Okay, let me pitch Dominions 5 to you

[Sen isSaqqara]

If anybody does not agree with any of the above settings, let them speak now.

Two questions, but not really objections:

Why no story events? I always found them to be fun.

Why no score graphs?

[Olinser]

Two questions, but not really objections:

Why no story events? I always found them to be fun.

Why no score graphs?

Score graphs give you access to effectively scouting information you really shouldn't have about most nations.

[Glimbur]

Story events can be fun but they can also decide who wins or loses based on random chance. I can see not including them.

Speaking as Caelum I like graphs being off. Makes flying scouts more useful.

Do we want AI players to be Impossible? That will make them a pain; not sure if that is fairer than having an AI be trivial or not.

[Sen isSaqqara]

One last question: why events at rare? Aren't they normally common by default?

[Olinser]

One last question: why events at rare? Aren't they normally common by default?

Same reason - events are huge sources of RNG that can swing games completely outside of player's actions.

Especially since this is supposed to be a sort of training game for a lot of people, it's not very good practice to basically end up at, "Well you were doing great until that event, next time do exactly the same thing but make sure you sacrifice a goat to RNGesus".

[Nadevoc]

So... searching for magic sites. Obviously, magic sites are great. They give gems and other cool things. But it seems like I only find anything like 10% of the time.

Is there a minimum path strength a mage should have before I bother having it search for sites?

[Knaight]

So... searching for magic sites. Obviously, magic sites are great. They give gems and other cool things. But it seems like I only find anything like 10% of the time.

Is there a minimum path strength a mage should have before I bother having it search for sites?

One. Most magic sites can be found with just one in the relevant path, and what really makes mages better at manual searching is having more paths more than higher paths. It also helps to have an understanding of site distribution, and site distribution can be weird (the best place to search for nature sites is actually the ocean, not forests). A second point of path strength is still worth a fair amount, a third and fourth point provides a pretty marginal advantage. Past that there's no gain with manual searching (there might be something with Strands of Arcane Power, but that's a terrible spell anyways).

[Nadevoc]

Ah, interesting. So where should I be looking for the various paths?

At a guess...

Fire: ??
Air: Highlands
Water: Sea
Earth: Caves, Forest
Nature: Sea, Forest
Astral: Farmland?
Death: Swamp, Waste


I'm guessing that the magic sites are generated at the start of the game, so fire sites wouldn't be increased by a Hot scale

[deuterio12]

Two questions, but not really objections:

Why no story events? I always found them to be fun.

Why no score graphs?

One last question: why events at rare? Aren't they normally common by default?

Rare events and no story events to avoid too much random swings since about half the players are newbies.

No graphs since it's basically free scouting and also simplifies the game as it saves carefully analyzing everybody's graphs every turn. Also from my experience most mp games have graphs turned off anyway.

Do we want AI players to be Impossible? That will make them a pain; not sure if that is fairer than having an AI be trivial or not.

Well people were complaining a player going AI is a free lunch for the neighbours so leaving it at the hardest possible difficulty just in case.

Although notice there's no way for a player to coordinate with an AI so even then it will be at a disadvantage.

Ah, interesting. So where should I be looking for the various paths?

At a guess...

Fire: ??
Air: Highlands
Water: Sea
Earth: Caves, Forest
Nature: Sea, Forest
Astral: Farmland?
Death: Swamp, Waste


I'm guessing that the magic sites are generated at the start of the game, so fire sites wouldn't be increased by a Hot scale

Actually some events can generate magic sites and I believe some are tied to scales. However such sites will show up right away.

Also although yes some types of sites are more common in some types of terrain, you can basically find anything anywhere, so it pays off to look everywhere. Even Holy Magic can find some sites, like the ancient temple.

And then some sites change the local scales even while hidden, so for example if you see a province with unusually high death or heat, probably has a related site on it.

[lord_khaine]

For horror marks, "eventual" can be a pretty damn long time. I've had plenty of games where I spam lightless lanterns by the dozens midgame and barely see a single horror from them until the end.

And with lifelong protection in an elite mage, they may actually be able to take on some lesser horrors.

It still makes for a slightly hard choice though, when you instead could use the item slot for something safer. And it does at the same time require blood magic.

Just remember that the Elixir of Life will be destroyed when it saves your mage's life.

I do think thats a minimal price to save someone with 8+ summoning skill. At that level its almost only big useful things that arrive. Like a Visitor. Or a Vastness. Or Greater Otherness.

I'm not saying don't protect them, just cautioning you against investing too much in doing so.

I'll also note that Void summoning, even with a highly-skilled summoner, is unreliable, unlike most ritual magic. It's free apart from the cost of the summoner and whatever protection you give to him, but it's not guaranteed to produce useful results, or even any results, every turn.

Alright so far it seems like the Ring of Alarm is the best possible investment to keep your Summoner alive in face of angry void Monsters.
And yes, it seems like its only every 2-3 turns something happens. That is again quite nice all the same.

But a new question. What the heck does i do with a bunch of Astral magic masters? Its kinda hard to find spells they can do much with, either in combat or summoning. So far im mainly using water magic to produce a massive army of Vile water. But i got a rather large bunch of Astral pearls. And a lot of Astral mages, than dont really do anything.

[deuterio12]

But a new question. What the heck does i do with a bunch of Astral magic masters? Its kinda hard to find spells they can do much with, either in combat or summoning. So far im mainly using water magic to produce a massive army of Vile water. But i got a rather large bunch of Astral pearls. And a lot of Astral mages, than dont really do anything.

Light of the nothern star+astral cascades spam or paralyze spam.

Communion up and cast really big battle spells.

Spend pearls in astral caps.

[lord_khaine]

Light of the nothern star+astral cascades spam or paralyze spam.

Communion up and cast really big battle spells.

Spend pearls in astral caps.

Alright thanks, guess it is generally things that take a lot more research than i got pt.

Edit.
Also, are there anything sacret you can summon with the basic spell set?

[Glimbur]

Most sacred summons are national spells. The only two I can think of that are generic are the Bishop Fish (UW summon, aquatic, but Holy 3 which is useful) or Mound Fiend (Holy 2 I think, also some general death-type stuff like ethereal and death magic).

Edit: shambler skin armor makes a unit amphibious and works on aquatic units. Easier to make than amulets of the fish bit takes armor slot.

[lord_khaine]

I guess a moderate bless investment for Rhyleth was not that viable then (regeneration and hardy), but by dam then im just going to gift of reason all my void monsters, and make them into SC!

Most sacred summons are national spells. The only two I can think of that are generic are the Bishop Fish (UW summon, aquatic, but Holy 3 which is useful) or Mound Fiend (Holy 2 I think, also some general death-type stuff like ethereal and death magic).

And Holy 3 is kinda nifty, even if it means you need to first go underwater, then get a amulet of the fish.

[Sen isSaqqara]

So, what time tomorrow do we want to begin? What's our schedule?

[Glimbur]

So, what time tomorrow do we want to begin? What's our schedule?

Might as well put up the game now and start collecting pretenders. Admin will need to know who is the pretender and who is disciple for each team.

[Olinser]

Might as well put up the game now and start collecting pretenders. Admin will need to know who is the pretender and who is disciple for each team.

Yep we can go ahead and create the base game so people can start sending pretenders that will let us have all day today to work on it.

[Knaight]

Might as well put up the game now and start collecting pretenders. Admin will need to know who is the pretender and who is disciple for each team.

I'm playing as disciple (I think the plan was that veterans all played disciple - it is a helping game after all).

[Aeson]

So... searching for magic sites. Obviously, magic sites are great. They give gems and other cool things. But it seems like I only find anything like 10% of the time.

Is there a minimum path strength a mage should have before I bother having it search for sites?

I don't recall the exact numbers, but in Dominions 4 an X1 mage could find something like 50%, an X2 could find something like 80%, an X3 could find something like 90%, and an X4 could find 100% of hidden magical sites in X path by searching a province. If you want to increase the probability of any given search finding a site, using a mage with many low- or mid-level paths, such as EA T'ien C'hi's Master of the Five Elements, is often a good bet. Note that there is no guarantee that there are any magical sites (hidden or not) in any given province even at maximum site frequency, and that there are no more than 8 magical sites in a province. Throne provinces are more likely to have sites. Terrain also has an effect on likelihood to have sites, with swamps and wastelands being the most likely to have sites and plains and farmlands being least likely, and also on the kinds of sites which are present, though not necessarily in intuitive ways.

Most sacred summons are national spells. The only two I can think of that are generic are the Bishop Fish (UW summon, aquatic, but Holy 3 which is useful) or Mound Fiend (Holy 2 I think, also some general death-type stuff like ethereal and death magic).

Telestic Animates (Telestic Animation, S3, Thaum-5, 5 pearls; summons an immobile H2), Juggernauts (Juggernaut Construction, S5, Const-9, 25 pearls), and Dust Priests and Dust Kings (Hidden in Sand, E3D1, Ench-6, 75 gems) are the other generic sacred summons.

Also, any commander bearing a Shroud of the Battle Saint (Const-4, S1) will count as blessed (but not as sacred, which matters for a handful of abilities and for upkeep) and will benefit from whatever your blessing is.

A useful resource if you want to try to figure this kind of thing, or some other things, out for yourself, is the Dominions 5 Mod Inspector, which by default shows unmodded Dominions 5 things (there is also a Dominions 4 Mod Inspector, which can be reached by changing the url from dom5inspector to dom4inspector). It appears as though it's not entirely complete at the moment (e.g. the Dominion Immortal ability does not appear to be listed for any unit, such as the Phoenix, which has it in the game), but it has most of the things you might be interested in finding. Note the 'advanced' checkbox - select it, and you can filter for a specific attribute (e.g. sacred) or set of attributes. The 'show keys' checkbox which becomes visible when 'advanced' is selected will let you find out what the internal names used by the site for most attributes are.

Since it's a bit difficult to discover normally, the 'mpath' key accepts values of f, a, w, e, s, n, d, b, h, r, and u for Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Astral, Nature, Death, Blood, Holy, Research, and Random, respectively, and accepts numeric values (1, 2, 3, etc) for path level ('mpath' =~ '4' will return any mage with a skill of 4 in at least one path). If you want to search for a mage with Y skill in X path, values of the form XY where X is one of f, a, w, e, s, n, d, b, h, r, or u and Y is a number will return all mages with that level in that path. If you want to search for a mage with Y skill in X path and K skill in J path, use multiple filters.

Light of the nothern star+astral cascades spam or paralyze spam.

Communion up and cast really big battle spells.

Spend pearls in astral caps.

As far as big S battle magic goes, Master Enslave and Arcane Domination can be fun, though Antimagic, Will of the Fates, and Doom are probably more practical most of the time.

Mind Burn (or preferably Soul Slay, but you'd need at least S2 before Light of the Northern Star goes up) can also be a useful spam spell with large numbers of low-level S mages, though Stellar Cascades and Paralyze are probably better in most cases.

Magic Duel can be useful (target and attacker roll a d6, not open-ended, and add it to their S level before boosters; at least one of the mages will die, and if both mages get the same result then both die). It can be a good way to kill expensive, valuable, or hard-to-kill things that have relatively low levels of Astral magic, like Dusk Elders, Grand Lemurs, and pretenders/disciples with low or even moderate levels of Astral magic (an S1 has a 1-in-6 chance of killing an S6 in a Magic Duel, and while the S1 will also die, basic S1 mages can be had for under 100 gold, and in some cases for under 50 gold whereas a pretender or disciple is easily worth a lot more than that, so even though the pretender or disciple can come back it can easily be worth sending 10 or 15 cheap S1s off to kill one).

I'm playing as disciple (I think the plan was that veterans all played disciple - it is a helping game after all).

Pretender design is one of the more complicated things in the game, and doing it well requires some understanding of what your nation - or in the case of a disciples game your nations - needs and wants from its scales, blessings, and pretender/disciple. Especially if the new players are going to play as the pretenders, the veterans should probably talk to them about what the needs and wants of the nations on the team happen to be, and maybe also on how the nations that the other teams have might influence this.

The new players might also want to read this Dominions 4 guide on pretender design.

[deuterio12]

Game is ready. Feel free to send in your pretenders/disciples. Once the players are all in I'll set up the teams.

Instructions:
- Go to Game Tools -> Create a pretender god (or in this case "create a pretender god for a disciple game" or "create a disciple") in Dominions. Don't set a password, since for PBEM games they're not helpful and occasionally annoying (e.g. if you need a sub)
- Go to the savedgames/newlords folder in the dominions directory, and find your pretender file (e.g. mid_pythium_0.2h)
- E-mail the file to: pretenders[ at ]llamaserver[ dot ]net
- Crucially, you must have the game name in the subject line of your e-mail

A few minutes later you should get a confirmation e-mail, and if you check the website you should find your nation added to the list of nations which have joined the game.

If later you think of an improvement to your pretender, you can send it in again. Provided the game hasn't actually started the server will accept your revised pretender, and send you an e-mail to say so.

I'm playing as disciple (I think the plan was that veterans all played disciple - it is a helping game after all).

There's really not that big of a difference if you ask me, as the disciple has complete freedom of actions too, and you should discuss scales/bless useful for both your nations anyway.

[Olinser]

Game is ready. Feel free to send in your pretenders/disciples. Once the players are all in I'll set up the teams.

Instructions:
- Go to Game Tools -> Create a pretender god (or in this case "create a pretender god for a disciple game" or "create a disciple") in Dominions. Don't set a password, since for PBEM games they're not helpful and occasionally annoying (e.g. if you need a sub)
- Go to the savedgames/newlords folder in the dominions directory, and find your pretender file (e.g. mid_pythium_0.2h)
- E-mail the file to: pretenders[ at ]llamaserver[ dot ]net
- Crucially, you must have the game name in the subject line of your e-mail

A few minutes later you should get a confirmation e-mail, and if you check the website you should find your nation added to the list of nations which have joined the game.

If later you think of an improvement to your pretender, you can send it in again. Provided the game hasn't actually started the server will accept your revised pretender, and send you an e-mail to say so.




There's really not that big of a difference if you ask me, as the disciple has complete freedom of actions too, and you should discuss scales/bless useful for both your nations anyway.

Uh that says Caelum is not yet assigned to a team.

[Glimbur]

Yeah, the admin will have to team everyone on Llamaserver. Caelum is disciple for Jotunheim pretender.

[The Hellbug]

Oh yeah, Pangaea will be carrying the pretender in the Pan/Abysia team.

[Olinser]

OK looks like we're still missing Vanheim, Ulm, and Agartha pretenders.

[Sen isSaqqara]

Just waiting for Squid to get back to me re: coordinating timing for getting those set up tonight.

[Olinser]

Game is ready. Feel free to send in your pretenders/disciples. Once the players are all in I'll set up the teams.

Instructions:
- Go to Game Tools -> Create a pretender god (or in this case "create a pretender god for a disciple game" or "create a disciple") in Dominions. Don't set a password, since for PBEM games they're not helpful and occasionally annoying (e.g. if you need a sub)
- Go to the savedgames/newlords folder in the dominions directory, and find your pretender file (e.g. mid_pythium_0.2h)
- E-mail the file to: pretenders[ at ]llamaserver[ dot ]net
- Crucially, you must have the game name in the subject line of your e-mail

A few minutes later you should get a confirmation e-mail, and if you check the website you should find your nation added to the list of nations which have joined the game.

If later you think of an improvement to your pretender, you can send it in again. Provided the game hasn't actually started the server will accept your revised pretender, and send you an e-mail to say so.




There's really not that big of a difference if you ask me, as the disciple has complete freedom of actions too, and you should discuss scales/bless useful for both your nations anyway.

Looks like we're just waiting on your guys Agartha pretender now.

[deuterio12]

Sent my pretender, assigned teams, but I need to know who is the main pretender for teams Ulm/Vanheim and Marignon/Pythium.

[Ionbound]

Marignon is the main pretender for our team.

[Sen isSaqqara]

And Ulm is the main for ours.

[deuterio12]

Great, game started!

-You should be receiving an e-mail with the turn file.
-In the dominions 5 savedgames directory, create a new folder with the game name and place the file inside.
-Inside the game you should be able to load it up with "continue old game".
-When you're finished giving orders, end turn or save and quit.
-Go back to the respective game-folders and e-mail the .2h file to turns[at]llamaserver.net with the game name as subject (that's the file with your orders).
-You should receive a confirmation e-mail a few minutes after sending.

Good luck everybody!