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[USEC_OFFICER]

From what I understand, it's like how resources work now. You don't need to supply all of the commander points in a single turn but can accumulate them over multiple ones. So a palisade could recruit a high level mage in 4 turns, a fortress in 2, and a citadel can recruit 3 spread out over 4 turns. Hopefully that makes sense.

[Culise]

EDIT: Wrong thread; two threads on this is getting a mite bit confusing for my sleep-addled brain. ^_^

[USEC_OFFICER]

Yeah. I only noticed that there was a second thread afterwards. Think I should dump my massive rant in the proper thread or is the damage done?

[E. Albright]

I was wondering why Dom 4 hasn't received any updates for a while. Now I know it's because they've been working on Dominions 5.

I'll admit I was getting suspicious on this point, not because of update frequency, but the scope and type of changes was starting to look a lot more like that. No KO, and most of the JK changes were bug fixes, laser-focused simple stuff, or things general enough that they could be arising from shared resource libraries...

With all that said... As hyped as I am for the game, I get the feeling that it's going to be to Dom 4 as 4 was to 3.

I'm tempted to put this as potentially being more Dom1->Dom2 than Dom3->Dom4. It's still iterative, but the iterations are affecting systems at a much lower level.

[Cruxador]

since a minor bless no longer requires at least 4 points in a path.

No, it does. You can spend less points than that at a time, but you still need four ranks in the path to get any points.

since reinvigoration and regen will undoubtedly require those paths.

I can confirm that they do, though there are separate versions of regen for undead and for constructs that are in D and E respectively.

Hopefully it'll weaken the dominance of those blesses, probably by making them incarnate and needing your pretender to be around for them to work, or at the very least enable you to splash some other stuff on your pretender instead of being locked into EXN9. I wouldn't be surprised if, say, E5N6 or something similar got you the regen and reinvigoration you wanted, which should free up points for better scales or a handful of additional magic for another blessing. Basically something like that to make blesses less stale and/or predictable.

Regen is N8 and Reinvig is E2 (per point) currently, though of course this is subject to change during the beta.

But since national generals and scouts cost half of a mage fort-turn wise, I'd imagine that they'd see more use than right now. Giving up recruiting a mage to get two generals or scouts/assassins is a more favourable than only getting one after all. Having only 8 commanders out of 10 being a mage is still an improvement after all.

You say that, but I still see no reason why I wouldn't rather go for more mages in most situations.

How is this going to impact, say, Mictlan and other nations that can only build palisades? Or are they going to be able to build fortresses as well now to keep pace with everyone?

Those limitations are still in place. Notably, Pangaea now has a national spell (for... 35N gems? I think, this is my memory now) that builds a palisade.

With all that said... As hyped as I am for the game, I get the feeling that it's going to be to Dom 4 as 4 was to 3. Not a massive improvement or change but enough of an iteration that most people will play it instead.

I mean, isn't that what we all want though? How much more different could it be without becoming contentious?

EDIT: I found this thread with more info about the features in Dom 5. Lots of juicy details here. I'm still looking over them all.

I'd recommend taking some of that list with a grain of salt, as the thing about placing units on the walls, at the very least, is misleading.

[etgfrog]

Vastness is now a pretender? hm...

[nenjin]

I like the new fonts. But I'm a font nerd, and Dom has been using the same shit fonts for at least 2 games now.

I'm a font nerd too and I see no grounds on which to like the new ones.

I missed this before.

I'm not saying I like all the new fonts. More I was talking about the Olde English font on the Pretender title bar.

The rest of what's on the game looks like....a mix of Arial and TNR? Kinda looks like they're testing out different fonts on different screens, because it's different between text descriptions, titles and the map text in some places.

What I didn't like about the old Dominions font is it was very thick. No real serifs and it made for thick blocks of uninteresting, workman-like text.

This actually looks like True Type Font. Which means it's possibly moddable. And it in generally looks like it takes less effort to read. Stylistically? Yeah it's kind of balls. But from a readability standpoint I think it's better, especially for menus. Might also mean dynamically resizing text is also now a thing, which is useful for a whole lot of stuff.

[USEC_OFFICER]

I'm tempted to put this as potentially being more Dom1->Dom2 than Dom3->Dom4. It's still iterative, but the iterations are affecting systems at a much lower level.

I'm starting to think that's the case as well. After further research I think that the changes are more fundamental than I originally thought.

With all that said... As hyped as I am for the game, I get the feeling that it's going to be to Dom 4 as 4 was to 3. Not a massive improvement or change but enough of an iteration that most people will play it instead.

I mean, isn't that what we all want though? How much more different could it be without becoming contentious?

What I was trying to say is that Dom 4 feels a bit like an expansion pack to Dom 3 to me. The tweaks and new mechanics were interesting and meta-changing but the fundamental systems were generally intact. That's why I followed the comment up with 'I don't know if everyone will be as excited about it as I am'. I remember people who already had Dom 3 complaining about Dom 4 because they felt that they were buying a full price game for expansion level content/changes. But like Albright said, Dom 5 is such a bigger iteration on the formula that I've changed my opinion and doubt I'll hear anything like this.

So yeah. It is pretty much what we all want. I just can't English sometimes.

since a minor bless no longer requires at least 4 points in a path.

No, it does. You can spend less points than that at a time, but you still need four ranks in the path to get any points.

Oh. I didn't about know that and kinda assumed that's how blesses work now. I guess that Rainbows didn't receive the boost I thought they did.

But since national generals and scouts cost half of a mage fort-turn wise, I'd imagine that they'd see more use than right now. Giving up recruiting a mage to get two generals or scouts/assassins is a more favourable than only getting one after all. Having only 8 commanders out of 10 being a mage is still an improvement after all.

You say that, but I still see no reason why I wouldn't rather go for more mages in most situations.

I said 8 out of 10 commanders, didn't I? Everyone is still going to be pumping out mages but you get punished less for taking a few national generals/scouts/assassins/whatever. So you should have twice as many situations were you'd take them (though twice of a small number is still not a lot).

How is this going to impact, say, Mictlan and other nations that can only build palisades? Or are they going to be able to build fortresses as well now to keep pace with everyone?

Those limitations are still in place. Notably, Pangaea now has a national spell (for... 35N gems? I think, this is my memory now) that builds a palisade.

So I can look forward to Mictlan/Pangaea/whatever spamming palisades everywhere?

[Cruxador]

I like the new fonts. But I'm a font nerd, and Dom has been using the same shit fonts for at least 2 games now.

I'm a font nerd too and I see no grounds on which to like the new ones.

I missed this before.

I'm not saying I like all the new fonts. More I was talking about the Olde English font on the Pretender title bar.

The rest of what's on the game looks like....a mix of Arial and TNR? Kinda looks like they're testing out different fonts on different screens, because it's different between text descriptions, titles and the map text in some places.

What I didn't like about the old Dominions font is it was very thick. No real serifs and it made for thick blocks of uninteresting, workman-like text.

This actually looks like True Type Font. Which means it's possibly moddable. And it in generally looks like it takes less effort to read. Stylistically? Yeah it's kind of balls. But from a readability standpoint I think it's better, especially for menus. Might also mean dynamically resizing text is also now a thing, which is useful for a whole lot of stuff.

The blackletter font is the least terrible of the three. It's a really pedestrian choice for something that appears as though it's trying to stand out, but there's nothing worse to say about it than that. The sans-serif font (not arial) has big wide letterforms that look strange and overly airy; for the role it performs it should be heavier and more workman-like. The serif font used is very narrow and poorly kerned. I also find the letterforms themselves to be needlessly delicate; you're free to not like heavier fonts I suppose, but I don't want to have to lean into my compter to read things clearly. That's not to say that the old fonts were necessarily great, I think a lot of the people who like them do so on nostalgia, but I do hope that the fonts are moddable and if they are I'm replacing them straight away.

That said, while I don't think the old font is necessarily better, it definitely didn't have the stylistic contrast that the new ones do. Nothing else in Dominions has clean edges, so clean edges on the font doesn't look nice. This is potentially fixable with a font that has slightly noisy borders though.

[E. Albright]

I said 8 out of 10 commanders, didn't I? Everyone is still going to be pumping out mages but you get punished less for taking a few national generals/scouts/assassins/whatever. So you should have twice as many situations were you'd take them (though twice of a small number is still not a lot).

I'd take dismissals of recruiting more non-mages in D5 as "non-optimal play" with a grain of salt, particularly since they're based on current meta and mechanics (and I'm wondering if meta might not shift even further from mages >>>> troops with non-instant spells and RT combat). A betatester on D4Mods cited MA Marignon's example: 3 command points in the capital, assassins take 1 and T1/T2 mages take 2. Over two turns,  two assassins and two witch hunters (or 4+1, or possibly even 6+0) can very easily make more sense than 3 witch hunters - not least if you're short on gold, which is what always seems to be brushed aside in describing How To Play. Will it make sense if you don't use assassins but do use mages? Ofc not. But that really says nothing at all. And if the reason you don't currently use assassins is because their cost of a "fort-turn" is too high, this changes the calculus significantly; saying it doesn't is like saying that StR had no impact on recruitment priorities D3->D4.

[Cruxador]

I said 8 out of 10 commanders, didn't I? Everyone is still going to be pumping out mages but you get punished less for taking a few national generals/scouts/assassins/whatever. So you should have twice as many situations were you'd take them (though twice of a small number is still not a lot).

I'd take dismissals of recruiting more non-mages in D5 as "non-optimal play" with a grain of salt, particularly since they're based on current meta and mechanics (and I'm wondering if meta might not shift even further from mages >>>> troops with non-instant spells and RT combat). A betatester on D4Mods cited MA Marignon's example: 3 command points in the capital, assassins take 1 and T1/T2 mages take 2. Over two turns,  two assassins and two witch hunters (or 4+1, or possibly even 6+0) can very easily make more sense than 3 witch hunters - not least if you're short on gold, which is what always seems to be brushed aside in describing How To Play. Will it make sense if you don't use assassins but do use mages? Ofc not. But that really says nothing at all. And if the reason you don't currently use assassins is because their cost of a "fort-turn" is too high, this changes the calculus significantly; saying it doesn't is like saying that StR had no impact on recruitment priorities D3->D4.

The StR change isn't really comparable, because on either side of the equation what you're getting there is mages. An assassin specifically might be worth something since they do something that can't be done otherwise but... An assassin that's not also a mage won't do it that well anyway, except as a vehicle for bottles of living water.

[E. Albright]

That still takes for granted the baseline assumptions that 1) mages are superior to other recruitment options in all circumstances (regardless of paths or other considerations), and 2) quite specifically in this case (but related to a parallel underlying assumption in all similar cases) that you can afford to spend 150% as much gold every two turns. Both assumptions are based on untainted theorycrafting, and are just as sound as making calculations about marginal utility of gems based on the "fact" that path-1 items cost 3 to forge (or 1 if you're Ulm).

To say nothing of its assumption that the current meta and conventional wisdom will not noticeably change or become obsolete.

(Or we could go further and examine the claim that non-mage assassins are useless except with Bottles. What about with Handfuls of Acorns? What about with Amulets of the Dead? To say nothing of "what about when your piles of indy troop mules get targeted by the assassin instead of a mage"...)

[Cruxador]

That still takes for granted the baseline assumptions that 1) mages are superior to other recruitment options in all circumstances (regardless of paths or other considerations), and 2) quite specifically in this case (but related to a parallel underlying assumption in all similar cases) that you can afford to spend 150% as much gold every two turns. Both assumptions are based on untainted theorycrafting, and are just as sound as making calculations about marginal utility of gems based on the "fact" that path-1 items cost 3 to forge (or 1 if you're Ulm).

To say nothing of its assumption that the current meta and conventional wisdom will not noticeably change or become obsolete.

Yeah but theory-crafting is all we can do at this point, and the previous game's assumptions will be held true for at least the first little while. Anyway, leaving aside that mages cost more, what can a non-mage offer that will make it worth delaying the mage? If you've not got enough gold you're not going to have full recruitment, but if that's the case it's probably still the expansion phase anyway. Or you're blood and your gold economy is irrelevant, in which case you would still rather wait for mages than spend on something else.

[E. Albright]

The theorycraft point holds true WRT continuing to hold to Dom4 assumptions, though... as you immediately helpfully demonstrated by dismissing the possibility that the hypothetical we were considering could even be something other than a theoretically-optimal situation.

[nenjin]

I like the new fonts. But I'm a font nerd, and Dom has been using the same shit fonts for at least 2 games now.

I'm a font nerd too and I see no grounds on which to like the new ones.

I missed this before.

I'm not saying I like all the new fonts. More I was talking about the Olde English font on the Pretender title bar.

The rest of what's on the game looks like....a mix of Arial and TNR? Kinda looks like they're testing out different fonts on different screens, because it's different between text descriptions, titles and the map text in some places.

What I didn't like about the old Dominions font is it was very thick. No real serifs and it made for thick blocks of uninteresting, workman-like text.

This actually looks like True Type Font. Which means it's possibly moddable. And it in generally looks like it takes less effort to read. Stylistically? Yeah it's kind of balls. But from a readability standpoint I think it's better, especially for menus. Might also mean dynamically resizing text is also now a thing, which is useful for a whole lot of stuff.

The blackletter font is the least terrible of the three. It's a really pedestrian choice for something that appears as though it's trying to stand out, but there's nothing worse to say about it than that. The sans-serif font (not arial) has big wide letterforms that look strange and overly airy; for the role it performs it should be heavier and more workman-like. The serif font used is very narrow and poorly kerned. I also find the letterforms themselves to be needlessly delicate; you're free to not like heavier fonts I suppose, but I don't want to have to lean into my compter to read things clearly. That's not to say that the old fonts were necessarily great, I think a lot of the people who like them do so on nostalgia, but I do hope that the fonts are moddable and if they are I'm replacing them straight away.

That said, while I don't think the old font is necessarily better, it definitely didn't have the stylistic contrast that the new ones do. Nothing else in Dominions has clean edges, so clean edges on the font doesn't look nice. This is potentially fixable with a font that has slightly noisy borders though.

Black Letter is what you get when you go to dafont and look for medieval fonts. Which is why I think a lot of this is testing to see which ones they like.

I do like heavier fonts actually, there was just so little to like about the Dominions fonts. It did fit the aesthetic better, that I do agree, and this does less. But it seems like a lot of things in Dom are finally starting to look like it was made after 2000. Now if the world map could just oblige.