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[E. Albright]

Honestly, it's circumstantial. If your only reasonable death mages are STR/cap-only, death is absolute garbage for skellispam, even if you ramp up into blood for vampire lords (who are either makin' baby vamps or baby skellies, but not both). Would you go out of your way to skellispam with or without vamps as EA Ermor or MA Agartha, just because you could? For that matter, if your opponent could field hordes of H3 mages, tactical skellispam is very underwhelming... even if jump-started with strategic reanimation spam.

So, yeah. I'm gonna stand by my actual answer (rather than my smart-mouthed pseudo-answer) of "not enough information to make a reasonable judgement".

[BFEL]

Hmm well I personally like death and nature, with earth and blood falling just slightly behind that.
Death is good because its quite simply the best at getting your army size up, bar fucking none, and not only that but pretty much all its good stuff is in enchantment, so you don't have to waste research on other paths to make good use of it. (there ARE good spells in other paths obv, but enchantment is deaths bread and butter)

Nature I like because it has the BEST GODDAMN GLOBALS. ALL OF THEM. It also has stuff like mass regeneration, and can generally keep your armies alive and kicking. Kinda disappointing that the "normal" healing spells it has are basically worthless due to the way Dominions works, but ah well.
Also synergizes surprisingly well with Death magic.

Earth is cool because it has probably the SECOND best globals, and its just generally the most useful path for construction period. Also earth elementals are awesome and spamming them is hilarious.

Blood is good because you can actually control your "gem" supply with it and it has a buttload of good spells all in its own category, so you don't have to waste research on other shit.

[Shadowlord]

Nature's enchanted forests is absolutely hilarious. "I'm conquering you all without any armies, har har har"

[Kagus]

It's really just about what all you have to work with... Like, blood magic is all good and fine, but if you don't really have any kind of hunters to secure a decent income there's not much you can do with it.  Also there's the question not only of spells, but of items... Like, air and blood have some seriously baller items available for construction, and fire lets you be a complete dork and give a nataraja 4 fire bolas.

Hehehe... Has anyone done Bogarus stealth cults?  Between the fivefold angels, lucky B1 skoptsy and a screen of khlysty, you can have a sneaky, roaming sabbath that can show up somewhere, drop blood rain and whatever else on the PD, and then scoop up some more slaves and leave behind one severely f'ed-up province for the other guy to clean up.


But yeah, I quite like air magic too. You've got illusions for padding, the aforementioned awesome forging, some pretty wicked globals/rituals (particularly when combined with a secondary path of some sort), and some absolutely terrifying battle magic.  Plus all their spells are generally cheaper, fatigue-wise.  I've also got a soft spot for the fire-water crosspath, because acid spells are great for cleaning stuff.


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to building my swan army.

[E. Albright]

fire lets you be a complete dork and give a nataraja 4 fire bolas.

Not to be a nitpicky pedant, but you misspelled "give an Ancient Kraken five Fire Bolas, a Copper Arm, and an Amulet of the Fish" pretty badly, and technically that takes Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, even if it's soooooooo worth it...

(Also: don't forget to get a point of Water and script Quicken Self so you're flinging 10 low-accuracy bolas per turn from your fearsome stealthy death machine...)

[ThtblovesDF]

Nature and Earth, since both scale really well with everything. Early game the summons are OK, late game the army Buffs and evocations work wonders and provide enough options to Counter most Cheese.

Basically won my first MP game with ociana because I could just slap some gems and gear on a pan to Counter whatever people where (ab-)using, while also turning ok troops op.

Also, still the best gemgens & Globals, with Solid gear.

Death is a one Trick Pony for the most part and blood touch of a Hassel & Mage turn Investment.

[Kagus]

fire lets you be a complete dork and give a nataraja 4 fire bolas.

Not to be a nitpicky pedant, but you misspelled "give an Ancient Kraken five Fire Bolas, a Copper Arm, and an Amulet of the Fish" pretty badly, and technically that takes Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, even if it's soooooooo worth it...

(Also: don't forget to get a point of Water and script Quicken Self so you're flinging 10 low-accuracy bolas per turn from your fearsome stealthy death machine...)

Wouldn't it be 20 bolas, since it fires two shots each time?  Or was that changed?

[E. Albright]

No, you should be right. I was thinking that it was 2 but checked the mod inspector and it said 1, so I went with that. But now that you bring it back up, yes, without testing, my memory definitely wants to say it's still 2. So your octopus is wildly flinging nearly 3 bolas/arm/turn; such a pity there's no way to get a 6th to round it out...

[George_Chickens]

What's the best nation for overwhelming the enemy with hordes of units, but still retaining some decent units? So far, I'm liking the look of Abysia and the mummies.

[Karlito]

You can play Ermor and get a good bless on your Lictors. Takes a while to set up a good base for reanimating, but once it gets going...

[E. Albright]

Depending on your bless, the freespawn KotUS can be rather nasty as well, those those are a bit harder to reliably mass.

[Kagus]

Well, uh... There are a few things to pick from.

Ermor is definitely swampiest of the swampies, but their "decent" units are kinda hit and miss.  And, as mentioned, needs a bless.

Nazca (not sure if that's what you mean by "mummies", since C'tis also has mummies and one could make an argument for Ashdod's undead summons) has a whole bunch of chaff options, from slaves to reanimators to just a bunch of cheap easily-massed basic troops.  For their decent dudes, they've got those ethereal flying sacreds you can summon via a spell or just spawn for free, but like Ermorian lictors they're mainly only noteworthy if you've got a nice hot bless for them to wreck things with.

Without a bless though, those mummy bundles are absolutely terrifying battlemages.  Not particularly mobile, but they have "innate spellcaster", 0 encumbrance and generally good paths. There's even a hero bundle who is capable of casting 3 spells a turn like it was no big deal.

Then there's stuff like Shinuyama's cheap bakemono-sho grunts, and their excellent sorcerors, plus other battle-ready commanaders and some decent elite troops.  There's also Ur, which has recruit-everywhere everythings so you can amass a horde across multiple provinces, although as far as "decent units" go it's kind of a gray area.

EA and MA Pangaea can send freespawn maenad swarms, and Pan always has some good troops available for heavy hitting...  LA R'lyeh gets some freespawn swarms too, but not to as huge an extent as Ermor. That said, R'lyeh's decent troops are... Seriously terrifying.

Xibalba has massive swarms of recruitable troops, but not a lot of elite units outside of summons.


I guess it kinda depends on whether you specifically want a freespawn nation like Ermor, Lemuria, Asphodel; reanimator/summon nations such as Lanka, C'tis, Nazca, Mictlan; or just readily-recruitable horde nations such as Ur, Xibalba, Shinuyama, Jotunheim or Bandar Log.

Heck, there's even stuff like LA Ulm with wolfherds/vampire counts making their chaff, backed up by the always exemplary Ulmish footsoldiers and knights.




...and then there's Therodos. Nobody knows what the hell Therodos is.

[Culise]

...and then there's Therodos. Nobody knows what the hell Therodos is.

Nerf-hammered into the ground, last I recall.  They start weak, reach a mediocre mid-game, then descend into oblivion late-game if they haven't somehow already been wiped out.  Mages are either poor-quality or both expensive and cap-only, freespawn is weak, and your dominion will literally murder your own gold income, making gold-recruiting a tricky endeavor.  Their best bet is powerful sacreds and sneaking through a throne victory, but even that's not a great bet.  I wonder if Asphodel isn't a good comparison for Therodos, as far as effectiveness is concerned.

[USEC_OFFICER]

But Asphodel is pretty good, if I remember correctly. Their mages are effective, freespawn are good (for freespawn), have plenty of national spells for buffing and access to the summons needed for a late-game, gold-light economy. Not to meantion that what troops they have are good instead of mediocre/questionable, so the early game is not as rough.

Mind you I'll never play either of those nations in a serious game so... Take this all with a big grain of salt. But I still feel like the two are separate in terms of effectiveness.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I never really got the gist of Dominions 4, as I was always pretty good at managing the armies and to a lesser extent, the equipment, but I'm just really bad at magic, both using and countering it.

I love it, I'm just not good at it.