/domg/ - Dominions General

Postponed hosting 12h.

If anyone is interested in subbing Shinuyama with 1 (one) staled turn, let me know. I have no idea what's their build.

If not, I'll set them AI.

>RESTART
Sounds like someone lost his awake :^)

>inb4 it's Shinu who fucked up and is trying to force a restart

5d chess

t.malakal

Sure hope I'm next to all that free land

I'm taking the free cap to snowball out of control :^)

To be fair, it's Shinuyama we're talking about. AI or not, it's free land anyway.

Hey, I had issues with pbem manager
can we get a rollback?

I don't know what kind of innovative strategy you're trying for Malakal, but it won't work on us

cmon
its just turn3

Considering you would have staled twice before you posted anything and the host had to extend the turn you got a stale message on, I vote no.

...

ded ichtyid

How's FastTurns going? You guys have been quiet

fast

Xib is dead. Saur and Mictlan are in power. Therodos is no longer relevant because BoT is down. Yomi ai so everyone is eating. Mictlan is actually spamming horrors at everyone.

That's not Mictlan it's me.

Water nations are inherently weak. Not because of their troops, though units that can't be used against >90% (literally) of nations is bad design. Not because of their mages, though "being X but underwater" is a terrible gimmick. But because of terrain.

Water provinces are strategically different to land provinces: you always have MM:1, you always have a multitude of neighbors, and your lands are always treated as a natural barrier.

As a natural barrier, they are spread out between landmasses, so a nation that mostly owns water provinces will be spread artificially thin; though their territory may only be ~20 provinces, they will own large, long provinces of ocean that border half-a-dozen other nations and have 4 land-connections each.

Not only that, they will take much longer to traverse than similarly sized land-based nations, have less population, and severely restrict site diversity.

Finally, since maps are made with land-nations in mind, water provinces are often severely limited in number. As water nations can at best recruit national units and commanders from the coast, this restricts their production capability, especially its expansion. A water nation that successfully conquers a land nation may have double the gems and triple the gold, but they'll still only have as many mage-recruiting sites as they started with, bar forting more UW provinces; not an issue that land nations are troubled with.

There are things that modders have done to improve the lot of the UW nation, but frankly, UW nations should just be made into land nations until the whole terrain issue is fixed.

There is a whole slew of arguments as to why UW nations are pseudo-balanced due to all the points you've listed, but foodcoma is hitting me hard right now and I'm gonna take a nap.

>Xib is dead
I'm putting EXTRA bane venoms in your stockings this christmas.

Just expand on land you dum-dum.

During the expansion phase? If you prioritize it over oceanic provinces you start producing mages and troops later than other nations. If you wait until you've started on your first fort, it's probably been taken already.

also the one time I tried they called me calamari and bullied me back into the sea

>During the expansion phase?

During the whole game.

>If you prioritize it over oceanic provinces you start producing mages and troops later than other nations.

Why is that?

>also the one time I tried they called me calamari and bullied me back into the sea

Don't let them bully you. Remind them that unless they plan on paying another aquatic-capable nation to kill you attacking you means they will have to deal with you raiding them for the entire remainder of the game. If I see uw-fags on land and I have no means to go uw and fuck them up I usually let them keep their land. Better than creating a bitter enemy that I can never fully defeat.

>if a unit with regeneration gets diseased, they don't lose HP but continually gain afflictions until they're worthless
Glad I learned this before my event-gained Circle Master died. He became Mute but I empowered him and cast Blood Feast to cure him so now I just gotta hunt up 140 more virgins and I'll have my first Earthblood Stone.
>During the whole game.
But the issue is that you can recruit absolutely nothing from non-coastal provinces and barely anything from coastal provinces, in a game where maps are primarily land; other nations get more forts that can recruit more mages, and more troops when they conquer another nation, UW nations don't.
>Why is that?
Because UW nations can't recruit their best units from the coast if they can recruit from the coast at all.
>[the rest]
Fortunately for them the other UW nation decided it didn't like my squidface and killed me less than a year afterward.

>Because UW nations can't recruit their best units from the coast if they can recruit from the coast at all.

You blob on land mostly and use the money from that to make underwater forts. Were you under the impression that I said you shouldn't take any UW provinces at all??

No, I was saying that if you go after land provinces before water provinces, which is what you'll need to do to get there before land nations, you will not be able to start up an UW fort as quickly as a land nation can start up a land fort.

That's not true though unless you are rolling in the dosh for some reason and can build more forts than there are easy-to-take uw provs in your capring.

what a fucking reeetarded assburgers thing to do

well there's about 70 virgins that post here for your first tribute.

>Because UW nations can't recruit their best units from the coast if they can recruit from the coast at all.
MA R'lyeh and MA Pelagia's better land fighters are coastal, and MA Atlantis's research mages are coastal. Oceania gets essentially the same stuff on coasts that they get UW. Therodos and Ys are primarily coastal nations, essentially, with more out of coasts than UW. Getting most of your stuff UW only is the exception rather than the rule.

It depends on the nation, silly billies.

What maps do you play on? The ones that I've used don't have enough water provinces in one place to have a cap-ring composed solely of them, and the map generator has to be specifically tailored to produce an RNG-map that does.
Oceania and Ys are exceptions. Atlantis, R'lyeh, and Pelagia can only get good mages UW. For R'lyeh's troops, you're right though. Therodos is a freespawn nation (though even then its best spawns are UW) and not a typical UW nation.

>Atlantis, R'lyeh, and Pelagia can only get good mages UW
Atlantis's labrats are coastal. It'd probably be better for them if they could get battle mages on coasts and their researchers UW, but there's a whole lot more I'd change about that nation first. Point is, though, that they do really can use coasts. R'lyeh's starchildren are generally their go to mage anyways. Slave mages are expensive, and if you're fighting a land war you need only so many big W mages.

The coastal changes really did help with giving UW nations benefits from taking coastal provinces.

beautiful
where do you guys get maps, period?
I used to browse mode forum but nowadays it's pretty dead

I played on Valances my last 15 games or so

Valanis
autocorrect be damned

Can we push back hosting by 3 more hours? I'm gonna be working on a work project through my lunch break and might work late too.

Yeah sure I'll push it back for you

Deleted my name. This is Fourth Greeks

Whoops, forgot my name

Pictured: the worst map ever made in dominions for balance. Somehow, fucking somehow, someone made something trashier than damn Latus.

I'm no UW master but most UW nations don't want to expand solely UW for the reason that doing so would lead them to having a spaghetti shaped border that takes years to traverse at map move 1.

My point is to avoid having weird borders and becoming irrelevant UW nations should expand on land significantly. Obviously this doesn't mean they should have 0 UW provs. They should get enough UW provs to produce the units they need. It's not impossible to balance this out. Send, say, 2 expansion parties on land and 1 expansion party to take on the easier UW indies. Now you have reasonable borders and enough dosh to make forts in your uw provs.

If some landlubber uses mercs or some shit to enter your pool you forcefully push him aside later.

It's not THAT bad for small games without sailing

Sailing is literally required on the map though, otherwise you can get stuck on a 2-province isle blocked off from the rest of the world by Zeus.

Literally worse than Flatus. But someone reminded my the Uropia map existed, which actually just puts non-sailing nations on complete isles with 0 way off, so I guess it isn't the worst.

I think the map is shit too, but if I'll give it some optimism and assume those anchors with the black lines are supposed to represent harbors and land troops can cross there like if there was a bridge on other maps.

This is true, but that doesn't stop you from spawning at the upper-rightmost land province, with a throne right beneath you - effectively cutting you off from everything unless you have sailing.

Or from starting on the waste at the bottom left side of the map, with the harbor province a 3-throne.

Set starting locations, you can get stuck starting on that bottom left swamp and get walled in by the nation that spawned above you. Or you can start at the top of that right island and have to crawl through 2 mountains and a swamp only to get blocked by that nation who spawned in the bottom swamp.

Those lines that pointed out are landbridges, yeah.
>upper-rightmost land province
That's one province true, but the one below it is actually four provinces.

Oh wait, those start locations are fucking set? As in they were intentional. Jesus, its worse than I thought.

I sure hope that throne wasn't hard to take. And you had the right temp scales to go over that river or that mountain.

What are the best/prettiest/more balanced maps then?

>As in they were intentional. Jesus, its worse than I thought.
If everyone has a terrible starting location, nobody does.
Shahrivrah is pretty and I don't think it's particularly unbalanced. Just hope you don't start in one of the corners.

Snerdyn

moggers shut the fuck up nobody likes bolingard its a terrible map

I have been knocked out by bats, I only have two provinces and no troops, I gave away all my stuff. I set myself AI for all the good it could do. I think I really like EA abyssia but I made a lot of mistakes, if I ever play them again I imagine I'd do a lot better.

I like it too

Summod buffs the shit out of them, but in vanilla they're barely stronger than uw nations and even then you rely on people not knowing what devils are.

Alternatively rush harder.

Abyssia is also my favorite nation despite them not being very strong.

This was without summod, I know it makes them way better. I should have rushed harder, and probably not went after bats at all. I might have been able to rush down Mictlan, even Lanka would have have been a better choice. I should have grabbed a n9 bless as well, and possibly an e4 or even as high as e9. I think n9e9 would be an interesting bless for all your sacred evo spammers who would otherwise really suffer from fatigue and be vulnerable to RoS or being attacked by bats. The extra protection would give them a chance to cast a scripted fire blast to counter some flying units which would be neat, or let their heat at least do something, and the reinvig would seriously help burning ones.

I think I would have done much better with a better designed pretender. I focused my pretender on blood to try and use it for late game, but I think using nature and earth would have been better overall for a lot of reasons. I also should have taken production 3/order 2 I think, maybe even order 1 and tried for some magic. You need scales badly because of your stupid expensive troops so its hard to say for sure. overall 4/5 bretty fun

Yeah good scales are pretty needed for abysia. Research is shit until you get lightless lanterns, after that your research is pretty strong.

I had order3/prod2 but was consistently resource blocked so I think prod3 is more important

I'm an obsessive piece of shit shutin, should I play this game? Is it much fun if you don't have friends to play with?

Online multiplayer dude. You play with random people on the internet, like...any other online multiplayer game.

Where can I find mp games nowadays?

This game is pretty much perfect for you, then.

lmgtfy.com/?q=dominions 4 multiplayer games

It's alright in singleplayer for a while if you are really autistic.
Amount of units and stuff to experiment with is huge and it makes for a good sandbox experience even with braindead AI.
And after 600 hours of singleplayer you'll be able to drop into multiplayer and be awful but at least not clueless

Sorry, no rollbacks unless absolutely necessary.
That said, if something like that comes up again, let me know beforehand and I'll postpone hosting if needed.

hey fuck you buddy

Thanks for being goodmin and not a Lukas

I need a 10 week extension pls

rollback or stale

Soooo.... about that sub for Shinuyama?

Admins do not negotiate with terrorists, baka

I love cocks!

Same. Every time I pee standing up, I'm thankful.

Hey admin, can I get a sixteen second extension on the current turn?

>peeing standing up
its like you arent even a tranny

>Fishpeople for Social Justice

I'm just checking my privilege.

Yup, it's still there.

>assuming fishperson's birthgender
Wow you fucking pig.
Maybe he is a female to male transginger.

>user casts Astral Tempest

>last post was 30 minutes ago
What the h*ck.

What happens if you add a negative value to that +PD thing that Eunuchs and some other commanders get? What happens if you add it to a unit?

I love ichtyids!

Yea, especially with rice. Sushi are delicious.

Is it a 50% chance per commander in the province, or does it just pick one commander, make one check, and return to the mage if it fails?
>read the manual
Jokes on you I already checked and it only tells you the stats for an Ashen Angel.

why can't I DL my turns through gmail?
this has literally never happened before, and I've done more turns than I can count.

Fairly certain it's a 50% chance it determines if any of the commanders are suitable. No clue how it picks commanders, if its by random chance or goes off experience and stuff or some other hidden nonsense.

So I was just seeing if I could get a communion master to cast Enlarge on himself and if it would buff the slaves but it didn't, is this because it's not a self buff spell by default?

Can't you cast enlarge on the slaves?

Yes. ONLY self-spells transfer through communion.

I love ichtyids!