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| LA Pythium???; Da fuq do I do with these guys? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 2 2014, 07:53 AM (13,205 Views) | |
| Itwastuesday | Mar 21 2016, 06:19 PM Post #61 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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So, in short : Pros : - Rec everywheres - Map movement - All sorts of stuff! Cons : - No Crossbows - Human troops that have the audacity to demand more than 10 gold pay without significant superpowers - Weak, limited depth mages So... Something's missing? Would LA Pythium be good if it had a normal MM2 crossbowman? |
| Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. | |
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| GlointheDark | Mar 21 2016, 06:22 PM Post #62 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Rejakor, I grant a lot of what you say is true. It doesn't significantly alter my opinion that you are playing pythium the wrong way. You don't need temples as pythium - at all. Period. The only time you build them is when you build a fort. Which is rare. Three revellers will drop an enemy 9 dominion to nothing in 2-3 turns. Have you played around with a Dom 1 score ever? I'm willing to bet you have not. But the mechanics are interesting - because it has the fastest dom spread. Since your dom spreads all the time you will rapidly have a friendly candle even in a heretic province. sure the heretics are killing dominon - and then your home/god/temples send out dominon to 5 provinces. Think of it this way - 3 revelers are 9 dom kill. But you only ever have 1 candle. Will it conquer a high enemy dominion score - of course not. But thats what your revellers are for. Lets recap You don't need forts. You don't need temples. You build labs like a mofo. All your troops are remarkably cheap, and very very low maintenance. You snowball into a lot of crappy troops supported by a lot of crappy mages. The fact that they are crappy doesn't - in itself disqualify pythium as a viable nation. Look at ermor in Dom2... You will be a research leader - courtesy of half a dozen labs dropping out 40 gp researchers. And sure - no one is going to usggest any of those mages are amazing. But to quote some russian dude, quantity has a quality all its own. 50 mystes popping out swarms is nothing to sneeze at - and while you laugh at fireballs - there are times they are perfectly serviceable. Not to mention those f2's become f3's with phoenix. Or flame skulls + eagle eyes. You also have the ability - since many of your mages have astral randoms - to use commune effectively. Plop a catscharm on a satyr, give him a longbow of accuracy and he'll either seduce men or kill em. If you want him to kill them more effectively, give him the bear charm. Pythium, more than any nation I can think of, has a lot of different tools. There are times that the hydras are the answer, times that cataphracts are; times that assasins are. Times that communes are. Tricky to play - no question. |
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| Rejakor | Mar 21 2016, 09:43 PM Post #63 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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1 Dom has very few overall candles. Temple checks from neighbours could domkill you very fast, and your heretic-wall micromanagement would take up a lot of time and be very annoying. It doesn't mitigate much about the problems of heretics meaning you can't take a good domscore or good scales and get as much effect from them as other nations do, and have to waste turns/positioning moving heretics around.
No. Your two trooptypes that are cheap are limitanei and milite. Everything else is at or above human standard. Your goddamn solari cost 20g each. And the thing about your nonfort mages is they are worse than your fort mages. Fireball is a bad spell even from just a lab for 90g. Wooden Warriors is okay, but not around Fireball. Swarm was okay in dom3, in dom4 it's terrible for battle use.
For a start, it's Communion. For a second, the only mages you have with S are fort mages, aka the ones you're saying not to build. And only 25% of the noncap ones will have S. 10% of revelers will have blood 1 and can join via sabbath, but that's 1 in 10, and they should likely be hunting to make satyrs instead. For a third, except to drop big spells, there's little use for communions for pythium and due to needing so many schools they are unlikely to hit the big spells significantly fast enough to care.
Longbow of Accuracy, 15 piercing damage, STR not added. An indie commander has a good chance of ignoring that. Seduction doesn't even result in an assassination battle reliably anymore. And when it does, you're hoping you'll get a squishy mage who doesn't skelespam or buff and dies to arrows, or you lose 10 gems of gear?
I'm less questioning if you've won games with LA Pythium at this point and more if you've actually played any dom4 mp at all. |
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| Admiral_Aorta | Mar 21 2016, 11:52 PM Post #64 |
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Suddenly a troll appeared in the laboratory!
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there's always been people suggesting some weird variation of this idea, using a low dom score or heretic or whatever to reduce the harmful effects of your own dominion, and I don't think anyone has ever successfully used it in a game. |
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| sum1won | Mar 22 2016, 12:09 AM Post #65 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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Really? In dom4? Where did this occur? I did a reasonably thorough survey of dom4 games and didnt find any LA pythium wins. |
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| GlointheDark | Mar 22 2016, 06:43 AM Post #66 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Blitzes against Raiel, MP 5-6 player private host. |
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| GlointheDark | Mar 22 2016, 07:35 AM Post #67 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Rejakor - I don't recall you being quite so rude when you and I used to talk when you first started what around 2011 or so? The micromanagement of heretics isn't as much as you think. You're building labs at your borders . Heretics are just as valid as dominion spamming via blood sac - more so as you don't require blood. Since you control when you build your heretics, as well as where you build your lab it is relatively easy to have magic 3 expressed. Think of it this way. Temples radiate in every direction, and dominion checks do not always succeed. Heretics cancel dominion in the province you care about. Three revellers cost 150 and are way more effective than a temple at reducing enemy dominion. Two heretic stacks stop essentially all dom spread, with no micromanagement. You are wrong about troop cost. Midway through year 3 or so my upkeep is usually around 800. Income is usually around 2000. 4/5 troops you build not at a fort are cheap, and 5 / 11? are cheap at a fort. Together they comprise 85% of what you will build. I don't agree that fireball is a bad spell. Sure there are counters for it - but in an H3 environment, with a large area heat affect...
Again, your revelers are hunting - they are not inside a fort. If you get raided, you've got the script set already.
6 gems. You get three shots. You never miss at assasination range. I think those odds are rather better than seeking arrow. What do you consider reliably? Wearing a bearclaw seems to help cause an assasination if you want to assasinate men. Wearing a cats charm if you want a chance to seduce them. Opposite if you want to seduce an amazon. Fire ants, combustion, flame eruption. Army of giants on baby hydras, especially if you went a n9d4 bless where they will regen 9+hp a round. You have early protection, Moss body. Fire in a jar and clams for communions or north star. Tanglevines works great with hydras. Relief, bone melter. since you have a lot of labs, you have the ability to move equipment around, to respond to threats. Exactly how much time have you spent with the nation? |
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| Admiral_Aorta | Mar 22 2016, 07:48 AM Post #68 |
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Suddenly a troll appeared in the laboratory!
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there's not really any rudeness in that post, he's just saying that it doesn't sound like you've played much MP, because you're saying some weird stuff(and he's not wrong there, that thing about using heretics to reduce your own harmful dominion for example). |
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| sum1won | Mar 22 2016, 05:19 PM Post #69 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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It's not been addressed, but I think your understanding of the mechanics behind heretic is incorrect. 3 Revelers are not 9 domkill at three each. Heretics get a heretic level*20% chance of removing a candle. This means that heretic three has a 60% chance of removing a candle, instead of the three hostile temple checks each you are interpreting it as. This means that three revelers will remove, at best, an average of two candles per turn. This is an 80% reduction in efficiency. Similar issue with your domspread calculation. While Dom1 candles will always spread to neutral provinces, dom2+ candles will do so 73%+ of the time as well. The advantage is not vast. These candles will be incapable of resisting or overcoming hostile candles. Maintaining a wall of heretics is easier said than done, and the moment one of your borders is overrun, scattering your heretics, the enemy dominion will follow suit. In short, this makes you a very easy domkill target. Final issue: your heretic provinces will not have your dominion. Unless there is a double-layer of heresy, which requires a rather large empire and exorbiant number of heretics, they will have enemy dominion. Turn resolution has heresy preach down a province first, which given enough heretics will hit 0. Some time later, dominion spread occurs. Both your dominion and enemy dominion will attempt to enter, but due to the higher enemy domscore, they will almost always win the conflict. (coin flip on who gets there first, but they have good odds at overcoming you if they get there first, and you have bad odds at overcoming them if they get there first). Edited to account for Zonk's correction. The heretic values I was using were too generous. |
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| Zonk | Mar 22 2016, 05:53 PM Post #70 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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I am quite confident it's 20% per turn rather than the equivalent of a HX preaching priest (even if intuitively the priest mechanic makes more sense). I think the 'documentation' claiming it is actually a post by Kristoffer. Should be possible to test this using heretic 1 - if it works like a H1 priest, it will never lower dominion when it's 6+ candles. |
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NATION MODS Spoiler: click to toggle OTHER MODSOni Spectral Weapons Zonkmod | |
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| DonCorazon | Mar 22 2016, 06:23 PM Post #71 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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I would think it would be even less than 90% (or 60% if that is the base) because the chance to counter "hostile" dominion is reduced by 5% for each hostile candle in the province or is that not part of heretic mechanics? Kudos to Glo for trying to come up with an approach. I fought Pyth briefly as LA Caelum, and Pyth sure felt toothless. Flyers counter their assassins, mobile raiders take their unforted labs, thunderstrike/wrathful skies/wailing winds mow down their slow moving armies. Hard to see what Pyth could have done to counter that particular match up. |
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| GlointheDark | Mar 22 2016, 09:53 PM Post #72 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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I'm not theorycrafting on the dominion reduction. In cases where you don't have an enemy actively replacing dominion, 3 heretics dropped dominion from 9 to zero in three turns. That was probably a one off that just caught my attention, but heretics are remarkably good at vaccuuming up dominion. Likewise, I am not theory crafting that you will have your dominion in a heretics province. You Her1 Her2 Enemy. Most of the time both Her1 and Her2 will have your dominion under dom 1. It goes back to what I was saying - under dom 1 - your dominion always spreads. Under dom 9, your temple checks have a chance of filling up the local bucket, or spreading. And the local bucket is 9 deep, with each candle harder to earn. This means that when heretics are killing dominion a 9 dominion wall is worth more in regular terms than a 1 dom wall. This is what we empirically observe. Going back to the Dom 9 vs Dom 1 competition. How it seems to work (because really, who knows): Suppose you have a dom 1 nation - with 4 temples, an awake god, a home province and a prophet. Vs - the enemy with 9 Dom, but the same number of temple check generators. I forget the exact calculations: but more or less 1 mandatory for the god + 2 regualr, one for home province, one for prophet, one per temple. Call that 1+8 for each nation. Until the dom 9 bucket is full x% (call it half, pulling number from thing air) of the dom 9 temple checks will go to filling the bucket - or call it 4.5 for spread. Vs. all 9 for dom1. You're dealing with the edge condition that neutral territories fill automatically. Except you have much great probability every turn that the dom 1 guy will fill it. As a special note - since you will always be pushing heretics forward in a war - your opponents dom buckets should never be full. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Regarding being dom killed. I've never faced this circumstance in an actual game as pythium, but I have faced it and executed it many times in other games. But I will say - when you only have 1 dom i n a province - its far easier to notice when someone is trying to domkill you. Neutral spaces show up. Additionally, contrary to popular opinion, since you have heretics everywhere, its not enough to just have stone idols killing your dominion. Lets look at the mechanic. In a regular domkill, the real issue is that the opponent is sending a wave of temple checks (or point sourcing them) that establishes high value dominions scores which your dominion cannot beat - and they cover a larger and larger percentage of your kingdom. Thats not the case here. You have way more heretics sucking up his dominion than he has temple checks generating it. So he sends out his dominion wave, gets a certain amounts of successes - then the heretics suck it up. It is very difficult, and I would say practically impossible for him to get high dom values. That being the case, very difficult to beat the mandatory dominion spread on your God. Combine that with your God moves, and it should be difficult to know where he is moving to. Regarding difficulty in maintaining heretics dominion walls - it isn't. Its not as if you're buildng 1-2 of them. You're building dozens of them. Last game I had 40 revellers before I got my first b1 - the unrest is more an issue than maintaining a heretic wall. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Played this way, I don't think pythium's weakness is troops or mages, so much. I think its defense is strong, its economy is strong. Its weakness is mobility and the fact that you are really depending on your pretender (and summons) for high end battle spells. Labs and scads of mages covers the weakness on defense, but not on offense. Commune great if you go first, not so much going second. Oh. Its also micromanagement hell. Because your mages are not safe behind castle walls, you pretty much have to adapt placing, buildout, and spells everytime for every province to mount an effective defence. Definitely not for a large map. (Not to mention your point sources for dominion only goest to 4 temples before you bump to 2 dom and cut your spread...) |
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| Morsigil | Mar 22 2016, 11:02 PM Post #73 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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I have to say, some of the prices on these units are shocking. 20 gold 30 res for 18 prot and 5 fire resist? 22 gold 30 res for a slightly above average human soldiers with 18 prot and 9 encumbrance? You can get a warrior of the five elements for 26. I will say, the milite are a blessing in disguise. They are just about as good as T'ien Ch'i's footmen, except 2 gold cheaper and they get 2 javelins to boot. Lead them with a Tribuni or Magister Militum, throw some limitane standards and eventually equip your leaders with a horn of valor and they have half-decent morale, especially if they get a level or two There's definitely a disconnect in the nature + fire paths. You'd want to cast protection on your high prot units to make them even more durable, but then you won't be using fire alongside them or you risk destroying your own investment. I'm not really sure how this nation is supposed to do damage.. Flaming arrows + javelins? Or is the idea to buff hydras with their horrendous fire vulnerability? Poison vapors and bone melter later, but until then? |
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| GlointheDark | Mar 23 2016, 12:15 AM Post #74 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Like I said - 85% of what you will build will be the milite / limitane. With a standard, magister and a dot of experience 12 morale. 13 if defending in home. The only thing you will have trouble with is cav - use retiari to take the charge. With practice, you should have no problem getting to 14-16 territories by the end of the first year. Your income should be in the neighborhood of 1300, your upkeep around 150. You should have 5 labs, and probably a 2nd castle on the way. Your research should be around 180 a turn. And you must ALWAYS lead the milites with at least a tribunal. They break badly if you just use regular +0 cmdrs. |
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| LDiCesare | Mar 23 2016, 07:21 PM Post #75 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Getting territories by end of year 1 isnot a problem. What you do with the mages mid-game is, and I don't see that answered. Getting 40 revelers for a B1 is, well, expensive,and you get to summon satyrs who are good enough assassins for 1 slave, and who summon maenads at a slow pace, so it's not exactly groundbreaking either. If, by the end of year 1, if you have 15 provinces, you're very likely to be at war pretty soon. How do you deal with that at this point? What research helps you? And where do you o from there? (Hydras coming from the capital are just not an optionas they are slow to move and to recruit both.) |
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1:02 AM Jul 11