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

Yup, congrats Kelan! Exceptional performance!

Thanks, guys. I can’t believe I did it :). I can finally take this item off my bucket list.

For the past 20 turns or so I kept telling myself, “Don’t screw this up!”. I was really close to pulling off a win, I believe, right after the big strike on Agartha. I already had armies in place and priests ready to hit 3 at a time when Sauro jumped into the war with full force. That was perfect timing to make me abandon my attempt at winning then. I thought I still could pull off the win then, but if I was wrong, I would have been in pretty serious trouble with a lot of land given up to Sauro and back to Agartha.

Machaka, your alpha strike of 3 nukes a few turns back did indeed kill a 3 Holy priest that I intended to use on that last throne so I flew and used sneak to get my prophet up there in time to claim it and brought along another 100 or so bats to help siege. I was impressed at how much Sauro had upgraded their forts making it take a lot longer than I anticipated to siege those throne locations. I pretty much never upgrade my forts although I probably should look at that closer in the future.

Two turns ago I was prepared to strike at the 6th throne, the one that Agartha still had, but it seemed like I had a great chance to win without leaving the 4th throne I claimed so I stood pat there and waited the last couple turns out. I felt time was ticking away as those remote attack spells were really getting rough that Machaka was throwing around. I felt I could hit him pretty hard on the other end like I did to Agartha, but I was most likely going to need to use movement and stealth to keep away from him as he moved his mass of kings around slowly taking territory.

I have lots more details and things to share and will throw some blog entries up on my website with a bunch of pictures, but this will have to do for now. Thanks all for an enjoyable game and to pyrhic for holding off attacking just long enough and my ally Lanka for not turning on me ;). It was killing me trying to keep quiet for so long and I feel I disguised how well my blood hunting economy was doing. For the last 30+ turns I was probably averaging over 100 blood slaves a turn and was burning lots of them up too. At the end I finally summoned my first Helio, Amaimon, and really wanted to use him, but I kept having to use my slaves in battles and for other critical summons/items so never got to summon one til that last turn even though I had the research level for a little while.

This game sucked because I couldn’t break the Seal. :(

:P

edit: my saved turns, all of them, in case anyone want to point and laugh at my mistakes.

Congrats Kelan! Very well played. It shook me a bit when I tried to summon a second Arch Devil and none showed up. Up till then, I thought I was doing pretty well.

And TurinTur, if you hadn’t been dancing around multiple armies with hundreds of summons, wiping through hundreds of Jaguar warriors while paralyzing all his casters, I might have been able to give Kelan a bit of a hard time. Instead I had to exert everything except for a couple hundred chaff undead against Agartha.

Heh, yeah. Sorry I didn’t build my strategy around being able to cast Theft of the Sun at any point in the game. I also completely gave up trying to summon any of my special high end conjuration summons (Balam/Chaac) and that helped me a lot as I didn’t push up Conjuration at all and only hit 6 by the end of the game. I normally fall into a trap of trying to do too many things and too many strategies at a time and did a better job of being more focused this game and it paid off. I rushed Alteration 6 for Darkness really early and at one point only had that and Blood 4 (for Ozelotl) and maybe Construction 2 and Conj 2/3.

I was really worried 2 turns ago that Machaka was going to cast Crumble at my throne he was besieging. If that happened, you maybe could have stormed one turn before I could claim that last one I needed. I debated abandoning that to race for that 6th throne above if that happened :). Also, Darkness + bats and blessed Ozelotl (with Nature/Fire/Blood bless) with Blood Lust were pretty mean mid game. Add that to any number of 1 Blood mages casting Leech and I was hard to counter mid game. I was concerned about the magma children and masses of Blade Wind casters that Agartha had and the one Sauro army with masses of mummies and shade beasts scared me a bit (how did you get so many mummies?), but once I rushed to Wither Bones and gathered some Onaqui, I felt comfortable.

Congratulations Kelan on your victory. And thank you to pyrhic for setting up the game and keeping it going, and of course DireAussie for setting up the map. I’m sure I’ll have a few things to post about my gameplay in good time.

Awesome, congrats Kelan! Caelum was out at turn 38, so I have no friggin’ idea what has been going on, but it sounds like to executed wonderfully!

Turin, interested on your thoughts from your first MP game? Did it compare favourably to SP? Do it again? Pick up a few tricks? Get schooled on thug design? Open diplo would at least meant the shady side of the game was one less thing to worry about!

Not sure I ever did a debrief, but there was really not a lot to say. Caelum did not get a great starting location. I was right next to a throne I could not take, too close to mountains and water. Fairly hemmed in with limited expansion opportunities. But that was really neither here nor there in the end, when compared to my terrible design decisions.

Two things:
1 - Caelum has sacred archers! Always wanted to try them out.
2 - Destroyer of Worlds/Nataraja/Devi of Darkness - I have always wanted to try one, load it out with four weapons and just go to town!

So I went an A9D1 Destroyer of Worlds with order/productivity scales to precision buff my sacred archers, supported by resource intensive sacred, air-shielded, high protection wingless and of course, mammoths. Take some land, get some gear, kit my pretender and go nuts!

Turns out I should not have tried both idea at the same time. Maybe should not even have tried either, really. Wingless are poor - too slow on the battlefield and remove Caelum’s flight advantage. Could never really get enough sacred archers to make it worthwhile and it turns out that Mammoths, with only mildly better morale than elephants, become unfriendly when exposed to friendly fire.

At least when the end came, it was swift.

Well, I did it alright I think, there wasn’t a lot of gap skill between veteran mp players and myself, a sp player until now. It’s more a thing of how much you want to invest into the game, looking at spell lists for counters and scripting carefully dozens of mages, etc.
Obviously in mp it’s feels like a bit different game, another pace, much smarter opponents, diplo, etc.

Though in this particular game we didn’t have a lot of diplomacy. It was supposed to be “open diplomacy” but let’s be honest for a moment: it actually meant almost no diplomacy, with just some smear campaigns and exaggerated claims here in the thread that I don’t think anyone hold for factual truth.

The main problem for me is the inherent lack of flexibility of multiplayer. I shouldn’t explain the difference: If I want to play 15 turns straight… I can’t. If I want to leave it and focus in a newly released game, I can’t (technically I can, but I won’t because I know it’s a bummer for other players). For me it’s rare to play a game for more than 3 weeks in a row, so playing for several months the same game, and the same “match” was an big effort :P. Most of the turns are “slow” turns where not a lot happens, you know, that small “drip” of game isn’t enough to hold my attention for two or three days. I was kind of hyped at the start of the game, being my first Dominions mp, but after a few weeks I was a bit bored. Later at least the war with Mictlan revived my attention somewhat.

Another factor that I dislike of Dominions is something that I already noticed reading LPs/AARs: it’s a lot of effort for multiple months to try win, but truly in the end there is a fair amount of luck involved in who wins the game. With that I don’t want to downplay the winner’s skill in each game, but it’s embedded in the nature of the game, you can’t choose who your neighbors are.
Some players can start with another player in his border which is very aggressive while another player happen to have a passive neighbor. Some can start with the most skilled player of the group as neighbor and another with the most noob (because even in games labeled as “noob games” or “veteran games” there is going to be someone who is the best and someone who is the worst). Even in the most balanced of maps indie and throne placement is random and can be an important factor in expansion.
Or you can start with a nation in your borders that happen to be just the natural counter to your own nation: not every nation has exactly the same odds against the rest of nations, for example someone who can cast Rain with their national mages is going to have a easier time against Fire nations, or a Earthquake capable nation is going to have a great spell against nations with weak units and no access to something like fliers or fog warriors.
Some can start at the side of a player that later in the game turns AI, others don’t.
And after all that we have what happens in the “metagame” of diplomacy of war. Let’s say we have nation A, B and C, all close. A attacks B. What will C do? Here is where who is the best at diplomacy has an effect, obviously both A and B will send them messages and try to convince them of how the best option is helping them and not the opponent. But imo diplomacy is a bit overrated, normally C player will disregard mostly the messages because obviously both are biased to their own interests, not C interests, and just think by himself what’s the best option. Or we could say A and B diplomacy skills are mostly the same so in a way their counter each other efforts, with both offering similar arguments. Ignoring the option of not doing anything, C has two options, attack A because he knows his territory will be mostly undefended because he is busy attacking B, or do an opportunist attack on B, taking for himself a few provinces because he knows B is too busy fighting A.
The decision of player C is super important to determine who is going to win and who is going to lose, but from both A and B perspective, it’s basically a random dice throw. You can try to convince him but the logical thing is to think your opponent did the same and with similar effect. You can try to guess what C will choose but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s a very wild guess. In fact there are hidden variables that can affect C decision: is it Monday or weekend? Did he have to work a ton that day? Did he have a discussion with the spouse? In other words, the same person with the same initial conditions can choose to attack A or B, depending on his mood, we aren’t logical machines.
Another example, if three players form an alliance in secret early in the game to attack a fourth player and divide the territory in three parts (and no one betrays each other, lol), well, the fourth player is fucked. No way to win 3vs1. That’s free for all for you.

This happens in a lot of games of course, few have “perfect balance and fairness”, but if it happens a fps, it was just a 20 minute round, if it happens in a moba, it was just 30 minutes. If it happens in a RTS, maybe it was 70 minutes. But in a TBS, maybe it was a 30 hour game.

I suppose Disciple games with just two teams should at least palliate this problem.

TurinTurs post pretty much sums up why I preferred fast head-to-head style games.

Although the big free-for-alls are fun if you just embrace the chaos, the slower pace and the need for loads of diplomacy.

The QTDoom style of two massive teams was an interesting experiment too. A lot of effort went into picking balanced teams, supporting allies against multiple player rushes, basically got rid of a lot of the randomness that TurinTur mentions, and it was nice to have allies that you didn’t have to worry about betraying you!

QTDoom ended up playing like a giant head-to-head but with the fun of having loads of players.

Ahhh, QTDoom. Where one side put on a masterclass at obliterating their opposition. :D

Quick Mictlan wrap up for anyone interested.

Pre-game:

I didn’t do much in terms of testing my Pretender design which is why I went with a fairly standard nature bless, along with a minor fire and blood. If, at the time, I had to motivation to do some testing, I would have tried to either forgo a bless strategy so I could focus on scales, or do a bless, but make it a major bless in some other way. What I did know is that I was going to be producing a lot of Nahuallis, and as such, having a Pretender proficient in nature magic so I could open up the nature boosters (notably getting to Treelords Staff) was high on my mind. Add to that having regeneration fits thematically with werejaguars. The blood and fire was to add to the offensive power of the Jaguar warriors.
I had no idea what I could hope to do against any sort of nation with archers early on. Mid game, once my blood economy was up, I could summon flyers to go in and disrupt ranged units, but early on, well any nation with the ability to quickly and easily recruit archers would be a problem.

Early game:

My expansion went incredibly well, and the bless paid off as I suffered barely any losses to my Jaguar warriors against independents. By turn 15, I’d managed to claim all but one independant province, and all up, I had managed to expand out to 17 provinces thanks to 2 expansion armies.
I didn’t record when it happened, probably around turn 5, I managed to get a hold of Mictlipoctli the King of Legends. This hero is a D3B3 undead commander which gives me access to death magic, of which I had none. When I got this hero, I was pretty happy because it meant I could later on summon Vampires and Vampire Lords.

Mid game:

At turn 30, the turn before war was declared, it was clear that site searching was mostly a waste of time. I found 2 nature sites total, each one giving one nature gem. On top of that was a fire site, giving one fire gem. Other gem incomes include death coming in at 4 per turn, and astral at 6, 3 courtesy of the throne. In that turn alone, I captured 45 blood slaves, but the efficiency wasn’t really there due to not having scouts or cheap indy commanders to ferry them back to the lab. Unrest was also rising as I pretty much focused solely on blood hunting, and my income was beginning to suffer.
I had been, for some time considering what nation would be ideal to attack and expand. Sauromatia was tempting, but Androphag archers would be effective at nullifying my regen. The same thing with Machaka, and their poison bows also. What tilted my hand towards Agartha was a combination of: proximity of his capital to my borders, declaring that the waters of Moon Sea (5) were his, whilst furthermore taking and controlling the lake to the northeast, and making a comment to Xibalba (if I recall) about attacking me. I decided it would be better to take my own initiative, and strike first, though I suspect Agartha was gearing up for war with me anyway. Damn, that was a lot of summons to deal with.

One major oversight I made was being ignorant to the fact that the bulk of the Agarthan units would be poison resistant. Breath of the Dragon was my best offensive spell to use, but naturally it wasn’t going to be cast. Nature is fine for buffing, but I had no real options after that. Furthermore, I had to hope that a battlefield spell like Darkness would not be cast as that would absolutely trash my army. And as was pretty clear when I lost the second large battle that I was leaning too heavily on my Jaguar Warriors because I couldn’t think of what else to do. I barely won the first big battle, which is why I indicated that no one really won it.

I think that is really about it from my end. I could say that I needed to spend my gems more given how many fire, astral and death gems I had in the end. The death gems would have been cut because I lost the King of Legends, so it would have meant empowering someone to D1, which seemed rather useless anyway. Astral was hard as I only hand a handful of S2 priests. As for fire, well I was deliberately saving for those for later.

ok…where to start, where to start…

Game length/pace: Hangman was a remarkably well-paced game: it started off like 2 or 3 months after Anon, and it ended on turn 68 (and right now Anon is on 70). During the course of the game, there were only 4 stales, all by the same nation, which is also pretty extraordinary. I know it may seem slow to your preferences Turin, but that’s incredibly fast paced for a dominions game (at least any MP games that i’ve played). Whether you enjoy that or not is for you to decide, and I can perfectly understand why you might not. For me, for instance, I find myself more often dreading the later game phases when turns can take 3 or more hours to do because that’s just a giant chunk of time that i pretty much have to commit at once. So for me, it’s not about playing a turn every few days, but how much time i need to commit to that turn when i play it

Random/luck: show me a game that doesn’t have random/luck in it, and i’ll show you chess. There’s randomness in every game, and in something as asynchronous and multi-faceted as Dominions, randomness is going to be all over the place. My advice is that if you approach this game as ‘This game will determine who is the best at…’, you’d best start looking elsewhere, because this game will not satisfy. You’ll find better satisfaction thinking ‘how can i find success given all the random stuff that is happening to me and to others’. Is your most fearsome counter right next to you? Great, how are you going to deal with that? Is the weakest player in the game right next to a chief rival? Great, how are you going to deal with that? Do you not have scouts, Do you not have gems, Did the great fire god piss all over your garden? Great…well, you get my point. And, of course, when luck tips her feathery cap at you, how are you going to utilize that? So, i guess for me, it’s less of ‘who got lucky’ and more of ‘who was able to overcome bad luck, or make use of their good luck’. Where this really starts coming to bear in this game though is, knowing bad/good luck is going to happen to what extent are you going to plan for it? Are you going to trust that a 25% magical affinity is going to work in your favor for a key combination? Are you going to make your pretender the sole character with magical affinity in an area (and how are you going to site search?) Will you have a backup caster for a key spell incase the caster gets interfered with?

Meta diplomacy: Yes(at least in my opinion), this can be(or just, perceived as) a problem in the game. However, it wasnt(imo) in this game, and this one of the reasons we tried this format. There were no lifelong alliances, there were no unbreakable pacts, there were no secret cabals. Were there instances of more than one player attacking another? Absolutely. But this is something that will happen in any activity where there’s more than two sides. Lol, even when there are two sides and a neutral party(like any professional sports league), there are often claims that the neutral party is unduly favoring one side or another. In general, this format we used for this game disappointed me a little - at least in terms of the expectations I had with it. I want to think on that a little more in terms of what failed in that regard and how it could be improved…

Sorry, Turin, I don’t want to beat down on you or anything, nor trivialize your feelings/thoughts - I come from the camp of ‘if you don’t like it, you don’t have to qualify your feelings’, but in the above I did want to point out that dominions hasn’t solved conundrums in human competitive contests that have been plaguing our species since it learned it was kind of fun to see who could throw a rock the furthest :)

Where were you disappointed? That might be the first place to start.

This was my second open diplomacy game now and I think it was a little more successful compared to the first one I played in the interaction that happened. It is about getting a good mix of people involved. In saying that, I think as game turns consume more time, it became harder for me to write about whatever it is I would or could write. It isn’t just time in game, but also looking at spells, checking their effects, that sort of thing. I wanted to bounce ideas around more, but then it gives up any sort of surprise. Losing two players in the beginning meant a natural loss of interaction also.

As far as nations go, I think there was a fairly heavy emphasis on players focusing heavily on the late game and building up to that point. There were plenty of complaints about how low the income was, but no one seemed to want to go to war? I realise of course that recouping the cost of war can take a long time.

One thing I could suggest would be to raise the magic site frequency, to at least encourage possible gem and item trading.

I found the most irritating ‘meta’ aspect of the long games (for me anyway) is the potential for a patch release to totally alter the balance of power in an existing game… and a single long game can span multiple patch release.

Again, just have to accept it as the nature of the beast and embrace the chaos!

Did anyone have that one site or know of a way to check the graphs from our QTHangman game? When score graphs are on, I enjoy recording and tracking numbers of the details of a game, but I was always curious how my research, income, provinces, and army size compared to others during this game.

You had a good chance against me. In the first big battle, where my stupid Olms showed no fear of death and not knowing when to retreat, you killed 5500 gold worth of Great Olms! :S That’s when I was pressured to put all the force I could muster against you, that meant getting out of the capital a ton of mages and giving them all the Earth gems (in fact I stopped summoning Earth Elementals) for battle magic. Thanks god that was enough.
It was also a good lesson for me of gems in battle, it’s more efficient to use 30 gems in battle magic in a big battle (great effect) than to use 30 gems to summon three 10-gem monsters that will barely be a small factor in the same battle. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that the monsters are permanent and can be used in several battles and that’s why they cost more gems (in comparison with one-use battle spells), in any big battle they are going to die like any normal unit.

I have to say I think I had better luck than you in magic sites. I was gaining 25 gems per turn, 6 in the capital, so 19 came from magical sites. One of them gave me 4 death gems and game me D2 necromancers for 105 gold.

The thing with EA Agharta is that they have a certain opportunity window where they are stronger than most other nations, when they unlock Conj3 and start gaining enough gems to mass produce their national summons in a period where other nations don’t have good counter, that’s their strength. If you would have rushed me in the second year for example, I couldn’t have defended myself. If you could have waited to war against me in the mid-late game I would have the advantage anymore as you have better spells in that time while my main force would be still the same summons.

Can’t you load up the last gae and check the score graphs? In the turn the game is over, the score graphs are “activated” for everyone.



I unselected the two early droppers, Caelum and Tien’chi, to make it a bit more clear.

Thanks, TurinTur. I didn’t realize the graphs were active! I will check them out later. I didn’t realize I was so far behind on research. Wow. I am now curious on the gem income and army size :).

QTHangman -EA Lanka: This is the second time I have played this nation, and the first time I got stomped by sharaleo and direaussie. That build was a quick, hey, Throne of Blood looks good, Blood Vengeance looks neat, creation.
This time, influenced by Anon, Doom, and QTThree, I spent a long time trying out builds. The consensus with Lanka on the desura forums is to go extreme. Since the demons benefit from chaos/turmoil, one school of thought is to go Turmoil 3 Luck 3, get a huge bless, and expand with small groups of invincibles.
The other is to go with good Order scales, and get either a commander oriented bless, or just ignore the bless altogether. I chose this route, in part because the lack of gold I had in Anon, and because I wanted to force myself to do more thug builds, something that I lack skill in. So finally, I took a utility bless, F6E4S4, on a Nataraja, hoping to gear him up and set him loose on some poor army, much like sharaleo’s god.

Early game - expansion was fairly easy, using a plethora of monkeys, with a couple demons to round it out. Caelum was just three provinces away, so I had to be careful that they didnt start jumping all over me. I found an amazon province, and later, gobbling up the province that Tien Chi had taken from Caelum, I found anohter. With the fairly steady gem income, fairly low blood slave income, and good gold, I was in the process of becoming more of an astral and air nation supplemented by blood than vice versa.
Tien Chi’s contribution to the game was odd. I was wary of him, he did great earlier, and then dropped out. I took advantage of that drop to seige Caelum, saw sharaleo’s four armed fiend, and decided descretion is better, and dominion killed him with a ton of priests.

The war with Agartha occupied Lanka the rest of the time, with only a passing interest paid to my northern border. I quickly found that remote attacks like disease demons and leprosy are shrugged off by the Agarthan mages, but I had better luck with Mind Hunts. But I might have just been mind hunting a bunch of necromancers.

My armies were chaff undead summoned by the mass of priests I had left over from dominion killing Caelum, buffed by Dakinis and Rata…big Lankan mages, and tons of monkey archers. I have a feeling Machaka could have steamrolled me without much problem.

What was the remote spell that says “cloud of disease”? It affected a lot of my troops each time. Of course the effect isn’t immediate as you have to wait for the diseased effect to provoke afflictions.