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[USEC_OFFICER]

Eh... The problem is that their sacred archers are cap-only, which makes it hard to amass them and utilize the bless to its fullest. Or at least in the early game, which is generally when you want to utilize your bless, before the sacreds get drowned out by waves of chaff. I'm not about to fully discount the worth of a death bless for them, but I certainly wouldn't take something like that. _{Also if Bows of War weren't Construction 6, MA Ulm would be pretty hilarious with a major death bless. They can forge them for 1 gem each and hand them to indie priests. 13 death-blessed arrows a turn per priest is pretty ridiculous.}

[E. Albright]

Spoiler: Patch notes (click to show/hide)

Game
More varied pretender costs and +150/+100 design points
Pretender cost auto calculation
Dominion spread chance changed to 50% + dom str*5%
Shape changing units can die in one strike if it's powerful enough to kill the next shape too.
Auto kill occurs 20 rounds later to give more time for auto rout.
Rainbow didn't affect allies, fixed
New monster pretenders
Some new pretender titles
Changed the selection of pretenders for some nations
New graphics/sounds for some spells
Adding thrones to .map files automatically adds ascension points too
Independent wizards got more spells researched
Can select players with only 1 nation in era
New throne effect 'Dominion conflict bonus'
Mercenaries no longer drown when unhired
Siren's lure didn't work, fixed
Monolith could blink and use stygian paths
Wish fix
Nicer handling of corrupted turn files
Geoglyph didn't reduce MR properly
Supaya reanimation changes
Print 'defence negates' on those weapons
Void Lord cannot have helmet
Serpent tailed pretenderws can wear armor
Battle performance improvement
Host performance improvement
uw stat, spells and item fixes
Dragons did not use ammo for breath weapon in melee
Slash/Pierce weapons only gets -1 penalty under water
Underwater non pierce penalty fix
Stone beings not affected by plague or disease
New magic item for Nazca
Crumble was way too effective
Send horror resulted in one horror too many
Theft of the Sun now affects resources too
Don't auto summon units when you have fled the field
Max number of commanders increased 9990 -> 20000
Max number of units increased 160000 -> 250000
New option: --maxunits to limit number of units
Disease effect on death blessed arrows didn't work
Ethereal did not offer protection against some non damaging spells
Xibablba UW defence fix
Improved gem cheat detection
Cheat detection fix for mercs
Random map generation speedup
Improved dirt generation on random maps
New switches for random maps: --mapdirt, --mapdirtcol, --mapdirtsize
Minor memory leak fixed
Game info says whether story event are enabled or not
Snow/Rain/Sea graphics performance improvement
Altered snow and rain fall
Site power that kills undead & demons only affected undead
Swamp survival boots didn't help against miasma
Azi and Drakon have 3 head slots
Demonic Locusts
Dementia didn't heal correctly
Gossamer Cloth etc didn't give properly rounded scout reports
Bug fix for shape shifting units starting with magic items
Flying raiders needed 10000 patrollers to get caught
Xibalba dart throwers in towers has dmg value 12 instead of 0
Corpse Eater icon
Pretender discounts can now be set per nation
Stat fixes
Site fixes
Events updated
Typos fixed

AI
AI lab building improvements
AI Mictlan more likely to blood sacrifice
AI gem usage fix

Modding
New poptype mod commands: #defunit1, #defmult1, #defcom1, etc.
New mod commands: #disableoldnations, #clearallevents
New mod commands: #batstartsum6d6 ... sum9d9
New mod commands: #req_targitem, #req_gold, #killpop, #removesite
Event mod command renamed #newsite -> #addsite
New unlimited always event (rarity 5) for modding
Rarity 13 events also happens at low population levels
New nation mod commands: #cheapgod20, #cheapgod40

[Boksi]

Shape changing units can die in one strike if it's powerful enough to kill the next shape too.

Oi, that's huge and I didn't know about it.

I mean, there's other huge changes in there, but I hadn't heard about that one before.

[Frumple]

Kinda' wonder if that means N9 jaguar warriors are going to become a thing.

Also poor skinshifters ;_;

[Delta Foxtrot]

I thought N9 jaguars were already a thing to some extent.

[Il Palazzo]

Does anyone know how the Raven of Underworld's 'eater of the dead' works? Surely, it doesn't mean endless hitpoints?

[USEC_OFFICER]

I thought N9 jaguars were already a thing to some extent.

I thought so too. And I honestly I don't see this change having much of an effect on shapechangers in general. It's only a problem if they take 20~30 damage in a single strike, which is something that only happens if they're getting ganked by Pillar of Fine, Soul Slay, or something similar. So I wouldn't worry about them. It's more of a nerf to the Nahualli than anything else.

Does anyone know how the Raven of Underworld's 'eater of the dead' works? Surely, it doesn't mean endless hitpoints?

I believe that it's the same ability that the "Eater of the Dead" has, so... I want to say that it does provide endless hitpoints. Until they're chopped off. But I might be wrong, especially since the Raven also gets temporary hitpoints from its dominion and the two might cancel each other out somehow.

[Frumple]

... watching battle replays, I see low-twenty hits... quite often. Especially against otherwise squishy humans. It's particularly common with calvary charges and whatnot, but you see it often enough on plain crits (or whatever those higher end hits are on non-fatigued critters) and fatigue-boosted hits and whatnot. Just about any human with a two-handed weapon is going to manage it with non-trivial regularity. Being able to straight kill a shapeshifter in one hit will definitely make the major shifter troops (jaguar warriors and skinshifters) fairly significantly squishier. The difference between one hit and two is... pretty big.

[tompliss]

The "Eater of the Dead" ability is a bit buggy for now, because it is endless :
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/the-new-path-released/page/6#1028405

A little hotfix is apparently expected in a few days to fix some things that got in because the patch wasn't really expected to be released right now, by the way...

[EnigmaticHat]

So I'm actually kind of enjoying this game now.  Finally got magic and forged items to do useful things for me... although not in either of my multiplayer games, heh heh.  Started a new Sauromatia SP game, ended up building baby's first thug by giving some scouts skele spamulets and sending them to kill province defense.  Not a good design but somehow worked.  I'm thinking instead of doing that, I'll take the no-path soothsayers you have a 25% chance of getting, give each of them one handful of acorns and a skeleton amulet, and send them after poorly guarded border provinces.  That's... about 10 expendable units for each of them, per battle that they survive, and its only ten gems invested.  And technically some gold, but a mage with no paths isn't exactly worth money.

I finally got around to finding a combat magic I understand.  A medium sized forward army got utterly wrecked by some Unmarked and a giant wolf SC pretender.  Like... holy shit, 45 casualties, one enemy killed.  So I panicked a bit, and gathered most of my forces into a 200 strong horde.  I took 12 soothsayers and 4 Enarie and setup a mind burn spamming communion which actually worked quite nicely.  Not that I ever got to use it on anything strong because instead of meeting me in the field the AI has been leaving small or medium armies in my path to die while taking back territory behind the army.  Some asshole claimed a throne that filled the world with disease, so between that and the starvation there's been like 40 non-combat deaths.  But in theory the mind burn should overcome the fact that my wimpy spears and arrows can't hurt the enemy giants.

I also got a rainbow great sage, who found all sorts of sweet gems for me.  Unfortunately I can't use most of them, and his paths are too low to forge anything useful except for the Astral boosting ring.  I guess the idea is since I'm focusing on Astral I'll be able to convert them on a 1:2 ratio and that combined with my solid research will let me do baleful star, wish, doom, all that fun stuff.

Not sure if I'll actually continue it, SP seems a bit too much work.  The strategy I'm using in my SP game (not in the MP one, don't really have a strategy for that) involves moving around a bunch of cheap Soothsayers and independent commanders around.  It all takes a while.  I'm actually looking forward to my MP turns for once, so that's nice.  I almost want to join another but for a while I was terrible at submitting turns and not having fun so I'll wait to see if this lasts.

[Shadowlord]

I like the PBEM MP because you actually have time to think.

[Sean Mirrsen]

And so I finally own this game. Huzzah!

Well, the only immediate benefit to me is the various changes and bugfixes. I am assuming I shouldn't poke my head into multiplayer for quite a while still.

[Delta Foxtrot]

There's only one way to learn

That said it would be wise to at least be able to play the first dozen or two turns somewhat competently with your chosen nation. That portion of the game is mostly against independents whether you play AI or against humans. Once indies are dead it's like night and day between SP and MP and as such you can't really learn what happens after that.

Bay12 seems to lean towards mixed skill games, though we've had a newbie game or two. I'm not sure if there's enough player populace to start another purely newbie game, maybe. If not, you should be able to get a low skill game fairly easily in the official MP forum on desura:
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/board/arena-of-the-gods-mp-games

[EnigmaticHat]

My advice as someone who's still learning: its really important to know what spells you want, and the research screen does not present the information in a very helpful way.  Use this instead.

For my part, I just learned that you can spend gems to cast combat spells that are above your path level, provided you spend no more gems total on the spell than your path level.  So level 2 can boost to level 4, unless the level 4 spell requires gems to be cast normally.  Of course checking out the spell list I realized that pretty much the only spells this can be effectively used for require path level 2, which is already quite attainable without using gems.  I guess it could be decent if you wanted to send your wimpy research mages out to fight.

[EnigmaticHat]

Tried my first MA game as Ashdod in a 1v1 map, AI randomed MA Ermor.  Such great practice 

Anyway, I decided to try something different and go for a W9E4 bless.  I figured with quick berserker giants I would have a bunch of offense.  Unfortunately I kinda forgot to check their encumbrance, which was 5.  So they would take 10 fatigue per turn of melee combat with quickness :/

Is this useless?  I'm thinking I could maybe up it to E9, or fight a non-domkill faction.  But my PD is outperforming my sacreds, which might be a sign to think of a better bless.  Probably boring old E4N9.