err, until Lemuria decided to scream and leap at me. I was surprised at his pick of targets - I can buy sneaking H1 priests, H3 priests, I can summon H3 and H2 flying priests, and have both death and blood mages, in addition to fire. I was expecting Lemuria to go after the bats or Jomon- ethreal legionares should clean up tiny flying things with obsidian daggers, and the Jomon footmen do not get magical weapons, and thier priest power is not that great either.
Lemuria’s initial pushes were hard to mass opposition to, since they required some troops to stand between the slavering hordes of undead and my priests. And my morale 8 troops were not cutting it. The handful of bone devils, elite calvary, and whatever else I could scrape up went into the grinding battle of attrition in my frozen lands. For many turns I did not even buy mages, instead spending my few gold coins on priests. The line was held by wave upon wave of Flagellants, who occaisionally burst into flame after being blessed by an errant priest.
Having thwarted the inital attack, I pushed into Lemuria territory, preaching as I went. It was here that I realized I needed help. Lemuria effortlessly summoned more troops while I labored to ferry mine to the front, which was now in his dominion. The barren frozen wastelands held barely any population, and my troops almost immediately began starving. I had no nature magic, no nature income, and soon I had to retreat, or risk having my army waste to nothing. Calls went out to everyone else, pointing out how Lemuria looked a lot like Ashen Empire in the Middle age, and how if he gets out of control now, we are all done for.
Fortunately for me, that call was heeded. Jomon and Mariginon entered against Lemuria, while Ctis aided Bogarus with cauldrons and bags of wine. My few scouts, congratulating themselves on watching the others advance, also brought me news- my magic research was way behind.
Panicked, I turned to making quills, imps, and lanterns, trying to augment my slim research in any way. My income started coming up again, but soon flatlined- mages who cost 400 gold each and are not sacred, are not cheap. I decided to ignore all other schools of magic and went Blood all the way to 9.
Along the way, Lemuria surged and fought, and was eventually ground down to a husk. The player for Jomon had to leave, so it was an easy switch to have the Lemurian player pick up Jomon. Marigion moved in and took out the embers of Lemuria.
That begun the uneasy peace, as we all looked around at each other. I tried to not look as weak as I thought my nation was. But it wasnt easy. In talks with Xiababla, he was quite happy with his progress, having summoned all the Arch Devils (later found out that Marignon had one of the 5). I found out about this a bit too late, after trying to summon one of them. I did manage to snag a Heliophagus, but did not even try to get others. Instead, I scripted my mages to concentrate on anti super combatant spells, and tried to build up slaves for the blood 9 summons.
Ctis proposed that Jomon and Bogarus join him in attacking Mariginon or Xiabalba. We all thought Xiabalba was the strongest, and thus should be reduced. In addition, the priest power of Marigion against the undead hordes of Ctis and my bone devil legion were a factor.
The war against XIabalba went differently than I expected. I only experienced a lot of raiding against my lands with 2 teams of two arch devils, kitted out with melee gear, and some assorted devil bodyguards. Usually I was able to pick the province back up the next turn, since Xiabalba did not have a lot of gold left to buy provincial defense. I know Ctis was trying to wage economic warfare on him, while my one seeking arrow a turn was hopefully doing…something. My early raiding with Send Horror did not work against the blood hunters, since they just cast Leech.
Finally, I was able to mass most of my mages protected by a bunch of chaff units- cavalry, archers, bone devils, fire drakes, spring hawks, imps, and random event generated melee troops. I put them all in a donut shape around my mages and thier 6 or so blood slaves each, and went in against Xiabalba.
In our climatic battle, my chaff died in droves, routing me off the battlefield, but not before killing off 2 Heliophagus and 4 Arch devils, in addition to other assorted kills. While Life for Life remained something my mages refused to cast, instead deciding to cast Bloodletting, which contributed to my own rout, the sheer number of Leech spells that came out proved too much.
Only too late did I realize that the Turmoil Luck build I started with was not fully implemented. Critically, I did not have a mass of FireBirds to ensure good events, and I strongly suspect mass castings of Baleful Star contributed to my string of bad random events. In addition, I was not able to expand beyond my core strength of blood magic, in part because of the early war against Lemuria.
Looking at the game now, I think that the restrictive settings do not work for the Late Age. With the Early Age, the gold restriction forced you to be inventive with your spells and gems. This was a good thing, and made for wonderful creative gameplay. But given the Late Age’s lack of gems, and relatively weak mages, the lack of gold and gems just merely dragged out the beginning stages of the game further, with the players reluctant to attack until they had a force that more resembled what they were used to.
I think blood slaves is directly linked to the magic site chances, so despite having higher population, blood slaves are still harder to find. I might be wrong though.
Hi. I have, basically, not read this thread but I want to play a multiplayer game of Dominions 5. You guys seem like you would know where that can be done (also you seem like you’re already in the middle of at least one game)
Nice write up!
One quick point, Marignon never had an archdevil, though perhaps we might have inferred we had one. We’re like that sometimes…
@a1s we just finished off the only game i’m aware of here. We were chatting about starting up another, and there might be more than one in the making - what multiplayer experience do you have with dom5(or any dom)?
Great write up Akaoni.
I was playing C’Tis and on turn one of the game, I thought I would be in good contention to win the game. I’ve had experience playing as this nation before and was familiar with their mechanic of being able to summon undead. Think of them as the good guys of death magic, whereas Lemuria, Ermor and their ilk are clearly evil. C’Tis doesn’t rely on pop kill to summon undead. Instead they have three national spells from turn one that require only death paths to cast, some liberal death gems on hand to spend, and out pops an undead priest who can freely summon undead units to our collective cause. These undead were going to be the bulk of my army seeing as resources were constrained enough to prevent large armies from forming in a hurry. A second reason to go C’Tis is because I didn’t want to rely on blood magic. With income also down, killing my population to get slaves didn’t make economical sense to me. I was wrong. The two strongest nations in the game both had a blood economy going and didn’t seem too badly impacted from it. Well I assume Marignon had a blood economy, but can’t verify.
The second feature of the undead priests was to put them into a thug role. Given the changes to bless mechanics, I decided to play with the idea of having them be something akin to my lieutenants on the field, a small army of undead by their side, self casting bless and sweeping across my enemy’s land. The priests could shrug off bless attacks with a boost to MR, an undead army of chaff to wear down the opposition, buffed again by my priest if needed, and have a decent HP pool to take a hit and survive.
Where this plan failed spectacularly was the absence of death gems in my lands. I searched and searched and searched, and at the height of my peaceful expansion, was bringing in 6 death gems per turn. The cost of each tomb priest and tomb king is high, and necessitated adaption to my gameplan. Where I was doing poorly with death gems, I had ample nature, earth and astral. With Marignon and Jomon as my two immediate neighbours beating up on Lemuria, while Bogarus barely held on, I had time to shift gears.
My Pretender included nature paths because I planned to summon and Gift of Reason Scorpion Men by end game. They are a formiddable unit in their own right, making them commanders and giving them a better sword makes them much stronger. To complement my Scorpion Men was going to be Ivy Kings that were used to great effect against me in a previous game a year or two back now. Instead I was to bring that plan forward. To take the pressure off my Pretender, I summoned some Lamia Queens that were largely useless with the paths they took on board, but was fortunate enough to get a site that allowed me to recruit N2E2 gnomes if I recall. Easy enough to boost them up to casting the spells I needed.
All the while, my capital was growing with undead. Hundreds of them. Some were regular chaff, some were the tomb serpents who were awfully strong. I just needed some way of managing this great cast of undead. Enter the Banes. Much cheaper than Tomb Priests. Rather than kitting them out in thug gear, I was giving them an ethereral crossbow so they could add some small amount of firepower. Their role was to take charge of about 100 undead and walk through enemy lands. For a cost of 5 astral for the bow, 7 death gems for the summon and time for the summoning of undead, I wasn’t too worried about the losses. In fact, my undead were that expendable I was happy to keep my priests and kings at home always summoning. There would always be more. They were successful when war came in removing Xibalba from the water. They were also largely responsible for the initial push against Xibalba, and I always had them hovering near my main army at the outset of the war to join in the fight when numbers were needed.
The big battle I had against Xibalba I got wrecked. I had no shortage of undead (about 600 units I think) but no where near enough magic support to back them up. I had transported a few casters to the front line in the early stages, but was unable to add too much magic support from there. It was suicide to fight in that situation, I saw the situation, yet I guess with game fatigue I ended up making that ill fated move and Kelan absolutely wrecked my army I had. Should this game have continued, I would imagine I’d have lost all the northern provinces I’d fought for in short time and would need to rally at the natural choke point on the map to try and get things together again for another assault.
@pyrhic : I’ve played 2-3 games of dominions 4, didn’t win any, though. And I played some dominions 5 against the AI, so I think I’m ready for some humans.
Interesting. That could be true, but I was really cranking in the blood slaves when you guys decided to attack me… like 120-140 a turn. You ruined all my wonderful plans!
So I am looking at @pyrhic 's turn 78, and its amusing to see the differences between his play style and mine.
Either I really suck at gem searching, and pyrhic excels, at it, or pyrhic hoards his gems. He had about 200 air, 200 water, 300 earth, and 200 nature gems. Me, I was casting alchemy spells to turn my earth and fire gems into gold fairly early on in order to pump out more priests. At no time did I ever look at my gem income and say, “huh, only 50?”
Who would have thought a giant head would have so much fatigue that it needs a belt?
I feel…flattered… that there are so many Mariginon scouts in Bogarus lands. 12 in Bogarus, and only 7 in Jomon. At least none of them were assassins.
well, even without my globals, i have better gem income than you. Many, if not most, of my provinces have been searched to at least 1 in every path and most have been searched for a while now. Since I didn’t come into death until the end, that was the notable exception that hasn’t been exclusively searched for. Also, you’ve been at war for what, 60 turns now? And your wars have been the brutal, need to survive, kind as oppose to my less threatening style conflicts. And actually, i did realize that i wasn’t really using my gems - i think when i started burning off big summons for trolls and legendaries, i was around 4 or 5 hundred earth and just a little less water. I also noticed your stockpile of magic is rather…pitiful.
I was thinking of using him in combat so i had him don a belt. I thought of it more as a bandana though…
Well, I wouldn’t feel flattered. They were mainly there to watch the border clashes and i moved them between the borders frequently. They did tend to cluster a little more on the bogarus side of the border because life expectancy in the xibalda lands was rather short…
I will try to do a short write up of what I remember from the game… It will probably be a little general, but better than nothing hopefully!
For my pretender I took one of my old favorites, a great enchantress with free astral pearls and quite a few paths in the 4-5 range. I decided on favoring scales over an awake, strong pretender so I went imprisoned and believe I managed to fit in Order 3, Luck 3, Growth 3 which worked out awesome for my blood hunting and I did manage to get several 500+ and 1000+ gold events, which were huge. Even while pulling in the 120+ slaves a turn later in the game, I wasn’t losing income and believe it was even slightly increasing. I also went with Sloth 3 and probably some hits on temperature and Drain to be able to make everything fit.
The expansion phase didn’t go too well, but I believe I was able to at least hold my own enough to not fall far behind. The map really did end up being a big problem for me with my capitol bordering water on one side and a single land province bordering all rivers and sea on another, and only one small path to take any land units the other way. The rivers were never going to freeze with my high heat scale, so it really limited my options and mobility. I had played Early Age Xibalba well and won a game swarming with my bats with demon/devil support and was hoping to do the same here while using the good underwater troops to establish a strong sea presence. What happened was a had two major battle losses early that really hurt. One was with a large army of bats that got mostly wiped out and routed by the stronger Late Age independent troops. Later on, I made a large effort to take the underwater throne that was further limiting my expansion and mobility in the Sea and lost a huge army and lots of resources when I stupidly thought Darkness was going to have an effect on the 200+ Amber Triton army. I had a decent supply of the large sacred troops with 30+ Sacred Scorpions and 30 or so large recruited sacred Wo’ Muuch backed by some decent infantry and nets with mage support. They didn’t hold up near as well as I had hoped and got wiped out along with some good mages.
I recovered well enough on the land to keep gaining provinces and was able to go around the Throne in the Sea and take some more provinces and believe I had my fair share. I was really overextended in the water, though, and once the wars started, I had no means to hold them. I had great luck with Death gem sites and was remote site searching for Death very early. Probably by turn 30 I had an income of over 15 per turn and was forging Skull Mentors like they were going out of style. I probably had 40 of them at the end and my research was robust, I believe, and was over 1000 a turn mid game. I felt I was really coming into my own and ready to forge a war on either Jomon or Marignon when both C’tis and Bogarus attacked. I tried to raid and disrupt with my Arch Devils and Helio, but I wasn’t making a dent and was unable to push any fronts on either side on land. In the meantime, I was getting hammered by Blight and remote attacks and didn’t have decent enough armies at home to defend all the attacks and was slowly worn down by what I felt was some masterful coordination by the two nations. I did win some big battles late, but the mobility limitations I had and the crappy bat armies hurt me in the end. In hindsight, I should have used more resources to summon demon armies than summoning the fun to play with Helios and Arch Devils as I was woefully short on mobile armies when the wars broke out. I also had Father Illearth, which helped quite a bit with summons and forging.
in the end, I felt I really mismanaged this game and squandered the decent position I thought I had mid game. I also played a bad diplomatic game and sat on my hands a lot longer than I should have. Still, it was an enjoyable game and I believe I learned some valuable lessons that I can hopefully apply in the future.
The other big mistake I made was picking a nation I needed to mass bats to be effective in a game with 50% income. I ran into upkeep issues almost immediately!
So I am currently involved in a MP game with almost the exact opposite settings of WyldRyde, as in 200% more gold, resources, and recruitment, but standard supply setting and everything else.
Currently its just made for more numerous armies of normal troops wandering around. Ironically, its made me concentrate more on geared thugs to help deal the enemy troops, since my own troops aren’t that good.
But I haven’t heard back from @milspec on a team game, and from what I can gather his gang of players have been consumed playing the latest Conan game, so its probably a dead idea.
Alright, fueled by massive quantities of Oktoberfest, I have a BRILLIANT PLAN.
Why dont we, instead of planning, plotting, and executing diabolical plans against each other - join as a team and post a challenge on the steam multiplayer board? We would have to figure out the parameters here first, but I think it would be fun.
Initial thoughts -
llamaserver hosted, disciple game, Early Age, maybe some mods, random map, and we CRUSH THE ENEMY, DRIVE THEM BEFORE US, and HEAR THE LAMENTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.
When it comes to crushing enemies, grinding their skulls into powder, making the rivers and oceans run red with blood, cleansing the lands and turning the sheeple to the one true God, I’m in.
Just when I thought the group of twelve that @milspec knows had burnt out on Dominions, they seem to be back.
There is interest in getting a bunch of people from here to join with his crowd, and do team game of Early Age Dominions. Two teams, who take turns picking the nations. Randomly determined who is on which side.
At least, thats how it looks so far. Early talks, you know…not as decisive as CONAN!
I haven’t play MP Dominions since Dominions 3, so I’m thinking of sticking my toe in by setting up a Comp Stomp Game against the AI. It’ll probably be a straightforward disciple game, with at least 3 AI teams and 1 human team.
Probably daily turns until the one year mark.
Would anyone be interested in that? We can use the GGG discord to set it up. https://discord.gg/9Nba4nc
and of course I’ll cross post this idea with our Compstomp thread.