The Gaming Den

Zinegata wrote: Also, re: Ulm

Is the Master Smith Recruit everywhere even without a fort? The no-fort reruits are a pretty big deal.

That said, Summon Ogres is showing up in a lot of playthroughs as one of the key cheap early summons; which will really help Ulm out. If their troops are still wiping themselves out due to fatigue however they're still problematic :/

Unless I am mistaking the signs of the "recruit outside a fort" mechanic, than no, the Master Smiths require a fort to recruit. In my Ulm game I was recruiting indie troops and commanders from fort-less provinces. When I would bring up the recruitment screen there was no sign of any Ulm recruitables (even the faded out version you get when you lack a temple for a priest or a lab for a mage).

Now that I think about it, I did build a lab in a fort-less province at one point to let me recruit indie mages and I was not given the option to recruit master smiths (or any other Ulm unit). So no, I'm pretty sure Ulm stuff can only be recruited from an Ulm fort.

Yeah, no Master Smiths outside an Fort.
Look at Ur, they have recruit everywhere mage outside an fort (and an different one in swamps.)

Played some Marignon. The Big Giant Head is now F2S1B1. Friars and flagellants are now recruit-anywhere (still requiring a temple). The big casters seem to have been gimped, F3S2 no randoms (maybe a 10% random, but I didn't get any), which is a shame.

Also played some Pangaea. They can now recruit a lot of their nationals (Black Harpies, Satyr Commanders, two flavors of caster Centaur [w/lab], regular harpies, three flavors of Satyr, Minotaurs, and two flavors of archer Centaur) out of any forest. Black Harpy scouts will be everywhere.

The more I try out the Virtue, the more I think it might actually be worth 150 points. She starts out as a decent SC, and as a humanoid angel has the gear slots and magic to keep upgrading as the game progresses.

Magic weapons will still mess you up in mistform, right?

I think Mistform still reduces one hit to 1 damage and then ends when hit by a magic weapon.

-Username17

The Virtue's 3 defensive strengths are awe, invulnerability, and mistform. Awe is the only one that magic weapons can't counter. Anti-thugs will probably have an easy time, and you don't want to get in a fight with fire-blessed sacreds.

For those who want to try the beta in MP:
http://brainwrinkle.net/games/61

(I'm trying EA Mictlan in this one and MA Ulm in the other one)

I posted the following over at the Desura Forum and the Invision Forum, and I'd appreciate it if any of y'all would add your thoughts on the matter. Hilariously, the first two responses I got on the Invision forum were "Don't worry, CBM will fix this".

---

MA Ulm. A nation I really, really, really want to work. In the past, it hasn't, but now we're in the brave new world of Dominions 4 so MA Ulm might, this time around, be competitive in its off-beat sort of way.

I've purchased the game and been having a fun time exploring all the new goodies through the beta, but what I'm finding with MA Ulm has me a bit concerned. However, I could easily be looking for balance from a Dominions 3 frame of reference, and missing what is actually balanced for Dominions 4. Or it may be that the rest of the changes haven't even been made yet (the game being in Beta and all) and I'm looking at an incomplete fix. So what I would like is to give a list of my observations/concerns and then have the good, informed people of this forum tell me how truly wrong I am and how MA Ulm will be competitive come the end of September. And on the off-chance I do stumble across a genuine balance concern, that said concern will be corrected by release or in a follow-up patch.

Enough preamble, let's look at Ulm!

Observations
1) Ulm's troops (i.e. not commanders) haven't changed stat-wise or cost-wise. The exception is that Sappers are now Map Move-1 (down from Map Move-2), and of course there are those oh-so-neat size-1 war hounds. The former is a small change (Ulm's only Move-2 unit is the Black Knight, and while the hounds are Move-3 there are no Move-3 commanders), but the latter is a neat, new deal.

However, my concern is that Ulm's troops have always been pretty lack-luster. High protection is excellent, of course, but their generally underwhelming weaponry, slow speed (in combat and on the map), poor magic resistance, very high resource cost, and terrible endurance have meant Ulm's armies have not been all that impressive. I think the biggest concern is that of fatigue; Ulm simply can't fight that long and the units don't hit often enough to make a battle end quickly. You want to have your superior protection allow you to attrition the enemy down, but you're racing the clock before your forces pass out and get their throats slit. And while there are many magical options to improve the protection of an army, there are almost none that improve it's endurance.


2) Ignoring Master Smiths for a moment, Ulm's commanders are unchanged except for a few slight price tweaks and Siege Engineers now have a siege bonus of +40 instead of +20.

I have nothing to say on this matter, other than that it means Ulm is not receiving any buffs here. That's fine; there is plenty of room elsewhere for buffs.


3) Master Smiths cost 5gp less, provide +10 resources. I'm going to address the forging changes further down, so I'll leave that out here.

This seems like a moderately big deal because it seems like almost all other nations have had their mages made more expensive and/or slower to recruit. The absence of both these nerfs makes for an indirect buff for Ulm! This has me excited. The resource boost is also nice because, let's face it, you're not really going to be recruiting much of anything EXCEPT Master Smiths for Ulm, so having all of those be cheap and provide some extra resources is a solid leg up for the nation. That said, +10 resources isn't actually that much for Ulm like it would be for other nations; you can upgrade one non-blacksteel unit to it's blacksteel counterpart for each Smith present, or recruit an extra 2x 24-resource goombas for every 5 smiths. Unless you plan on recruiting a lot of non-Ulmish troops (or dogs, I guess), the benefit here is modest. Welcomed, but modest.


4) Ulm is worse in almost all ways at forging than it used to be.

This has me really concerned. I'm fine with the forging revision, in abstract, but I'm worried that it might undermine an already under-performing nation. Let's look at the gem cost in forging the following typical items for Ulm, comparing a Dom3 Master Smith against a Dom4 Master Smith.

Item Dom3 Dom4 Delta Dom3 w/Hammer Dom 4 w/Hammer Delta
Pendant of Luck 3S 3S 0 2S 1S -1
Fire Brand 3E3F 4E4F 2 2E2F 3E3F 2
Boots of Earth 7E 8E 1 5E 6E 1
Charcoal Shield 7E3F 9E4F 3 5E2F 8E3F 4
Crystal Coin 7E7S 9E9S 4 5E5S 8E8S 6
Dwarven Hammer 11E 13E 2 7E 11E 4
Robe of Invulnerability 30E 38E 8 20E 36E 16

If you are forging an item that costs strictly 5 gems, then a Dom4 smith performs as well or better than a Dom4 smith. However, for everything else it gets worse. By quite a lot, actually. Again, I'm not being critical of the forging changes in general, but the data clearly shows that Dom4 Ulm will forge less efficiently than Dom3 Ulm, in the majority of cases. On the surface, this seems like a really large nerf to a nation that wasn't all that great to begin with. So I'm really, REALLY curious to know what is being done to offset this issue.


Conclusion
Dom3 Ulm needed help. Making blacksteel armor lighter (i.e. lower encumbrance) than normal steel armor would've helped. Making Ulm's rank-and-file carry better weaponry, or have better MR, or both would've helped. Giving the smiths the chance of getting the paths they needed to actually summon those Iron Angels would've helped. It looks like Dom4 Ulm is in similar need of help, because what little it's gotten hasn't really addressed the larger issues, and because Dom4 Ulm seems much worse at that one thing they did really, really well: forging.


So I'd be much obliged if you all could fill in the blanks for me and show me how Dom4 MA Ulm is balanced and I'm just not seeing it, or how it will be balanced after specific changes are rolled out.

Thanks in advance,
Shatner

Ok, I bought the beta. Will take requests for info.

It looks like Lanka is slightly less screwed than I initially though. They can recruit Atavi Archers and Commanders out of forest provinces without a fortress, so that pushes Lanka towards a more archer-focused game.

Reanimated dead are also a lot sexier with Piercing resistance. You can take Indies down without a lot of hassle since everything from archer to cavalry uses Piercing.

Longdead aren't even undisciplined.

These new events are kind of a trip.

--There seem to be new events that create magic sites.

--I got one event where foreign priests changed my dominion. It said "Foreign priests have corrupted the central tenets of your faith!" and the effect said "Dominion change."

Near as I can tell, the average magic diversity in the Middle Era is actually a little bit higher, even though you are expected to make do with more lower class mages and less higher class mages. This makes outlier factions like Ulm and Agartha even more screwed.

-Username17

I am going to get so much pleasure when I turn people's SCs into frogs permanently with Curse of the Frog Prince.

Gah, Mandeha and Danava are Chaos Power 2. They are basically kittens in Order 3 dominions.

They may have a gold upkeep as well. Dominions 4 determines unit cost by a formula that adapts to the amount of magic, whether a unit is commander or soldier, and the presence of certain abilities. Dai Oni base cost is actually 50 in the unit code.

So it might be even worse than you think.

If you click on a unit's moral it will show you the annual gold cost of its upkeep. Try that with your summons to see if they are costing you cash.

Weird. Blood Feast only cures one affliction. On the bright side, it also cures the population-eating pseudo-affliction that the ritual sometimes give you.

Blood Vortex is nice. In a small game, I was getting between 32-46 slaves a turn.

The Throne of Winter periodically spawns Magic Sites (1W, Cold) in adjacent provinces. This makes me unaccountably happy.

Is it worth grabbing 2 blood on a Mother of Monsters so you can take advantage of the crossbreeding bonus?

Hydras work differently now. I'm looking at Pythium's version, and it's got like 80 HP. And it's capped at 1 per turn. I assume it doesn't have 8 secondforms?

Has anyone tried modding lammashtas into regular units? Is their indiscriminate murder hardcoded?

I was screwing around with the Freak Lord bonus to Crossbreeding and I didn't find it that noticeable.

The only reason I'd see to get Blood on a Pretender is to get rid of afflictions with Blood Feast. That's not inconsequential.

You still get +2 Strength for a Blood 4 bless, right? That's one of the better minor blesses. An slight increase in strength is a huge increase in the killing power of sacred who come in numbers and an even huger increase for sacred with multiple attacks.

-Username17

Yeah, I was fiddling around with the point costs to try to get the STR bonus on LA Pythium's sacred hydras. If they worked the old way, the new Nature bless would have applied 9 times, so I can see why things have been changed a bit.

On the bright side, Pythium can apparently recruit limitanes and heretic cultists in any province.

The Ulm Pike guys are really good. I was playing around with them and having no problems taking cav provinces with almost no losses. Add in some Earth magic for battle with human players and I don't see any problems.

With production-adding Master Smiths, Ulm can basically diversify into anything indie like Longbowman or the fish-guys that show up in coasts sometimes without needing to build expensive fortresses. Heck, just being able to mass huge amounts of resources for Ulm cav is worth it.

Nice. I've heard that repel had been reworked, but I didn't realize it was that good. Next game I'm definitely playing Ulm.

If a pike held by a guy with an average attack skill really does rock the casbah, shouldn't T'ien Ch'i benefit from it more? After all, they can field 2-3x as many pikes AND those pikes have Map Move-2. Toss a towershield up front set to "Guard Commander" to pull aggro on all the archers and you should be able to repel your way to dominance even faster than Ulm.

Shatner wrote:If a pike held by a guy with an average attack skill really does rock the casbah, shouldn't T'ien Ch'i benefit from it more? After all, they can field 2-3x as many pikes AND those pikes have Map Move-2. Toss a towershield up front set to "Guard Commander" to pull aggro on all the archers and you should be able to repel your way to dominance even faster than Ulm.

Well, it's the combo of high armor and pikes that works.

I figure that Ulm and Tien Chi are about equal. Tien Chi's Ministry footmen are half the resources and about equal in armor because they have tower shields, but Ulm has the resource bonus from master smiths that can be recruited from any fortress and so produces about the same number of units (Tien Chi also has slightly higher losses against cav provinces).

I haven't done a lot of experiments with second-rank pikes. There might be something there, but the Tien Chi pike-guys are not that great in straight combat.