The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

[deuterio12]

Any leader recruited out of a fort can be used. You just need 1 per assasin team.

For that matter. Its some shockingly high expectations you have to assasins.
I do understand if they disapoint you when you want them to be able to keep up with an army.
But they are often just 1/4 to 1/5 the gold cost of an army that can clear reliably without attrition.
So of course they also work in more or less the same speed.

If you need 500 gold for an expansion party, you're kinda doing it wrong. Lots of nations can pump out effective expansion parties at around 300 gold (or cheaper if going with some uber bless), and the pokemon assassins are costing over 100 gold now. Each. Most indie provinces have at least two commanders so the assassins aren't even half as cheap as an actual expansion force.

And time is money. The sooner you conquer provinces, the sooner they start paying taxes to your coffers.

Plus it's a race against everybody else. The longer you take conquering indies, the higher the risk enemies will take the indies near you first.

We were just talking about the earth snake moments ago, speed of expansion is worth sinking a lot of points in a monster pretender and risking them in the frontline even at the cost of scales and bless.

Its not what i call minimal if your paying a 50 gold tax and x resource tax per commander.
That is troops who suddenly dont contribute to the actual army fighting.

Quite in the contrary, thanks to the way morale work, even troops hanging in the back help keep the army fighting for longer than if they weren't there by adding to the HP total.

Plus they hanging in the back is always a nice safety in case some enemies do manage to outflank your frontline or surprise fliers or something.

[deuterio12]

Why is it that none of the Water pokemon - including those set to be recruited from underwater forts only - for Cerulean City are amphibious/aquatic?

...

Because I made a typo and then copy-pasta'd it for all the cerulean pokemons.

Hotfix version.

[lord_khaine]

If you need 500 gold for an expansion party, you're kinda doing it wrong. Lots of nations can pump out effective expansion parties at around 300 gold (or cheaper if going with some uber bless), and the pokemon assassins are costing over 100 gold now. Each. Most indie provinces have at least two commanders so the assassins aren't even half as cheap as an actual expansion force.

And time is money. The sooner you conquer provinces, the sooner they start paying taxes to your coffers.

Plus it's a race against everybody else. The longer you take conquering indies, the higher the risk enemies will take the indies near you first.

We were just talking about the earth snake moments ago, speed of expansion is worth sinking a lot of points in a monster pretender and risking them in the frontline even at the cost of scales and bless.

I said without attrition. I would like to see you designing a 300 gold expansion party for every nation that can clear 40 barbarians.
Without screwing up your middle game :P

And yes its a race. Thats why you send armies for the chokepoints. And assasins off to clear corners.

Quite in the contrary, thanks to the way morale work, even troops hanging in the back help keep the army fighting for longer than if they weren't there by adding to the HP total.

... i dont considder acting as cheerleader fighting

[deuterio12]

I said without attrition.

Assassins die now and then and thus suffer attrition too.

I would like to see you designing a 300 gold expansion party for every nation that can clear 40 barbarians.
Without screwing up your middle game :P

You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

So instead I'll just point out that you start the game with only 400 gold and probably even less than that in income and you'll want to spend 100-200 of that gold in a mage each turn to get your research corps started and capture some 15 provinces minimum plus get a fort with lab completed in the first year (so another 1200ish gold you need to set aside) so being able to produce 300ish gold expansion parties is a necessity for having a shot at winning the game.

And yes its a race. Thats why you send armies for the chokepoints. And assasins off to clear corners.

Having safe corners is a luxury, not something you can count on.

... i dont considder acting as cheerleader fighting

So mages casting iron/fog warriors/strength of giants/will of the fates aren't helping with the fighting?

[Knaight]

You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

Barbarians are also a bit of an edge case that suggests different troop composition than your usual armies. Which basically means that if you can mass archers or slingers to deal with them you should mass archers or slingers to deal with them.

[deuterio12]

Barbarians are also a bit of an edge case that suggests different troop composition than your usual armies. Which basically means that if you can mass archers or slingers to deal with them you should mass archers or slingers to deal with them.

If you have troops with long reach weapons like pikers available that works well against both barbarians and most kind of indies. Super dodgy sacreds with even a minor bless can easily clear most indies too.

[Knaight]

True, but those are a little more niche (I also played way more Dom 3 than 4 or 5, and the changes to the repel mechanic don't always immediately come to mind) - and if you're expanding with blessed sacreds you probably have a bless strategy, which makes massing cheap armies a lot easier as a rule. The old days of F9W9 Mictlan really showed this; 100 gold in troops goes a long way when they have vastly better stats and double the turns of everyone else plus flaming weapons.

[deuterio12]

In dom 4 there was the Nature 9/Death 9 combo that granted basically +36 HP per jaguar warrior plus extra AN damage which was as good as flaming weapons against medium armor and actually better against anything more armored, in particular it allowed jaguar warriors to threaten even super protected thugs and SCs who would fail some MR checks. Then add B9 on top for the evulz so the enemy kill themselves while trying to chew through all the HP the jaguar warriors have.

However in dominions 5 the top blesses demand having an awake pretender so double/triple 9 isn't really possible anymore, but in the other hand minor/medium blesses are quite affordable with the new customization system. No need to get all the way to fire 9 to get flaming weapons now for example, or you can grab something like +2 attack/defense/str/extra speed with a dormant elemental rainbow.

[lord_khaine]

Assassins die now and then and thus suffer attrition too.

Yes, thats why i though assasins who would win around 95% of all fights against indies were so valuable.

You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

So instead I'll just point out that you start the game with only 400 gold and probably even less than that in income and you'll want to spend 100-200 of that gold in a mage each turn to get your research corps started and capture some 15 provinces minimum plus get a fort with lab completed in the first year (so another 1200ish gold you need to set aside) so being able to produce 300ish gold expansion parties is a necessity for having a shot at winning the game.

Yeah, i just said it like i doubted you could do it.
Not that i actually expected you to do so.
But a 300 gold party can be as little as 1 commander and 20 men.
I dont expect them to last though 5-7 fights.

Having safe corners is a luxury, not something you can count on.

Its easily something you can assign for yourself if you just plan your expansion a little.

So mages casting iron/fog warriors/strength of giants/will of the fates aren't helping with the fighting?

Oh no thats a collosal contribution to battle outcome.
I just dont see what that question has to do with anything

[Aeson]

Its easily something you can assign for yourself if you just plan your expansion a little.

Depends a lot on the map, where you start in it, where your neighbors are, and what your neighbors are doing.

[deuterio12]

Pokemon 0.23 version, mostly national spells for Cerulean City.

Also preparing Vermilion City, rough ideas:
-Strong air magic, some earth for magnemites/magnetons... Welp that's kinda it. Maybe a bit of astral since Raichus would eventually have a psychic alternate version and fire to represent the voltorb/electrode's RAGE plus electric pokemon are usually hotblooded.
-Voltorbs and electrodes explode on death.
-Zapdos unique summon.
-Magnetites and magnetons as high protection tanks.
-Electabuzz big HP/Str size 3 ogreish.
-Pikachus.
-More pikachus.
-Even more pikachus.
-There's really few generation 1 electric pokemon but quite a lot of pikachu variants. So cheap pikachu militia with crappy stats, fast moving pikachus with quick attack, pikachu ranged artillery, vanilla pikachu, luchador sacred cap-only pikachu. Only the vanilla can actually evolve into a Raichu.

[lord_khaine]

Cant argue against the though of sending hordes upon hordes of electric rodents to their death.
What is it now the city count is up to?

[deuterio12]

Only Pewter and Cerulean cities so far, Vermillion will be the third.

How do immortal voltorbs and electrodes explode on death and I added immortality since, well, you can always get them back. For now coded as normal immortality (aka no need of dominion) with reduced respawn of just 1 month, but I'm open to arguments for other approaches.

Plus sprinkinling some unrest generation on those and other non-pikachu pokemon since they seem to cause all sorts of trouble with daily life. Gentlemen non-mage commanders will passively reduce unrest and have patrol bonus as a way to mitigate that.

Rockers will be seducers non-mage commanders.

[deuterio12]

Pokemon 0.30 with Vermillion City included! Most human trainers using the basic sprites and no national spells yet but otherwise plenty of pikachu variants to be sent to the meatgrinder!

[lord_khaine]

How many towns are there suposed to be?
I though it less relevant to comment on balance before they majority were done.

[deuterio12]

For EA, the red/blue/silver/gold towns that nicely cover all first 16 pokemon types besides Dark.

But it would be pretty useful if you start commenting on balance now since I'm kinda trying to follow a formula here. Like how best to implement resistances/vulnerabities, or about the human trainer mages which basically just switch colors and one or other extra ability between cities (Pewter ones get mountain survival, Cerulean get sailing, Vermillion actually get nothing unique for now, maybe every trainer gets a bit of unrest reduction?).

Or which pokemon should each trainer auto-summon at the start of battle and how many.

Plus internal balance if nothing else, like if one of the current cities feels too strong/weak compared to the others available or if there's one pokemon troop you want to spam at the exclusion of everything else for a faction or if there's a pokemon you'll never want to recruit for a faction besides magikarp those are supposed to suck until you can get one to evolve

[lord_khaine]

Well alright sure.
I will start by playing a year with each of them.
And try to give me my initial expression on each.
What town should be used as baseline for comparison?

And.. what should be done to make the mod work?
It seems a lot more complex that the previous one i have tested

[Aeson]

And.. what should be done to make the mod work?
It seems a lot more complex that the previous one i have tested

Extracting it to whatever directory you use for mods should work fine.

[lord_khaine]

well yeah i tried that.
But got a message saying the mod contains 36 errors.
And the game crashed when i tried to start.

[tyckspoon]

well yeah i tried that.
But got a message saying the mod contains 36 errors.
And the game crashed when i tried to start.

I think this usually is a problem with the sprite files - image not found, in wrong file format, too large, or similar.

[deuterio12]

Derp, had accidentally moved several sprites from the Brock folder to the surge folder and that makes the game crash when the game tries to load images that aren't in the right place and I didn't bother checking Pewter City after working on Vermillion.

Fixed version, also includes Vermillion City national spells and Zapdos.

Still some 18 errors, not sure what they are but the game shouldn't crash right away at least.

Thanks a lot for the offer to test Lord Kahine, it's a great help!

What town should be used as baseline for comparison?

Well Pewter City was the first made and is relatively simpler so probably that one.

[lord_khaine]

Your welcome, its a very interesting project
Ill write again when i have had a chance to test pewter city.

[Olinser]

Now that a couple games have finished (or about to finish), I'm going to try and create another pairs Disciple game. I'll make another thread for recruitment, if anybody is interested post there, I'll make a Discord shortly.

I'd like to see at least 5 teams for a good FFA, but we'll see where we go based on how many people are interested.

[lord_khaine]

Pewter first impression

Spoiler

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-They have some really powerful sacreds. Seems a crime not to take advantage of this somehow.
-The nation symbol is perhaps just a little to large. Kinda annoying at that size.
-Geodudes with an Onyx Tank expand quite well.
-Regular Rhyhorn works quite in a group of 10
-Generally the pokemon munch indie provinces with minimal casulties.
-The promotion mechanic is quite interesting
-They have some really good units, that are really expensive.

Initially i think Pewter City is internally balanced.
I dont really think there are any of the unit that stands out as noticeably better than the others.
Or well, those that do are recruitment capped.

[deuterio12]

Pewter first impression

Spoiler

Show

-They have some really powerful sacreds. Seems a crime not to take advantage of this somehow.
-The nation symbol is perhaps just a little to large. Kinda annoying at that size.
-Geodudes with an Onyx Tank expand quite well.
-Regular Rhyhorn works quite in a group of 10
-Generally the pokemon munch indie provinces with minimal casulties.
-The promotion mechanic is quite interesting
-They have some really good units, that are really expensive.

Initially i think Pewter City is internally balanced.
I dont really think there are any of the unit that stands out as noticeably better than the others.
Or well, those that do are recruitment capped.

Nice! Will reduce the size of the flag icon.

Also for the record, changing each xp requirement for promotion is possible and easy for basically any amount, so if you feel like something should evolve a bit faster/slower, feel free to point it out.

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. well yeah right now i think it will play out in a way that results in just about all the members of your expansion armies will evolve.
Then afterwards, when you actually engage in open comflict with the other cities. Then i doubt many others will live long enough for it.

First glance Cerulena

Spoiler

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Is a lot harder to play.
And their scouts are overpriced.
I had them lose 3/4 times to a basic infantry commander.

[deuterio12]

Hmmm, which of the following options sounds more interesting:
-Make the cerulean scouts cheaper to reflect they're not very good assassins.
-Buff the base tentacools that the cerulean scout calls.
-Buff the tentacool's poison sting and/or wrap attacks.
-Added a tentacruel to the summons. Been testing it a bit and seems to have a pretty good success rate.

Spoiler: Also had something funny happened

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A bersek barbarian chief slaughtered his way through the tentacools and tentacruel then got punched to death by the maid.
One-punch maid.

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. i do thing something should be done to buff the Maid.
The Tentacools are kinda cool as a concept. Its just a shame that in a assasination attempt it seems like they just stand and watch as they are killed 1 by 1.
Ill make a new post about Cerulean City after i have tried them a second time.
Though it seems like Magicarp is meant to newer evolve?
Since it requires an absurd 100 xp.

[deuterio12]

Yeah, not sure why the tentacools kinda just stand there, but a Tentacruel seems to actually fight so will add that to the Maid's autosummon.

100 exp for magikarp evolution is indeed be too harsh, will drop it to 30.

Thanks again!

[lord_khaine]

Your welcome.
I mean now i can at least see potential uses for this pokemon.
Like giving all your commanders a bodyguard of 5, and then hoping some of them survives long enough to evolve?

Also, i kinda think the ancient Gyrados is wastly overpriced for what it does.
And why does it eat people? Is that a joke im missing?