So with the fifth installment I intend to learn more of the game, and try to get more juice from it. It's not really a complex game, as its intricacy comes primarily from knowing how each of the many playable nations works, identifying its pros and cons, and last but certainly not least, famiiliarizing yourself with the many, many spells at your disposal.
How is knowing seventy some nations and thousands of spells and units and using them effectively not complex?
And there's the bit of a problem I seem to have with the game right now, from my superficial level of understanding: it seems to be all about identifying the clearly overpowered spells, and discarding 80%+ of the list. Is this the way it's supposed to be or is it just a major balance issue? Is there real tactical depth or is it all about exploiting the 2-3 OP spells which are most compatible with your nation's playstyle and pretender?
Well, you're playing singleplayer, so you can do it that way. The issue with that comes in multiplayer, when you use a single tactic (not necessarily based on a particular spell or spells) and get countered. If you're too ironbound in one "OP" setup, you'll get fleeced.
Also, and this may be new to 5, is there any point to non-Sacred units? Clearly blessings can make a monumental difference, and turn Sacred units into unstoppable demigods. Seems like another huge balance issue, if they really render 90% of units irrelevant.
Well regarding the details of the balance, it's not totally clear yet since no serious game has been played to completion yet, and it'll take several before we really know anything for sure. But in general, the benefit to sacred units is that you can get a heck of a lot more of them – and blesses are nice, but for the most part they don't do anything you can't do with alteration and construction, and save on pretender points. They're only good because you can get them out early, but you pay for that in scales.
What am I missing?
When people talk about Dominions using incredibly praising terms, they're not talking about the singleplayer experience. The AI is ordinary video game AI, and as such is not capable of imitating human creativity and response to novel situations. As such, the singleplayer gameis a decent strategy experience, but little more – it's mostly noted for its lore, and the pervasiveness of the lore's effects on mechanics.
I should note here, because a lot of people hear "multiplayer" and think "that isn't for me" that Dominions multiplayer is not really like video game multiplayer in general. It's more like the online play of chess or shogi, if you're familiar with that. There are lots of people who play Dominions MP that didn't play anything multiplayer before Dominions, and still don't play anything else in that context.
FWIW though, playing Dom single player against easy or medium AI is a very, very different game than playing against people.
It is against high difficulties too. It's not necessarily super easy any more, because the AI gets to "cheat" with bonus to many things, but it's not like playing a competent human. You could talk to Wilson Max about it it you're interested, he's gone further down that rabbit hole than anyone else to my knowledge.
Limited per turn, yes, which helps but only to stem the flow to some extent. Is it really enough, if each can take on dozens of regular units on their own?
If it can take down twenty four units but your enemy has twenty five, then yeah. But don't forget that your enemy (if you're not playing against AI) can also use magic and will have his own tactics in mind. Even if you somehow made an army that could kill any amount of non-sacreds, all they need to do then is survive long enough for his mages to kill your sacreds via non-troop means. Of course, if you can make him commit that many mages, then you can harry them with raiding parties, make them spend their gems, pick them off a few at a time (or many at once with spells like earthquake) using small armies that you don't mind losing, and only then hit them with your real army.
I'm just worried multi boils down to executing one of 2-3 optimal strategies, depending on nation, and forsaking most units (along with suboptimal spells) altogether. I suppose all competitive strategy multiplayer boils down to optimal paths, but I suppose I worry such paths are too few in a game with so much potential for variety.
This perception isn't entirely unfounded, but I think you're really overestimating the problem. Sure, each nation has a few optimal strategies, but there's a ton of nations. And each "strategy" has to be discovered, and people don't always agree what's good and what's totally foolish, and even when people broadly agree, the details differ – And after all that, it's invalidated when things change, whether that's a strategic situation within the specific game you're playing, or on a larger meta-defining scale like updates to Dominions itself. Because while Dominions, like any game, isn't perfectly balanced, it's close enough that updates do majorly swing meta, as people catch up to the changes.
To give an example that's less abstract, I've played a game as Marverni that readers of my AARs may remember. I looked at one of Marverni's very obvious strategies – use the unlimited amounts of sacred boars. The problem is, those boars are pretty mediocre units. Even with a bless, they're not going to do all that much against most opponents by themselves. So I thought to combine them with Marverni's other quite obvious advantage – the Sequani, very cheap astral mages. So my boars exist to protect my mages, and my mages, who were cheap but who I still needed scales to leverage in sufficient numbers, cast particular spells to support them – Stellar Cascades, which deals damage to fatigue instead of health, and thereby weakens my enemy enough for the pigs to properly kill them. The problem is, with my pretender points spent on the bless for the pigs and scales for the mages, I had hardly any adequate method of expanding, and no real assets for an early war. If I had been attacked early on, I'd have been wiped out. It was only thanks to luck and diplomacy that this didn't happen. But when I did get things on line, I got the kind of effect that you're seeing in singleplayer, where I was able to dominate by combining a few things. The only downside was that, in order to punish enemy evocation against my pigs and (relatively fragile) mages, I'd taken blood vengeance, which prevented me from using other high efficiency spells like Gifts from Heaven, which has very low accuracy but deals high damage to a single square. Normally, that's great for Marverni, since killing a few pigs is no big deal but killing a few of the enemy can really hurt them, depending on who you're fighting. But in this case, killing a few pigs also killed the mage. But it didn't matter too much, because I was winning every major battle – And then, for reasons pertaining to strategic deployment, I lost the game. If that hadn't happened, I very well might have won, because it was a relatively small game, but then again, I might fairly easily have been countered if someone had built an SC with regeneration, a lot of reinvigoration, and a small horde of backup dancers to draw away excessive evocations. If that was the case, I could fall back on the totally different mage strategy of using my sequani for communions and casting other spells – buffs targeted at countering the SC, most likely, but if I could get to really end-game research in time, I could spam master enslave in the hopes of capturing it. But then by that time, my opponent might have more SCs ready for me, or something else that could totally annihilate my army in some way that I haven't thought of yet. And in all those turns of tactical arms race, the strategic game could be won by one side or another at any point. Including the counter that Jilladilla just posted, which I never thought of, and which would effect my mages almost as well as it effects the boars.
Mages > sacreds once you hit a certain point, so most troops eventually become blockers moreso than force multipliers whether they're sacred or not. And not all nations have worthwhile sacreds in any case.
Eh. Dominions 3 was the era of the supercombatant, and Dominions 4 was the era of mage support, but it's not yet clear what the dominant consideration of Dominions 5 will be. Sacreds may indeed matter more.
-The most optimal army cannot stand up against a war on two fronts.
True of a single army, but a nation can (and, if it's to win, will) have multiple armies. To state the point slightly more directly, you can only have so many really good armies at a time. Battles are one on the back of tactics, but wars are won on logistics.
Author
Topic: Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith Released! (Read 135332 times)