The Gaming Den

K wrote:1. There aren't that many effects that are hostile. Less than a dozen when you count up the various monster abilities that affect a province and the couple of magic items.

This means that it's trivial to code for those. You just put a line in the province code that checks if the unit producing the effect is NAPed with the owner of the province.

You could do that, but that would be shitty. Because Bane Charms hurt you when you station them in your own provinces. So if you could store them in your allies' provinces without hurting their stuff, that would be extremely awesome.

2. The main reason a simple counter won't work is because NAPs need to have obvious benefits that are better than the stealth NAP where people don't want other nations to know who they are NAPed with in order to make themselves appear weaker.

It would just be a counter that appeared on each participant's turn. It wouldn't be visible to other players. The only thing that it is for is to unambiguously tell each player whether their NAP is current, and to allow each player to send their turn to a 3rd party to demonstrate that an NAP was or was not broken.

It ends misunderstandings and he said/she said bullshit. That's all it does. But that's all it needs to do in order to preserve functionality and reduce butthurt.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

K wrote:1. There aren't that many effects that are hostile. Less than a dozen when you count up the various monster abilities that affect a province and the couple of magic items.

This means that it's trivial to code for those. You just put a line in the province code that checks if the unit producing the effect is NAPed with the owner of the province.

You could do that, but that would be shitty. Because Bane Charms hurt you when you station them in your own provinces. So if you could store them in your allies' provinces without hurting their stuff, that would be extremely awesome.

How would that be awesome? You can already safely store Bane Charms in your Magic Item Treasury or in a province with a low and shitty pop that produces almost no gold like almost every swamp and wasteland.

You are acting like there is some killer tactic using Bane Charms that would become broken if NAPs made them non-functional. The last time I checked, people weren't winning games with their killer Bane Charm tactics. At best, Bane Charms just piss people off disproportionate to their very tiny and stupid effect of ruining provinces that you want to conquer. Ar worse, you spend a lot of Death gems and mage-turns that could have been used for an actually effective tactic.

Dom4 is preorderable.

http://www.matchstickeyes.com/2013/07/1 ... ascension/

http://thurot.com/2013/07/13/dominions-4/

Oh hell yes, a lot of that looks like great stuff.

Interesting.

Good to hear that there are some more high-end direct damage Water spells.

I've seen those previews before, they've been around for a while. Quick summary of the new nations seems to be the following though:

1) A new Babylon-inspired Civ.

2) An MA version of Bogarus.

3) Ermor gets more love, again. Basically Ashen Ermor (Zombie Apocalypse Rome) gets moved to MA, while Dom 3 MA Ermor is now the "Reformed Empire" - meaning it's the human part of the empire that wasn't OMNOMed by the Zombies.

In LA the Zombie Apocalypse Ermor wins, and the two merge into Soul Gate Ermor (inspired from Dom 2) - which is basically like Zombie Apocalypse Ermor but with ghosts instead of zombies.

Saw this in the Desura comments page for Dom4

pewpewchewchew Jul 26 2013, 1:25am said:

I've been given pre-release access to Dom4 and I've set up a Thread in the Desura Dom 4 fourms in the link below.

So far I've uploaded one video, we'll take a look at the foundations of the game in this particular video, nothing advanced, very limited magic, mostly going over what the game is about and how the general things such as moving units, recruiting people, researching and some other stuff. Returning players can check out some of the new UI enhancements and what not.

Dominions 4 Thrones of Ascension - Abysian Introduction Newbie Let's Learn!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-ThUi- ... e=youtu.be

Desura Dom4 Fourms
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4 ... -with-ppcc

If you're interested in the pre-release cover, or to get a feel for Dom4 feel free to head to my channel and subscribe for automated notifications when videos are released!

Looks like there are a fair amount of new spells of all levels. High-level evocation gives some love to Water and Death, but even low level Nature gets some new spells (Shrink, Enlarge).

A few spells look renamed. I'm pretty sure that Twist Fate is now Cheat Fate.

On the downside, it looks like ritual site-searching was nerfed for some gem types. For example, Gnome Lore is now Thaum 4.

Not only that, but all ritual spells have ranges. It might not be possible to search all your territory with one castle of remote searchers.

The ranges are another lever that can be used to diversify and balance the site-searching spells. Some can be at higher or lower research levels, some can require more or fewer paths to cast, some could require more or fewer gems to cast, and some could have better or worse range.

Gnome Lore being at Thaum-4 and requiring (I assume) E2 and 2 gems means it could have a very wide range, allowing a single caster to cover most of your territory. Conversely, the astral site search (Evo-2, I think) only requires S1 and 2 gems, so it could have a narrow range.

Shatner wrote:The ranges are another lever that can be used to diversify and balance the site-searching spells. Some can be at higher or lower research levels, some can require more or fewer paths to cast, some could require more or fewer gems to cast, and some could have better or worse range.

No, this is mostly just really obnoxious fiddling for the sake of fiddling. Balancing those four parameters (range, research level, path req, gem cost) against eachother is not happening. Partially because some of those costs are dependent on bullshit like faction and how you happened to expand which are not intrinsic to the spell, and partially because some of those costs are measured in things like gold and research and it's not clear how many gems those should give you.

Site-searching should be as standardized as possible. Tweaking the costs to match the relative frequency and value of magic sites would be ideal, but there's not a lot of room to do so; the shift from 2->3 gems or 2->1 gems is huge. And all of this is assuming that all gems/paths are equally valuable, which... isn't really true (where's your lategame, fire? Get on that), but whatever.

Remote site-searching is already pretty underused as it stands compared to using multi-path dudes to manual site-search. Sure, it's just one search every 2 turns, but being able to search multiple paths makes up for it in a lot of cases.

And in other news, Nature Bless is changed now. No more regen for N4, instead you get some extra HPs (1/size is what most people think) and only get Regen 10 at N9.

This is beginning to make me feel like this is just a bunch of random and very hastily thought out changes; and they're again just going to let the modders handle it. Boo.

People have been complaining about Nature Bless for a long time. It's basically mandatory on every Giant race, and not coincidentally the Giant Races fall in the "over powered" category more often than not. While I'm sad about what this will do to my home boys Bandar Log, that's the kind of nerf that Niefelheim and Hinnom have been needing for a long long time. The fact that Ashdod can get 6 hit points back a turn on their Anakites for the cost of Nature fucking 6 isn't 100% of why Ashdod is problematically overpowered, but it sure doesn't help.

I would really expect to see Air Bless changed too, because no one gives a fuck about it and it was changed in the switch from Dom 2 to Dom 3 as well. And I would hope that Blood 9 would get an overhaul because it's amazingly worthless and no one ever takes it.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:People have been complaining about Nature Bless for a long time. It's basically mandatory on every Giant race, and not coincidentally the Giant Races fall in the "over powered" category more often than not. While I'm sad about what this will do to my home boys Bandar Log, that's the kind of nerf that Niefelheim and Hinnom have been needing for a long long time. The fact that Ashdod can get 6 hit points back a turn on their Anakites for the cost of Nature fucking 6 isn't 100% of why Ashdod is problematically overpowered, but it sure doesn't help.

I would really expect to see Air Bless changed too, because no one gives a fuck about it and it was changed in the switch from Dom 2 to Dom 3 as well. And I would hope that Blood 9 would get an overhaul because it's amazingly worthless and no one ever takes it.

-Username17

Yeah, Nature was really good for giants, but that change also affects other nations like Vanheim. Plus, the extra HP thing feels really weak. Apparently all blesses have been changed though.

Blood 9 is supposed to get a new ability wherein the attacker must make an MR roll, otherwise they also suffer any damage inflicted on an enemy unit. Which is pretty good.

If the range limitations are severe, that will seriously affect several mid-game ranged offensive rituals and late-game strategies like teleporting armies.

I don't see how the suggested changes hurt Vanheim any. A Van is Size 3 and has 13 Hit Points. If they get +1 HP/Bless Level/Size Level, a Van would gain 6 hit points from a Nature 6 Bless. Going from 13 -> 19 hit points seems generally more useful than regaining 2 hit points a turn when you only have 13 to start with. Makes you a lot more resilient to Fire and Lightning as well.

Nature Bless is going to be a must-have for people with sacred Heavy Cav instead of for people with sacred Giants. And that seems like a good change.

I hope there's a replacement something for nations with sacred old geezers to do about Diseases though.

-Username17

We're not sure if the HP scales per size though. I think what they've seen is more like +1 at Nature 4, +2 at Nature 6 and so forth.

Edit: Confirmed. It's not based on size:

The HP boost scales up 1 per level, so it's +3 at level 5, +4 at level 6 and so forth and at level 9 it hits regen. So the nature bless in and of itself at level 4 is nothing spectacular. At higher levels it improves survivability and at level 9 it synergizes well with the minor bless by boosting HP total, which then boosts the regen rate, making survival more likely.

For example, arssartuts with N9 become pretty tough customers.

So base +2 HP at level 4, +3 at level 5 and so forth. Basically it's good only when you invest a lot of points in it. It's really for human-sized stuff now.

This doesn't change any build that I use. I used to go to N9 for the Beserking even though it's not that great, and now I'll have to go to N9 for the Regen.

This really only nerfs the N4 that people used to lazily toss on when they had some situational sacred troops and a pretender that could get it cheaply.

Holy shit.

Blood 9's bless is Blood Vengeance.

Yeah, it's pretty badass. I've never played a serious blood nation before, but this might be enough to make me try Mictlan for my first versus match when it comes out. Flying sacred jaguars will be absolutely ridiculous with a BV bless.

K wrote:Holy shit.

Blood 9's bless is Blood Vengeance.

oh soooo gooood

Totally OP but I want it.

From what I saw it isn't BV as we know it, because the blessed unit still takes the damage - it's just also taken by the damage dealer. I might be mistaken, or BV might have been nerfed overall, but that was my takeaway.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:From what I saw it isn't BV as we know it, because the blessed unit still takes the damage - it's just also taken by the damage dealer. I might be mistaken, or BV might have been nerfed overall, but that was my takeaway.

Yeah, Edi confirmed it already. The original Blood Vengeance has been renamed Damage Reversal. BV has both the attacker and defender receive damage.