Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Dominions 5 Mods. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
A Guide to Therodos - Telkhine Spectre; Crossposting from Steam!
Topic Started: May 6 2016, 09:19 AM (4,147 Views)
suppenit
Member Avatar
*Spicy* Crew
Two words: Rigor Mortis. It takes a while to get a mage able to cast it (I used Revenant + Skull Staff + master matrix + two communion slaves + death gem overcast, could be substituted by Mound Fiend or pretender), but the spell makes a huge difference in crucial battles and has a nice synergy with spectral soldiers.
aka olli!, bumpjack
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
KoboldLord
*Spicy* Crew
suppenit,May 15 2016
06:03 PM
Two words: Rigor Mortis. It takes a while to get a mage able to cast it (I used Revenant + Skull Staff + master matrix + two communion slaves + death gem overcast, could be substituted by Mound Fiend or pretender), but the spell makes a huge difference in crucial battles and has a nice synergy with spectral soldiers.

Where is Therodos getting a caster for Rigor Mortis? Therodos has neither native S nor native B for communions, and their native D access is 1D without a 1/400 random slow-to-recruit cap-only mage. Seems like this plan pins a lot of hopes on a single unit, while competing EA nations often get the same thing from recruit-anywheres.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
suppenit
Member Avatar
*Spicy* Crew
Therodos needs awake pretender with death magic anyway to search for death sites ASAP. Rigor Mortis is so cool for spectres, it is OK to hope for single unit (it is _single_ in early game only) and it is OK to plan pretender to forge accessories for the spell. Luckily the same magic path D4 is prerequisite for covering battlefield with Darkness - other great spell for undeads.

Slaves can be provided by slave matrices forged by pretender or by lizard shamen\astral sorcs if one was lucky to find them.

Competing armies have other drawbacks, like vulnerability to fatigue drain, poison, cold and fire fatigue drain, what isn't case for Therodos. National strengths are not to be missed.
aka olli!, bumpjack
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zonk
Dom 5 Beta Team
I have tried some SP with an awake God-King, dominion 9 and Death 3/Cold 3.
Base magic A4W4E4, so in 'dog form' A5W5E4.
No reason to be in human form until you need to forge or wield weapons, as you lose hands but get better prot & HP.

I found the 'get some ghosts, let Foul Vapors kill enemies' expansion strategy quite impressive, and as soon as I got some research the pretender can actually use his paths to help kill the foes quicker (with 3 paths, it shouldn't be hard to find an usable spell to help the spectres while poison does its thing).

With only 2-3 turns of capital spectres I quickly took 3 low level thrones, something I'm not sure many others awake expanders could have done with comparable army support.
Had to avoid undead provinces, but then that is the case for many expanders too.

Of course, MP is a very different game...but in a blitz, it *might* just work?
Anyone else tried it?

EDIT: I should specify, his good expansion was *on land*.
In the sea he might do worse, because with mermen & triton being so fast they would make contact with the spectres and there would be less time for them to be poisoned.
On the other hand UW you don't have to worry about undead indies and you're not going to get shot at by archers while you wait for the poison to work so...maybe it could still work.
NATION MODS
Spoiler: click to toggle
OTHER MODS
Oni Spectral Weapons Zonkmod
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
TheSHEEEP
Tartarian
Quote:
 
I found the 'get some ghosts, let Foul Vapors kill enemies' expansion strategy quite impressive

While I agree that it is effective, something that has kept me from using it en-masse is that you do not only have ghosts. You'll have some Melias as well as Daktyls and Kabeiroses (ssi, ssis?), none of which are immune to poison.
So you either need to build one-trick armies with Hekaterides and the odd spectral commander or risk poisoning your mages.

Quote:
 
With only 2-3 turns of capital spectres I quickly took 3 low level thrones, something I'm not sure many others awake expanders could have done with comparable army support.
Had to avoid undead provinces, but then that is the case for many expanders too.

Yes, I would say Therodos has one of the strongest, if not the strongest early expansion armies. Spectral units vs indies is just unfair ;)
And it works without needing any kind of bless or support. Not that you'd have the scales for that, anyway.

Quote:
 
In the sea he might do worse, because with mermen & triton being so fast they would make contact with the spectres and there would be less time for them to be poisoned.
On the other hand UW you don't have to worry about undead indies and you're not going to get shot at by archers while you wait for the poison to work so...maybe it could still work.

I'd say that UW indies being stronger than their land counterparts is true for Therodos as well. The greatest dangers come from those indies that attack very fast (their armor doesn't really matter). With many attacks, there just is a higher chance that something comes through.

What surprised me the most is that your undead units not being mindless is less of a burden than I thought. For "normal" soldiers, they still have somewhat high morale, especially when lead by Melias or Hekaterides. And for undead, they have kinda high MR, so you can't just banish a large army away. And even true undead killers like solar rays are slightly less effective.
Their biggest downside is the low armor value which you can do precious little to help with until much later in the game. Or somehow use large amounts of N1 casters for "mass" protection, but I don't know if that is a clever use of a large amount of N1 casters...

But on the other hand, if those freebies had a notably large armor as well, the spectres would simply be overpowered, even for Dom 4 standards ;)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zonk
Dom 5 Beta Team
Melia have N1, so base resist 2 and the ability to cast Poison Resistance with Enchantment 1.
If they're not casting that they'd need to suffer 5 Foul Vapors hits to eventually die, assuming no other damage, so not too worried.

Daktyls and Kabeirosi are a problem, though. Human troops & kouretes/korybants, I guess not really.
With Death 3 and other trash economy scales, you're not getting many of them anyway (leaving aside the recruitment limit), are you?

On spectre morale - the base isn't exceptional (goes from 9 for archers to 13 for Kouretes), but they do alright thanks to melia and long weapons (and berserk for the sacred).
It helps that now they receive the regular +1 morale from own dom rather than -1, wasn't always the case.

Also, spectral ranged weapons UW are quite nice and unique, even if tritons & mermen have > 10 MR. That was another nice change.

I do like how spectre Therodos plays now, at least early on; but I still wish the Kourete/Korybant part of the nation hadn't been crippled so much.
NATION MODS
Spoiler: click to toggle
OTHER MODS
Oni Spectral Weapons Zonkmod
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
TheSHEEEP
Tartarian
Quote:
 
Melia have N1, so base resist 2 and the ability to cast Poison Resistance with Enchantment 1.
If they're not casting that they'd need to suffer 5 Foul Vapors hits to eventually die, assuming no other damage, so not too worried.

True, of course. Totally forgot about that ;)

Quote:
 
I do like how spectre Therodos plays now, at least early on; but I still wish the Kourete/Korybant part of the nation hadn't been crippled so much.

I even like how it plays late on, when you got loads of forts down (Therodos is a true turtle nation) and can start swarming. If you get there, of course.

But yes, the Kouretes now are simply a trap. Even if you have lots of forts and Ephors summoning, the number of sacreds you get is not nearly high enough to warrant a high blessing strategy.
And two sacreds per cap turn is a waste of gold that should go into fortresses. If they were recruitable anywhere UW (with fort+temple?)... maybe.

And I agree, that is rather sad.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Zonk
Dom 5 Beta Team
Bumping to share a recent discovery - projectile weapons that can fire underwater do not suffer the 50% chance of not working when Storm is up.

This is relevant for Spectral Archers and Peltasts, although they still suffer the Storm precision penalty.
NATION MODS
Spoiler: click to toggle
OTHER MODS
Oni Spectral Weapons Zonkmod
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
iSeenUB4
Maenad
Zonk,Apr 7 2017
01:23 PM
Bumping to share a recent discovery - projectile weapons that can fire underwater do not suffer the 50% chance of not working when Storm is up.

This is relevant for Spectral Archers and Peltasts, although they still suffer the Storm precision penalty.

This is true for UW fights, I thought I had mentioned it somewhere, I was wondering if storm affected them, it seems it does. Trying to imagine a phantasmal arrow that fires underwater versus currents and goes straight but gets affected by a storm :D

Well then again we can say its a magical storm haha
Check out my YouTube Channel! We host Dominions, Strategy, Adventure (PointnClick) and Management LPs and Guides:
iSeenUB4's YouTube

Check out my guides:
EA Therodos
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
« Previous Topic · Academy of War · Next Topic »
Add Reply

Skin created by Nikku from Zathyus Networks Resources