Dominions V

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DrPraetor
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Dominions V

Post by DrPraetor »

Yas.

This surely justifies a new thread.

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Can anyone explain how the Trinity pretenders work?
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Post by GreatGreyShrike »

The hooded spirit is one trinity pretender; don't know if there are others, haven't looked at everything exhaustively yet.

For the hooded spirit:

- it has 3 magic paths on the design screen: Water, Earth, Nature
- In game, it shows up as 3 different gods, one for each of those magic paths: one god with however much W magic, another with E magic, and a final one with N magic. They all have full stats as a Hooded Spirit.
- When they aren't in the same province, they take -1 to all magic paths for every path for each hooded spirit not there - so by themselves they're -2, with another they're -1, and all three together they're at +0
- Each can cast independently, be geared independently, etc.
- If you take other additional magic paths, all those paths ended up on the Nature god - not sure if that's reliable, coincidence, or what.
- Each of the gods has a strategy-map ability "unity" to call the other gods to that location.
- When dead, calling back is about twice as fast for each part of a trinity as a normal god.

It allows you a lot more flexibility by splitting your god into multiple fairly strong parts - so you can have part of your god go cast N rituals while another part summons Water elementals in battles or whatever. In battles, the idea of having 3 different gods each of which can spellcast simulataneously is very cool and powerful late in the game when you actually have stuff for them to all cast, but early on Hooded Spirits are ~40 HP ethereal guys with fists and no armor. Base design point cost is very high (290) - and even more so if you want your trinity to have meaningfully high magic paths when split apart.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

There's also the Morrigna, which is the one I was looking at and baffled by.

edit: Morrigna paths seem to work differently.
PathsAirAstralDeath
Paid for445
#1 has:224
#2 has:233
#3 has:323

So I paid for 13 levels and got 24, but they max out at 1 less than I saw on the creation screen.

They do also lose paths when separated, as the hooded spirit does.
Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Tue Nov 28, 2017 2:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DrPraetor »

Who all gets the Morriga and the Hooded Spirit?

Let's spitball pretender designs, because shit gets insane.

For early Mictlan, how about a F6D10 awake Demilich, with Awe and Fear, DS5, Order 3 Sloth 3 Temp 0(-1) Growth 1 Misfortune 2 Drain 1.

Abysia can get the same blessing at F5 D10 because they get +2 fire blessing points.

The bigger blessings require your pretender to be awake, so let's consider good blesses for Dormant pretenders. From the full list (although does it vary by nation? It doesn't seem to), the following look competitive. Keep in mind you need 4 points in a path to get any blessing at all, though.

[*] Swiftness (A2) is going to be good for many sacred units, if they're strong enough that you'd consider using them anyway (so, Vanheim, Eriu, Mictlan... EA Abysia?). EDIT: FOR A4 YOU CAN GET THIS TWICE. THIS WILL OFTEN BE EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT
[*] Charged Bodies (A4) plus Minor Shock Resistance (A1) as a combo, will give you a bonus AN hit against anyone that strikes you. Do shield hits count, or hits cancelled by ethereal?
[*] Unbreakable (E4) blocks 75% of afflictions. I think most people are overly-worried about afflictions in this game, but that might still be a power-buy.
[*] Reconstruction (E2) is a tax on anyone who gets sacred statues which enables them to heal. I dislike taxes and I think this becomes mandatory if you expect to actually fight with those units.
[*] Spirit Sight (S1D1) and Low Light Vision (N1), are possibly exploitable if you can find some easy way to produce darkness? Spirit Sight lets you fight "invisible" units without penalty but previous games didn't have invisibility so I don't know what that means.
[*] Far Caster (S4) - +50% spell range, and Arcane Finesse (S4) - +1 penetration, may be very powerful? How good these are is an emergent property of the entire game, so hard to say for now.
[*] Solar Weapons (S3 F1) only do 3 AP damage (9 AP against demons and undead), but the RNG in this game is pretty swingy so that might matter.
[*] Undying (D1), when you die, you come back with 2HP and if you are undead you also survive the battle. Depending on how this works, it may make Shadow Vestels straight up immortal. That would be pretty good, if so.
[*] Unaging (N3, Magic 1) actually reduces aging by 75%, and it's not clear if this protects already-old units from picking up afflictions (?).
[*] Blood Surge (B4) +3 Att, +3 Str, +1 Def, Recup 1, after you have killed somebody. Depending on how quickly your sacred troops expect to kill someone, this could be quite good? Of course, the faster you kill people the better this is but the less you care about att and str bonuses because you are killing people...

So Pythium can get a...
Dormant Neteret of Many Names, S4N4, Arcane Finesse, Low Light Vision (Resilient?) and Unaging, Domstr 8, Turmoil 3, Productivity 1, Cold 1, Growth 1, Fortune 3, Magic 1. That's pretty insane.

Marignon (MA) gets +2 bless points on Fire and... Astral? So you can get Awe on your Knights of the Chalice at only F5. Perhaps even more insane, you can now recruit Flagellants in non-Fort provinces. So, that's... nuts. Is it more nuts that Knights of the Chalice are not capital-only? So you get sacred knights out of all your forts.

So you get a... Awake Great Sage, F5A4S4, with Awe, Twist Fate, Swiftness x2 (!), and Domstr 5, Turmoil 3, Prod 1, Cold 1, Growth 1, Fortune 3, Drain 1. BECAUSE MADNESS, THAT'S WHY.
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Post by Red_Rob »

Something I pointed out in the beta is that "free" bless points are worth more the more points you put into the path. Getting a 6-point bless for 4 points saves you 72 points (starting from 1) whereas getting a 9-point bless for 7 points saves you 120 points, or 3 whole scales. This really incentivises nations with bless points to go all-in to get maximum benefit.

I've only played a couple of years with one nation, so not really got my teeth into the new bless options. Incarnate + Blessed Pretenders in friendly Dominion really seems to push towards an Awake combat Pretender though. Taking a decent bless and a chassis that can take on indies gives you a double push during expansion.
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Post by Grek »

DrPraetor wrote:Who all gets the Morriga and the Hooded Spirit?
Hooded spirit access is mostly unchanged from Dom4. So celtic nations, mostly.
DrPraetor wrote:[*] Charged Bodies (A4) plus Minor Shock Resistance (A1) as a combo, will give you a bonus AN hit against anyone that strikes you. Do shield hits count, or hits cancelled by ethereal?
Charged Bodies goes off the first time you take damage and only goes off once, as far as I can tell.
DrPraetor wrote:[*] Reconstruction (E2) is a tax on anyone who gets sacred statues which enables them to heal. I dislike taxes and I think this becomes mandatory if you expect to actually fight with those units.
Inanimates heal in labs, even without the bless. A big MA Argatha strategy is to put labs all over the place.
DrPraetor wrote:[*] Spirit Sight (S1D1) and Low Light Vision (N1), are possibly exploitable if you can find some easy way to produce darkness? Spirit Sight lets you fight "invisible" units without penalty but previous games didn't have invisibility so I don't know what that means.
Spirit Sight is basically 100% Darkvision and immunity to glamour.
DrPraetor wrote:[*] Unaging (N3, Magic 1) actually reduces aging by 75%, and it's not clear if this protects already-old units from picking up afflictions (?).
Unaging reduces the age gain from paths (particularly fire paths) by 75%, but doesn't help with old age due to just being old as fuck on recruitment. Maybe a future patch will change that?

One thing that you might not have noticed: Imprisoned is +350 points now. So it's often pretty plausible to get 7+ candles, 2-3 paths to 4 for a non-incarnate bless and great scales all at once on an imprisoned pretender. Non-incarnate blesses can be pretty good, too. One that I find myself taking repeatedly is F4E4B4, which gets you +1 morale, +5 attack, +3 strength, +1 defense, +3 reinvig as soon as you kill anything - and that applies to mages too, who often really like the reinvig when dropping evocations.

Other good low level options are Forest/Mountain survival, Water Walking, Magic Resistance, Water Walking, Precision (notable for being +1/path instead of +0.67/path). A more situational bless is F4 for Inspirational Leader. It lets you substitute an H1 indie priest for an H1 indie commander in order to give everyone under him +1 morale while he spams Heavenly Fires or blesses your sacreds or whatever. Something like F4A4 (Leadership + Swiftness x2) is particularly nice for nations like Mictlan who A] have decent recent anywhere sacreds, but B] would like it if they didn't have to use valuable mages to lead them. You can do something similar with Astral for Kailasa/Theredis (who need magic leadership for their sacreds, but would prefer not to waste recruitment points on a Guhyaka/Melia to babysit them) and with Death for undead leadership (See: anyone who wants to summon demons, or who gets undead reanimating priests)
Last edited by Grek on Tue Nov 28, 2017 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Grek wrote:
DrPraetor wrote:[*] Spirit Sight (S1D1) and Low Light Vision (N1), are possibly exploitable if you can find some easy way to produce darkness? Spirit Sight lets you fight "invisible" units without penalty but previous games didn't have invisibility so I don't know what that means.
Spirit Sight is basically 100% Darkvision and immunity to glamour.
Invisible is actually a new trait (I've seen it on the succubus, but I'm sure there are others). The text is 'Invisible units can only be seen by units with spirit sight. When a unit with invisibility is sneaking, only patrolling units with spirit sight will be able to find it. In combat, invisibility gives any melee attackers -10 to their attack skill unless they have spirit sight.'
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Post by Username17 »

Is there any reason that all the pretender costs have been increased by 80? The lowest Pretender Cost I've seen is 80 instead of zero, but since you don't have the option of not having a pretender I don't see what difference that makes. Base design points is 425, but it might as well be 345 because there's no way to get a Pretender that is cheaper than 80.

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Post by Shatner »

FrankTrollman wrote:Is there any reason that all the pretender costs have been increased by 80? The lowest Pretender Cost I've seen is 80 instead of zero, but since you don't have the option of not having a pretender I don't see what difference that makes. Base design points is 425, but it might as well be 345 because there's no way to get a Pretender that is cheaper than 80.

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Maybe it's so future content can include heavily discounted pretenders? Like, a pretender costs 80 but for a specific nation it costs 20 less and thus 60? The pretender discount is a thing in both Dom4 and Dom5, but I doubt it'd play nice with a 0-cost pretender getting a discount, so maybe they wanted to leave that conceptual space open.
Last edited by Shatner on Tue Nov 28, 2017 8:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Red_Rob »

Pretenders can be discounted by up to 60 points for a particular nation, so really you don't want to have any that are cheaper than that.

In Dom4 the Floating Mind was 50pts and 20 cheaper for Rlyeh, so 30 was the cheapest you could get. I can see wanting to leave some room at the bottom end for future Pretenders.

Is it just me or are the indies putting up more of a fight in Dom5? Archers definitely seem harder to decoy and foot troops seem to get to my back line more often
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Post by Username17 »

Red_Rob wrote:Pretenders can be discounted by up to 60 points for a particular nation, so really you don't want to have any that are cheaper than that.

In Dom4 the Floating Mind was 50pts and 20 cheaper for Rlyeh, so 30 was the cheapest you could get. I can see wanting to leave some room at the bottom end for future Pretenders.

Is it just me or are the indies putting up more of a fight in Dom5? Archers definitely seem harder to decoy and foot troops seem to get to my back line more often
I can confirm that starting neutral armies are a bit sterner than they were previously. The default neutrals have relevant orders instead of just being big blob. So they are a lot harder to game. Neutral Raptors are sitting around on Attack Rear, Neutral Archers are on various different fire orders. It means that old tricks just don't work at all and the new tricks aren't going to be nearly as good.

All in all, I think a lot of factions are going to have a really hard time with early expansion.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I called a Pretender back from the dead, and while he did suffer the usual path loss, he also gained a point of Death from the experience of being dead. So that's neat.
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Post by Shatner »

I knew about the possibility of gaining death or blood magic from being revived, but I thought the penalty for being revived was supposed to be a loss of 1 level of 1 path (so as not to overly penalize rainbows) or the loss of a point of Dominion Strength.

Does your experience contradict that, angelfromanotherpin? I haven't had a chance to test yet.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

My pretender was a single-path Dragon, so no contradiction. And the rez message specified the path lost by name, which sounds right if they're only meant to lose from one.
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Post by Korwin »

I noticed Dom9 does'nt give your pretender awe anymore.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by Shatner »

I can't help but notice that archers seem much less effective than they used to be. I think this is a result of the new real-time combat system. My suspicion is that the aiming algorithm hasn't changed since Dom4 but since enemies advance while the arrows are mid-flight, arrows now have a terrible hit rate.

I was trying some SP last night, first as EA Yomi (which is now a freespawn nation in the vein of Asphodel) and second as MA T'ien Ch'i. In the former I noticed almost none of my kills were coming from my bakemono archers (unless you counted friendly fire once my ko-oni closed to melee). But whatever, those were always trash archers reliant on numbers for effectiveness so maybe I hadn't reached critical mass yet... plus, my freespawn demons were more than pulling their weight so I didn't really care.

The T'ien Ch'i game, though... my expansion was abysmal. Now, a lot of that could be me not knowing what I'm doing with this new combat system overall. But when it took me 3 tries to conquer a modest province of barbarian indies I paid attention. That used to be a cake walk for MA TC. Archers + Pikes = win, simple as that. Here, those 20+ archers were getting maybe 2 kills total (plus a scattering of non-fatal wounds). That my line of pikes was also performing so poorly was a separate matter, but my main guess there was that they were overwhelmed from my archers being so ineffective.
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Post by Grek »

What did you script the archers to shoot at?
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Post by Shatner »

Grek wrote:What did you script the archers to shoot at?
Well, for Yomi you can't script the archers because they're undisciplined, so I'm pretty sure they just do Fire Closest or choose a target at random. For T'ien Ch'i I had them on Fire Closest against the barbarians. Honestly, it doesn't matter what their target is against barbarians since barbs are a giant blob of melee running at you headlong. It's not like there's archers in the back or cavalry trying to flank.

The basic formation was archers in a line about 3/8ths from the left-most position and a line of pikes at the halfway position. My commander and prophet, the mounted guy with a falchion and a composite bow, was just behind the archers scripted to cast Sermon of Courage a few times and then spam whatever the air-variant of Smite is called.
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Post by Red_Rob »

Pikemen are worse than in Dom4 because they changed the repel rules back to the Dom3 version. Now only the target gets a chance to repel instead of everyone in the target square.

I haven't really tried out bows yet, I've read some reports they are worse at targetting because of the real time combat, but also some people saying they feel more accurate because they aim for the front of a formation and the target unit "walks" through the firing line.

Have you seen the new Gifts from Heaven effect? It looks really epic and the sound effects are great. Probably the first time I've been visually impressed by a Dominions battle... :rofl:
Last edited by Red_Rob on Wed Nov 29, 2017 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Shatner »

Red_Rob wrote:Have you seen the new Gifts from Heaven effect? It looks really epic and the sound effects are great. Probably the first time I've been visually impressed by a Dominions battle... :P
I hadn't, though I was musing earlier about using a strong air bless (which would allow you to purchase the precision boost effect numerous times) and easy access to Wind Guide to turn Gift from Heaven into a tactical nuke rather than a the meteorite-equivalent of spray-and-pray.

One cute little detail I discovered earlier was that MA Ulm gets an additional forging discount (20%) on the Blacksteel Items, including the new Blacksteel Sword. A Master Smith can, out of the box, forge a shield for 2 gems and the full plate for 6. Not anything super exciting, but it does mean you can turn an awake pretender or an early hero into a Prot-24 tin can with minimal investment.

I assume that same mechanic is available for other items for other nations, but I have checked yet. Maybe Marignon can forge the Flambeau on the cheap, for example.
Last edited by Shatner on Wed Nov 29, 2017 3:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DrPraetor »

Are the in-flight speeds for missiles modable? If you made the arrows fly faster, they might arrive before the troops moved as far.

I remember finding what I recall was a missile-speed value in the executable.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

DrPraetor wrote:Are the in-flight speeds for missiles modable? If you made the arrows fly faster, they might arrive before the troops moved as far.

I remember finding what I recall was a missile-speed value in the executable.
They are, it's (#flyspr <flysprite nbr> <animation lgth>), but the animation lgth for arrows is already 1, and I remember that making it less than 1 caused problems.
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Post by Red_Rob »

Shatner wrote:I was musing earlier about using a strong air bless (which would allow you to purchase the precision boost effect numerous times) and easy access to Wind Guide to turn Gift from Heaven into a tactical nuke rather than a the meteorite-equivalent of spray-and-pray.
Be aware that Gifts of Heaven has a new "innacurate" tag that means it always deviates a little. It is apparently meant to be used as scatter fire rather than a guided missile.
One cute little detail I discovered earlier was that MA Ulm gets an additional forging discount (20%) on the Blacksteel Items, including the new Blacksteel Sword. A Master Smith can, out of the box, forge a shield for 2 gems and the full plate for 6. Not anything super exciting, but it does mean you can turn an awake pretender or an early hero into a Prot-24 tin can with minimal investment.

I assume that same mechanic is available for other items for other nations, but I have checked yet. Maybe Marignon can forge the Flambeau on the cheap, for example.
Yeah, national item discounts are a thing now. Looks like a nice way to encourage players to forge thematic items.

The new recruitment mechanics have shaken things up a little. With every indie mage being effectively Slow Recruit unless you build a fort on them, I think that hurts nations like Lemuria or Vanheim that rely on indies for boosting their research. On the flip side, the Recruit Points mechanic seems intended to restrict recruitment of very low resource units when you have a gold glut. I've also heard the devs intended it to restrict the number of elites you can recruit vs. lower level units, not sure how effective that will be though.
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Post by Shatner »

Red_Rob wrote:The new recruitment mechanics have shaken things up a little. With every indie mage being effectively Slow Recruit unless you build a fort on them, I think that hurts nations like Lemuria or Vanheim that rely on indies for boosting their research. On the flip side, the Recruit Points mechanic seems intended to restrict recruitment of very low resource units when you have a gold glut. I've also heard the devs intended it to restrict the number of elites you can recruit vs. lower level units, not sure how effective that will be though.
It really has. With the caveat that I've only just dipped my toes in the water of this new game, I'm fairly pleased with it. It makes recruiting non-mages better, which means commanders that had previously been opportunity costed to the margins actually have a chance to make an appearance. Spies. Assassins. Edge-case units like eunuchs, mid-tier commands, and low-tier priests (especially if you tack on leadership blesses that improve their ability to ferry troops or even lead raids) suddenly have a use.

Also, it means that high-end forts have a place because, with a 3-recruitment citadel or what-have-you, those capstone mages go from being 1-every-2-turns to 3-every-4 turns.

Finally, the promise of cavalry being something more widely usable is exciting. In MA Ulm, you'd recruit the blacksteel troop variants when you were willing to trade recruiting bandwidth away for troop quality. It looks like the idea is that cavalry will be much the same. Again, I haven't confirmed that this is true in execution, but the prospect is neat.

Your point about indie-reliant nations is well-taken, though.
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