Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith

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I originally bought Dominions 2 when it was a hot Q23 game but couldn’t figure it out and couldn’t stand the uglification of the graphics so it got installed and the disk got lost in one of the various moves I’ve made around the world and never played.

I picked up Dominions 4 in the steam sale last year and it sat in the backlog, unused but Dominions 5 was on sale on Steam a few days ago and I decided to do some YouTube investigation to see if it’s worth it and ran across Dastactics beginner series and rush game and watched them and decided to go ahead and purchase because it looked awesome.

I’m about 50 hours in to single player and I know I haven’t explored 10% of the content but here are my observations so far:

  1. I love the depth and the range of strategies. I don’t know all the paper rock scissors effects but I like the options. Mass troops, build up powerful heroes with crafting, research and outfit powerful spellcasters, and the pretender options, oh my!

  2. Two days ago this game was the greatest game I’ve ever played. Now it’s getting a bit more mundane. I’ll explain a bit more below.

  3. I’m getting to the point where I want to try some multiplayer. Where’s the best scene for that nowadays? I’d love to play with some Q23 peeps if there’s still an active scene here.

  4. This is the first game in many years that I’ve put in a lot of time thinking about when I’m not playing. Thanks to everyone who posted helpful stuff above. I’ve caught up and read all the info above and it’s been helpful.

Here’s a summary of my experience so far:

First game. I wanted to kind of copy what Dastactics did in the rush game and created a red dragon pretender and tried to take over the world. Said dragon died in three turns and mission aborted.

Second game I did a small two player map against the AI with MA Pangaea because it looked like a fun nation. Lots of fun and I won this one, probably due to some map imbalance because the thrones were closer to me.

Third game I did a random map with 8 players and chose a random land nation and ended up with Phlegra. I recruited a few of those giants with the pointy sticks and had a starting fort in a corner and proceeded to kick some ass. I took over about a fourth of the map and had some real fun. Peak moments included a message from Man in a battle for a province that started out the turn empty saying “you killed our God”. I also took out Pythium who had some giant statue that looked like Zeus in their final castle. At one point in the game I had about 30,000 gold and 50 defense on every territory. I had some good military strength but by the time it was down to three players I ended up having my massive dominion area start to disappear. I was about tow to tow militarily but my dominion eventually got snuffed out. What I did with all the gold was set every province to recruit as many units as possible but couldn’t get all of them efficiently to the front. From this game I put a little work into seeing hos dominion works but I still have questions.

Fourth game I played 8 players on a premade map and selected Tien Ch’i. The pretender I picked was a freak lord with 4 in every type of magic. I had to make him imprisoned to make it happen. My strategy was going to be to have him do massive site searching once he woke up but I ran into two issues. Firstly I couldn’t get and reliably hold more than 8 provinces and secondly unlike in the Phlegra game a lot of those provinces were barren with no sites. Nothing redeeming happened from this game except I decided I really hate wraparound maps and I’m wondering what the difference was between the game I played where almost every province had magic sites and lots had 3-4 and this game where magic sites were hard to find. I think having more sites makes it more “fun”.

Next game I played YS on another premade map. I absolutely won’t be doing any wraparound maps again. It’s still ongoing but I reiterate my hate for wraparound maps and this game has seemed pretty one dimensional. The only strategy I can see with this nation is to recruit the sacred knights and then the sacred leaders to lead and bless them. The rest of the troops are pretty much useless except maybe as filler for the two turns of hold and recruiting the mages for crafting, summoning and researching. I’m getting to the endgame here but this game is reminding me of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 where you made a bunch of heroes to shuffle units to the front and it’s getting tedious.

Also a game in progress is an 8 player random map game where I’m playing Ulm. I designed a pretender with good scales and earth magic 8 but I’m thinking this pretender is a mistake. The bless is useless (Ulm doesn’t have any sacred troops you can make in good quantities?) and there isn’t a lot of magic for Ulm so it’s feeling pretty much like playing Risk and again the tedious HOMM 3 issue of shuffling troops to the front so with two boring games ongoing I’m starting to reassess my initial 'best game ever" excitement.

I’ve been reading everything I can and watching videos but I have some questions that I haven’t been able to find answers to:

  1. I’ve got a basic grasp of dominion but what is a good way to manage this? Should I be spamming temples down on every province I think I can hold? Every other? I don’t know a good ratio for this. Should I build temples only behind my dominion area or should I be building them in front of the line? What about preaching? Should I be doing a lot of preaching or is it a small effect? When my territorial holdings are beyond my dominion area should I be preaching behind my dominion line, in front of the line in enemy dominion or deep in enemy territory or does it matter?

  2. When a game is going well what should I be doing with gold? I see a few options: Temple spam. Mass recruitment of units in non-fortress provinces and province defense points. The AI seems to throw troops at high defense provinces but I have a feeling that human players won’t be that stupid. I know from playing lots of strategy games that resources in the bank don’t win games, it’s resources on the field but with the recruitment limits I can’t spend all the gold on nation troops from fortresses so where should it be going?

  3. What kind of gem site settings should I be expecting in multiplayer? I can see gem income is a huge difference maker in mid to late game and I haven’t really explored blood magic so I imagine there’s a “fair” setting for magic site frequency to make it even for blood and non-blood nations.

  4. Is there any way to avoid the HOMM 3 troop caravan effect? I see there are some spells and items later that may help move things along but the fiddly micromanagement is getting old fast.

Well thanks for reading. I’m going to go back and see what happens in one of these ongoing games…

Glad you are having fun with this game. I had a similar experience, in where I bounced off from Dominions 3 but I eventually tried again in Dom4 and it was then when I finally ‘got it’.

Some comments on your games

First game. Look at what types of troops there are in the indie provinces. Avoid heavy cavalry, they can kill Pretenders, or hurt them badly.

Third game. Don’t let overflow your resources so much. This isn’t even a hint for Dom5, but a general strategy thing. Build temples on your territory and hire priests and let them spread your dominion with that money to avoid being dominion-invaded.

Fourth game. Don’t attack AI factions nilly-willy. The game don’t have a proper diplomacy screen but internally the AI can be at ‘peace’ or at ‘war’ with you. In other words, try to attack them one by one. Also don’t pick random AI, pick normal AI in the setup screen.

Fifth game. Yeah Ys is pretty much a one-trick-pony, focused on their excellent sacred troops and sacred leaders (thugs).

Sixth game. Ulm don’t have sacred troops, they are special like that. But they still can do a good amount of magic, you just have to know good combos. In fact, surely you still have to learn all that magic can do, with communions, item boosting, etc.

Your questions.

  1. There is no hard rule, but yeah, temples should be built on provinces you think it will be hard to attack, at least. How many? Well, my friend, that depends on how many temples the opposition build, too, so it’s hard to say. Just start building more if you see your dominion start to shrink a bit. It also depends of yours and his Dominion score, so yeah hard to say.

  2. Build more fortress to have more places where you can recruit good quality troops and mages. The recruitment limit is per province, so just have more provinces with castles. In special recruit mages. Number of fortresses is the ‘cap’ to your mage recruitment per turn, that’s the true reason veteran players build them.

  3. I would say most people play on the default settings.

  4. While there are a pair of high level teleport spells, they aren’t common or cheap enough to use them just to avoid micro. Fiddly micromanagement is 80% Dominions, to be honest. You can only try to learn all the key shortcuts to try to reduce the amount of micro per turn, but even then, Dominions is a micro heavy game, it’s the reason after my first 200 hours, I play it much more infrequently, even if there are still lots of nations I haven’t played.
    Armies at least can remember their destination province from turn to turn, in Dominions 4 you had move them again each turn!

I’ve been trying to write an introductory strategy guide to put in the manual but was having a hard time figuring out what questions to answer. I think I’ll start with some of these.

Also, the manual really needs a communion guide. The Bogarus strategy article in the Dom4 manual was meant to cover that but now with a new manual this needs to be addressed.

I made the mistake of downloading the Dominions 5 nation generator app. Now I am stuck just generating Nations instead of playing.

By the way, next week, I will start the process of setting up a comp stomp play be email game.

Any chance that a new patch is coming down the line? There is a lot of talk on the discord about buffing Titans, and I would love to see Jomon get some tweaks (I’m thinking a reduction in resource costs on the Samurai, as well as a capital only mage priest that can cast the almost necessary Fear-Not-Sign right away.

Zonk and co. from Discord are beta testers from Illwinter and are better informed. I heard the same, that the next patch should be a balance patch and Illwiter are looking at what to buff and what to nerf. That said, ‘Titans need a buff’ was already a common feedback during the beta previous to the Dom5 release, and they barely did anything, so who knows if they will do anything :D

This? GitHub - elmokki/nationgen: NationGen is a program that procedurally generates new playable nations, including graphics, for the strategy game Dominions 4 published by Illwinter. Support for Dominions 5 may be forthcoming.

Yeah. It started with Dominions 3. It’s pretty wild what is generated.

I think there were a few MP games based on it back in the day.

And after months waiting, we have an update

Hasn’t hit yet. Hopefully we get a turn in before the update, otherwise we’ll have to all resubmit our turns,.

There are lots of smaller changes no in the changelog. Summons were balanced too:

Cave grubs 8 -> 6 gems
Sea dogs 3->2 gems
Yetis 15->13 gems
Kraken 3->1 gems
Cave cows 4->3 gems
Cave crab 2->4 gems
Bog Beast 8->7 gems
Call of the wild 15->12 gems
Fire drake 7->6 gems
Swamp drake 8->7 gems
Sea Serpent 5->4 gems
Cave Drake 5->4 gems
Wyverns 4->3 gems
Draconians 45->30 gems
Naiad Warriors 30->18 gems
Winter Wolves 10->8 gems
Fall Bears 15->12 gems
Fire Snakes 9->7 gems
Great Eagles 10->8 gems
Animal Horde 25 ->15gems
Iron Pigs 10 -> 9 gems
Manifest Vitriol 2->3 gems (hm)
Clockwork Soldiers 8->5 gems
Wooden Construct 5->3 gems
Manikin 12->9 gems
Clockwork Horrors 10->9 gems
Behemoth 10->7 gems
Ziz 5->4 gems
Bind Fiery Imps 2 slaves -> 6 slaves
Bone fiends 3->5 slaves
Storm demons 7->10 slaves
Demon knight cost 8->15 (okay, fear aura is a thing, but still pretty pricey for mundane demon cavalry)
Five Gates 28 -> 39 slaves (total +1 extra over sd/dk price increase)
Father Illearth 85 ->105 slaves

Bears 10->8 gems (other animals unchanged)

Arco and mediterranean in general
Procession of underworld 15->13
Keres 9->12

Tien Ch’i
Celestial servant 3->1 gem (cue N7 on MA TC and Geomancer spam)
Celestial Hounds 5->4 gems
Heavenly Fires 10->6 gems

Mictlan
Jaguar Toad -> Jaguar Toads, 2 per 2 gems.
Jade Serpent 5->3 gems
Jaguar Fiends 13->16 gems; rain of jags unchanged (I’m sorry what?)

Caelum
Daevas equalized with yazatas! Both cost 15 as previously, but 6 per summon.

C’tis
Sacred crocodile 8->3 (yes, not a typo, I checked)

Agartha
Living Mercury 5->7 gems

TNN
Cu Sidhes 8->6 gem for 7

Fomoria
Barghests 10->7 gem for 9

Rus
Bears 10->8 like generic one
Zmey 8 -> 5 gems

Kailasa
Apsaras 3 gems -> 2 gems

Lanka, Yomi
No changes noticed;

Hinnom
Shedim 23->28 for 3 summons (cheaper than early storm demons now)

Ur
Anzu 6->4 gems

Xibalba
jaguar costs

Atlantis:
Monster Fish 10 ->6 water gems

MA ERMOR
Wailing Lady 15 -> 8 gems. Lamentation 50 -> 25 gems. Great Lamentation 66 -> 33 gems.

In my opinion, it isn’t overall gem cost that needed tweaking, it is the ability to get multiple summons. My magic users are normally tied up, and time is important. Why would I care that it costs less gems to get a summon when I’m basically getting one summon that has piss all difference in a decent fight involving 100+ units each side eg: drakes. A caster getting multiple units per turn is still pretty good to me.

I think the goal is to making scaling less powerful, so that we are more likely to cast spells with non pretenders.

Naiad warriors is now pretty tempting though.

Naiad warriors always was tempting :)

Edit: No. Always worth getting!

Really, 35 gems for 15 middle of the road units?

30 gems right? But, yeah I always liked them even if they were a little expensive. Decent protection and MR, Recuperation, Awe +4 and they can be very nice for underwater armies. Plus, like @Strato mentions, I find it nice to be able to crank out a decent sized batch of summons for one mage turn. Water gems aren’t exactly one of the most sought after gem types and Sea Trolls cost upkeep. With a decent Water gem income and if I am keeping up on water gem items I want, I tend to summon them.

Shoot, I forgot Trolls have an upkeep cost.

https://larzm42.github.io/dom5inspector/

It’s been updated.

If the Summon Great Eagles stills scales, I had a lot of fun with an A9 pretender summoning a ton of them for a WyldeRyde game. 10, now 8 gems for eight or nine size 6 units with siege bonuses meant I could move them in and drop walls on some castles in the same turn. A bit of buffing made them pretty good vs Trolls as well…until @pyrhic brought in literally a (flying) boat load of them and a dozen mages to support.

A lot of spells now scale 2 for 1. I believe Great Eagles were hit by that bat.