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EA Lanka: Boy Eats World; Ruling the world as crazy-strong demons!
Topic Started: Jul 13 2015, 08:49 PM (9,880 Views)
Indract
*Spicy* Crew
I think the main mistake you've been making with Lanka is ignoring the undead (or at least not using them as a major part of your strategy). Priest reanimation is a huge advantage and is what makes Lanka go from a good nation to a top tier one.

Undead leadership is not really an issue. At enchantment 2, any D1 mage (i.e yoginis) can revive a mound king with 80 undead leadership and MM4 for only 3 gems (which is your cap's income). Arguably you could use a revenant as well (9 gems for 110 leadership but is also a mage), although for patrolling duties mound kings are vastly superior. Raksharajas get at least 80 undead leadership as well, yoginis 35 and all the indie priests you'll be spamming have 15 as well, so in an emergency you can quickly move a lot of undead troops.

And what can these undead hordes do outside of combat? They can patrol. They're the best patrollers in the game by far, since they're free, numerous and almost as effective as humans. It doesn't only help blood hunting, it also makes scouting against you very difficult since you can definitely afford (especially in times of peace) to patrol most of your provinces and prevent scouts from gathering any intel. Combined with the fact that Lanka gets pretty good scouts (forest rec, albeit expensive, scouts, and the very cheap shadow imps), you'll have a major intel advantage over most opponents (a bit like glamour nations).
They're also the best siegers in the game for obvious reasons. Lanka's undead are even better than regular ones at this since they get str 15 bandars. You don't need to use your sacreds to crack forts, since your undead hordes are already enough to crack them instantly almost all the time.
Having loads of indie priests reanimating also opens up scorched earth tactics. Every H1 priest can reduce a province's pop by 60-70 a turn by reanimating ghouls, which quickly adds up and can be particularly useful in some cases.
Finally, these undead can let you gain a water foothold. In the EA only 2 other land nations can get there as well (Fomoria and Agartha) and water nations are mostly crap and not played, so that lets you get another advantage over your opponents.

These are some of the many advantages of longdead and why you should make sure to have hundreds of them as soon as possible (spending most of your death gems on mound kings). In combat they become really good once you've got darkness. As raiders you don't want to use small groups of sacreds. 80 longdead led by a mound king are much cheaper, work about as well against low PD and you don't really care if they die to a PD trap or enemy mages. Your sacreds are almost always going to stay with your main armies, which should definitely have mage support.

Regarding the blood bless, archers aren't really a counter against Lanka, or at best for a very limited amount of time. Archers aren't good for expansion and require critical mass to be effective, so in a very early war (like turn 8) they aren't a good solution. Afterwards, Lanka gets very good spells to counter them : mist at evo 3 (precision halved), storm at evo 5 (precision halved again, half the archers become useless) and arrow fend at ench 6 (pretty much a hard counter to any archer army, especially when combined with storm). If you attack with your stack of archers at around turn 15 or 20 it might be effective since the counters won't have been researched yet, but after that the archers will be useless since you will have researched the appropriate counters (assuming you scouted your opponent's strategy and changed your research accordingly). This thread was talking mostly about B9 jaguars, which are indeed very vulnerable to archers at pretty much any stage of the game.

But as I said previously, the point of B9 is not only to protect your demons, it's also to protect your undead, which aren't only chaff but actually good fighters against most enemy troops thanks to darkness (and that gets only better as your research advances, thanks to spells like mass flight or mass protection). What do you want to counter longdead with? Spells that deal low damage (longdead haven't got much health) in a large AoE. Cleansing waters is a very good example of that. What does BV work best against? AoE spells that deal low damage, because the AoE means you've got to pass a lot of checks to survive and the low damage isn't likely to kill your tough demons, while still triggering full BV damage (it doesn't depend on the damage you actually took, and yes it does return the full damage even with mistform). This is why you want to mix your BV demons with your longdead - it negates their main weakness.

It's true that you can significantly increase a mage's MR, but that is costly. To make someone pretty much immune to BV, you've got to spend at least 15 gems (10 for the lead shield + 5 for the anti magic amulet) on top of casting antimagic, assuming you've got access to these paths. This works for a few mages, but you can't do that for everyone, which means that your opponent will only be able to field a few "safe" casters to spam evos, and risk losing the others if they're scripted to cast evos, which are the most efficient counter to your army. You will lose demons as well, but overall they're much less valuable than enemy mages, so that's a good trade for you.

Another thing to keep it mind with BV is that it works on pretty much anything that does hp damage, even if it's indirect. Cloud spells for example (fire cloud, cloud of death...) are affected by BV. The main exception is poison, which doesn't work against undead anyway and isn't very good if your demons have got N9 as well (and becomes obsolete once you've reached ench 7 or blood 7 for the poison resistance buffs). There are also few protective buffs against BV. Mistform doesn't do anything (it doesn't reduce BV damage but the spell isn't broken), the only things that work are MR buffs, twist fate and luck.

Getting enough demons isn't particularly hard once you get the blood econ rolling (which is by far the best in the game by the way). Asrapas are very cheap (about 2 slaves each, it's the cheapest summonable sacred in the game) and you get a lot of them per cast. With N9, they have an excellent hp / slave ratio. Their initial prot is bad, which is why you want yoginis to buff them in important battles, but they scale really well with buffs (fog warriors, darkness, iron bane if you can get an earth mage...) thanks to their built-in life drain weapon that is also magical (which counters stygian rains and fog warriors). Leadership isn't an issue since your dakinis and raksharajas battle casters (which you're supposed to bring to major battles) can lead a lot of them, and if necessary mound kings work as well anyway. Finally, any raksharaja can cast divine blessing with a small communion, which is usually fine since evos are rarely dropped on turn 1 (if they are you might want to bring your prophet). Worthy heroes gives you 2 H3 heroes by the way, so if it's on (it is in most games), blessing your troops is easier.

Regarding research priorities, const 6 is definitely not one. Skull mentors are too expensive to be worth the cost and you'll probably be spending a lot of death gems on mound kings anyway. The main use of const 6 is to forge blood boosters and black hearts for lifelong protection / amulet of the dead assassins, but that can wait. You'll want ench 2, const 4 and blood 5 fairly early for the blood summons, rods, wrath of pazuzu and mound kings, but then it all depends on the situation. If you're at peace and expect to be so the next few turns, blood 6 for dakinis is a very good idea. If you're at war you'll need key battlespells, and in that case alt 6 for darkness and wooden warriors is an excellent choice. Ench 6 is a good option as well if you're fighting archer heavy nations.

It's true though that N9B9 is among the weaker options in the early game (which is why W9B9 is a popular option as well, since it offers a stronger early game but a weaker mid / late game). It's especially weaker for expansion, but the blood bless is actually pretty good against a lot of sacreds, so you do have somewhat of an edge for early fights (though you'll probably still get shredded by vanheres, but that's the case for most nations anyway and there isn't really a bless that could prevent that). As an added bonus B9 makes prophet banishment suicidal, since they're usually a basic commander with only MR 10 (even less in your territory). Without B9 the prophet can make a major difference in an early battle since his H3 banishment is very strong.
Another advantage of N9B9 is that it's cheap, probably one of the cheapest dual major blesses for Lanka, while still giving you a mobile pretender. Which can let you do some cool stuff, such as bloodletting spam with a +3 pen bonus (assuming you've got a booster for B10) along with an undead army that's immune to it.

No matter what the bless I don't think Lanka is a good rushing nation, unless your opponent is really weak. You just can't use your demons in the early game to invade someone with order scales, and kala-mukha warriors are pretty bad for their cost compared to other sacreds.
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joansam
*Spicy* Crew
I see your point. I haven't really considered the utility of lots of undead seriously, as it seemed like they would take too many mage turns. Indie priests, though...lots of possibilities. I also hadn't considered the leadership of Mound Kings...

Lots of undead would also mesh really well with what I've considered Lanka's main weakness: the sacreds are too expensive to be everywhere at once. Water, castle cracking, patrolling...these are all things I'd been missing.

I'll just contest one point - that Kala-Mukhas aren't very good for their cost, with the proper bless. They may not hold up to the absolute top sacreds, but it's tough for anything else to stop them in the early game with E9N9. I also think the full +4 reinvig is useful, as there are so few of them early on that they can otherwise pile up a lot of fatigue. The protection seems to put them over the attrition rate in normal combat, even over long engagements, and obviously you don't have to bring the expensive Yogini along.

I don't use Worthy Heroes, maybe I should start. I can't see how Lanka would get an Earth mage of any skill to cast Iron Bane, but the rest of what you've described seems quite powerful.

How exactly does the BV mechanic work? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks for the feedback - I'm learning more each day.
Dom5 mod: WARHAMMER COMPLETE
Dom4 guide: EA Lanka: Boy Eats World
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Indract
*Spicy* Crew
joansam,Jul 24 2015
06:38 PM
Quote:
 


I'll just contest one point - that Kala-Mukhas aren't very good for their cost, with the proper bless. They may not hold up to the absolute top sacreds, but it's tough for anything else to stop them in the early game with E9N9. I also think the full +4 reinvig is useful, as there are so few of them early on that they can otherwise pile up a lot of fatigue. The protection seems to put them over the attrition rate in normal combat, even over long engagements, and obviously you don't have to bring the expensive Yogini along.



I don't use Worthy Heroes, maybe I should start. I can't see how Lanka would get an Earth mage of any skill to cast Iron Bane, but the rest of what you've described seems quite powerful.

How exactly does the BV mechanic work? I can't seem to find it.

Thanks for the feedback - I'm learning more each day.

Quote:
 


I'll just contest one point - that Kala-Mukhas aren't very good for their cost, with the proper bless. They may not hold up to the absolute top sacreds, but it's tough for anything else to stop them in the early game with E9N9. I also think the full +4 reinvig is useful, as there are so few of them early on that they can otherwise pile up a lot of fatigue. The protection seems to put them over the attrition rate in normal combat, even over long engagements, and obviously you don't have to bring the expensive Yogini along.



To be more precise, it's not exactly that they're bad, but rather very cost inefficient. They're very similar to colossi warrior, which cost only 35 gold. Arguably, you could say they're slightly better, but in terms of raw combat effectiveness and when compared with other similar sacreds of the area, they're only worth 40 gold at best. They cost 20 extra gold because they're not cap-only. That's huge.

For the same 60 gold that a kala-mukha warrior costs, I could recruit an indie priest. This indie priest will reanimate 4 longdead a turn for pretty much the entire game, and if necessary can also do typical commander / priest stuff (leading undead, blessing, building temples...). It's considerably better than that one kala-mukha warrior, who also doesn't scale very well throughout the game due to having only 50% darkness. And if I've got extra gold, I'd rather save it to build another temple to recruit more reanimating priests. It will also help with domspread, which is good since chaos power makes fighting in your dom more important. As Lanka you won't often much have extra gold left after having recruited a raksharaja + other mages + indie priests + temples + cap sacreds (which are superior to kala-mukhas), especially if you're blood hunting really hard (as you should).

This having been said, they can be worth recruiting if you need extra troops now, for example if a fort is about to be attacked by an enemy army now. But outside of that, they're inferior to your other options, even if you've got a good bless for them (though that's the case for all reanimating nations though. Indie priests are extremely cost effective at this, perhaps too much).

Quote:
 


I can't see how Lanka would get an Earth mage of any skill to cast Iron Bane, but the rest of what you've described seems quite powerful.



You can get E thanks to spectres. They've got an about 45% chance to have at least E1, which allows them to cast summon earthpower for 1 gem and then iron bane for 2 gems (hopefully with luck scales you should easily have enough gems for that). If they don't have E they'll have either D3 or either S or W (sometimes both), so they always bring diversity. They're excellent for Lanka. Unfortunately they come at conj6, which isn't a priority target (definitely after blood 6 / ench 6 / alt 6), but it does provide a lot of additional options for the end of the midgame and the lategame.

Quote:
 


How exactly does the BV mechanic work? I can't seem to find it.



Whenever you deal damage to someone with it, you must beat a MR check (10 iirc) or will take damage as well. This damage seems to be based off the base damage you would have dealt, but it's a bit weird. For example, with gifts from heaven you take about 40 damage back. With bloodletting it's much lower.

Edit : after having done some testing, it appears that neither twist fate nor luck do anything against BV. Which makes sense given that it isn't an attack.
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Stone Dog
Maenad
joansam,Jul 21 2015
11:43 PM
You're right - I rarely use them. I was also thinking about empowering for the ability to forge Air boosters. But for other purposes... yes, communions would be better.

That's a big mistake, in my opinion. Communions can be very strong, either letting you put up a big spell without too much of an hassle, or letting you spam some low-level stuff.
Lanka has also a great set-up for extensive communion use: cheapish slaves, good masters and great capacity for bloodhunting (blood communions are quite expensive, slave-wise).
This is especially true because, as it's been said above, you can easily put regeneration and enlarge on an already high-hp (for a crappy mage) communion slave. It becomes truer still if you're gonna use that E9N9 bless you're talking about.

EDIT: to give a practical example, enlarged raktapatas, with an N9 bless and personal regen, will regenerate 8 hp per turn. That's enough for two of them to sustain indefinitely four D1 casters spamming horde of skeletons.

EDIT 2: empowering to A4 can indeed be a good idea.
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joansam
*Spicy* Crew
Thanks! I can feel my gameplay improving :)
These indy priests do look...a little too good. Lanka seems thematically to be much more about demons than skeletons.
Dom5 mod: WARHAMMER COMPLETE
Dom4 guide: EA Lanka: Boy Eats World
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dyslexicfaser
*Spicy* Crew
joansam,Aug 9 2015
02:37 AM
Thanks! I can feel my gameplay improving :)
These indy priests do look...a little too good. Lanka seems thematically to be much more about demons than skeletons.

The great thing about Lanka is that you don't have to skimp on either one.

Speaking of undead, what are you guys' opinions on Ganas and Vetalas? Are they worth rushing Conj2 to expand with them? A pack of 20 ethereal undead with average stats for 12 D gems doesn't seem bad at all in the early game until something like Flaming Arrows comes online.

The Vetalas are a little harder to justify at Conj5, but they're really cool.

10 D gems gets you 10 Possessed Corpses, which are better than a Bandar Warrior (+4 hp, +2 prot, +6 MR, +6 morale, +1 str, +1 atk, -1 def, loses Sticks and Stones ability but is also enc 0 and amphibian, since they're undead).

Then, when you kill these 22hp beasts, they change form into Vetalas, bandar ghosts. They get another 15hp, lose a lot of protection and morale but become ethereal, gain a life drain attack AND an attack that feebleminds enemies. And everything I've been able to find online (I haven't gotten to play them in a game yet) says that they work like the viking werewolves; if the unit survives in the Vetala stage, at the end of the battle it resumes its Possessed Corpse form and is ready to go again.

I'm hoping that by the time the Possessed Corpses bite it, enemy mages will have mostly blown their load of evocation, or the Vetalas won't be lasting long. But still, how cool is that? It's a monkey zombie controlled by a ghost.
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Dr. Quackzalver
Troll
I can confirm that they work the way their description implies: you get a new zombie even if the ghost is released during the combat.

As for using Vetala(Edit:) Gana for expansion: I doubt it is viable. But the great thing about expansion is that you don't need to rely on anyone's opinion! Simply run some tests and see how well you do with a research rush to conj2 versus just pumping expansion parties. (presumably you recruit differently?)
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Porterhouse
Tartarian
I have not seen it mentioned but it might be in here somewhere, but their is a synergy between blood hunting and reanimate. If you are patrolling a blood hunting province you are guaranteed a steady supply of corpses, which can be reanimated at a greater rate as soulless rather than longdead or ghouls. Let your selfless population serve you until death....and beyond!
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joansam
*Spicy* Crew
A nice point, soulless are great for patrolling, whether it's for bloodhunting or counter-intelligence. I really need to update the guide to reflect my evolving strategies...I'm going to play Lanka in a casual MP game and I'll probably overhaul it after that.
Dom5 mod: WARHAMMER COMPLETE
Dom4 guide: EA Lanka: Boy Eats World
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Rejakor
*Spicy* Crew
Just a note: This guide opens with 'is intended for singleplayer', and people are expecting it to be a competitive guide to lanka play? Really?
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joansam
*Spicy* Crew
Haha true, this shouldn't be taken as a truly competitive MP guide. However, I would like to update its MP sections for those looking for MP help. There aren't that many Lanka guides...
Dom5 mod: WARHAMMER COMPLETE
Dom4 guide: EA Lanka: Boy Eats World
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Soyweiser
Member Avatar
*Spicy* Crew
I recall getting a lot of ghouls (in dom3) by depopulating a province, just to get a lot of people that helped a lot in keeping my walls up during sieges. I'm not sure, but I recall some of them have higher than average strength. So they helped a lot.

(I recall that mindless units have a malus in siege protection they count only as 10% of a normal unit).

And if you need patrollers as lanka, never forget the call of winds spell. Commander and flying troops. Very good at patrolling. (They have a hidden -1 at sieging, so not good at that). I used them to big effect in the past. (Yes you can use mages to summon undead who can also patrol for free, but these take up way more turns and another commander to get. So using a few air gems could be a lot more effective). And one in 3 of your Rhaksharaja can cast the spell.

It used to be that the asrapa had hidden magical paths if you GORed them. That might be gone, the danava still have them. (and become good SC's/thugs when GORed, if you are lucky and get magical paths (they can get 0-2 blood 0-2 air and always get 2 holy).

Never forget that a lot of your mages can get into a blood sabbath. And you have access to the reinvigoration spell (which works to reduce fatigue on your slaves). Add that to your already impressive slaves (they have higher than human HP, probably are blessed, and you have access to nature mages so you can give them regeneration). Really, try it some times. It is super. Not many people expect Lanka to lay down a barrage of thunderstrikes from a communion. Getting a large communion to cast darkness, regeneration, the mist form spell, and then a lot of thunder strikes can really give your mages something to do. (esp when they also have a large army of undead to serve as the meat shields).

But personally I found the undead summoning a bit overrated. As you are already a blood nation you need a lot of research. And each mage you use to get undead reduces your research output.

(Looking at the spell and paths of vanilla dom4. I miss CBM. Wind ride uses air 5? there goes the dakini alpha strike attack... :( (it was great, dakini, with a vine shield, self bless, mist form, and one other protection spell, attack rear/archers. Bye bye PD! (And with the flying their map move made them very hard to catch))
[Maerlande] Because it was a smart idea. Soyweiser was right.
The irc channel: #Dominions on irc.gamesurge.net
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dyslexicfaser
*Spicy* Crew
Why would you be dropping Call of Winds for patrollers when you have indie priests summoning up multitudes of undead everywhere there's a farm or normal province? Summon a Mound King to lead 80 of them for 3 D gems and you're golden.

Also, Lankan ghouls are Pisacha, which are pretty outstanding, for ghouls. 16 strength, 20hp.
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Ohlmann
Dom 5 Beta Team
IIRC they get a mix of ghoul (common) and pisacha (rare), because it would be *too* good otherwise.
Worthy Heroes - UW Expanded
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Soyweiser
Member Avatar
*Spicy* Crew
Ohlmann,Mar 11 2016
09:31 AM
IIRC they get a mix of ghoul (common) and pisacha (rare), because it would be *too* good otherwise.

This is also what I remember. (I think I created squads of pisacha in combat eventually).

Quote:
 
Why would you be dropping Call of Winds for patrollers when you have indie priests summoning up multitudes of undead everywhere there's a farm or normal province? Summon a Mound King to lead 80 of them for 3 D gems and you're golden.


I don't think I had the gold to just put down a temple in every province that I found. So the supply of indie priests is limited. At least for how I played.
[Maerlande] Because it was a smart idea. Soyweiser was right.
The irc channel: #Dominions on irc.gamesurge.net
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