Dominions 4 Teasers

K · Post by K » Sat Sep 07, 2013 6:50 pm

Is is weird that my favorite change is the regen numbers that rise up off of wounded guys?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 6:57 pm

It is not weird, that's very satisfying, though at first I thought they were poison numbers. Those seem to be red now?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 8:18 pm

The regen numbers do look nice, but I think my favorite aesthetic changes are
1. Dragon breath looks much cooler.
2. In at least 1 battle, my fireballs set some shrubs or mushrooms on fire. Playing as Marignon or Abysia can look pretty awesome when your fiery evocations start setting plants ablaze.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 8:46 pm

Kailasa's Yakshas and Yakshini's are NOT slow recruits, which means that Kailasa now has some of the best mages that can be built every turn.

Marverni has been inexplicably gutted, with the old Druid becoming a capitol-only slow recruit.

EDIT: Jomon got an amazing unique pretender. The Bodhisattva is 50 points for an A2S1 lady with map move 5 flying, glamour, healer, and awe. AND she reduces unrest.

K · Post by K » Sat Sep 07, 2013 11:59 pm

Mmmm. Was screwing around with the new Yomi and I noticed that Bandits had the ability to Raid instead of Move or Stealth. Basically, you Pillage a province that you would have entered (the move arrow turns into a line with an X at the end).

Ruining people's provinces without entering them, and getting gold for it, is kind of neat.

Lots of very long weapons on Yomi too. Might be a build there since my primary worry that Aka-oni would not Fire because they are Undisciplined was baseless.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 12:19 am

Middle-Age Pangaea is looking very, very good. Pans are actually cheaper now, and being slow-build isn't that big a handicap. Pandemoniacs are slow-build cap-only, but even cheaper, and they now make maenads. You can recruit the unarmored harpies, satyrs, and minotaurs out of any forest. You can also recruit all your mini sacred mages out of unfortified forests, although once you put down a lab and a temple you might as well add the fort.

Blood can forge research boosters now, although they take forever to pay off.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 12:19 am

Yeah, the Bodhisattva is available for most of the eastern nations (Jomon, T'ien Ch'i, Bandar Log, etc.) and it is indeed pretty excellent.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 12:31 am

DomIV really is going to be "fight over forests" edition isn't it?

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 12:40 am

Site-search spells are now mostly research 3 and 4, cost 3 or 4 gems, and tend to have a range of about 3 provinces. (Or for Air, 2 provinces not crossing water). I get that this is what you'd probably have to do to make manual versus magical and interesting trade-off, but mostly it's going to be super annoying. And add to a trend of it taking forever to actually do any magic in this game.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 1:07 am

Ancient History wrote:DomIV really is going to be "fight over forests" edition isn't it?

Well, some nations are going to fight over swamps or mountains.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 1:28 am

Orion wrote:Site-search spells are now mostly research 3 and 4, cost 3 or 4 gems, and tend to have a range of about 3 provinces. (Or for Air, 2 provinces not crossing water). I get that this is what you'd probably have to do to make manual versus magical and interesting trade-off, but mostly it's going to be super annoying. And add to a trend of it taking forever to actually do any magic in this game.

Dom IV is in some ways the "less magic edition" because of more difficult site searching because of worse ritual searches and fewer big mages, no gem gens outside of unique artifacts, harder Blood slave acquisition, much fewer big mages, more expensive forging, slower research at the high-end, harder ritual use, and added difficulty in breaking into other paths.

In other ways, it's the "more magic edition." There are better low-end items, more spells, spells that fix some tactical holes in Dom III and so more magic to use in battle, more tiny mages from nation-specific non-fortress recruitment and so more magic in battles, having Forge bonuses is less important, faster low-end research, more gems because of random events generating new sites, temp gem items for more big magic during battles, fewer reasons to NOT spend gems on mages, more magic on Pretenders that you'd actually use, and less reason to use mages as thugs because they no longer get stat-boosts from paths.

In other words, it's a different game. Finding the new balance points is going to take some time.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:21 am

Just two notes:

Slow-to-recruit (StR) is explicitly said to have not undergone much thought on balance. Kristoff didnt even have a list of which mages were StR until Dom3Mod people gave him one. When challenged on this Edi basically said "If we tried to balance it we will need two months. Just mod it to fix it".

Which is why a lot of rather crappy mages got StR'd.

Also, new Pretenders have not been costed yet. The default cost of Pretenders is 50, so all the amazing 50-point ones should be changed before release.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:54 am

Zinegata wrote:
Also, new Pretenders have not been costed yet. The default cost of Pretenders is 50, so all the amazing 50-point ones should be changed before release.

That makes me sad. I seriously thought that people might stop using the same handful of Pretenders.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:23 am

Awesome as dragons are, friendly fire can be a bit of an issue. I wish I could get my pretender to fly ahead more reliably.

I am so glad land nations can now buy underwater PD. Things just got much less tedious in games with undersea Thrones.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:43 am

So Asphodel (a.k.a. evil MA Pangaea a.k.a. The Happening w/Zombies) can build temples for 100gp.

100gp temples.

100gp TEMPLES!!

Holy crap! Is that a bug? Some sort of oversight? Unintended or not, it makes the plant-zombie apocalypse come that much more quickly. Asphodel's domain kills pop and turns corpses into various forms of mannekins, and a temple, high growth, and high magic all help you get better varieties of free-spawn.

Add to that that you can recruit a handful of national troops in unfortified forests and you can have a province churning out super-efficient mage-priest researchers for one turn of simultaneously building a temple and a lab (500gp and 1 turn vs. 1100gp and 4 turns to build a fort-temple-lab).

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:46 am

Worms that Walk are a bit confusing. The psuedo-immortality, invulnerability, regen, reinvig, and all the other stuff seems a bit much for a N3 caster with 10 HP.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:57 am

K wrote:Worms that Walk are a bit confusing. The psuedo-immortality, invulnerability, regen, reinvig, and all the other stuff seems a bit much for a N3 caster with 10 HP.

What are those? Are they a general summon, a national summon, or a national recruit? I'm really looking forward to when the manual for this game is out so I can freakin' search for recruitment and game mechanic info.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 5:59 am

Nature mages summoned by a generically available Nature Thaumaturgy.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:04 am

Jeezus. The new Horrors are badass.

Cast Send Horror twice. Got an S5D2 guy with six attacks, and a Gore Tide elemental-ish thing with massive resistances and 50% regen.

Even the Lesser Horrors are neat.

Nice sprites too.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:10 am

Yeti are basically naked monkey-men with high strength and a cold aura. The nice bit is a Damage 19 Sticks and Stones ranged attack.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:38 am

Gah, Gargoyles are no longer SCs. The spell gives you a bunch of medium-sized flying stone units with low HPs.

Mound Fiends turn people they kill into Soulless. This makes them a weirdly interesting option for battle magic.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 10:18 am

So, people are of course flocking to Order as their one true master. I don't think it is. I just did a simple test where I had ten nations start up with 9 provinces and an awake dominion 10 god to push dominion for a year. I did the test three times, giving the nations:

Order 3
Growth 3
Turmoil 3, Growth 3, Luck 3

Each of those is obviously 120 build points for dominion.

The results were as follows:


Dominion	Total Gold	Bonus Gems	Magic Items	Heroes
Order3	105226	50	1	0
Growth3	94152	108	2	1
T3G3L3	95336	228	7	3

And also the non-order people got more labs and random barbarian chiefs and shit, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that. But the bottom line is that after positive events, the Order 3 factions are only pulling down 10% more money than the Turmoil/Luck people, and aren't running a 1 in 3 chance of getting a national hero in the first year and are missing out on an average of 17 magic gems and about a 50% chance of getting a magic item in the first year.

Now obviously, variance is really high. The highest single gold level at the end of the first year was in Pythium's Growth 3 year, where they happened to have really valuable provinces. And the lowest gold level at the end of the first year was actually Caelum's Order 3 trial, where their provinces just kind of sucked monkey butt. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that I ended up with an anomalous result.

But I kind of think it isn't. I think Turmoil/Luck is actually a reasonable life choice. As such, I don't think "Chaos Power" is going to be as much of a disadvantage as you might think.

Note also that I don't think the parameters of the experiment especially favored Growth. Growth gets bigger the longer the game lasts, and I only ran it for 1 year.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 1:12 pm

Marignon's lack of randoms turns out to be a bug that will be fixed in the next version.

-Username17

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:26 pm

Did you use "random events rare" (the default) or "random events common"? (Which appears to be the equivalent of the old game, maybe?)

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:59 pm

I left random events unchanged from default.

-Username17