The Dominions 4 Thread of Multiplayer Stabby Stabby Ascension - 2014 Edition

More diplomacy!

Eriu, you are absolutely right. Yes.

Also, the hamburger flies at midnight.

-TC

Things that never happen in test games:

Madman randomly spawns, decides he doesn’t like my temple.

Three or so turns of site searching with more than one guy…finally found ONE site.

You can’t FOOL us with your Perkins-style LAMENTATIONS

You want a lament?!?!? HERES MY LAMENT-

I hired as a mercenary a Destroyer of Worlds - she was sooo hawt, both air and death, baby, let me tell you, she rocked my world.

And then she left me, and shacked up with some ape with a lot of bananas.

Regarding the Team Game, in the face of overwhelming odds, our side has decided to resign.

That’s it? Was thinking your youngster could learn from the battle and use more mages/spells. I do think the map is on the verge of tipping, but still…

Ya, that’s it.

we lost a major battle due to a glitch and his turn’s orders not posting…that one battle lost about 80% of his battle chaff and combat units. I don’t think it’s recoverable…

Sucks to hear that the orders didn’t go through. I was so surprised that Bandar took no mages into the battle. Can we roll back the turn and resubmit?

I guess that’s the thing with team games. One or two major battle losses tends to be game over and the newbies playing don’t experience Dominions in its full glory.

We could, but there’s no rolling back that we know about the global youre about to cast. Nor could we reroll an extraordinarily fortunate lightning strike that hit and killed a highly specialized, equipped, and stealthed commander of mine. And, as you know, rollbacks are inherently risky anyways…

It’s up to my team though, and while we were unanimous in the concession, maybe they’d feel differently about a rollback. What say you?

Personally, if the interest is in to continue, i’d forward that I’d rather start a new new-player game and concede this one, rather than try to continue this one…

I agree. I think this game was the longest disciples game I’ve been in, and that’s largely due to the peace timer with the Pretenders. In comparison, the first WildRide game went for 100 turns, and even then it was tense until the end.

I’ve made a few points in PM for our team to consider, but in general, I am opposed to doing so and would rather a new game. I’m sure there is plenty to debrief on that I think has plenty of value to new and old players (and idle spectators) as opposed to fumbling around with mid-late game spells and army composition.

On the team game, my biggest concern is what is best for the new players and their learning and to keep them interested in the game. If they want to continue playing some multiplayer and start a new game, I am all in and would gladly play again, or assist in some way if we want to run a newer player only game. We may want to switch up some of the game settings, though, to keep it fresh.

I would also be fine continuing the current game if people decide to.

Idle spectator here, reading with interest…where are the new player posts on this?

I’m one of the newbs on the resigning team, and I’m fine with throwing in the towel. I greatly enjoyed the experience of my first full Dom 4 MP experience and really appreciate the help I got. The depth of the game is mind-boggling, and its great this community has veterans who want to help.

Rolling back is never a good idea. I also am fine resigning because a) in-game, Marignon was poised to trounce on my Ass-phodel, and all I was doing lately was turtling; and b) in real life lately I’ve been incredibly busy with little time to devote to each turn.

I’m not sure how the newbs on the winning side feel. I know @geggis is also fine with resigning (he said by PM). I think we got what we wanted – a lot of hand holding that we’d never gotten on our own, in MP or SP. And, it was relaxed and enjoyable!

So congrats to the winning team and thanks again to @Akaoni for running the show!

Sorry for the late reply, just got back from work.

I think, folks, I’m going to have to call it a day on Dominions 4, at least for the time being.

I was concerned initially with the sprawl of races, units and spells and while they’ve certainly remained intimidatingly vast, it’s mostly the UI and controls and visible information that have frustrated me and made almost everything feel like work rather than play. It seems that which ever way you cut it there’s a lot of micromanagement involved and coupled with all the other moving parts it’s a lot to process.

Certain hotkeys like Ctrl+1/2/3 etc. to copy orders were a god send (cheers @Strato!) but otherwise I found myself almost chasing my tail because I kept thinking I’d forgot to do something important before ending my turn.

And the thing is: I’d had a largely uneventful 40~ turns recruiting my sacreds and casters for research (at the expense of site searching). It was only when Ashdod rolled into town that I realised that despite (what I thought was) spamming Yogis and Gurus, I was behind on research so I didn’t have much choice but to stay in my hole and try and reach Antimagic to counter what I was told was going to be ‘Shadow Blast spam’, hahah. My god, did that hit hard in that last battle. I had to quit the replay it was so grim!

My potentially most active turn, where I was planning to attack Ashdod’s fort near White Waste, (some time ago now, back when psyanojim was playing I think) I staled my turn because I read the date/time wrong on the turn email. I was very annoyed with myself for that. I was amazed how that seemingly small mistake lost me/us a lot of ground because after that Ashdod’s fort was secure enough to force me to retreat back to Baccar–or BACKARGH as I chickened out. After that it was a bottleneck filled with ugly giants.

I’ve got to say a big thanks to @psyanojim, @Strato and @pyrhic for their help. I’m incredibly grateful for your patience and direction. Sorry I’ve not come out the other end of this with more enthusiasm or thirst for more, but I’m really glad I gave it a shot and that you folks have been more than willing to help a noob out so much. Oh, and thanks @Akaoni for arranging this, it’s much appreciated!

You never know, I may return, but considering how much time I spent playing this one game (and doing the map! Ooof, that was a weekend right there!), it’s time I think I’d rather pour into other strategy games.

Totally understandable. Don’t forget to check in at times when you guys are up for a new game!

Who played as Ashdod? Just so I can watch them from the corners of the forum…

I was playing as Ashdod. Yeah, if you had moved on White Waste I was just going to concede the fort. My giants, at that stage, had no magic backup and the multi-attacks on your sacred units would have chopped them up pretty. As luck would have it, you pulled back. I was still 5-10 turns away from having my shadow blasting team ready so it gave me enough time to consolidate and get my mages ready for the upcoming battle.

Sounds like such an unfortunate bug, that sucks!

Glad to hear that the game went pretty well. Can everyone not named @geggis do a write up on how the game went for you, what went well, bad, and what your plan was/would be different?

I am also interested to hear how the map worked out. Were there enough provinces, enough sites, etc?

Thoughts time:

The map made me think about Dota 2. Three lanes and a cut away in the mountains that made me think of the position of Roshan pit from many years ago now. Just an odd comment. @geggis did a fantastic job illustrating it and I hope we get to play it again at some point. The terrain was clear, the sites with increased odds of magic sites were subtle but present, every province was clear as to its features (eg: swamps looked like swamps).

Is it a newbie friendly map though? No. Start positions surrounded by forest and wasteland (province 96 - Asphodel) don’t offer a lot of inspiration when gold is necessary. Experienced players in a team, knowing what they want, where they need to be can of course indicate the difficulties with gold income or overcome it. In a game where new players are being pushed as gently as possible against the wall that is the Dominions learning curve, getting a good indication of how they are travelling is difficult to establish. I know with my own gold income I was basically burning every little bit each turn. I think three per side is a better count.

To me, a bless strategy for new players seemed like a good idea on paper. It eases the difficulty that newcomers face with independents and evaluating if their force is good enough to defeat them. The other thing I consider with a bless is the need to rush towards opponents playing some fairly aggressive moves. Vanheim (@psyanojim) managed that down the right hand side of the map, but the middle and left was at a bit of a standoff. I think more aggression was needed to help a transition into the later game, but again, difficult to expect of new players. The result of this is the scales from the other team had the desired effect of enabling a sizable economy and we were going to end up being outproduced unless we could keep them small.

The speed of expansion I think will always catch new players off guard. Dominions isn’t a game that allows a person to sit and have a breather, rebuild forces and then pick the next target at leisure.

One regret I have with this game is that there was no real big battles to show off. There was a decent skirmish between TC and Vanheim much earlier in the game, but otherwise, the slaughter of Bandar at the hands of giants seemed to be about the only one.

I think Illwinter need to spend some more time evaluating disciples games and make it more team friendly. One issue I identified is that I could not build temples in friendly lands. If I wanted to place a cheap temple in Bandar’s territory, the only way it could happen was to switch the province over, then I build the temple, then switch the province back again. Switching provinces doesn’t raze temples! It is fiddly work that wasn’t worth doing.

Secondly, I made a seduction attempt on a TC commander however the Dryad couldn’t find a safe location to retreat to, I suppose because Pangean land wasn’t adjacent to the province. However right next door was Vanheim territory, but that doesn’t count.

As far as my game went, the notable things I remember:

  1. Having an army rout in the early stages of the game thanks to a stray arrow into a commander.

  2. I devoted a lot of thought to how best to arrange my troops for defeating the throne defenders. It paid off well, only suffering a couple of satyr losses.

  3. Celebrating the fact I found a province with Jade Sorceresses. I could save gold and get the same number of RP each turn from recruiting them. Plus the dedicated WN paths were going to be useful (eg: Clams for Bandar). What I didn’t get though was much in the way of water gems. Pulling in 15 nature gems/turn is nice, but not useful. 4 water gems/turn wasn’t much to cheer about. It did cross my mind to ask the other team for a cheeky trade :)

  4. Temples everywhere! Our dominion was strong, and that made the Carrion dragons hideously strong. A 500hp beast, regenerating like crazy in battle. Shame it never came to that admittedly. I decked out my carrion dragon to self cast quicken self. That’s 8 attacks each turn, and Alt 6 was my first real research priority for soul vortex. Other spells I wanted at that point was Transformation for the Pans and later recognising the value in Iron Bane, especially if I mixed it with swarms of chaff like Maenads or cheap to recruit Satyrs. The general spell combo was Iron Bane from one Pan, followed up with Maws of the Earth for some nice AoE armor breakage while the swarms of chaff race forward. If the dragon were in the fight, I was confident it would basically kill giants easily.

One unfortunate problem with the temple spam was that it never really pushed opposing dominion. I built 11 temples total, pushing from the back of the map. That money spent could have been spent better in hindsight.

  1. I had harpies everywhere in my land and never really managed to catch any scouts. They served a useful purpose of helping with the small blood economy I had going, transport slaves back to labs and patrolling down unrest as required. I was never going to be able to sustain much of an economy, but I was putting myself into a position of getting around 5-10 slaves per turn. I had just finished recruiting a second Pandemoniac (B3) who looked promising in conjunction with my B2 hunter and also a Pan hero who allowed me to forge bloodstones (E1 + booster,N3,B3).

  2. Killing TC’s disciple I think hurt me long term more than it hurt TC. It only came about because both my forces were discovered. I got lucky by having friendly dominion in that province that turn, but it came at the cost of losing two sizable raiding parties who I was looking to send west and harrass Eriu for a bit. Also, on the issue of raiding, sorry to TC (?pyperkub) for the ongoing harrass. I can only imagine it was annoying, but you were also what looked like the nation with the bigger economy. I did halt temporarily while other plans were coming together, but they never eventuated. There were two provinces that would have cut off 3 or 4 provinces from the cap, but the instruction was to wait in the hopes that bigger fish could be fried.

One thought I developed as the raiding began was to name all my commanders of said raiding groups the same name. The idea was to try and prevent an accurate count of how many raiding parties were present (hence the name Mr Bean). Next time I’ll make sure I have commanders with the same magic paths, and try and keep the same number of units.

Think that’s about it. Not much in the way of unique sites in my part of the world. I did have a priest summoning longdead horsemen from one province at the end just because he had nothing to do. I lagged heavily with research at the beginning, but started to bring it together. Income was my biggest issue, and I would have gladly taken a small hit to resources in order to have growth or order scales. Oh, the other reason for Alteration 6 was to get transformation. Getting the throne that gave luck scales was a happy coincidence as that would have helped me immensely in transforming expensive Pans into free upkeep animals with the potential for added magic paths on top. I never made it to Alt 6, I did a quick diversion to Construction 4 and Conjuration 3 at the time.

Eee gads, yeah, my stale was definitely a major one then.

@Akaoni I noticed in my corner of the map, along the top edge, there was a missing connection between two provinces. Will try and take a screenshot to show you.