Author Topic: Intrigue! Onis! Diplomacy! Werejaguars! Oslecamo plays Dominions 4 Multiplayer!  (Read 1619 times)

Offline oslecamo

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As you may've or not noticed I'm a great dominions 4 fan, however I've only played solo for the last year or so. This week I finally decided to give a try at multiplayer.

For those of you who don't know, Dominions 4 is a turn-based strategy game that draws inspiration from mythologies all around the world along with several ancient civilizations. For example in the current match there's:

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The game includes over a thousand different units, hundreds of spells, and enough random events to make sure you'll always see a at least a new one each time you play.

Oh, and since I couldn't find any game recruiting, I joined a game midway to replace a player who had to drop. So I didn't get to design my pretender god(more on that later) or play the 17 turns before this, so let's see how this goes.

Turn orders are taken over a 28-hour span, then we send our save files to a central automated server that combines their data and sends the results back at the players to create a new turn. There's no player order, turns are solved simultaneously, so you don't need to wait for any specific player.

Now let's check the mess glorious nation I inherited, shall we?
(click to show/hide)

But nevermind all of those numbers and stats now. Because Dominions Multiplayer isn't just a game of optimising your nation and using and abusing magic. It's also a game of intrigue and diplomacy, because no matter how good you are, if three other players decide to gank you early game you're probably screwed.

The big scary player faction right now is Mictlan. They've almost fully wiped Caelum, and they did so because they took a super-bless strategy that turns their already good jaguar warriors into murderizing machines. In particular because they get an ability called blood vengeance that makes anyone that hurts them also take damage. Blast mages, normally quite effective, are suddenly rendered almost useless. Glass cannon elite units can't do much either. However to afford that super Bless Mictlan had to tank their scales. Their population is dying, their gold income sucks, they're probably suffering random disasters every turn, and their casters are receiving a research penalty meaning they'll lag behind in magic terms the more the game goes on. So this means their only viable strategy is to keep attacking and hope their super jaguars murderize everybody before anyone else can reach the big spells.

A defense coalition has been formed between Yomi and some other players, based in "if Mictlan attacks you, we'll band together to deafeat him". Arco actually seems to want to do a first move by attacking right now. I don't know if that's brave or stupid from them. Mictlan can't  (probably) deal with all of us, but they can make sure one of us will suffer greatly in their death throes.

Also Mictlan promised to pay me a bunch of fire gems if I don't take that throne between our borders you could see at the center of the initial map.

Meanwhile Ulm is beating the crap out of Vanheilm. However Ulm doesn't have a super bless, and their troops are low magic resistance, so I trust all of my fire and death mages can make short work of them if push comes to shove. Signed a non-agression pact with them for the time being.

My plan? Get a couple oni-kings with boots of flying and whatever other magic gear I can afford in the 4 turns I'll take to recruit them. Hopefully war will finally have broken with Mictlan and I can attack them without being deemed the main agressor. I'll fly my oni kings right into his capital, that currently seems quite undefended from my bakemono scouting. I can't conquer it right away because it has a fortress, and in dominions it doesn't matter if you can fly or you're ethereal or you're a giant oni with a flaming sword that can cleave stone in half, you're only gonna break inside a fortress if you bring a bunch of troops to tear down the gate by brute force. However while sieging his capital, he can't produce anything there, and I get the local income, so it will still screw him big time. Hopefully he'll be meanwhile busy with somebody else to recall his army to murderize me.

Of course, even if everything goes swell and Mictlan is taken down with me taking minimal losses, there's still a lot of other players around, several of which are proabably quite ahead of me in spell research. Let's see how this goes.

But Meanwhile Lanka is offering me a personal alliance based on ganking Arco while Mictlan is busy chewing on their next victim, which seems like it will be Machaka. Berytos should still ally with Machaka to fight Mictlan due to an alliance pact they have. Yomi and Lanka will watch from the sidelines and attack whatever seems more profitable. In an ideal scenario, Arco, Machaka and Berytos are all wiped out, or at least rendered too weak to matter.

Feel free to chime in advice for my strategy on this. Or to at least go down in a blaze of glory.