Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith

Morgan Freeman!

I could no longer hold out. I am now among the fold

Even though I’ve played Dom4 and Dom5, both SP and MP, there’s still basic stuff I don’t get. Such as – I research certain schools to nice levels, but they don’t show up in the lists of available spells for my commanders. I’m talking about spells that have no gem or other requirements. Why is this? What basic thing am I missing here?

Well the spells have level requirements, so maybe the commanders don’t have the right levels in their paths?

Simple example:
image

Research Level 1 Evocation, but the icons on left indicate you need a Level 2 fire mage to cast Flame Bolt.

Thanks, I probably knew that when I played Dom4 (I never played a ton) but seemed to have forgotten that when returning for Dom5.

I found this in the manual:

In order for a mage to cast a spell (a) you must have researched the school up to the level required by the spell, and (b) the mage must have proficiency in the magical path(s) required by a spell, and (c) the mage must have any magical gems or blood slaves required for the spell…

So b) is my problem. I’ve been researching schools but don’t have commanders with the appropriate magic paths. My Pretender does, but not my race’s commanders. Which leads to my next question – is it usually only Pretenders who can use high level spells? Or is there a way to boost the magic paths of a race’s commanders, to add paths to a commander.

I’m playing C’Tis in my MP game, and as far as I can tell only the Shaman even has any magic paths among the commanders. Are other races more likely to have multiple mage-worthy commanders?

Part of pre-game planning is to think about what magic paths and levels your recruitable mages will have. Use that to see what spells are both useful and within reach and plan your research targets accordingly.

Are you playing the age where you can recruit Marshmasters? They should have (from distant memory) water, death and nature plus some useful random additions (determined separately for each mage).

It is really hard / expensive to add a new path to a mage who does not have it. Path-booster items, on the other hand, should be another pre-game planning consideration. I’m sure someone will jump in with the table of path-boosting items. There are also some battlefield spells that can temporarily boost a magic path.

Pretenders can cast high level spells, if built with high levels of magic. That is not the only way to cast those spells. There are several ways to do it.

  1. Site searching -sometimes you find hidden sites that give you different types of mages, like pyromancers, sorcerers, witches, enchantressses, etc. You should always be site searching. I find the “cast monthly ritual” combined with Augury, Hauruspex, Gnome Lore, etc. is the easiest and laziest way to go.

  2. Items - Construction of items that give bonuses to magic abilities is the most common. At low levels, you get earth boots, thistle maces, starshine skull caps, things that give a +1 to a path to the user. At artifact level (construction 8) you get items that give stronger buffs.

3 . Empowerment - take a commander, and click the empowerment options. For a hefty fee in gems, that commander now has a +1 magic skill.

  1. Conjure a better caster - in Conjuration, and somewhat in Blood and Enchantment, you can summon creatures that are perhaps better or different in magic than the mage who summoned it. Lama Queens, Ice Devils, Spectres, Liches, Forest Troll tribes, Hidden in Sand/Ice, and other spells all summon mages with various paths to help you branch out.

Its worth noting that you will probably use all 4 of these options in a game, if you want to win MP.

Very helpful, thanks. I haven’t been doing anything but site searching.

There are still even more ways to gain magic paths:

-With 1 gem a caster can temporally gain +1 to the magic path.
-There are spells like Light of the Northern Star or Summon EarthPower that gives +1 for that battle.

Just an addendum, both of those apply to battle magic only. Don’t go trying to cast a ritual and wonder why adding a gem to their inventory does not open options up.

Yeah, and don’t do what I just did in our MP game where I made my pretender with all these plans to add magic items to it to open up other spells only to find it only has a single Misc slot, lmao.

[s]I was wondering when the 5.10 update was going to be done… I entered this morning in Steam to check, and it was still in 5.09.

Well, it seems a few minutes later I looked, they released 5.11!

[quote]A new nation appears, Mekone is a nation of giants that have unfinished business with the Gods. The random map creation has also been improved together with new features for the map editor. There are also new modding commands, some new contents for other nations, battle AI improvements, performance improvements and a whole bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks.

General

New nation: Mekone
New god epithets
New Hero for EA Ermor
New ritual: Sow Dragon Teeth
New item: Boots of water walking
MA Man recruitment cost tweaks
Attack rear now less reliable
Leper effects only results in one message per province
Battle performance improvement
Huge battles start in slow motion
'x' for super slow motion
Skip turn (n) speeds up more and returns to old playback speed
Raise/lower camera in battle with mouse wheel
Champion's Skull 10 -> 5 death gems
Battle AI slightly more willing to use gems at all
Sun awe more effective during Second Sun and Solar Brilliance
Events cannot occur if affected nation isn't in play
Limit number of units for commanders in events automatically
Fatigue 25 -> 50 for dmg
Took too little damage from communions
Smoother text scaling for income boxes
Too many combat recordings could crash the game
Network clients can change team nbr and pretender/disciple settings
Fix for multimove out of besieged castle
Fix for random gods with 3 in sorcery/element
Fix for communion damage
Fix for battle teleport
Fix for Hunter of Heroes crashing the game
Awe works against trample
Charge bonus is strength limited
Improved message for farstrike spells
Cannot view battlelogs outside combat
Communion fix (Masters casting slave)
Skirmisher trait for Ulm and Mekone
Fix for ranged target prediction
Unholy Weapons now affect pretenders too
Fix for Erytheian princesses and unaging
Fix for Throne of Creation
Shock damage could stun even when no damage was inflicted
Blood slaves started on walls
Fix for host time skew
Stupid units no longer attack themselves
Spellcasters in drawn out single combat will advance eventually
Fix for Mace of Eruption weapon info
Event unrest has a random variation
Chorus communion restricted properly
Prevent events causing negative population
God Vessels unwishable
Network showed disabled nations
Immortal now works when dying from some more unusual circumstances
Higher chance to remove some afflictions when reforming body
Fix for resource computation on multi turn commanders
Ardmon's Soul Trap didn't work
Hall of Fame size didn't wrap around properly
Wait now counts as Defend regarding siege strength
Typos fixed
New events
Stat fixes

Map Related Changes

Can set team start positions in map editor
Can hide flags in map editor
Tweaked filters in map editor
Better island and small sea creation for random maps
Use swapfiles during random map generation (less memory usage)
C'tis doesn't mind starting next to many rivers, others do
Mapeditor: Ctrl-b = load border pic and autocalculate areas
New map command: #teamstart
randommap progress bar improvement

Modding

temporary blood slaves create real blood slaves in battle
event #exactgold didn't work
Fix for modding fly- and explosion particle effects
Armor modding: #magicarmor, #woodenarmor, #ironarmor
Event modding: #req_2monsters, #req_5monsters, #2d3units - #4d3units
Event modding: #cleartag, #claimthrone, #poison, #xp, #kill2d6mon

[/quote]


-Sparta inspired nation.
-They don’t have sacred units.
-The human units are slaves, but can promote to a different (freed?) unit, with a new ability.

-Lots of units with formation fighter, even 8g slaves.
-Naked Olympic disc throwers in battle, lol.
-New ability, skirmishers:


-Gigantes have magical weapons (but without any special effect)
-Several inquisitors, and most commanders also have taskmaster.
-Their most expensive commander is a 330g cyclops with Master Smith 1, Resource bonus 25, F2A1E2 + ?1.

Someone is going to have to research how the unrest thing work in Mekone.

The more human slaves you have, the more unrest suffer you forted provinces?
I think some giant commanders can lower the unrest with their presence, even if they don’t have any visible ability for it, because I saw some unrest drops with no associated event.
On late summer, there is an annual ritual that has to be done, the krypteon, if you don’t have an Ephor in your forts, you suffer an event with ~+14 unrest. if you have him, you have another event on fall where you can lose ~300 populatin but all unrest is eliminated.


If you think about it, this gameplay mechanic represents a fairly disgusting evil nation, even for Dominions standards. They are giant nazis that purge their nation of non-giants regularly in an ritualized way. But it’s also cool because in a way represents religion/ritual/cultural/ethnic issues in a game that usually is played by recruiting pixelmens and throwing them into the blender of battle.

How do you do this?

If you give a caster a gem, then go and script a spell to cast in battle, you will see you can cast a few spells that usually are outside his normal capacity (they appear on the list as normal, instead of in red text, as usually happens when you select a inappropriate spell).

What I meant was the first part – how do you give the caster a gem?

They need to be in a province with a lab and then you can give it to them - I think.

Inside a commander detail unit page, you click on the slots for the gems (on the right side of their magical inventory), then you will have a new window to transfer gems from your treasury to your inventory.

From a lab if there is one in the province, or from another commander present in the province. Scouts and indie recruit commanders are often used to ferry armies, magic items and gems and slaves around to get them where they need to be.