In keeping with the spirit of Dominions, that is all the info you get.
Maybe he meant to link something else - I’m not seeing anything here myself that leads me to ponder a decision. This seems like a thread to talk about Dominions 5 and it’s announcement? I only skimmed the first few posts, admittedly.
Perhaps “decision” was autocorrected from “discussion” or something? Either that, or perhaps it was meant to link to a particular post within the thread. Or maybe legowarrior can just give us a proper tutorial so we understand what’s going on. :)
That very interesting. Making the guides available as separate things is easy. But if the way they are written is the problem, that can’t be fixed without changing the manual writer, or having someone else write the guides. I’m really not interested in taking the history out of my Dominions writing. I understand that some people may not enjoy it, but I don’t think I could bring myself to write a straight guide. It’s not the way I think about the game, and I don’t enjoy that kind of writing. So when you say, “eliminate the academic tone,” I can’t. Or won’t. Same thing. But I can see about having someone else do guides.
That’s easy - the Dom2 walkthrough was a separate PDF, and I think the Dom3 manual had the tutorial available as a separate PDF as well (in addition to being in the manual.
Thanks for the feedback.
I have nothing more to offer. Dominions 5 does make some profound decisions about how blessings work, and about game balance though, but the link has nothing to do with that.
I would hate for you to think I’m whining lol.
I think I would be best served by an “official” let’s play where a player (one with experience! ) picks a race and an era, and explains *why (e.g. Ulm, middle age, lots of steel,) and then the same again for the pretender, with scales etc. (E.g. awake pretender, super combatant, expand quickly to 5 territories, upgrade etc.)
That said, I am quite happy to learn by failing. Just that sometimes I’m not sure why I’m failing, like the game I had where I was a Giant Carp leading the warriors of spring or whatnot.
Hey no one should be afraid of offending me or hurting my feelings!
I take all of this stuff as good feedback. I am very aware that I am an “old guy” from the time of “big manuals.” And that I value these things in a different way than some others. And that my style of writing isn’t gonna make it on Kotaku. Or wherever.
A lot of the stuff that people would like to see is possible, even likely, but requires assistance as I cannot do it all, or even in the way that people want it, but I can help facilitate that, ifyouknowwhaddimean.
So keep posting stuff. I will assume it is not meant to be offensive or whining unless you specifically label it, “this is meant to be offensive and whining.”
Hey no one should be afraid of offending me or hurting my feelings!
You know what would be even better than hexes in wargames? Squares.
You had to take it to 11
Also, I don’t mean to monopolize the thread - @TurinTur is posting some excellent info! I really do like where the game is going.
One thing is that they add new nations and change existing ones frequently in patches and nations change (or disappear) from era to era, so I don’t think in game/manual guides for specific nations/eras would be too practical without a significant risk of being irrelevant later.
I’m not very familiar with all the ins and outs of Dominions, so if there is something already like this then I have missed it, but taking a leaf out of EU4 (or even Total War’s) book to make things easier for the player would be a dynamic mission generator that is contextualised to your race/pretender/location that give you a series of mini-goals to work towards.
Yes, I updated the big post 2 or 3 times. People should take a look if they only did it when I posted it initially.
For me, I’m hyped with the UI changes. It’s going to make play the game like a early 90s strategy game instead of late 80s strategy game :P :P
I think an MP primer. There is a substantial amount of terminology in Dominions used for MP games.
Pretender design. SC vs Rainbow; what they are, pros and cons, when nations might favour one over the other. Thugs. Typical items that a thug might use (noting the brands are getting nerfed). Good beginner nations. Even other concepts like the need for rapid expansion, identifying difficult indy provinces to attack in the early game, cost effectiveness of PD (ie: not a lot). The tutorial is good for covering some of the game, but can really leave a new player facing an insurmountable wall if they want to try the MP side.
Someone should just spiral bind the entirety of the old Shrapnel forum then! :D
Some new units, summons, spells, and ui changes:
Some Dominions fans have been in deep thought of the new balance, trying to determine a good bless or in what tier is going to be a nation now. I think it’s a bit a waste of time. In these two months balance of nations can change a good amount, and the bless system is so new that trying to theorize purely on paper just doesn’t work.
In the other hand, I would like to speculate how some of the changes in this version could mean two important things: more viable Thugs and less powerful mid-late Battle Magic.
Less powerful criticals, less repels per square, less surrounded penalties to defense, and reinv1 for everyone seem a buff to me for thugs/SCs. The only point against this is the new possibility of breaking magical shields. Also they are commanders and have the advantage of having less chance of losing themselves while retreating.
Magic in the other hand, has received an overall small nerf. Reasons:
Big spells need more time to cast (so less spells casted on say, 10 turns, slower ‘combo’ effects like storm/summon stormpower/thunder, and enemies will be closer when you finish), communions are more prone to kill slaves if abused (5 fatigue points : 1 hp, instead of 10?), spells can be interrupted if you damage the mage with the new casting system, some of the popular spells (ie. RoS, GoH, Stellar Cascades) have been nerfed, and very fast units could ‘evade’ the evocations thrown to them with the new real timecombat. Against this is the point is already mentioned: 1 point of fatigue recovered per turn will benefit more mages than a random spearman; also default magic sites has gone slightly up so there should be more gems to use.
Well, the big post reached max size limit, so some more info here:
Limp & Crippled
Limp: Commanders lose 4 MM, troops do not but have a 25% chance of death if they move more than one province.
Crippled: Commanders lose 75% MM, troops do not but have a 50% chance of dying when moving one province and 75% if more.
Floating
Now also officially counts as forest and swamp survival (except for C’tis dominion I assume - ability info says ‘for combat and movement purposes’), making Lemuria quite mobile if you can get floating commanders.
‘Officially’ because it seemed to in Dom4 too, but it wasn’t obvious and it didn’t work when you got it from items.
More MM examples
Jotun/Niefels have base 16/20 (and winter move), so +2/+6 over common humans with the same equipment.
Most jotuns have 14 after armor, Hirdmen are 22, Niefel Giants are 18 for troops, 20 for Jarls.
Bane lords have MM 18 (20 base -2 armor, chain mail hauberk is -4 but halved because base enc 0)
The female Tartarian Titan and Tartarian Cyclops have MM 20 (no equipment).
Did not check Horse Tribe, but LA TC cavalry is MM 18 (horseman), 14 (heavy horseman), 16(ancestral vessels) after equipment.
Enlarged gives +2 MM.
There are new +MM items, and old +mapmove boots were changed to the new system.
75 less base points for Pretender design. 50 more points than before for Imprisioned.
Guard commander is free for squad number purposes: If you have 3 squads and 80/+1 leadership, 4 squads normally gives -1 to all, but not if one is ‘guard commander’.
Man’s Wardens now have MM 12, enough to double-move in forests and plains and not slow the Witches too much.
New Yomi starting army: 15 ko-oni, 10 bandit archers
More Yomi stuff:
Namanari (N1D1, swamp & mountain recruit) can cast Hannya Pact (6 gems) to turn to D2F1N1 Chunari.
Chunari can cast a Greater Pact (12 gesm) to turn to a D3F2N1 Hannya (still has upkeep)
Succubi are invisible.
New celtic pretender. Dom3 pathcost 60
Fomoria Const2 item
Since you asked… Long time casual player(although i guess not really considering the scope of the series…dom 4 anyways):
I see 2 major hurdles in dom for beginners. Quality of Life stuff (QoL) and false choices.
QoL is, for example, things like having to micro a ton of armies, troops, and mages as early as t15. You really should never forget a scout, army, pretender, or mage. They should all ALWAYS be doing something. I haven’t played since the demise of desura, but my vague memory recalls a “check for ideal guy” command, but not actual “hey so and so doesn’t have orders, are you sure you want to end your turn” prompt. Many TBS games flat out replace the end turn button with “select idle city/planet/worker” button until everyone has some command. Ditto on research.
I’m not sure how much this sort of stuff can be fixed, and how much is engine limitation, but rally points(and really how many games have you recruit generals for shipping units?), easy ways to give mass commands, and a better interface in general would help. Any action i’m going to be doing every single turn should have a way to be automated. More time handling grand or micro strategy less time making sure all my mages have matching accessories (you’re not leaving the fort in that old man…), or the proper orders before a battle (scripting especially can get very very tedious even with copy paste, which feels hidden)
Items ESPECIALLY could use a looking at. Many of them could really be reworked into passive empire bonuses so long as X condition is met (+1 research for all mages in this province for example) rather than a click tax for the rest of the game. Obviously you lose something whenever you streamline stuff, but I’m having a hard time remembering anything great happening because I took the time to consider 1 by 1 which mages could be spared a quill or a lantern for 1 turn ( and it clearly did happen because that’s way more efficient that over researching, but god is it dull and tedious). If asked I could not tell you how many items there are in the game, but I would say there’s basically research boosters, path boosters, mobility items, and then a vine/blind shield and fire/frost sword. Might be other combat items as well, but that’s basically dungeon trash when for low investments I can kill cells full of enemy chaff rather than one by one.
And this leads me to false choices, which is a much harder issue to address. I have a notebook somewhere theoretically filled with poly sci 400 level notes, and really filled with notes on how i’d design a reduced Dom game, by removing a lot of the “fake” or “obvious” choices. How many nations actually NEED access to every single possible spell in the game + their nationals? In my experience watching and playing it seems like most nations have 2-3 viable strats + some randomness that just comes with the situation you find yourself in, but you rarely see tremendous deviation from that. So why then can every single race cast summon flame jelly (I honestly don’t remember what the useless spells were, so please substitute as appropriate)
Obviously there’s good stories coming from it, and the ability to find a mage with the right paths + the right construction to leap frog up a path you didn’t even start with is huge, but maybe take a look at what people are actually using each game and streamline from there (i’m guessing that not every nation needs every single spell, at least that’s what I remember thinking).
Likewise combat is a whole slew of easy to make terrible choices. Just understanding how to get your units to work right takes some effort, and then once you do you’re allowed to do all sorts of terrible stuff like not have arrow tanks and cast spells in orders that aren’t effective. You may have 20 air spells you can cast, but what you should be doing is spamming thunderstrike until they have an answer. All the fire magic in the world is great, but you better cast flaming arrows and spam archers if you can. Hope you’ve been recruiting leaders for the last few turns because a massed army of units is going to fall apart vs one split apart by groups.
This isn’t even going into the TONS of units for each race that almost never see the light of day because they’re just too expensive or poorly stated or fill some role that they don’t need.
It’s not bad that these are the go to strats, it’s bad that it’s insanely non obvious that with all these choices that’s probably what you should be doing for your situation, and its very easy for a beginner to try a whole slew of things that will never work unless they get some outside guidance (if they even get their economy off the ground to begin with, something even easier TBS games struggle to teach beginners).
Really dominions comes down to building certain engines or kits from all these pieces, and then meshing them together, but if you don’t know that it’s super simple to wind up just playing with parts from all of them and getting destroyed. More ways to communicate these engines/kits exist would help a lot.
Pretenders are obviously false choice farms, but I think it’d take a major redesign of the system to help with that, and you’d lose quite a bit. Someone already mentioned having prebuilts for each race and I think that would go a long way towards helping (especially if 1 of those was always an early expander thug/SC).
All of this is on top of the non obvious strategy stuff. There’s a post or a video somewhere that flat out changed how I played showing how you can leapfrog from w2 to like…w7 + some other stuff with a few levels in construction and summoning. Figuring that out for yourself is possible, but given the scope of the game and the fact that you could just spend hours playing one specific style, it helps to have guidance.
For solutions, in this day and age some good tutorials and videos would do wonders.
Tutorials should be short challenges that drop you in as a working nation showing off what a realistic early/mid/late game scenario looks like. Ideally they should NOT be puzzles and clearly be marked differently if you include those to (“here’s how abyssia should use fire magic” vs “you have 3 insane barbarians, conquer the AI in 4 turns”). Once people know what they should be doing they can start learning how to tweak that, rather than just being given a zillion pieces and told that there’s a strategy in there somewhere.
As for videos short ones showing off how to early expand as each race, and what your mid game goals should be and how to get here would help a ton. Once you get the basic types of late game, and understand how to not insta lose the early game, you wind up with enough of a framework to not fall apart when you try new things because you understand what is and isn’t a sane goal. Right now useful footage of dom 4 is still hard to find, ESPECIALLY if you want real pvp footage (the AI being weak enough that a single dragon pretender and a decent early expand makes basically anything work).
Personal note on dom 5:
Will something be done to fix the fact that dom kill nations are practically BM in multiplayer? I know it’s somewhat inherent to their design (here’s a neighbor who is going to kill you by existing), but it doesn’t help that every turn they’re alive the more land they make useless since a 0 pop territory is a wasteland forever, and thus standard strategy is to dogpile them asap. I really love Ermor, Ryleh, and Lemuria (and am glad to see you can’t do a non D3 start with lemuria anymore), but never jumped into MP in part because they’re so terrible for everyone involved. Also hoping lemuria feels a little better.
Some good points here. As a noob who struggled to get into Dom 4 I see a lot of my struggles documented here :)
On the other hand, a lot of people seem to enjoy the game for what it is - maybe ill winter don’t see a need to streamline.
I will probably buy Dom 5 anyway and give it a crack. But that’s probably due to my game addiction, the romance of the concept and my admiration for the developers in making these types of games rather than the hope I will eventually grok it and put 1000 hours in.