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  1. - Top - End - #421
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Im genuinly not certain how things work against Tower shields. Have not fough any of those yet.
    And fire shields could actually be a weakness for Celadon, on a unit with a large shield.

    Burning ones im not worried about though. Not unless they got an exceptionally nasty bless.
    They are 70 gold per head. And Garden Bellflower hits for 10 AP against 9 before berserk/bless.
    While Bulbasaur/Ivysaur are going to shoot right though both tower shield, berserk and bless.
    Garden Bellsprout Razor Leaves are just 9 AP so averaging 0 damage (less once berserk kicks in), and Bulbasaur Leech Seed is a whooping 1 damage average (the damage gets the random 2d6 added yes, but the defender still gets a protection roll of 2d6 even if their armor is ignored, meaning a 1 damage AN attack still has a significant change of bouncing off harmlessly). Burning ones have 23 HP, more than enough to tank plenty of those shots (even if you get 4 19 gold bulbasaurs per 70 gold burning one, they would need 6 almost perfect acuraccy volleys to take them out). Even basic EA Abyssian Infantry have 15 HP. If you can get Ivysaurs that's nastier, but as you said earlier you were going full Garden/heavy Bellsprouts and leather paras early game, not bulbasaurs.

    But I'll bump the Garden Bellsprouts to 20 gold then just in case.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Special Pokemon cover over the slightly more expensive ones like Excegcute, or whatever you get from recruitment sites.
    And yeah thats of course true. Regular bellsprout can likely still take a nice chunk of PD if you bring 30-40 of them.

    But alright. Who would you rather i move to. One of the new nations?
    Or the Ninja nation, who seemingly struggles a little bit?
    Fuschia nation to keep going in order then, thank you.
    Last edited by deuterio12; 2019-09-23 at 07:33 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  2. - Top - End - #422
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Im genuinly not certain how things work against Tower shields. Have not fough any of those yet.
    And fire shields could actually be a weakness for Celadon, on a unit with a large shield.
    Prot 16 Def bonus 7 (penalty -2, so net +5 Defence chance to block something with the shield) shields. Basically assume that anything that might hit the shield probably will, especially projectiles, so figure on an extra 16 protection for the units getting shot at. Units with Tower Shields + actual armor basically don't care about anything less than a high-damage crossbow, as projectiles go.

  3. - Top - End - #423
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Garden Bellsprout Razor Leaves are just 9 AP so averaging 0 damage (less once berserk kicks in), and Bulbasaur Leech Seed is a whooping 1 damage average (the damage gets the random 2d6 added yes, but the defender still gets a protection roll of 2d6 even if their armor is ignored, meaning a 1 damage AN attack still has a significant change of bouncing off harmlessly). Burning ones have 23 HP, more than enough to tank plenty of those shots (even if you get 4 19 gold bulbasaurs per 70 gold burning one, they would need 6 almost perfect acuraccy volleys to take them out). Even basic EA Abyssian Infantry have 15 HP. If you can get Ivysaurs that's nastier, but as you said earlier you were going full Garden/heavy Bellsprouts and leather paras early game, not bulbasaurs.

    But I'll bump the Garden Bellsprouts to 20 gold then just in case.
    The math for bulbasaurs look a lot better the moment they get a +2 str bonus from bless.
    Something that then gets even nastier with Ivysaurs the moment you begin to summon those.
    But yes for a nation without shields, Bellsprouts seems to do the trick.
    All the same not certain about if they deserve a 20 gold price tag.
    They are good. But in part because they are easy to mass up, and easy to use.
    Or well they are also stealthy, so i guess the price might be fair.

    Fuschia nation to keep going in order then, thank you.
    I do have a few ideas for them.
    Initially, did they get any special items? Like something that gives their snake champion Awe.
    And were also thinking about giving them a national death version of Mother Oak.

    Prot 16 Def bonus 7 (penalty -2, so net +5 Defence chance to block something with the shield) shields. Basically assume that anything that might hit the shield probably will, especially projectiles, so figure on an extra 16 protection for the units getting shot at. Units with Tower Shields + actual armor basically don't care about anything less than a high-damage crossbow, as projectiles go.
    Did mean in relation to running face first into a Celadon army.. Since i do know shield coverage isnt 100% guaranteed.
    But i am to lazy to go look up the exact formula.

    Else, that aside on general pokemon balancing.
    Then i do think there needs to be a cull of the number of magic attacks on regular pokemon (not recruitment limited).
    Since it is something that disrupts a lot of tactics for regular nations. Like etheral, mistform, or invulnerability.
    Usually magic weapons/attacks are reserved for units that are special in some way.
    And so by default i think all the attacks who are not fire/lightning based, or MR negates, should lose the magic damage tag.
    Last edited by lord_khaine; 2019-09-24 at 05:26 AM.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

  4. - Top - End - #424
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    I do have a few ideas for them.
    Initially, did they get any special items? Like something that gives their snake champion Awe.
    And were also thinking about giving them a national death version of Mother Oak.
    They have no special items yet, something for Awe shouldn't be too hard.

    Will need to look a bit to figure out how to make/change a global, that would be a first for me.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Else, that aside on general pokemon balancing.
    Then i do think there needs to be a cull of the number of magic attacks on regular pokemon (not recruitment limited).
    Since it is something that disrupts a lot of tactics for regular nations. Like etheral, mistform, or invulnerability.
    Usually magic weapons/attacks are reserved for units that are special in some way.
    And so by default i think all the attacks who are not fire/lightning based, or MR negates, should lose the magic damage tag.
    The Pokémon attacks that are magic are those that aren't normal/fighting and thus should be able to fully affect ghost Pokémon, aka ethereal/invulnerable stuff.

    Also Caelum exists and doesn't break the game or anything with having spammable troops with magic weapons accross all 3 ages. By LA Atlantis and Ragha join in the fun. I guess the mind-blasting nations also count. Then good old Nazca Supaya spam. Hinnom has Dawn Guard with Dawn blades recruitable everywhere.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  5. - Top - End - #425
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    They have no special items yet, something for Awe shouldn't be too hard.

    Will need to look a bit to figure out how to make/change a global, that would be a first for me.
    I though an Intimidating Glare technique, or something like that, should do it.

    And well, clearly a learning experience then :P
    Cant be much different from pulling a regular spell apart though?

    The Pokémon attacks that are magic are those that aren't normal/fighting and thus should be able to fully affect ghost Pokémon, aka ethereal/invulnerable stuff.

    Also Caelum exists and doesn't break the game or anything with having spammable troops with magic weapons accross all 3 ages. By LA Atlantis and Ragha join in the fun. I guess the mind-blasting nations also count. Then good old Nazca Supaya spam. Hinnom has Dawn Guard with Dawn blades recruitable everywhere.
    I did suspect there would be a lot of resistance on this topic.
    Though i think it should be pointed out, that as it is in the base game, then having broad access to magic weapons are one of the things that makes Caelum special.
    Atlantis also, having magic weapons are one of their main things, a large part of their strategy and identity revolves around them, and how for example Stygian Rain lets them abuse it.
    While Ragha meanwhile are unlikely to ever see their own magic ice weapons, since those are cap-only cold recruit.
    Thats things who get changed wildly with a massive influx of nations who all have extremely cheap magic attacks.

    And besides MR negates mind blasting, then i think the only actual magic ranged attack we have is the Ancestor Vessel with its howling bow.
    Else, long term the issue is that it will be just about impossible to balance a etheral ghost pokemon.
    If its able to stand up to the other pokemon nations, then it will most likely walk all over 80-90% of the regular nations.
    And if its balanced against the regular nations with limited or no access to magic weapons. Then the other Pokemon nations will walk over it.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

  6. - Top - End - #426
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    I though an Intimidating Glare technique, or something like that, should do it.

    And well, clearly a learning experience then :P
    Cant be much different from pulling a regular spell apart though?
    Hahaha I wish.

    First there's no way to directly pull vanilla stats.

    Second a good chunk of the coding involves sums of exponentials of 2. So checking a global in another mod they have the effect "8388608".
    There's no official manual for spell effecs beyond some basic effects, and trying to look at dominions discussions it may be either Chest Wound, Flaming Arrows or Returning. Except the actual global doesn't do any of those.

    Also separate events may be are involved. A lot of the spells work like that, they create a "flag" that in turn triggers special events, which often don't get a special message so it looks like it was the spell doing all the work when it's actually a bunch of separate pieces.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    I did suspect there would be a lot of resistance on this topic.
    Though i think it should be pointed out, that as it is in the base game, then having broad access to magic weapons are one of the things that makes Caelum special.
    Atlantis also, having magic weapons are one of their main things, a large part of their strategy and identity revolves around them, and how for example Stygian Rain lets them abuse it.
    While Ragha meanwhile are unlikely to ever see their own magic ice weapons, since those are cap-only cold recruit.
    Thats things who get changed wildly with a massive influx of nations who all have extremely cheap magic attacks.

    And besides MR negates mind blasting, then i think the only actual magic ranged attack we have is the Ancestor Vessel with its howling bow.
    Caelum's main selling point isn't magic weapons, it's being an all-flying nation that can fly even in storms to boot, giving them insane mobilty. Heck, they were the only all-flying nation for most of dominion's history, and main rival Xibalba gets shut down extra hard by Storm while Caelum actually wants to cast Storm themselves.

    Similarly LA Atlantis troops are already pretty effective on their own since they have Ice Armor like Caelum but back it up with superior HP and strength plus have an excellent matchup against LA R'yleh (against which magic weapons doesn't do much, just Atlanteans hit hard and have good mr on top of their high HP and strength). So their main identity is conquering the heck out of the seas right away (which also grants them more troops and mage variety) then spamming wolven winter around to keep their troops super armored so Stygian Rains is pretty optional.

    Then can't forget EA Atlantis that are packing plenty of basalt weapons and don't have any death magic for fancy stygian rains.

    Ragha gets several flavors of Ayria infantry that can be recruited in any fort that's cold, it's only their Iceclads that are cap only.
    Actually Ragha is an excellent example of how you're overrating magic weapons, since most players will rather take hot scales, disregarding said magic weapons in return for other stuff.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Else, long term the issue is that it will be just about impossible to balance a etheral ghost pokemon.
    If its able to stand up to the other pokemon nations, then it will most likely walk all over 80-90% of the regular nations.
    And if its balanced against the regular nations with limited or no access to magic weapons. Then the other Pokemon nations will walk over it.
    A fair thing to worry, but one word: banishment. Available to all nations (besides the undead loving ones that have other tricks for destroying undead), ignores ethereal/invulnerability and whatnot. As you may've noticed Pokémon nations mostly lack spammable priests, but most vanilla nations can easily mass them or even have most of their mages be priests too. So basic plan is granting ghost pokémon some protection or airshield or something so they can take on other Pokémon while vanilla nations can fall back to good old banishment spam.

    Plus Lemuria exists. In the same age as Caelum, Ragha, Atlantis and R'yleh. Also EA Therodos that has to deal with Caelum and Atlantis magic weapon spam too.

    And before you go "but those are freespawn nations", well there already had been talk here of making the ghost pokémon nation a freespawn nation too.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  7. - Top - End - #427
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    I do have a few ideas for them.
    Initially, did they get any special items? Like something that gives their snake champion Awe.
    And were also thinking about giving them a national death version of Mother Oak.
    Based mostly on single-player messing around, so take with the appropriate salting, but I think Fuschia's troop lineup is mostly ok. (Heavy) Grimer front line backed by your choice of ranged pokemon will mess up anything not immune to poison pretty handily, and if/when you get those Grimers up to Muks they change over to throwing pretty beefy Acid attacks and don't care about that much any more either. Have to be careful about your formations and placements to reduce how frequently your 'mons charge through your own Grimers and get diseased, but hey, you have Nurses if it comes to it. I was reasonably satisfied with Nidorx, Weedles are ok supplemental crowd control (and Kakuna are great line-holders; takes a crapload of XP to get all the way to Beedrill, tho, were not able to see any significant numbers of them to have an opinion.) Venonat .. are the price you pay to eventually have Venomoth, I was mostly using Ekans and Nidos as the backline archers. Venonat could work, especially if you need to use their Psybeams to hit something with good poison resists.

    Did not really attempt much with Koffing. Weezings look like they could be pretty good, but the description suggesting Koffing have death explosion made me not want to try to shepherd them through fights to get there. Maybe worthwhile to pick up some handfuls and leave them in training.

    Generally, if Fuschia has issues right now, I think it's with things for their mages to do and their widely split research wants. Like any Pokemon nation, you want to get up Conjuration and Thaumaturgy. You have strong, reliable, Death and Nature access, which mostly wants you to be in Alteration and Enchantment.. although even once you get up there, I'm not sure what you want your mages doing. Barkskinning things? All your prot is natural already anyway. Summoning chaff with Swarm or Skeletons? You're a pokemon nation, if you're not filling the field with cheap bodies already you're Doing It Wrong (admittedly there is usually a place for more.) Putting down poison/sleep/death clouds? (Ok, that last one is kind of neat - as a Death nation with a reason to go into Thaumaturgy you're unusually well positioned to actually use the Death cloud spell) Your pokemon recruitables do that already; ideally you want to find something for your mages to do that your recruitables *don't* already cover. You don't need them to evocate, everything has good ranged attacks. You don't need them to crowd control, your ranged attacks include effects that Slime, Slow, Confuse, and Paralyze. So what does your standard Fuschia battlemage usefully do with D/N, aside from dump more bodies into the field? Especially inside the research paths you want to be in anyways? (Like, I'm aware there are some alright spells in those paths in Evocation, but why would you be researching Evocation?)

    Also, all of the Fuschia national spells use Death gems and Death as the primary path, which left Nature somewhat underutilized and Death overstressed. Would consider moving some of the spells to Nature primary (poison in Dominions is primarily associated with Nature rather than Death anyway. Venonat/moths and the Weedle line could be Nature units?) or give one of the Fuschia commanders the ability that converts Nature gems to Death so the player can balance their income toward the type they find themselves using more.

    Second a good chunk of the coding involves sums of exponentials of 2. So checking a global in another mod they have the effect "8388608".
    There's no official manual for spell effecs beyond some basic effects, and trying to look at dominions discussions it may be either Chest Wound, Flaming Arrows or Returning. Except the actual global doesn't do any of those.
    I'm pretty sure this particular effect number basically just means 'is a global' and does not directly code for or control any of the actual effects of the spell - it shows up in way too many disparate spells to match to any single effect. Global/Battlefield wide spells are a mess, and a lot of them are hard-coded and not built in any way that seems sensible.. so while you can clone Mother Oak and mess with like the path requirements, the research school, gem cost, etc, pretty easily.. if you want to do 'Mother Oak but it makes a different gem type'? Not obvious how to do that, and may not be possible.
    Last edited by tyckspoon; 2019-09-24 at 09:21 AM.

  8. - Top - End - #428
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Caelum's main selling point isn't magic weapons, it's being an all-flying nation that can fly even in storms to boot, giving them insane mobilty. Heck, they were the only all-flying nation for most of dominion's history, and main rival Xibalba gets shut down extra hard by Storm while Caelum actually wants to cast Storm themselves.

    Similarly LA Atlantis troops are already pretty effective on their own since they have Ice Armor like Caelum but back it up with superior HP and strength plus have an excellent matchup against LA R'yleh (against which magic weapons doesn't do much, just Atlanteans hit hard and have good mr on top of their high HP and strength). So their main identity is conquering the heck out of the seas right away (which also grants them more troops and mage variety) then spamming wolven winter around to keep their troops super armored so Stygian Rains is pretty optional.

    Then can't forget EA Atlantis that are packing plenty of basalt weapons and don't have any death magic for fancy stygian rains.

    Ragha gets several flavors of Ayria infantry that can be recruited in any fort that's cold, it's only their Iceclads that are cap only.
    Actually Ragha is an excellent example of how you're overrating magic weapons, since most players will rather take hot scales, disregarding said magic weapons in return for other stuff.
    Arrg.. i should have know anything i said would be taken -extremely- litterally.
    For a start i said -one- of the things that make Caelum special. Not the thing that makes Caelum special.
    And Ragha are still a bad example. Since your leaving out there that the reason people prefer hot scales, are to get access to of the most feared Sacreds in LA.

    That aside, in EA there are currently 32 different nations.
    Out of those Machaka, Agatha, Tir Na nog, Fomoria, Xibalba, Mekone, Pelagia have limited access to magic weapons.
    And Caelum, Hinnom, Atlantis have troops with magic weapons they can freely hire at any fort. Where Hinnoms are then still extremely expensive.
    But if we discount Therodos as a outlier due to being rather weird, then we are still left with only 1-2 nations where you might risk to face a nation purely armed with magic weapons.

    As we can see from how things currently are in the unmodded game, that still leaves Invulnerability and being etheral quite viable.
    But pokemon nations hard counters a lot of regular human nations as it is now. In my Celadon test game, fully grown fire elementals
    proved to be useless, because they did not survive to hit my line.

    A fair thing to worry, but one word: banishment. Available to all nations (besides the undead loving ones that have other tricks for destroying undead), ignores ethereal/invulnerability and whatnot. As you may've noticed Pokémon nations mostly lack spammable priests, but most vanilla nations can easily mass them or even have most of their mages be priests too. So basic plan is granting ghost pokémon some protection or airshield or something so they can take on other Pokémon while vanilla nations can fall back to good old banishment spam.

    Plus Lemuria exists. In the same age as Caelum, Ragha, Atlantis and R'yleh. Also EA Therodos that has to deal with Caelum and Atlantis magic weapon spam too.

    And before you go "but those are freespawn nations", well there already had been talk here of making the ghost pokémon nation a freespawn nation too.
    I though the balance goal were suposed to be a little higher up than the currently most badly balanced nations?

    The air plan is meanwhile interesting. But it runs into the issue of yet again nerfing one of fire's main tools, flaming arrows.
    And expecting vanilla nations to invest heavily in priests to have a chance against the Ghost nation, places a rather unfair burden on them.
    As they then miss out on mage recruitment, and ends with a bunch of units that are not much worth until they get into war.

    Based mostly on single-player messing around, so take with the appropriate salting, but I think Fuschia's troop lineup is mostly ok. (Heavy) Grimer front line backed by your choice of ranged pokemon will mess up anything not immune to poison pretty handily, and if/when you get those Grimers up to Muks they change over to throwing pretty beefy Acid attacks and don't care about that much any more either. Have to be careful about your formations and placements to reduce how frequently your 'mons charge through your own Grimers and get diseased, but hey, you have Nurses if it comes to it. I was reasonably satisfied with Nidorx, Weedles are ok supplemental crowd control (and Kakuna are great line-holders; takes a crapload of XP to get all the way to Beedrill, tho, were not able to see any significant numbers of them to have an opinion.) Venonat .. are the price you pay to eventually have Venomoth, I was mostly using Ekans and Nidos as the backline archers. Venonat could work, especially if you need to use their Psybeams to hit something with good poison resists.
    Thank you. Yeah i think the result shows on this being their second balance evaluation
    The first round pointed out the worst outliers, and resulted in a troop line that can actually handle indies.
    Im mostly now just worried about if all that AN poison damage is a little -to- effective against regular non-pokemon nations.

    I'm pretty sure this particular effect number basically just means 'is a global' and does not directly code for or control any of the actual effects of the spell - it shows up in way too many disparate spells to match to any single effect. Global/Battlefield wide spells are a mess, and a lot of them are hard-coded and not built in any way that seems sensible.. so while you can clone Mother Oak and mess with like the path requirements, the research school, gem cost, etc, pretty easily.. if you want to do 'Mother Oak but it makes a different gem type'? Not obvious how to do that, and may not be possible.
    Alright perhaps i overestimated how easy that would be.
    I though it was the same as normal spells.
    But perhaps there are other ways to do things then.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

  9. - Top - End - #429
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    Based mostly on single-player messing around, so take with the appropriate salting, but I think Fuschia's troop lineup is mostly ok. (Heavy) Grimer front line backed by your choice of ranged pokemon will mess up anything not immune to poison pretty handily, and if/when you get those Grimers up to Muks they change over to throwing pretty beefy Acid attacks and don't care about that much any more either. Have to be careful about your formations and placements to reduce how frequently your 'mons charge through your own Grimers and get diseased, but hey, you have Nurses if it comes to it. I was reasonably satisfied with Nidorx, Weedles are ok supplemental crowd control (and Kakuna are great line-holders; takes a crapload of XP to get all the way to Beedrill, tho, were not able to see any significant numbers of them to have an opinion.) Venonat .. are the price you pay to eventually have Venomoth, I was mostly using Ekans and Nidos as the backline archers. Venonat could work, especially if you need to use their Psybeams to hit something with good poison resists.

    Did not really attempt much with Koffing. Weezings look like they could be pretty good, but the description suggesting Koffing have death explosion made me not want to try to shepherd them through fights to get there. Maybe worthwhile to pick up some handfuls and leave them in training.

    Generally, if Fuschia has issues right now, I think it's with things for their mages to do and their widely split research wants. Like any Pokemon nation, you want to get up Conjuration and Thaumaturgy. You have strong, reliable, Death and Nature access, which mostly wants you to be in Alteration and Enchantment.. although even once you get up there, I'm not sure what you want your mages doing. Barkskinning things? All your prot is natural already anyway. Summoning chaff with Swarm or Skeletons? You're a pokemon nation, if you're not filling the field with cheap bodies already you're Doing It Wrong (admittedly there is usually a place for more.) Putting down poison/sleep/death clouds? (Ok, that last one is kind of neat - as a Death nation with a reason to go into Thaumaturgy you're unusually well positioned to actually use the Death cloud spell) Your pokemon recruitables do that already; ideally you want to find something for your mages to do that your recruitables *don't* already cover. You don't need them to evocate, everything has good ranged attacks. You don't need them to crowd control, your ranged attacks include effects that Slime, Slow, Confuse, and Paralyze. So what does your standard Fuschia battlemage usefully do with D/N, aside from dump more bodies into the field? Especially inside the research paths you want to be in anyways? (Like, I'm aware there are some alright spells in those paths in Evocation, but why would you be researching Evocation?)
    Shadowblast alone is worth researching Evocation eventually when one has death mages.

    As you pointed out, no such thing as too many bodies.

    Also if fighting something poison-resistant, the mage-trainers can come to the rescue, in particular against undead.

    Dropping buffs like regen and giant size plus fear effects is nice too.

    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    Also, all of the Fuschia national spells use Death gems and Death as the primary path, which left Nature somewhat underutilized and Death overstressed. Would consider moving some of the spells to Nature primary (poison in Dominions is primarily associated with Nature rather than Death anyway. Venonat/moths and the Weedle line could be Nature units?) or give one of the Fuschia commanders the ability that converts Nature gems to Death so the player can balance their income toward the type they find themselves using more.
    Good point, switched the paths around in a few of those so more nature gems are being spent.

    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    I'm pretty sure this particular effect number basically just means 'is a global' and does not directly code for or control any of the actual effects of the spell - it shows up in way too many disparate spells to match to any single effect. Global/Battlefield wide spells are a mess, and a lot of them are hard-coded and not built in any way that seems sensible.. so while you can clone Mother Oak and mess with like the path requirements, the research school, gem cost, etc, pretty easily.. if you want to do 'Mother Oak but it makes a different gem type'? Not obvious how to do that, and may not be possible.
    Yeah, seems like there's no custom option to make a fixed number of gems of a certain type per turn, although it's possible to do a random number of gems so going with that.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Arrg.. i should have know anything i said would be taken -extremely- litterally.
    For a start i said -one- of the things that make Caelum special. Not the thing that makes Caelum special.
    And Ragha are still a bad example. Since your leaving out there that the reason people prefer hot scales, are to get access to of the most feared Sacreds in LA.
    That still lack magic weapons. The point stands, magic weapons are nice to have, but not a priority. Caelum doesn' get picked for having magic weapons, they get picked for being an all-flier nation. Atlantis doesn't get picked for having magic weapons, they get picked for having strong tough amphibious troops. You could remove the magic weapons from either and they would still play pretty much the same.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    That aside, in EA there are currently 32 different nations.
    Out of those Machaka, Agatha, Tir Na nog, Fomoria, Xibalba, Mekone, Pelagia have limited access to magic weapons.
    And Caelum, Hinnom, Atlantis have troops with magic weapons they can freely hire at any fort. Where Hinnoms are then still extremely expensive.
    But if we discount Therodos as a outlier due to being rather weird, then we are still left with only 1-2 nations where you might risk to face a nation purely armed with magic weapons.

    As we can see from how things currently are in the unmodded game, that still leaves Invulnerability and being etheral quite viable.
    But pokemon nations hard counters a lot of regular human nations as it is now. In my Celadon test game, fully grown fire elementals
    proved to be useless, because they did not survive to hit my line.
    Let me ask you, how many spells out there that allow you to make stuff ethereal? Two. And one of them is caster only, while the other affecs a whole 1 square of troops.

    And how many spells for invulnerability? A couple self-buff one and the batle-wide that demands two paths, only one or two nations in the whole game may ever want to cast because you need both the crosspath and magic weapons of your own for it to be viable.

    You're trying to sell etherealness and invulnerability as something everybody uses all the time and central to the game, but that's just not true. It's plain impossible to properly buff a big army with etherealness, and only a few nations can cast Stygian Rains (and even less have a reason to).

    And both etherealness and invulnerability still crumble to most magic. If you've got that many astral mages, you're better off spamming Luck that can save you from oher spells plus can actually cover big armies.

    Meanwhile the Pokémon nations aren't 100% magic attacks. There's still spears in there (you were praising heavy bellsprouts just a couple pages ago), cavalary spears, tramplers, plus normal/fighting attacks, etherealness/invulnerability will still help against those. And there'll be eventually a normal and a fighting nations, remember? Etherealness and Invulnerability will hard counter those.

    So that mostly leaves fire/air elemental spam, but honestly those are bit more in the OP side and could be toned down a notch.

    In dominions you need (or at leas should) need to pick your counters, not just blindly follow build orders. Rain hard counters Abyssia but kinda useless against everybody else. And you don't go all out in etherealness/invulnerability spam if your opponent is packing lots of magic damage.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    I though the balance goal were suposed to be a little higher up than the currently most badly balanced nations?
    That's a pretty big claim when EA/MA Pangaea, Sceleria, MA Ermor and whatnot are all around the corner.

    We could spend quite a bit of time discussing which nation are the worstest, but then Illwinter would probably release a new patch shaking things up or even dominions 6, but either way undead freespawn nations are one of the key unique elements of the game, and I'll be damned if I don't make at least one of those.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    The air plan is meanwhile interesting. But it runs into the issue of yet again nerfing one of fire's main tools, flaming arrows.
    And expecting vanilla nations to invest heavily in priests to have a chance against the Ghost nation, places a rather unfair burden on them.
    As they then miss out on mage recruitment, and ends with a bunch of units that are not much worth until they get into war.
    Many nations have mage-priests. Several nations actually have their main mages being priests too (Agartha,T'ien C'hi, etc).

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Alright perhaps i overestimated how easy that would be.
    I though it was the same as normal spells.
    But perhaps there are other ways to do things then.
    Yes, 3d6 death income per turn averages to almost 10.

    Pokémon 0.911 with the new Fuchsia ciy Grandfather Oak global plus Ekans TM at construction 4 and their national spell paths switched a bit between death and nature.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Actually. I make very heavy use of Body Etheral whenever i play an astral nation. Both for thugs and elite units.
    I often considder Stygian skin as a bless if i have human sacreds and limited magic weapons among my enemies.
    While my death thugs used invulnerability regularly in the last game i played.
    Whenever im a fire nation i use a lot of fire elementals. The Same for an air nation.
    Both of those are important bits of the power inherent in air/fire magic.
    And of course, we also have mist form, and fog warriors for late game.

    So i think your underestimating just how much of an impact magic weapons have, just because it impacts
    your playstyle a lot less.

    Also. You can give a nation sacred giants without making it OP(like ashdod).
    You can give it recruit anywhere sacred knights without making it OP (like Marignon).
    You can even give it cheap crossbows, Elite Flyers, free skeletons, amphibians, or a broad range of mages skilled in different paths.
    And it wont grow to strong before you give it to many of those things.

    The issue then is that the stated goal is for the Pokemon nations to be in line with the other regular nations.
    At the moment i think thats hard to achive, because they have a -lot- of things.
    And massed magic weapons, let alone massed ranged magic weapons, are something i identify as a serious hinderance to that goal.

    Good point, switched the paths around in a few of those so more nature gems are being spent.
    Is that needed when they get their own national death global?

    We could spend quite a bit of time discussing which nation are the worstest, but then Illwinter would probably release a new patch shaking things up or even dominions 6, but either way undead freespawn nations are one of the key unique elements of the game, and I'll be damned if I don't make at least one of those.
    Then i suggest going the Yomi route, and make the ghosts either spawn off temples, labs or haunted villages (forts).
    I guess you could also give them corpses, or suits of armor animated by a ghost. If there are any ghost pokemon fitting for that.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Actually. I make very heavy use of Body Etheral whenever i play an astral nation. Both for thugs and elite units.
    I often considder Stygian skin as a bless if i have human sacreds and limited magic weapons among my enemies.
    While my death thugs used invulnerability regularly in the last game i played.
    Whenever im a fire nation i use a lot of fire elementals. The Same for an air nation.
    Both of those are important bits of the power inherent in air/fire magic.
    And of course, we also have mist form, and fog warriors for late game.

    So i think your underestimating just how much of an impact magic weapons have, just because it impacts
    your playstyle a lot less.
    On the contrary, if anything I'm playing an air nation and for once my plan A isn't "lol rush Alteration 7 for fog warriors and if I'm not dead/crippled by then I win".

    Because Fog Warriors is so seriously OP that even a nation like Caelum will get their teeth broken trying to chew on that. Since mistform always blocks at least one attack, which is huge even if everything in the other army is packing magic weapons. Suddenly all those magic lances are wasting their charges to just scratch the armor of the other side and I've seen armies with a single mage for fog warrior roll over armies of the same size with dozens of mages casting non-Fog Warriors stuff. I've seen players go out of their way to empower mages in air just for fog warriors and ride that to complete dominance. So if my mod makes fog warriors less of an auto-win button by the tiniest bit, excellent.

    But wait.

    What's that scripted in my air mages? All my air mages?

    It's MISTFORM!

    Because MISTFORM IS THE ONLY WAY MY MAGES CAN SURVIVE EARTHQUAKE WHILE KEEPING STORM UP BECAUSE I'M NOT PLAYING CAELUM AND THUS MY MAGES LACK STORM IMMUNITY AND CAN'T FLY DURING STORMS WHICH I NEED TO BUFF MY STUFF!

    SO EVEN WITH MAGIC ATTACKS EVERYWHERE MISTFORM IS STILL AN ESSENTIAL PART OF MY STRATEGY!

    THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM MISTFORM! IT ALREADY WARPS DOMINIONS AROUND IT! I COULD MAKE EVERY WEAPON IN THE GAME MAGIC AND IT WOULD STILL BE MISTFORM OR DEATH! MISTFORM EVERYWHERE! MISTFORMMISTFORMMISTFORMMISTFORM!

    It's not like air is lacking other (less) good spells. Mass flight, lighting spam, and as you pointed out multiple times Arrow Fend suddenly goes up a lot in value if fighting a Pokémon nation.

    As for your preference for etherealness, I'm well aware of it, but that's just your preference, there's plenty other ways to thug and plenty of other uses for batches of astral mages.

    Plus it's inevitable that a mod changes the usability of stuff around unless I was making carbon copies of existing nations.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Also. You can give a nation sacred giants without making it OP(like ashdod).
    You can give it recruit anywhere sacred knights without making it OP (like Marignon).
    You can even give it cheap crossbows, Elite Flyers, free skeletons, amphibians, or a broad range of mages skilled in different paths.
    And it wont grow to strong before you give it to many of those things.

    The issue then is that the stated goal is for the Pokemon nations to be in line with the other regular nations.
    At the moment i think thats hard to achive, because they have a -lot- of things.
    And massed magic weapons, let alone massed ranged magic weapons, are something i identify as a serious hinderance to that goal.
    I could say the same of Caelum. Before being the magic weapons nation, they're also an almost-full flier nation, and then get their fancy ice armor, and their personal guardian spirits, and a bunch of special summons, and big trampling mammoths, and stealthy fliers, and storm immunity, and resistance to two elements with no weakness, and also magic ranged weapons (blizzard warriors). Which I honestly don't see them used much. They're not even limited by being sacred or anything. Caelum will rather just get close and personal with their magic melee weapons than cowardly rain magic ranged attacks from afar.

    And even then Caelum is just half of what a nation like Ragha is.

    Yeah some nations are just "here's a small bunch of dudes with some spears and shields and swords and some basic cavalry and slingers", but plenty of other nations are a lot more varied than just that. Ermor isn't the only vanilla nation. Caelum is a vanilla nation (3 actually). Ragha is a vanilla nation. R'lyeh is another 3 vanilla nations. Lemuria is a vanilla nation. Pangaea is yet another 3 vanilla nations. Therodos is a vanilla nation. Nazca is a vanilla nation.

    Again, I'm open to the Pokémon nation ranged attacks to be nerfed if they're doing too much damage. Less range so enemies have an easier time closing in melee, or significantly reduced ammo so they're basically glorified javelins. But if Caelum can mass-produce magic bows and nobody cares because they're too busy doing flying charges and auto-summoning special spirits and riding mammoths and flying ninjas and locking down any other fliers with Storm while they ride the winds and dropping cold/lighting all over the place while shrugging it off just fine, it's a safe sign that some more magic ranged weapons won't break the game in half just because they're magic or the nation has other fancy tricks.

    What I'm not doing is flying/grass/steel/dragon/rock/ground/etc attacks bouncing off ghosts while Caelum is still riding mammoths and auto-summoning special spirits and sneak-flying around and whatnot while still mass producing magic weapons both melee and ranged.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Is that needed when they get their own national death global?
    Still need an use for nature gems as pointed out.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Then i suggest going the Yomi route, and make the ghosts either spawn off temples, labs or haunted villages (forts).
    I guess you could also give them corpses, or suits of armor animated by a ghost. If there are any ghost pokemon fitting for that.
    That's not just the Yomi route, that's the one and only undead freespawn route. MA Ermor summons some basic chaff in open provinces, but get a fort and temple up and they start spawning the good stuff. Ditto for the other undead freespawn nations with some variety here and there like Asphodel gets their best stuff at forests.
    Last edited by deuterio12; 2019-09-26 at 08:39 AM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    But etheralness is one of the only relevant buff spells for a astral random mage.
    Though alright relevant point on Fog Warriors are perhaps just a touch OP. And likely for air, getting arrow fend will cover at least a little bit.
    That still leaves Death and Fire getting a noteworthy kick in the teeth from this though. As well as Astral to a minor degree.
    There might be other ways to thug, but that requires access to other paths.

    As for examples of other nations, then initially i will point out that waste majority of them are MA or LA.
    Therefore i think its not relevant to compare an EA nation with them.

    All the same. I am a bit confused by your line of argumentation.
    Because 1 nation, Caelum, gets something, in this case magic weapons and flight.
    Then its going to remain balanced to give the same thing to a lot of other nations, with no regard for what they already have?
    Or for what sort of price they pay for those things?

    Because dont tell me you cant identify a line of severe weaknesses with Caelum?

    What I'm not doing is flying/grass/steel/dragon/rock/ground/etc attacks bouncing off ghosts while Caelum is still riding mammoths and auto-summoning special spirits and sneak-flying around and whatnot while still mass producing magic weapons both melee and ranged.
    Oh great!
    Since what im asking for is the attacks passing harmlessly though ghosts or other etheral beings.
    And Caelum by the defintion i gave earlier isnt mass producting Blizzard Warriors, since those are Cap-only

    Still need an use for nature gems as pointed out.
    Well.. i have yet to have a Dom 5 game where i had more nature gems than i could spend.
    The basic game already contains plenty of things to spend those on.
    Whats not blown on forging or summoning can always be swarmed away.

    That's not just the Yomi route, that's the one and only undead freespawn route. MA Ermor summons some basic chaff in open provinces, but get a fort and temple up and they start spawning the good stuff. Ditto for the other undead freespawn nations with some variety here and there like Asphodel gets their best stuff at forests.
    Well the difference is that Yomi -only- gets stuff from temples.
    And that their dominion does not kill your own population.
    Im thinking the easiest way to balance a ghost focused nation, is to limit the number of actual ghosts they have.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    But etheralness is one of the only relevant buff spells for a astral random mage.
    Luck, twist fate, magic resistance, astral shield.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Though alright relevant point on Fog Warriors are perhaps just a touch OP. And likely for air, getting arrow fend will cover at least a little bit.
    That still leaves Death and Fire getting a noteworthy kick in the teeth from this though. As well as Astral to a minor degree.
    There might be other ways to thug, but that requires access to other paths.
    Which brings up the question, what are you using astral/death thugs for?

    It can't be fighting other armies or other thugs. Because those auto-counter astral/death thugs. Not only plain magic damage but dust to dust, solar rays, astral duel, even a single level 1 mage can take out an astral/death thug.

    So all that astral/death thugs are good for is raiding unforted provinces.

    And well Pokémon nations get unforted PD pretty much as everybody else, so when one thinks about it astraL/death thugs are about as useful as before.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    As for examples of other nations, then initially i will point out that waste majority of them are MA or LA.
    Therefore i think its not relevant to compare an EA nation with them.
    Whot? Caelum/Pangaea/R'lyieh/Therodos/Hinnom are all in EA. Ragha and Lemuria are LA, Nazca is MA, magic weapons spam Atlantis is at EA and LA, it's spread out pretty evenly actually.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    All the same. I am a bit confused by your line of argumentation.
    Because 1 nation, Caelum, gets something, in this case magic weapons and flight.
    Then its going to remain balanced to give the same thing to a lot of other nations, with no regard for what they already have?
    Or for what sort of price they pay for those things?

    Because dont tell me you cant identify a line of severe weaknesses with Caelum?
    Yes, max hot scales to screw their ice armor should they invade and diplomacy the hell out of them. Even then I've had Caelum players rush right into my heat 3 domain just to drag us both down in a mutually destructive war (force them to retreat, but unable to mount a proper counter attack since I need to go in their cold domain where most their troops gains super protection all the while being raided) while somebody else is winning by thrones.

    Fighting Caelum is a pain all around since they not only have the massive advantage of being a flying nation, they're also immune by default to the main flying counter (storm).

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Oh great!
    Since what im asking for is the attacks passing harmlessly though ghosts or other etheral beings.
    And Caelum by the defintion i gave earlier isnt mass producting Blizzard Warriors, since those are Cap-only
    They're still only 13 resources each and Caelum wants production 3, they could easily produce plenty at their cap lone.
    If they wanted.
    But they don't want. What a Caelum player wants is more flying lances.

    It isn't even a matter of Caelum players Blizzard Warrior being capped.

    It's a matter of Caelum players not caring about Blizzard Warriors at all. They're not even bothering making small squads of magic archers when they can be just dropping bigger pointy sticks over the enemy's face. Flying Lances>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>magic ranged.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Well.. i have yet to have a Dom 5 game where i had more nature gems than i could spend.
    The basic game already contains plenty of things to spend those on.
    Whats not blown on forging or summoning can always be swarmed away.
    Death gems also have plenty of uses by default.

    Fuchsia is supposed to be evenly spread between death and nature so they should have even outlets for both.

    Quote Originally Posted by lord_khaine View Post
    Well the difference is that Yomi -only- gets stuff from temples.
    And that their dominion does not kill your own population.
    Im thinking the easiest way to balance a ghost focused nation, is to limit the number of actual ghosts they have.
    The vanilla ghost nations are all either freespawn everywhere you control and have dominion to a degree or Nazca's supaya factories. You can't claim that's unbalanced in Dominions because that's literally how all Dominions ghost nations work. Freespawn everywhere with domkill or recruitable ghost factories is the Dominions ghost nation standard by Illwinter's own hands.

    Doing things Oni style would be more fitting for actual Oni Pokémon, the closest thing being dark-types I guess. They don't have a gym associated, certainly not on Gen I and II, but that just means open creative space for the first Pokémon Nation where Pokémon are the masters with human servants.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Cerulean City stalled twice in a row and on their last legs. Anybody here mind volunteering to sub for them a moment just to set them to AI?

    EDIT: Nevermind they AI'd themselves.

    Also AI Ermor finally went down but somehow the game reported as Arc Armageddon being vanquished. Heresy!

    Or maybe a bug from including mod nations.
    Last edited by deuterio12; 2019-09-30 at 11:17 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by deuterio12 View Post
    Cerulean City stalled twice in a row and on their last legs. Anybody here mind volunteering to sub for them a moment just to set them to AI?

    EDIT: Nevermind they AI'd themselves.

    Also AI Ermor finally went down but somehow the game reported as Arc Armageddon being vanquished. Heresy!

    Or maybe a bug from including mod nations.
    Known bug introduced in the latest patch. Instead of reporting "[Nation ID's pretender] has been eliminated" it's sending "[Your Nation Pretender] has been eliminated." Everybody else in the game would have seen that message with their own god reported as well.

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Ah, thanks!

    Also something quite interesting happened in the most recent turn:



    One of Pewter's City Golem thugs. This monster was at the top of the Hall of Fame, having spread a path of carnage accross the world.
    How could I ever hope to stop it? Maybe some orbital bombardment gifts from heaven?



    But no, the heroic Golem dodges the meteors, and meanwhile some of my mages have gone off-script and are summoning air elementals, surely the battle is lost for air elementals are supposed to have the short end of the stick in the Pokémon mod! The heroic Golem will surely munch on them easily with his magic attacks from gear, the air elementals have no chance at all against his extreme protection and shock resistance!

    Yet... Is that the air elemental trampling the Golem? Maybe some insane fluke from the RNG?



    It's no fluke!! The air elementals trample the 30+ protection 25 20 shock resistance (after Iron Skin) heroic Golem thug to death!!!

    So there you have it, air elementals still rock in Pokémon mod even against a nation packing high shock resistance.
    Last edited by deuterio12; 2019-10-01 at 10:25 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by deuterio12 View Post
    It's no fluke!! The air elementals trample the 30+ protection 25 20 shock resistance (after Iron Skin) heroic Golem thug to death!!!

    So there you have it, air elementals still rock in Pokémon mod even against a nation packing high shock resistance.
    Size 6 tramplers do craploads of armor-piercing damage, and the lightning attack doesn't come into play at all unless they're trying to hit something they can't trample. I think that's pretty much an expected result, especially as the Golem lacks any means of recovering from the chip damage it will take even from successfully dodged tramples and any successful trample will take like half its hp. Although I would have expected the Golem to manage to take down or at least visibly reduce one of the elementals with it - did it happen to wind up eating a full on trample and get basically one-rounded when the elementals landed on it?

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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Seems like so. Fighting in cold weather and being at 72 fatigue thanks to coldblood when the elementals landed probably didn't help either.

    Against the tiny size 1 pokemon hordes, air elementals would probably cut a pretty big swath.

    Speaking of elementals, Skynet Cerulean putting up quite a fight:



    Basically all the water mages spamming water ice elementals to trample the plant horde.



    Notice the sea king himself charging right into the midst of the poisonous plant horde to club them to death close and personal!
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

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    Quote Originally Posted by deuterio12 View Post
    Against the tiny size 1 pokemon hordes, air elementals would probably cut a pretty big swath.
    Speaking of elementals, Skynet Cerulean putting up quite a fight:
    Basically all the water mages spamming water ice elementals to trample the plant horde.
    Notice the sea king himself charging right into the midst of the poisonous plant horde to club them to death close and personal!
    6 mages and gem expenditure lost to take down freespawn. Not a great trade for Cerulean there, and they're lucky they didn't lose the Sea King .

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    Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
    6 mages and gem expenditure lost to take down freespawn. Not a great trade for Cerulean there, and they're lucky they didn't lose the Sea King .
    The mage losses could've probably been avoided or at least reduced if the AI had spread the jr. trainers a bit instead of clumping them all in a single square.

    It still does show that ice elementals and even a naked sea king can tank a heavy razor leaf+acid barrage.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  21. - Top - End - #441
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Luck, twist fate, magic resistance, astral shield.
    Yes thats a pretty short list, that grows even shorter since astral shield doesnt do anything against a lot of pokemon either.
    While Luck doesnt protect against getting a ton of afflictions though chip damage.

    Which brings up the question, what are you using astral/death thugs for?
    It can't be fighting other armies or other thugs. Because those auto-counter astral/death thugs. Not only plain magic damage but dust to dust, solar rays, astral duel, even a single level 1 mage can take out an astral/death thug.
    So all that astral/death thugs are good for is raiding unforted provinces.
    And well Pokémon nations get unforted PD pretty much as everybody else, so when one thinks about it astraL/death thugs are about as useful as before.
    That really depends on the thug in question.
    A lot of them are actually going to ignore Dust to Dust, or Solar Rays, who only affect undeads.
    There are actually a pretty big difference between how you handle a thug that can be defeated by 10-20 units of whatever garison units you have.
    And one that require you gather a team of mages to support them.

    The vanilla ghost nations are all either freespawn everywhere you control and have dominion to a degree or Nazca's supaya factories. You can't claim that's unbalanced in Dominions because that's literally how all Dominions ghost nations work. Freespawn everywhere with domkill or recruitable ghost factories is the Dominions ghost nation standard by Illwinter's own hands.
    I can actually claim thats unbalanced in Dominions, if i havent made a prior claim to existing dominion ghost nations being balanced.

    It's no fluke!! The air elementals trample the 30+ protection 25 20 shock resistance (after Iron Skin) heroic Golem thug to death!!!

    So there you have it, air elementals still rock in Pokémon mod even against a nation packing high shock resistance.
    So. I could point out how said pokemon does not have any inherent magical attacks.
    Or how unreliable a single data point can be.
    Or how this actually dont have anything at all to do with arguments made about massed groups of ranged magical attacks.

    Instead ill just mention that from completely unexpected reasons i have lost the motivation to spend an evening
    balance testing the next nation now.
    Life is to short to spend it on arguments made in bad faith.
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

  22. - Top - End - #442
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    If I've somehow made you think I'm acting out of bad faith I humbly apologize.

    You're right my post about air elementals vs Golem thug doesn't have anything to do with massed groups of ranged magical attacks. It's just that, air elementals could take a geared out Golem thug, when if you asked me before I would've said the air elementals didn't stand a chance in such a scenario. Something interesting happened in the game and I wanted to share it.

    But it seems like I really can't understand several of your arguments there.

    More in particular, which thugs are we exactly discussing here? Because for example, most death thugs I see in games are undead/blood summons themselves since most recruitable death mages just have human stats and thus don't thug very well.

    And of living death mages that can thug in, say, EA? Niefel Jarl, Fomorian King and Dai Oni. Of those, the two first can cast air shield to deflect ranged attacks (plus having a default physical shield for extra anti-range safety) and the Dai Oni has natural earth magic to pump up their protection to levels where even most Pokémon ranged magic (armor-piercing) attacks will be bouncing off.

    Astral thugs are even scarcer. Not a lot of base summons for those (nether gate only one that comes to mind besides tartarian gate), and in EA recruitables there's 1/3 of Melqarts and 1/4 of Yaksha/Yashini. The Melqart has a default magic shield with superior stats, Yaksha has earth magic for reaching high normal protection. And since they're both cap-only commanders, you probably want the Yaksha for a thug instead of the Yashini.

    So when you speak of astral/death thugs in EA, which thugs exactly are you refering? And of those, exactly how many are limited to only astral/death and can't buff themselves with other effects?

    Then there's the troops matter in EA. They're the strongest ones in the game, not only with more common special powers or plain hard hitting or both:
    -Abysia (hard hitting troops with heat aura)
    -Agartha (hard hitting troops)
    -Atlantis (magic weapons spam, also stronger than average)
    -Caelum (magic flying lances)
    -Fomoria (giant nation with hard hitting stuff)
    -Hinnom (giant nation with spammable magic swords)
    -Lanka (kala-mukhas recruitable at every temple'd fort with 26 damage falchion before any bless)
    -Mekone (giant troops with magic weapons, sure those are one per fort per month, but even one alone is a serious threat to most thugs)
    -Niefelheim (the physically strongest giants, hirdmen are hitting for a record 27 damage by themselves)
    -R'lyeh (mind blasters)
    -Therodos (magic weapon spam)
    -Rus (hard-hitting bersekers)
    -Ulm (as elite as human infantry gets)
    -Ur (the smallest giants, but still pack a punch)
    -Xibalba (flying lances)
    -Pangaea (can throw harpies at a thug's face to disrupt their self-buffing, then berseker minotaurs with double axes for the killing blow)

    Even Iron Skin and Invulnerability won't help much against troops hitting for 25+ damage. EA is already the age where thugs are less viable since roughly half the nations can counter them with small squads of national troops whitout actually needing mage support. Later ages thugs are more viable since the buffs and craftable magic items remain the same but troops are weaker.

    Now you may ask about massed ranged magic attacks in MA/LA, and to that I reply that after thinking about it I would be more open to reducing the number of Pokémon magic attacks in those eras, following the whole "the magic is fading" theme. Abyssians grow colder, giants get smaller, etc.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  23. - Top - End - #443
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    So checking other mods for stuff to steal inspiration, and something that seems relatively popular in both new nations and mods that change the vanilla nations is that when a faction has domkill and freespawn, make it a relatively small domkill rate but apply an income penalty to the nation. Reason being so that the nation still gets less gold but when somebody else goes conquers them, they'll be able to benefit from a decent population sizes instead of finding only barren wastelands. So it's more tempting to attack the freespawn nation.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  24. - Top - End - #444
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by deuterio12 View Post
    So checking other mods for stuff to steal inspiration, and something that seems relatively popular in both new nations and mods that change the vanilla nations is that when a faction has domkill and freespawn, make it a relatively small domkill rate but apply an income penalty to the nation. Reason being so that the nation still gets less gold but when somebody else goes conquers them, they'll be able to benefit from a decent population sizes instead of finding only barren wastelands. So it's more tempting to attack the freespawn nation.
    Yeah. It's a popular thing to do because it makes popkill, freespawn nations less a zero-sum game of "kill them first, or kill yourself later". Gold reduction doesn't really hurt said nation anyway, since they don't usually recruit much to begin with. (LA Rl'yeh and MA Asphodel being notable exceptions).

  25. - Top - End - #445
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Grif View Post
    Yeah. It's a popular thing to do because it makes popkill, freespawn nations less a zero-sum game of "kill them first, or kill yourself later". Gold reduction doesn't really hurt said nation anyway, since they don't usually recruit much to begin with. (LA Rl'yeh and MA Asphodel being notable exceptions).
    Generally they still want to build infrastructure, and forts/labs/temples are incredibly expensive when your income is nearly 0. The income penalty is still needed to stop something like MA Ermor from getting all of the upsides of its dominions (ludicrously large amounts of free troops) and mitigating away almost all the downside (still getting money and being free to spend basically all of it building forts and temples.)

  26. - Top - End - #446
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Therodos also needs their recruits.

    Plus in Dominions 5 MA Ermor and Lemuria both get extra death gems for temples (but got their cap get income reduced), so they really want to be spamming fort's temples (which also spawn more and better undead to boot).
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  27. - Top - End - #447
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Finally stormed Pewter's cap.


    And of course there's a Boulder Badge waiting inside. Killed everything else but then failed to take out the big tough 40 prot immobile pretender before the turn limit made my stuff auto-rout.

    Also turns out that the gemless pikachu team spells was bugged and summoned Raichus.



    So there were a lot of Raichus when the clock ran out.

    Meanwhile the C&C war rages on:



    Of course water beats grass. What have I done, those blastoises inflicted over half the casualities.

    Anyway new version out:

    Pokémon 1.002
    Spoiler: Changelog
    Show

    All:
    -All nurses now cost 2 recruitment points and are poor leaders now.
    -All Pokémon ranged attacks that deal damage now only add half Str or 1/3 if they're either armor-piercing or aoe. Base damages overhauled so that the basic Pokémon now deal about the same or a bit less than before, but now the values don't scale so fast for bigger Pokémon and/or when buffed.
    -Resized sprites palette size so they're multiples of 32, seems like that way they show better in-game.

    Celadon City:
    -Squirtle can be recruited at the moving world turtle now.

    Vermillion City:
    -Pikachu Prime restricted to cap and Power Plant.
    -Electabuzz recruitment points reduced to 30.
    -Pikachu team spell was bugged and summoned raichus, fixed.

    Celadon City:
    -Bulbasaur restricted to cap and Growing Grounds.

    Cinnabar City:
    -Charmander and duel charmander restricted to cap and Burning Tower now.
    -Magmar no longer sacred, recruitment points reduced to 30.

    Added new nation, Azalea City, aka bug town!

    All new bugs are intentional, including coding ones.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  28. - Top - End - #448
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Pokémon 1.100

    Mostly balancing and cleaning up with a lot of advice from Lord_Khaine.

    Spoiler: Changelog
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    -Due to Pokémon battles often turning into artillery duels,the most common Pokémon ranged attacks with special effects changed to melee length-6 cannot-repel. This includes Razor Leaf, Acid, Ember, Poison Sting, Water Gun, Poison Gas and Thundershock.
    -All Pokémon melee Area 1 attacks now allow defense like Tail Sweep.
    -Rock attacks, Vine Whip and Swift no longer magic.
    -Thundershock inflicts 10 fatigue now.
    -Water Gun is armor piercing but only used half the time.
    -A Wild Charizard appears changed to A Wild Magmar appears since Charizard would often fly directly on top of the enemy commander even if they had bodyguards.
    -Poison Ink, Sand attack and Mud Slap removed, instead Pokémon with those attacks gain Illusion and Airshield 50 to represent reduced acuraccy.
    -Each nation gets their own color now.

    Pewter:
    -Geodude cost reduced to 11 gp (and relative cost of Graveler and Golem reduced accordingly).
    -Furs geodude cost reduced to 12 gp (and relative cost of Furs Graveler and Furs Golem reduced accordingly).
    -Hiker cost increased by 25 gold.

    Cerulean:
    -"Fish" Pokémon gain +1 defense, "Shell" Pokémon gain +1 protection.
    -Maid cost increased by 25 gold.

    Vermillion:
    -Pikachu Thunderer and Electrabuzz limited to 1 recruited per month.

    Celadon:
    -All Pokémon gain 5 HP.
    -Diamond Beauty cost increased by 25 gold.

    Fuschia:
    -Koffing's protection reduced to 0, Weezing's protection reduced to 2, champion to 3, legendary to 4.
    -Ninja boy cost increased by 25 gold.

    Saffron:
    -Sabrina's Domination no longer autosummons an Alakazam.
    -Sabrina's Duel now summons a single Alakazam instead of an Hypno and two drowzees, cost increased by 25 gold.

    Cinnabar:
    -Super Nerd cost increased by 25 gold.

    Viridian:
    -Rocket's Raticate and Rocket's persian had poison resistance and magic power by mistake, fixed.
    -Rocket's Koffing protection reduced to 0, Rocket's Weezing protection reduced to 2.

    Azalea:
    -Ariados champion was missing second sprite.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  29. - Top - End - #449
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Pokémon mod 1.101, legendary Alakazam and Mewtwo get map teleport but can only be taken dormant or imprisoned, not awake. Kudos to Stehlen for finding out the code for that.

    So Celadon surrendered after I crushed their crystal corps mages and started dropping firestorm mages on top of his plant hordes and everybody agreed to conclude the current game, so going to start a new one, if anybody here's interested.

    Spoiler: Details
    Show

    EA Pokemon game 2/10 players
    Players: 10
    Mod: Pokémon mod
    Map: Peliwyr
    Era: EA
    Server: Llamaserver
    world content : by default
    graphs: on
    random event : Rare
    Throne lvl 2 : 10
    required throne : 14

    This game is meant to test the pokemon mod in a proper multiplayer match, so please pick one of the currently ten available Pokémon nations on the mod

    I'll save my own choice for last.

    Players so far:
    Onard-(will pick last)
    Stehlen-Saffron City
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Of Mantas View Post
    "You know, Durkon, I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was a snarl. All the other gods said we were daft to build a planet over a snarl, but I built it all the same, just to show then. It got eaten by the snarl...

    ...so we built a five millionth, three hundreth, twenty first one. That one burned down, fell over, then got eaten by the snarl, but the five millionth, three hundreth, and twenty second one stayed up! Or at least, it has been until now."

  30. - Top - End - #450
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    Default Re: The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

    Might be an idea to first look over the remaining Pokemon Towns for Ranged attack adjustment.
    Im in particular looking at Fuchiva, Cinnabar and Safron.

    And of those, mostly Fuchiva. Im worried about how ranged AN damage would work against any normal nation.
    Or for that matter nations with low HP troops and no PR.
    So im in particular looking at Poison Sting and Poison Gas there.

    But likely just making them AP would work. Dont know if there are a poison sludge/slime attack.
    But thats something it would make sense had more trouble penetrating armor.

    I also think Disease spreader should be removed from Grimer.
    Since its annoying for Fuchiva (lost a few commanders that way).
    And annoying for their enemies, when every victory becomes phyrric.
    Also not even certain its thematic? Dont recall seeing any trainers get sick on the show?
    thnx to Starwoof for the fine avatar

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