Dominions 4 Teasers

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Feb 10, 2015 8:44 am

Red_Rob wrote:
Zinegata wrote:Having your recruit-everywhere mage being slow-to-recruit makes it harder to ramp up research
Isn't the Gygja their recruit anywhere mage? They aren't slow to recruit. The recruit anywhere Thug is slow to recruit.

Having your cheapest mage at 225 gold doesn't make for great research though, I'll grant you.

I was referring to Skratti as the previous recruit-everywhere go-to mage; hence the suggestion to go scales with Gyjgas casting Body Ethereal instead.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:16 pm

Gygjas with brands and shields?

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:49 am

Hey, is there a list of indie mages and a guide to what you can use them for? I always just sort of ignore them in every game I've played except buying a few wolf tribe shaman to search for nature sites and then make random Nature items, but I imagine I could be doing more.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 2:38 am

Orion wrote:Gygjas with brands and shields?

I really wouldn't bother. Gygjas are for casting spells to support your troops, and you really want to just have a lot of gold and resources to have enough troops to squish the enemy. A giant army that has been mostly ethereal'd is a much bigger threat than a group of Skratti thugs in the first place.

You only want a couple of Skratti thrown in for blood magic or thugging, but the ole Baalz doctrine of going all-thug with this nation is simply not sustainable in Dom 4.

In fact, come to think of it aside from the "Van" nations you really shouldn't thug very much, and in their case it's only worth it because they have glamoured 150-ish gold commanders with A1.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:44 am

I find combined arms is pretty important in Dom4. If your opponent isn't sure whether they'll face an army with mage support, an army with thug support, a Teleport Rain of Stones ambush or a SC it makes scripting a real nightmare for them.

SC Battlecasters are still pretty dope, y'all. A King of Fire kitted out with a full defensive item load and scripted with Living Fire > Firestorm can wreck any army without fire res. Similarly my A4/E4 Pretender had some great success with scripting Cloud Trapeze and Summon Earthpower, RoS x3. It's important to keep these threats mobile as once your opponent can predict where they will be they become less dangerous.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 5:12 am

So I went over to the Dominions 4 forums at Desura, and there are a couple threads where it talks about how everyone uses dragons.

What's up with that? Water and Fire are paths that are useful, but you don't necessarily have to have on your pretender and the bless is pretty specific. Nature is a much more general bless. At 50 points + 80 for extra path, they're really only good for 1-2 paths, and usually I'd want to add more to a nation. N9E4Dom6 costs 496 pts --- the same on a Great Mother is only 389, 100pts cheaper.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 5:59 am

I hear about them being used as early-game SCs. They can cast spells and are fairly buff. Obviously, that's not a service Sacred Giant nations require, but a number of nations have weak starting armies. Also, f9+Mictlan rocks faces, which might contribute.

Honestly I personally haven't had much luck with using them.

K · Post by K » Wed Feb 18, 2015 6:41 am

People use dragons because up until the last patch they had a broken breath weapons that did not run out of shots. Combined with natural fear and natural high armor and high HPS and an AoE tail attack, they were pretty ideal early expanders.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 8:26 am

Having F9 or W9 on a Dragon lets your Pretender pull double duty - you get a major bless for your sacreds and an awake flying expander to turbocharge your economy. That alone gives a Dragon a leg up compared to other Pretenders.

With the new patch focusing on Monster Pretenders and reworking the costs with the new Pretender Autocalc we might see some challengers to the title of Best Monster, and as K said the melee breath weapon ammo change might impact how well they can expand.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 2:36 pm

Plus they could be further super-charged as disciples. Dragon with an N9 bless...

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 2:40 pm

The breath weapons were nice along with Fear, but to me the real clincher for the Dragon was flight + protection 18. Being able to remain relatively immune to most normal weapons meant the Dragon really had a better shelf life than most monsters.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 6:57 pm

Cool, thanks for the thoughts.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:26 pm

Ikeren wrote:Cool, thanks for the thoughts.

One thing I forgot to mention in my Awake Pretenders guide (which is probably part of the reason why Dragons are in the vogue) is that the Green Dragon has the advantage of being able to pick up Personal Regeneration, which is an extremely useful spell with a high-HP unit that also reduces the chances for affliction.

That said, there really should be more viable Awake SCs with air magic, since Air Shield is pretty important for most SCs. I consider it important enough that I would add it to a Lich-type awake SC since all that arrow fire tends to be very deadly if not mitigated.

Archmage · Post by **Archmage** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:14 am

Two things:

1) Tips on blood hunting and how it's changed from Dom3? You can't set tax to zero now. So...do you mitigate unrest with patrollers, or what? Just live with it? I'm LA Mictlan in a game right now and general blood economy pointers would be nice.

2) Anyone interested in a disciples game?

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 4:15 pm

My advice is based on experience, not hard numbers and tests of game mechanics, so take with the appropriate amount of salt.

The best form of blood hunting I've found for a nation like EA/LA Mictlan is to put one B1 priest (ideally with a Sanguine Dowsing Rod) in every 4000+ population province and have them blood hunt each turn, with a scout acting as their caddie, ferrying blood slaves back to the lab. When possible try and leave the truly wealthy provinces alone because losing 50% tax income due to unrest in a 60gp province is minor, but losing it in a 250gp province is not.

I've tried patrolling with cheap and/or effective patrollers (slaves generated by your Tribal Kings are good for the job) and haven't found it to be anything too impressive. Having high dominion and high Order scales will do more collective good for your blood income than actively patrolling a couple of provinces. Patrolling lots of provinces means you've allocated too many resources to generating patrollers, resources that could have gone into conquering more provinces for you to blood hunt.

Stacking two blood hunters in the same province, provided both have SDRs, seems to work out, although it is always best to have one hunter per 4000+ pop province first and only stack up hunters second. More than that and you hit diminishing returns fast because they hunt sequentially with the 2nd hunter dealing with the unrest caused by the 1st, and the 3rd dealing with the 1st and 2nd's, and so on.

EDIT: A change from Dom3 -> Dom4 (if I remember correctly) was that unrest reduces automatically each turn by a percentage, which means less unrest is reduced when unrest is low, and more is reduced when unrest is high. This means most regularly hunted provinces will stabilize at a mid level of unrest as unrest generation eventually finds a point where it is matched by unrest reduction. More Order and friendly dominion will lower this stable value, and Turmoil and hostile dominion will raise it.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Feb 24, 2015 3:28 pm

New patch is out. And while it may be extremely premature as it's based only on a few tests, but I'm calling it - the Thrice Horned Boar is going to be a go-to Pretender because of its cheap cost, high protection, and trample ability - all of which lets it be an awake expander (that doesn't need Dominion 9 for Awe) for a nation that can also take Order 3, Production 3, and 2 other positive scales.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Wed Feb 25, 2015 2:40 am

I'm looking at the new version, and the Pretender dynamic seems to have been very altered. All the Pretenders cost a big pile of points now, but you seem to start with a lot more. Like, the Great Sage is now 110 points, but after selecting that you have 390 to spend. A Titan costs ~240 now. The cheapest chassis I've seen is 70. Dragons start with Dominion 2 and have been given a tail sweep. I'm going to be playing with Pretender creation a lot.

Also, somebody had themselves a hard-on for some snakes. So many snake pretenders now.

edit: whuh the oracle isn't astral 3 anymore?

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Feb 25, 2015 2:50 am

Firstly, they increased the starting point budget from 350 to 500.

Then there's the new pretender auto-calc (the actual mechanics of which aren't currently known) that's supposed to take into account magic paths, item slots, starting dominion, abilities, retinue size and quality, and so on in determining a fair price for a tiny human sorcerer, an elephant-sized rampaging bull, and a Zeus expy. That's why everything costs differently. The goal is to make monsters (inhuman critters with poor dominion, magic, and slots but good combat stats) and rainbows (tiny humans with poor dominion, magic, and stats but with good slots and very cheap path costs) viable compared to titans (size-6 humans with good magic, stats, dominion, and slots) and immobiles (magical things that can't move, with poor slots but great magic and dominion). Since they couldn't make pretenders cost negative points (which the crappier ones needed to be in any way viable without also being buffed beyond recognition), they increased everyone's point budget by 150 and then made some pretenders cost less than that.

Oh, and some thematic pretenders have a 20pt discount with certain nations (e.g. the three-horned boar with Marverni and the Vampire Queen with LA Ulm). However, by the devs' own admission, this hasn't been applied in all the spots it should be, nor is there any indicator where the discount is being applied; you'd have to compare costs between nations to spot the difference. They say to expect a patch in a couple weeks for various spot fixes.

Finally, the effect of your dominion stat on generating candles from temples has been changed to further enable monsters and rainbows. Beforehand you had Dom*10% chance of generating a candle from each temple (e.g. Dom-4 = 40% chance, Dom-9 = 90% chance), which meant dom scores below 6 were considered risky if not outright dumb. Now the formula is 50% + Dom*5% (e.g. Dom-4 = 70%, Dom-9 = 95%).

And yes, a whole lot of snakes this go 'round.

EDIT: Corrected the point increase from 350 in v1.14 to 500 in v1.16

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Feb 25, 2015 3:57 am

Damn that dominion spread change is a big deal. The lowest I'd ever even heard of someone going in multiplayer was 4, and I'm pretty sure that was someone who was not Mictlan and had blood sacrificing. And when you start from 1 it costs like crazy.

EDIT: Just noticed in the changelog that shapechanging units can now die in one hit if dealt enough damage. That's going to crimp jaguar warriors a bit. Not too badly, though, since they're fairly numerous and have reasonable hit points.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 2:31 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82zYA4-pI9c

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 12:51 am

http://i.imgur.com/T6svEO8.gif

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 2:58 am

Is that supposed to demonstrate something interesting?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 3:26 am

Without real weapons or attack spells like Magic Duel, fights between golems can descend into prolonged flurries of useless punches. Golems scripted as raiders who run into each other will probably fight like this unless they've got magic swords.

Also, golem punches look silly.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 3:40 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Without real weapons or attack spells like Magic Duel, fights between golems can descend into prolonged flurries of useless punches. Golems scripted as raiders who run into each other will probably fight like this unless they've got magic swords.

Also, golem punches look silly.

Yeah, it's funny when ubermonsters/summons like golems get into prolonged slap fights. Lacks the sense of epic gravitas you'd expect. LET THE ULTIMATE DUEL BETWEEN CONSTRUCTS BEGIN!

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 2:13 pm

I always name my Golems like famous anime giant robots.

And make sure to give them swords.