Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith

New update, 5.06:

General
Could not enter 0 for Cave Clustering or Island Chance
Elixir of Life didn’t work
Smoother font scaling for map province names
Commanders could lose their names and orders in multiplayer games, fixed
Help screen for Battle Orders
‘r’ will repeat last single round battle order
Shade Beasts killing size 1 units resulted in huge gods popping up
Changing resource multiple didn’t work
Slightly reduced memory usage
Never use real texture compression on fonts
Prioritize steam key over manually entered key

RIP funny bug:

Working as intended!

I own all the Dominions games but this the first one I am putting the time in to actually know what I am doing. I love it so far but there are some things that annoy me. Am I missing something or are these not possible:

  • no way to restart a random map with the empire you chose or a new empire.
  • no way to place the thrones of ascension when creating a new random map- it tends to have odd placement.
  • why can’t you see the nation details (units, etc) while picking a nation? You only see the units after the nation is selected and then there is no way I see to go back and choose again
  • Anyone researching (tons of dudes in capital) should not show up in the Position Army view or the Army Setup. Also, all the researches in a province should be in a collapsible view.
  • Does anyone else think that each province should have a research cap to force new labs and research center? As far as I can tell you can just recruit them all in the capital.

There actually is, although it’s a bit obtuse. You have to create the pretender (although you can just hit “accept” without using any points) and then accept the default name and then when it gets to the world creation parameters (Game Settings), just hit “Cancel” and it will take you back - hit “cancel” some more times until you get to the first screen so you can select a nation again.

Thanks. That will be helpful when deciding who to play as.

As well as the hack Bruce mentioned, you can browse the units more easily through the ‘Tools/Create Pretender’ feature. This lets you ‘cancel’ straight from viewing a nation back to selecting one.

No idea why that basic feature isn’t available when creating a game!

  1. Press Z in the army setup view. The people with research orders will ‘collapse’.
  2. If you only recruit mages in the capital, you will lose against real players.

Yep, not building labs and recruiting mages in other provinces is a sure-fire way to fall behind the research curve, so against humans is going to cost you. Also, indy mages (ie non-national mages from other provinces) are a key way to get some access to paths your nation otherwise will not have access to, even if only to lay Curse or Seven Year Fever smack down on enemy Pretenders and thugs.

Heck, a bunch of S1 indy mages in a communion can be a seriously nasty addition to your army.

I was reviewing LA Eyrtheia, and I’m not sure what to do with them.

They are half-UW nation but… they are actually ‘poor amphibian’, so it isn’t their strength, and it isn’t like it’s worth for them to go down the water because they have great units there (like LA Atlantis, Jomon or Uruk), their aquatic units are average. I imagine myself doing one UW fort to get the pearl cultivators and some extra gem income and not a lot else.

Their troops suck:

They have a pair fo militia level units.

They have a crossbow unit, but of inferior range than other crossbows, and we are in LA!. It’s nice they can work UW, but only being even closer, the fact they aren’t as good above water is a more important fact than the UW perk.

The sacred unit doesn’t seem bad at first, with their awe and formation fighter, but they are very slow, high encumbrance and high resources, it’s cap only, and their swords aren’t anything special (it’s nice to have something with magical weapons in case the enemy have ethereals, but it doesn’t have any extra secondary effect).

They don’t have any unit with a strong killing power.

You are left only with the Phalangites. Long Spear & Hoplon, Prot 15, Res 20, Formation Fighter. So decent, but as I was seeing they are lacking a hammer for this anvil. LA Arco has at least war elephants, cavalry, even the cerulan warriors.

And in addition, most units can only be recruited or in coastal forts or in UW forts, so be aware that limitation in the middle of the map, if it doesn’t have enough sea.

I guess the answer is obvious.

You are left then with a single tactic: a wall of spears and princes/princesss with random magic boosted by mystic communions. Although it’s kind of hard to plan what I will cast with the randomness. Some examples:

f2a1s1

f2w2e1s1

f1a1e2s2

f2a1w2e1s1

f1a1w1s2

Ugh, I hate having to think an efficient spell list for each mage, for a dozen of them. You can’t really copy and paste the spell script with this variation.

At least in my test I saw that they start with a 3cmdr. points capital fort which it is nice and the whole ‘princes kill each other’ is pure flavor, I had a single (failed attempt) after 3.5 years, and I had been recruiting 1 prince and 1 princess continuously.

The z key in the army setup is amazing. Now they need to apply it to the army position screen and the main settlement screen.

Hello Everyone:

I love the dominions game series. I’ve been playing it since Dom 3 came out around 2007ish. I just created a gameplay playlist (actually just the first episode at this point) as Niefelheim on impossible vs 15 ai. The first episode is pretender creation & map generation (vs 15 ais set to impossible). I added a bunch of commentary & tips aimed at beginners; I hope you all will like it & take it easy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOHtFfbvNzA

I’m still reading the (excellent!) manual; I intend to buy the game in the next few days. I have a question about the recruitment limits on commanders. The manual says: “You can only recruit as many commanders in a province in a turn as you have available recruitment points. Commanders can cost more than one point.” From what I can tell, there may often be dozens of recruitment points in a province. Maybe the manual means to say “commander points” rather than “recruitment points”?

There are ‘recruitment points’ for units and ‘commander recruitment points’ for commanders.

Commanders can cost 1, 2 or 4 commander points. Their intention is for you to upgrade a fort so it will generate 2 commander points per turn, that way the good mages will need two turns to recruit in most cases, which is how Dominions 4 worked.

AI recruiting Catoblepas, Ether Warriors, Eater of the Dead??

This is a new world!
Although they won’t use them properly. :P

edit:

Uhh, I’ve never seen this fan made image:

Tom Chick’s 3 hour stream of Dominions 5

It’s… kind of painful to watch. There are core basic concepts of the game he doesn’t seem to know (ie. bless your sacred troops!) and he get pushed by the AI in Easy mode :P :P

Like me, he probably assumes sacred troops are blessed automatically. Go easy. We can’t all be Dominions savants like you.

I also thought “sacred” meant automatically blessed.

So does one bless them as one of the battle spells?

Yep, that’s the primary use of your priests/prophets - lay the bless spell on your sacreds.

The only time your sacreds are auto blessed is when your Pretender is with them on the battlefield.

Thanks, I will try to make that more clear!

So, am I right in thinking not every sacred has the same requirements?

In my current game I have built temples but can’t recruit my sacred troops.