Відео

So the whole cracking down on exploits takes the fun out of the game, because it's definitely not adding any "balance" like Lemuria still exists so balance is non existent... What they do is make game more deterministic and boring by reducing impact of skill on outcome, it becomes more of a general numbers game and only makes already strong nations better and bad nations worse because now you can't even shift the scales by using fun mechanics. Overall none of the individual changes ruin the game but it's really bad direction this is going.

Project Self was barely useful before now just a useless spell... Expensive and useless

yeah the acid res thing seems like defeating the whole point of it.

I think a fun way to do grand communions that are path boosting would be if it did a difficult mr check to feeblemind the communion slaves, and could horror mark the master. Sort of like burning mages to cast a high level spell, which could be pretty powerful as a path access method. I'd also move it from being a nation specific priest mage thing to being maybe a blood astral crosspath requirement. (I'm sure there's major imbalance with that idea, but, just as a basis for the concept, maybe there could even be a chance for the feebleminded slaves to be turned into horrors who try to assassinate the master)

you skipped through the white dragon armour quite quickly. It is a big upgrade on the copper plate: It's +3 armour, -1 encumbrance and +5 SR for 5 extra gems. Its extremely good now to take spring hawk thrones

Thank you for Dominions content. From Russia with Love.

Grand communion is kinda disappointing. Even if you had S2-S3's lying around you need to stop researching for an entire turn to see any significant returns on overcasting it. Maybe it's better in lategame.

Yea, I was one of the guys that put one of the first Grand Communions videos up, its really kind of disappointing how they work, and its sort of depressing that they took something with such a neat idea, and sort of made it a REALLY niche thing for only a few nations, and they took virtually all of the power out of it (unless you hyper focus on it). And as you mentioned: its very confusing that it shares the name with the normal communion, but essentially shares none of the traits of it (or rather the formulaic power increases). Its almost like they unwittingly made the mechanic too awkward to use instinctively, but as a "win more" mechanic, because if you can afford to abuse that many mages just laying around: you're already getting away with something haha :) Always love hearing your thoughts on these patches Lucid! Appreciate it!

The 6.15 change on the mercs impacts how I'd treat Helmut as before on a lot of nations I'd want to overspend on him, twice born him, and then have him available as the mason to over upgrade forts. If he dies and comes back as a twicedborn chasis he loses the mason tag (or at least did in 5 when he died of a disease in one game I had done this with him). I think the month long gems are a great change. Gem burning on a turn-by-turn thing makes sense as that is a cost/benefit question and allows some one to react to that in an interactive way. Gem burning in the middle of the turn is an annoying thing (and it would be even greater if gem usage could also be tweaked to be more liberal when you have these settings in play since the other side of things are the traps that are just below triggering gem usage, since there is much less down side to gem usage when it persists through all phases - and below gem usage army wide wipes or poison traps shouldn't be something that works IMHO). On the fort sieging, I think it is consistent with wanting bigger armies and more premium on summon some of the sieging friendly troops (even some call of the wild can add a fair bit to siege strength) or gate crashers or the like. I think it would be good if there were more summons that were the equivalent of siege equipment (some of: siege towers, battering rams, catapults, ballistas, onagers, trebuchets, etc. Heck even ladders) that could possibly both help with the speed of siege as well as possibly either opening up other ways through/over the walls of forts and/or firing for your side or impacting the fort battle. I don't know if some of those should be things you summon ahead of time and take with you, some that you summon remotely on a fort that is under siege, or some of them that comes up automatically after so many turns or after so many negative wall strength (or some combination of the above), but I think that would help. There is Crumble as a spell which sort of does a form of this, but not sure if there couldn't be more play here.

"Press Tab to view details in battle unit overview" refers to the list of units you can bring up by pressing F1 during battle replay. It adds a column that shows afflictions, I don't know if there's any information besides that.

@LucidTactics Why the F, "Ma Man" gets chorus master and not Eriu/Tir Na N'og is beyond me. Lucid, crack Ill Winter on the head for me.

Arcane Analysis was + or - 5 gems from the exact amount last I checked. Grand Communions should be a very interesting way to control globals in the deep late game. For instance, Pythium could ad 300+ gems to the overcast of a 1200 pearl Nexus via a grand communion based on having a lot of mage paths present. This would essentially make it impossible to dispel outside of repeat casts of the dispels that lower overcast strength. Unless Grand Communions are capped on the max cast for a mage path.

You know I'm surprised they haven't made a high level spell that destroys forts. Level 9 spells should help break stalemates after all. Heck, even one that does forces starvation would be cool (by reducing castle supplies to 0).

Yea I wish IllWinter would revamp siege battles. imagine having a bunch of mages that can cast gifts but they can't bust through a wooden palisade... Maybe have walls have hitpoint and be props on the battle similar to stones and trees. Along with the sieging create holes mechanic.

Protective force applied before armor might save mossbody/mistform from popping sometimes, not sure though.

I have always hated gembating, so I will probably prefer to play with the monthly longevity mod. Still, even the lesser one will help a lot.

Gembaiting should definitely still be in the game, but yeah, there should be a limit to how oppressive a 3v1 can be, it's already unfair enough.

what happens when you cast multiple rituals in a province with a grand communion, does the effects of the communion affect all rituals cast or not ? If yes it seems to be very expoitable to me

New Chest makes fits "old man" pretender I am using used as rainbow (inc Earth) titan with its discounted paths and using power of spheres / astral booster climb to rings. Thanks for the reminder.

44:00 I'd rather see 2000 integrity to get one hole in the fort wall and then another 3000 to get the second (5000 total not the 3000 you suggest). I think my way is better but certainly it's the way to try first

I think project self is there to bring artillery to the battlefield without risking your mages. Gem stuff you'll have to bring. Can illusions be in a communion?

Isn't protective force the one that has like 20% chance to stop all damage (exceptions like AN or true damage or some)? Like on the.. dancing shield? So having it apply first might make your armor not get corroded by acid or such?

Project Self had a few very solid uses I've seen. One is to add skellyspam to a magic phase attack. Another is to drop Gifts from Heaven, if you've got a good Earth path too. Finally you can use it to fluff a magic phase thug. There's probably other things you can do, like Falling Fires spam, but they all feel pretty weak compared to the above. A class of tactic that I think could be interesting for some nations, like EA Machaka, could be to run ambushes with a national squad of stealthy skellyspammers to stall the enemy, plus a projected Pretender to do big Evocations or Soul Slays or whatever to actually kill elite units that can walk through skeletons. It would be kinda cool and thematic if you could bring Glamour gems only in projection attacks, to be able to do stuff like Phantasmal Army... Finally explaining what's actually happening with the Mist Covered Highlands attacks :)

The fort change I think makes strong earth/nature/blood income a lot more oppressive in the late game, just because they can freeze up your raided land, dropping forts left and right and forcing you to siege those down, and unless you can magic phase raid the land they raided, you are screwed. Edit : Fixed my awful grammar due to writing that comment in 15 sec while waiting in line to get a slush puppies

Well, I mean, if I'm playing against, say, Lucid, I'm not keen on him having a global, because it is likely a key element of his strat. I would be just as mad at that Lucid guy for putting up the global again, as you would be against the dispeller?

Im gonna watch the whole thing but there ain’t a time stamp for .15/.16 also love your stuff so far, going through the catalogue, and powering through the Atlantis game rn

Sick

Would be nice if you played the battles a little slower

What a series! That final Shinuyama fight was actually pretty impressive - they got a fair number of army-wide buffs off, but it looks like sheer troop quality and foul vapors carried the day. I think this series really showcased that the AI is actually capable of doing a lot more stuff now - Harvesters, cancer globals, dispels. Looking forward to what you come out with next!

Loved the series! Thx for the effort 😊

11:20 Аbout Gatewayin' stuff inside the Throne. For Erythia it may be a bit tricky. After all, AC is in power right now. And it's 10 gems spell and Erthia has Magic 3 probably? So unless Erythia player has a free Golem together with his troops and items letting him up his leadership (Whip of Command) he will have A REALLY hard time Gatewaying anything inside that fort.

Putting a mind into a mindless thing wouldn't result in a mindless thing, now would it?

The reason TC can't move onto the Erytheia army and siege it is chained gem burning. We have to stay inside forts even though we could crush Erytheia militarily, because Pan and Erytheia can and will burn all of our gems with Ghost Riders and national magic phase gem burn (possibly including chained bone grinding from the idol), and then after that harassment, we would probably just die without accomplishing anything. This is why we've basically set up shop in a single heavily domed fort that borders the rest of our little empire, so that we can protect all of our forts with just one doom stack that cannot be gem burned before a fight. I think this is a good example of the loss to the game that chained gem burning entails; you can't ride out and siege a fort against a coalition unless you've got a huge investment of gems into tempgem items or are willing to spend a ton directly.

The final war is dawning. I hope Vaettiheim, Tien Chi and Agartha also join in.

You can definitely get attacked through void pattern labyrinth, but it does help I guess.

5:12 Simply because Gath is a likeable nation. Everybody likes our ways😊

My vague recollection is the Dukes each come with an army, so I'm pretty sure they're fine value despite not being mages.

Combat caster on a B/D mage can do hand of death and leeching touch in melee, both of which can be very impactful... If you get the mage into melee rather than having him do Horde of Skeletons.

Boycott Lucid's cronyism and his middle finger to Patron supporters. Any time you want to return my years+ of support would be great. Sombre is a thief who stole functions of my steam account and regardless of Lucid's original claim to make a dom5 community that was different and more open than the past he doubled down on legging humping the same elite group of cyberbullies and banned a guy for ~3 lines of text in as many years from the discord he had effectively paid to access. Lucid and Illwinter sycophants like him who refuse to be publicly critical are why Dominions is still crawling in the mud of nichedom after decades. Gamer's Workshop (warhmamer) has in the past sold its license to companies who install spyware in the games. I'm not sure what Sombre's connection to them is but as a rule boycott Gamer's Workshop products until they compensate gamers for the personal data that has been harvested and sold.

I myself am a MASSIVE lore nerd when it comes to warhammer. Nurgle is actually primarily the embodyment of stagnation, people often forget this major part of him the absence of moving foward, yet also embodying rebirth from death in new forms is a bit of a paradox in terms of his characteristics. If you really want good depections of nurgle I would advice reading the hidden libary horror stories of the chaos gods, really gives the cosmic horror vibes alot more when you are not veiwing whats happening from the perspective of 9ft tall superhumans lol.

I am all about these warhammer mods Sombre did an amazing job on them

since your playing a mod nation when you get a hero can you go through them a bit

❤️‍🩹

Lucid, since I have never seen you use it, are you aware that you can shift a commander's orders up and down using the arrow keys? It is very handy when you need to add a new spell that you don't want at the end of the script, just add it to the end and, then shift it up to where you want it to be. Much easier than removing and re-adding a bunch of spells

On the question of how Erytheia might defend itself from the Gath invasion, the fact that Astral Corruption went up this turn is important; Gateway/Fairy Trod/etc. are less appealing options for moving troops if you're caught flat-footed with your troops in a province that doesn't contain both a lab and a mindless Astral mage like a Golem.

Regarding the big battle with Erytheia this turn, I've not double-checked the turn files, but the Charm was definitely planned; we were considering a requirement for any army to be at least one N2 with Thistle Mace/Rune Smasher/Eye of the Void kits on advance and cast with the specific goal of countering Tartarians, to the extent we had the gear available. There's a range of different strategies for dealing with them in the late game, but like "Casting Antimagic" and "having morale boosters for your important mages and primary troop formation", having a counter to Phoenix Pyre thugs is in my view part of an army being late game ready.

Very interesting thoughts on the diplomacy in Dominions in general. Thank you for this episode.

To be fair, what is really stopping Gath from winning the game? Mobility hampered by the necessity to have doom stacks supported all times? Can Erytheia do anything actually game winning with Nexus up? They are too far behind for that, right? Even Pan might have a shot with the resources but the alliance is noticeably less skilled than their opponents, imho.

11:00 "Hey guys, sorry about the temple spam, not my fault gotta fight off vengeful water :)" "Don't pay attention to the centaur printing press it's creating :DDDDD"

Great episode!