/Domg/ Dominions 4 General

Anybody happen to have the image of Sceleria on the couch? That seems to be the only one I forgot to save.

who isn't these days

i am in steam chat

Do animals count as normal units for fort defence?

Yes.

...

Hence why wolves are the most common protectors of fortresses.

IIRC only mindless units don't count? I might be wrong I've only played 500[/spoiler[ hours.

why not just press ctrl+s every time like white people

Join this Malakal-free game, nerds.

llamaserver.net/gameinfo.cgi?game=NoMalakals

Don't listen to proles, they probably pick EA and MA R'yleh themselves for the comfy wins. Both have shit troops, there is no avoiding that, they can't effectively fight other UW nations and they definitely can't contest Land nations in normal combat. Where they shine is their mages, EA Aboleths get E and D randoms they keep them relevant, add that to the fact roughly one out of ten Mind Lords is capable of casting Master Enslave after being boosted a single level and kitted with a ring you get some crazy lategame potential, nothing feels as satisfying as taking over half a dozen armies with teleporting mind lord communions (Boosted mind lords with crystal matrices).

Starspawn are even better Astral mages but you lose out in not being able to foreign-rec freespawn factories and maybe having to share a sea with Pelagia.

Can I join? I am Malakal.

But I already joined?

Oh fuck my other account gained sentience, run for the hills!!!

Is Malakal in AIBowl? What if even his AI wins all games?

What's a safe level of astral to have on your pretender?

>Sauromatia and Lanka are still dead set on helping Malakal win because he was nice to them

Ask yourself why you want astral on your pretender in the first place.

It's on a chassis, and you don't really need it that much? Monolith will be okay with S1 as long as it's not going into battle. Maybe S3 for teleport drops against non-astral nations. S4 will be enough to give your sacreds a minor buff and allow you to summon golems/craft matrices with crosspaths, teleport, cast antimagic, and to survive most S1 magic duels if you have national S mages to mix in with your pretender. Still kinda risky if you try to fight Kailasa as a non-astral nation, but that's life, and you'll have to compromise in some way.

Want to craft some serious shit and maybe do full astral end-game stuff? S5 with 2 boosters (need earth for the coin) allows you to craft both ring of wizardry and sorcery. They're expensive as fuck, you better have some astral mages to sitesearch or arcane probe the shit out of those provinces. This in turn allows you to cast Arcane Nexus and turn1 Master Enslave with 3 boosters (can still just use matrices for turn 1 communions). S6 allows you to craft rings easier (and without using coins, but why would you not craft them anyway), and with 3 boosters allows you to cast wish.

Because I want the site-searching machine without the magic duel drawback

I agree to the game ending but only if everyone agrees that Atlantis is top nation.

Why don't you just take the lose on astral and just spam arcane probing instead?

THE SITE SEARCHING MACHINE

Using human-sized chassis (those that give you cheap paths) in battle, especially in hostile dominion is hard, especially if you're a retarded newbie. You generally don't want to lose your god because it will hit you with -1 to all paths. This is why you don't need to be afraid of magic duels at all with a pure sitesearching/crafting build. You just won't see any combat.

I suppose that's true.

It depends.
If you're not going use your pretender to fight battles EVER - any level is fine.
If you're playing as a nation with supercheap and plentiful S mages (examples: Bandar Log, Sauromatia, LA Ulm), you can get away with low astral too.
In other cases - you need S7 to make your god 100% immune to S1 magic duel. Anything less is risky. Killing S5-S6 with magic duels will require significant investment, though. 90% nations in the game won't have enough astral nerds for that.

Magic duel isn't even your biggest concern. Your rainbow can get killed by some elves casting seeking arrow.
If you're relatively new to the game, avoid using rainbows, imo. Get a god that helps your early game and midgame, not a pretender to maybe give you more gems later on.

Also, blood sites are really, really rare, and are generally not worth it. If you don't have national blood mages, low blood is useless, and can't get you into full blood nation mode. If you have national blood mages it's useless because they can sitesearch for you.

I'm an elf, and I'm offended by this. Why would I use 4 air gems on an unreliable spell when I can spend 3 air gems on air elementals that will trample the nerd on turn 1?

Because the nerd will be scripted to retreat on turn 1. So, you're gonna need 3*[the number of bordering provinces] gems to cut off the nerd's retreats too. Seeking arrows can end up being cheaper.

Sorry guys. Thought I'd sent it in last night. Will double turn now.

If he's alone maybe (though I'd expect that from newbies). If he's not, and is scripted to fight with an army, air elementals are always a sound investment.

So what are the potential uses for Divine Channeling? The only thing I can think of is for when you're fighting an Undead nation so you have some crazy banishment. Also if you had a bunch of H2's you could use them to spam smite, idk it seems pretty cool but I feel like I'm missing something here

If he's scripted to "fight with an army", he won't die to a single elemental anyway. Unless the script (or the army?) is really, REALLY bad.

You're not missing anything. Divine Channeling is primarily used in banishment communions (Pyth or Skeleria against Ermor, for example), as banishment has great scaling.

With 10 hp he just might. And I'm not talking 1 elemental, I'm talking 3.

That's a lot of gems for cloud trapezing all these vanjarls and casting shit.
Unless you have vanjarls in all your opponent's provinces. But you wouldn't do such a thing, Mr. Elf, would you?

Elves are your friends, and should always be trusted, my good neighbor.

FUCK

You fool, you rube, when a rainbow is out sitesearching you backfield them and script them to retreat immediately

I didn't predict Conan's wrath, but I should have seen it coming after this

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. You should ALMOST ALWAYS set your sitesearchers to retreat in the very back, unless they will have an army supporting them next turn and they can contribute to battle with their spells.

>I remember reading somewhere that mages can only spend gems equal to their base paths even when boosted by a communion. Does that mean I need a mage with base S8 to cast Master Enslave?
Someone already answered you, but I think some examples would make it clearer.

A master can use up to their communion-boosted level in gems if they meet the casting requirements. Otherwise they're restricted to their base path.

E.g. S4 with 16 slaves (effectively S8) can spend 8 pearls on a S8 spell, but cannot spend 6 pearls on a S9 spell.

However, he could spend 4 pearls on a S9 spell (because his base path is 4).

>unless they will have an army supporting them next turn and they can contribute to battle with their spells

Then they aren't really sitesearcher but rather combat mages, no?

Combat sitesearchers. Like when you're eating the AI and sitesearching its lands at the same time.

And how do you imagine that works? You send your pretender first alone into enemy land? You send an army with him? If yes to an army why retreat at all?

The entire scenario is silly.

r u literally dumb

This is not the scenario discussed, what was discussed was your pretender searching a province on the frontline because the army was supposed to come there and possibly fight the enemy and thats why you didnt script him to retreat.

Noob here.

What are some short compressed do's and don't's tips you can give? Stuff like Just enough to avoid embarrassing myself online.

Reading is really hard, it seems. As is realing that there are more than one person you can speak to.

Don't attack a province with 5 Bloodhenge druids and 1 Dark Vines "seen towering over the army" with ~50 LA Atlanthians with no Sacreds and backed only by a Commander made Prophet set on casting Smite. The druids will almost likely sap all your morale and the army will give up after like 3 losses.

Why is everyone failing their expansion?

No idea about other nations but I have attrition expanding so my expansion parties melt slowly as they move from the capital.

At the same time the map is big with ~25 provinces per player and some nations failed quite hard so there is a lot of land left.

Is this manga about black people being literal cockroaches?

Nope, sorry to disappoint.

Are cockroaches the good guys?

Only to cockroaches.

I was looking through the factions and LA Abysia looked interesting with its fire guys and its blood guys. The problem is that I can't really find a whole lot of guides related to them, so are there any tips to playing LA Abysia and any tips to building their Pretender?

Practice expansion thoroughly before submitting a pretender.

Research and mages win games.

If you can't spend all your gold recruiting the troops/mages you want, you need more forts.

If you're losing, go nuts with gem spending. You can't use your gems if you're dead.

I'd get an awake expander with earth magic (you really need E2 for earth boots). Erf snek is an obvious choice, but man eater is alright too. Income scales, max magic, some prod if you can.
Expand with warbreds. They're tanky, hit hard and have berserk. Get conj5 ASAP for fire elementals. Const4 is dowsing rods, const6 gives you lanterns for huge research boost and evo7 is fire storm, which is your main battlefield clear. Fire storm is basically the last fire spell you're gonna need. At this point, all you need to do is blood.
Sanguine acolytes are your research monkeys + bloodhunters. They're good, get them. In your cap, you should be recruiting warlocks since turn 6 or so. They're extremely powerful mages. Use them for horrors, summoning stuff (I like demon knights). They can murder entire armies with teleport -> bloodletting and cast all cool blood stuff like bloodlust and blood rain. Get vamps, get all blood uniques. Cast astral corruption. Win the game.

So by what you told me, would this be correct for the pretender? I haven't played this game in quite a long time, so if I messed up something, I apologize.

gods almighty let me just drink that big can of bleach on my table before I start explaining shit okay thanks

Max heat, max growth. Drop dominion to ~5, you can blood sacrifice and your sacreds aren't very good. Order3+misf1 or turmoil1+luck3 is fine. I think you'll have enough points left for +1E magic, which allows your snek to cast earth blood deep well when given a blood stone.

llamaserver.net/gameinfo.cgi?game=NoMalakals

2 slots left

Alright, I went with Order3+Misf1 for the more consistent income and I guess I will fuck around in singleplayer with it to try it out. Thanks for the help.

First of all, for late-game oriented nations (and all blood nations are late-game oriented), growth > order because you'll get more income when your population grows. For blood nation especially growth helps to counteract poploss from patrolling in your bloodhunting provinces.

Order helps with bloodhunting as well as with income, so you'll ideally want to max both.

Temperature scales are usually dumped into the ground. Abysia's ideal temperature is heat 2, and dumping it to heat 3 basically gives you 40 free points.

This dude gets you expansion, reinvigoration for your sacred mages, flying EQ capabilities, earth end-game spells (summon earth king court or craft a bloodstone and you have E5 basically), demon knight summoning.

Misfortune is an acquired taste, so you might want to go magic 2 luck neutral if you're a pussy, or be a man and go misfortune 2.

Better arena link doesn't work.

Summod link gives me 18 errors.
Worthy Heroes gives me 200 errors.

send help

>earth king court
fug troll king's court, then sure summon earth kings and father illearth too, he's cool

You're a fucking idiot and put sprites in the wrong place. I literally answered the same question for 9000 times in the course of these 4 years, Jesus.

And after 9000 times it did not occur to you even once to put them in the OP?

>tfw to intellegent to put all files in mods folder
Do you really want to play this game instead of ASSFAGGOTS?

It's in the pastebin, newfriend.

Nice dodging the question fag. Here's to another 4 years of you putting up with newbyes having those problems 'cause you enjoy the attention of having people ask you in the thread.

Thanks, I assumed the BetterArena link from would be a newer version or something, it's a bit counter-intuitive. As a side question, are any of the interface mods worth having?

Not really, imo. They mostly just change the window colors.

The worthy heroes link in the OP (drive.google.com/file/d/0B51DS6LWagFTZG5UcVZTcnQ0eEE/view) has the wrong sprites.

They just change the game window skins.

Whew thank god, so it really wasn't my fault and I can shift blame from my incompetence on someone else.

You fucked up the summod all on your own though.

Would be a shame if someone joined in the last slot as Ermor.

Those 18 errors were because of a previous summod version I had installed from before but didn't really get to try the game. It was fixed by getting the latest version. Sprites weren't in the wrong place, they weren't there at all, so your 4 years old answer didn't really help, sorry.

So there's this nation I like that just fuzzes out in late game.
What are my non-blood options to fix that? Perhaps not so much as to make it compete evenly with other late-game nations, but just something to give me a couple more tools later. Like a trump card or a finishing blow when I already have an advantage from mid-game. (And yes, I didn't say what nation because I want something neutral that could work "generally" with other nations and ages too.)

Flying raiders will never not be good: most people don't go beyond 3 PD

Theres no reason not to put lots of PD on any province that actually produces money

Even so, most people don't go beyond 3 PD

True, true. Glad it didn't happen.

Memenames.

ay, sawaiki, where you headed with that army? don't want a bump in 91

I wish monkeys and rus pretenders switched places.

Any new games starting?

wish i could play this game in multiplayer without paying

wish you could fuck off permanently

My name is 100% not a meme.

Wish you would leave trolls without food.