Oh I can never stop being a weirdo I went like this, because usually I decide how I want to play, some nations make the preselection, and then ultimatively it's the flavor and the little sprites that tilt the balance.
-MA Abyssia, mild safescumming, left midgame eventhough I wasn't in an awful position it was kind of easy because I spawned in a corner and let the heat do all the work in combat.
-MA Ind, heavy safescumming, like I rolled back every second turn or so to be able to lead it to endgame, pushed ermor to their capital than they pushed me back all the way to my "ring of safety", left a game that I was going to loose IMO.
-LA Gath, started to be reasonably confident, I will admit tho the NPC were nice to me again. First real win.
-EA Mictlan, pain pain pain... I just can't make it with their measly troops, and what's the point playing them without like 20 bless points lol.
-EA Machaka, these dudes did what mictlan was supposed to, those twohand blunt sacred that scale best with strength blesses were fun, but the spider boys were more fun, no H3 priests thought me that blesses might be overated (sometimes). Good spawn, but I'm mostly past savescumming anyway, only if I'm extremly dubious about the outcome of an action, or need to try something stupid and irreversible. Wasted like 80 turns just crafting and conjuring shit and accidentally dominion wiped what I left of my ennemies (One thing that makes me mad: if you have diplomacy on weak, the guys you're at war with might offer you peace+NAP while they are sieging your forts, don't accept because nothing says that they have to move their troops... I had it happen to me once while I was the agressor too... you know I might be a savescummer but I refused to exploit that shit, this is what I consider buggy cheese, just moved the troops myself as any reasonable person signing a peacy treaty would as short lived as it might be).
Now I'm on MA Phlegra, and it's like "bring it", I have some rough idea of how to boost myself upwards, had to restart a few times TBF (usually do with a new nation), one particular game I thought I hit off my trajectory only to get taken down by a ridiculously aggressive Bandar Log that must have put all it's efforts into ensuring I die before they do, and so we both (I presume) got dominion wiped... But in my current run, I pulled it off, this game has the particularity that I disabled limited artifact crafting and legendary spell research. So naturally I'm rushing all the artifacts lol, and I did manage to craft a shitload, but I'm running out of gems, also without a rainbow mage the crosspaths are brainwreckingly difficult to keep track of, so actually what I will do now before jumping back in, is reload an old machaka save and do my own chart of the artifacts. I'm eager to play more, the only npc who has more research than me is also my biggest ennemy but I'm not particularly threatened, just got to be careful with that dominion because everybody who remains ingame is pushing their dominion strongly.
Yes I have a lot of time, this game doesn't make the fans go loud so it's better for my ear to heal.
I was looking at the steam page, and I noticed they use footage from dominions 5.
(yes what a weird admission of happenstance, put 1+1 together and sue me lol, but look I'm going to buy it, I just made sure I could play it, because I'm a weirdo like I love DF and Dominions but I can not deal with Rimworld or Crusader Kings which is surprising right?!) So usually I will have the underground disabled during map generation but I've seen some caves in a game or two, when I manually picked cave nations as ennemies. The cave thing just looks hell of annoying a real turn waster. But then I see this over at steam.
Is that a cave at the south of the map? That is freaking gorgeous! I can see why they'd change it since you'd allways know where some nations spawn, I presume. Also it's a silly incorrect kind of map but that's why I love it so much. I'm very impressed if that was generated randomly. I might just whip out dom5 to play agartha once before I dish out the monies, to dip my toe in MP some time around the weekend. But I'm super shy about it, mostly avoided multiplayer ever since I played a lot of dota2 like 9 years back... Since then I would only occasionally join survival crafting games, on dedicated servers, with people I know IRL. Like I really avoided multiplayer like the plague, 400h max in battlefield type shooters over 9 years, and that's it. Before that I did like 3000h in dota2 alone over 4 years. I'm still really irritated about the idea of not being able to play and pause at my pace, but for this game I could see it; both in how it usually works and in how it could be set up. I bet 90% of the community is text chat and not voice chat anyway.