Let's Read Giant Wusses: A Dominions 5 tourney LP

[Andnjord]

YET.

Not that I understand the fine details of what's going on, but even then:

 

[Galdred]

Spoiler

The thinking for the extra Skinshifters is simple: if our main force is Skinshifter based, we might as well have enough of them for it to be effective. I kinda realized at the time that this wasn't ideal, but I don't think half-measures would cut it either - if this is what we have gone for, we should invest enough for it to work.

It looks awfully close to a sunken cost fallacy justification!

 

[Reinhardt]

At this point he's doing it just to make Grimwulf mad.

 

[sqeecoo]

It looks awfully close to a sunken cost fallacy justification!

I don't think so - it's not like our Skinshifter army is useless, it's a strong force of regenerating two-form giants. It's just that we could probably have other stuff as well if we'd balanced things better. But even then our situation is far from terrible, there's not much that can beat our Skinshifters at this point in the game and if hard pressed we could retreat into our dominion and recruit some Nifel Giants which are a terror in cold; we're not making them now since they, just like Nifel Jarls, are pretty shitty in Yomi's heat 3.

The real sunken cost fallacy would be to say "we picked a nation with Nifel Jarls, now we have to recruit them (although they are not useful at this time)"

We are losing valuable tempo though, that's for sure.

 

[Grimwulf]

The Tiniest Turn

Good. Here's hoping you don't get a chance to fuck it up.

I've only managed to scrounge up only two pitiful screenshots to share with you

Both of them painful. Let's start with this:

On the Yomi front, we're holding our army and preaching with our prophet while reinforcements arrive, but we're raiding with that same 5-strong crippled Skinshifter group (red)

You're not raiding SHIT! Look at the screenshot AGAIN, you goddamn eyefucker:

Your whole MINDNUMBINGLY DUMB doomstack of Skinshifters is currently doing JACK SHIT! Grrrreat investment! Well worth the price AND the upkeep!

Oh, and that war is going JUST GREAT! Totally fucking worth it!

As I said, our hope here is to grab 4-5 provinces here

Yeah, keep dreaming those wet dreams. Ultima Typhia (the one you grabbed by an utterly pointless backstab) and Uliathum are the only Yomi provinces you will be allowed to claim. Hinnom won't let you have Silver Grove - you'll cut off his access to Yomi this way. And he already claimed the rest of Yomi basically.

You backstabbed Yomi player, got dragged in a pointless war, wasted a whole lot of tempo, bought an INSANE amount of units - all that for TWO PROVINCES! NOT EVEN GOOD ONES!

So many indy thrones around, even some regular indy provinces. Fucking ATLANTIS fapping his frog penis on YOUR LAND, but oh nooooo. Gotta help Hinnom, forget the fact he's Atlantis' ally. Gotta b CUCKY! Do POINTLESS SHIT JUST TO KEEP GRIMWULF VEINS BURSTING THE FUCK OUT

MOTHERF

At the time, I was waiting for Con4 (which is like 3 turns away), but you can actually gear a decent Skratti/Jarl at Con2 already

WRONG!!

One of the MAIN GODDAMN REASONS to grab a Jarl early on is that you CAN'T have a proper Skratti-SC at Constr2, especially without some Alteration researched, but you TOTALLY CAN gear up and use Niefel Jarls as SC with no buffs, and barely ANY gear - sometimes NO GEAR AT ALL! All you gotta do is watch the temperature, that's it!

Jarls in Constr2+Alt1 are actually BETTER than Skrattis when fighting in Heat scales. I'll get back to it in a moment.

Skratti have inbuilt regeneration and the Ranger Boots provide some reinvigoration; beyond that any shield and weapon and you have a decentish thug.

Thugs are the ones who fight alongside your army, play a supportive role, mid-late game tools for dealing with nasty threats in enemy ranks or soaking up some damage. In other words, NOT SOMETHING YOUR RETARD SKINSHIFT FORCES NEED RIGHT NOW!

Super Combatant is an entity who takes on hostile armies ALONE, or is accompanied by a mage or two casting buffs. THAT's what you need. That's what you CAN'T DO WITH A SKRATTI before reaching Constr4 and preferably some Alteration also.

Your "version" (more like lunatic's raving fantasy) of Skratti would be barely capable of beating low PD's. Which you could do with BASICALLY ANYTHING ELSE!

Still, we will want to eventually search for water and it's the Skratti who will be doing this (one of their many tasks) so it's not exactly a wasted turn.

Using Skrattis for sitesearching is so obviously, unbelievably stupid, I am honestly starting to think this LP is a troll attempt. You can't be serious. Nobody is THAT clueless.

Fine, I'll bite.

You must either search with Niefel Jarls, preferably the ones with A path, or wait til Voice of Apsu and use this instead. Niefelheim has more W gems than it could possibly need, and VoA is cheap.

Wasting Skratti's turns on sitesearching, on the other hand, is the equivalent of falling asleep instead of making a turn during a chess tournament. See what I did there? I was polite and gentle in my criticism. But I basically called you an idiot.

But we shouldn't be relying on pure Skinshifters any more, certainly.

The same turn:

We're making two Jotun Jarls and a few Skinshifters.

L - Logic Lolrandom

However that's why I decided to join this low-intensity war in the first place, to have something to do while our stuff gets online.

EXCEPT YOU'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING! YOU'RE KEEPING YOUR ARMY ON YOMI'S BORDERS, TOO AFRAID TO ATTACK!!

You had A WHOLE LOT OF OTHER OPTIONS, ALL OF THEM MADE SENSE!!! You picked ONE SINGLE OPTION that DOESN'T!! piece of

We also start a fort in the amazon province - like I said, a lab would have been sufficient there.

Which isn't reason enough to NOT BUILD A FORT, ofc. That would be offensive to God of Random Decisions.

We can also see that our non-prophet Jotun Jarl attached to our main army will be participating in a deathmatch this turn. This is a random event where all nations can send out one commander to fight it out in a round-robin free-for-all until a champion is crowned, who gets a decent artifact. Our Jarl is strong and fairly capable of winning and perhaps becoming powerful enough to thug it up with our future Skratti, while not being a terrible loss if we lose him. A decent bargain, so I'm sending him in.

Waste of Jotun Jarl. Even if he wins, he won't EVER become a "powerful enough" thug, not even close to that. At this point, you should have been so ashamed of not recruiting a Niefel Jarl, it would be reasonable to visit a hospital, check for brain tumors or sumth.

We're making two Jotun Jarls and a few Skinshifters. The two Jarls are cause we might lose one in the deathmatch this turn so we'd like to have a replacement

Or NOT send one of them to the deathmatch at all

, and the second is really an opportunity hire so we don't waste a commander point, and our capitol is currently our only fort with a temple and may remain so for a while, so I thought I might as well get two of these guys if I'm buying one anyway.

Now THAT's a really fancy way of saying "just wasting gold here guys coz I dunno wtf am I doing"

The thinking for the extra Skinshifters is simple: if our main force is Skinshifter based, we might as well have enough of them for it to be effective. I kinda realized at the time that this wasn't ideal, but I don't think half-measures would cut it either - if this is what we have gone for, we should invest enough for it to work.

You DON'T EVEN USE THEM, FOR FUCKS SAAAAKE!!!

JUST SEND THEM TO THEIR DEATHS ALREADY, AND STOP RECRUITING NEW ONES!

If they win you a battle or two - WELL, GOOD! THEY WERE MARGINALLY USEFUL ONCE!! - and if not, YOU WILL FINALLY START MAKING INCOME THAT IS CURRENTLY WASTED ON THEIR FUCKING MAINTENANCE!!

Grimwulfian commentary.

As always, most of the stuff he says is spot-on

It's hard NOT TO BE SPOT-ON when commenting on your freaking random "playstyle", basically doing ANYTHING ELSE would be BETTER than what you do in this LP!

I think I've mentioned this although I might not have made it totally clear: a recent patch (after Grim here stopped playing) reduced the size of bakemonos to 1

Would a Niefel Jarl here even be usable against Yomi in his heat 3

Isn't a Skratti better in every way for that task?

How do I play Dominions anyway? I watched a YouTube video, but still having a hard time with this game. I am also gay

I was sober until this point. But now I'm drunk enough to explain the fucking 101.

Here is a Yari bakemono:

Spoiler

Note the chess pattern in their formations. That's because of Undisciplined trait. The ones behind will start running long before they get close in melee range due to morale 8. Okay, make it 9 - let's suppose you're fighting in Yomi's dominion. Morale 9 is still shit.

That's a Niefel Jarl in HEAT 3:

Spoiler

Looks sucky, right?

FUCKING WRONG!

Same Jarl with a random armor and Horror Helmet, all within Constr2:

Spoiler

Now it's SUDDENLY very tricky to kill him faster than he regenerates, provided your bakemonos only have dmg 15 and maybe a few rounds of combat before the fear effect kicks in. Remember, those are Heat 3 stats (THREE! It only takes a MOMENT to plan out your Nifel Jarl movement/timing to make sure he NEVER gets to fight in Heat 3). In, say, Heat 1 it would be near damn impossible to kill the thing with any number of bakemonos:

Spoiler

But there is ONE THING a Niefel Jarl can do that a Skratti CAN NOT! The single thing that makes him VASTLY SUPERIOR in early wars in ANY temperature. The thing that makes him take down those bakemonos without ANY RISK WHATSOEVER, Heat 3 or not.

I WANT YOU TO NAME THE FUCKING THING!

Prove to me your brain wasn't hijacked by reptiles COMPLETELY! AND DON'T ASK DAYYALU OR MATALARATA, figure this one out yourself!

We are losing valuable tempo though, that's for sure.

You are losing your MIND!

And so am I

 

[Grimwulf]

After doing a quick&dirty test in HEAT 3 as mostly naked Niefel Jarl with your bless, I confirm that he was brought to roughly half hp but took down 120 bakemonos ALONG WITH PD 25 with no problems OR injuries. The battle didn't last long enough for him to fatigue out.

Ideally you'd want something more than a Horror Helmet and random armor before going on Yomi's cap but that's not the point.

The REAL point is, it took me 5 mins to do a dirty test. You are WASTING ENTIRE TURNS, PRESUMABLY THINKING OVER THEM AND PLANNING AHEAD, while playing a goddamn TOURNAMENT, and you STILL have the audacity to post shit like "kinda afraid of bakemonos guize pls don't hate"

 

[sqeecoo]

Turn 17: Arena DEATHMATCH

First bros, a point of clarification:

I really appreciate Grimwulf's detailed point-by-point criticism, but I don't reply to it point by point because a) I'm lazy and then we'd never get to the update; b) he's mostly though not always completely correct; c) I think the flow of the LP is better and more fun as presentation and critique than as a point-by-point discussion. However I will comment where I find it fun or feel I have to, like here:

You backstabbed Yomi player

Just to be clear: we didn't backstab Yomi, we politely and honorably ended our 3-turn-warning non-aggression pact (NAP3), waited the requisite 3 turns, and only then performed our majestic attack. We were not in any way dishonorable.

After doing a quick&dirty test in HEAT 3 as mostly naked Niefel Jarl with your bless, I confirm that he was brought to roughly half hp but took down 120 bakemonos ALONG WITH PD 25 with no problems OR injuries.

Your idea sounds good and I was definitely underestimating the power of Jarls at the time, so I decided to replicate your test. Nifel Jarl in Heat 2 with Horror Helm, Enchanted Ring Mail, and Blessing + Skeletal Body script. However it didn't go so well:

I guess there's at least a chance of this happening? I'm too lazy to test it more times to get a feel for the probability, but it's at least a risk I'd say. And notably unlike the Jarl our Skinshifters would kill a massive amount of bakemono even if they lost - which the tiny Yomi can't replace well, basically winning us the war even if we lose the battle. Whereas if this happens we've lost a massive investment for no gain.

Again, I definitely underestimated the Nifel Jarls and I should have been recruiting one or more around this point in the game for sitesearching and defense if nothing else, but I'm not really sold on using them in Heat 3 just yet.

On to the turn, however! Let's look at the DEATHMATCH first. Only three champions have been sent, our brave Jarl, Abysia's Warlord prophet, and a febleeminded suicidal mage by Hinnom (he's just trying to get rid of it). Everyone else is too cowardly to participate.

Warlords are strong dual wielders but we will have our regening giant, perhaps we have a shot. The first match is between Hinnom's suicidal giant and the Abysian, so we get a chance to see him in action:

Holy shit. I don't think we can beat that with our Jarl. Like, ever. Those stats are crazy - it looks like his heat power (the opposite of our Nifel's cold power) is giving him a +3 bonus to his stats as if he was in heat 3 temperature. Interesting, I guess perhaps you keep the stats from the temperature scales in the province you are in during the arena battle? I doubt the arena itself is heat 3. What's that "Shortsword" he's using though?

Oh god. 3x vs larger beings. Well, at least we should be happy we didn't send in a Nifel Jarl to die to this guy. This two handed length 1 "Shortsword" that I believe Abysia found on a hoburg (halfing) independent commander during expansion is an example of Dominions humor. Get it? It's it's short and it's also for short people cause it does huge damage to beings larger than the user. So it's called a Shortsword despite being two-handed. Har har. Another such example of Dominions humor is a mercenary group called "The Snake Charmer" which is a horned serpent named Putin leading (i.e. "charming") 50 crappy militia. Fun fun fun. And I mean that unironically, I love the Dominions sense of humor :D

We also catch a glimpse of Abysia's bless:

Okish but nothing overly impressive. The Burning One sacreds don't really need that much help with attack skill since they are berserkers, and +80 undead leadership seems excessive (though some is nice on Abysia to help ferry around their Hellbread troops). Combat far caster and reinvigoration are great on Abysia's strong mages, so that part is totally sensible.

Well, let's see how our dude does:

Ouch. Obliterated by a single 108 damage hit. Ah well. At least he was... brave?

So Abysia decisively wins the DEATHMATCH:

They get the Champion's Helmet:

This is actually a pretty useful item for this Warlord - Warlords are good troop leaders, and now this guy will add an additional +2 to troops under his command due to the inspirational bonus from the helmet. Pretty good improvement of the role he has anyway, leading troops.

As for our normal battles, the single raid we launched last turn was a success as we just fought a tiny amount of PD (province defense):

Now the situation looks as follows:

On the Yomi front we're raiding onward into (orange) with our group of brave cripples. Hinnom asked to move through the province we'd conquered previously (black) so he can merge his north and south forces most expediently in (green). Eh, why not. I don't really mind the one-turn loss of these two provinces - we're taking (back) black with a single commander this turn - if it speeds up Hinnom getting to siege Yomi's cap, at which point we can take our provinces and leave this front, letting Hinnom deal with the lengthy siege. The faster that happens the better, so we are happy to be FRIENDLY and helpful to our ally in the war and allow him to pass through our lands in the name of expedience.

We're also consolidating our guys in the province west of (green), so we'll be ready to move in if Hinnom looses/chickens out. We have a pretty fair deal with Hinnom regarding Yomi's capitol - whoever does the most fighting gets to keep it, with the rest of the land split evenly (Yomi's initial expansion to the north was as poor as his expansion in our direction, so there's really not too much to take). We can also see that Atlantis has grabbed two of Yomi's eastern provinces along the coast of that lake (east of red).

In other news, we see a large Atlantean group to the NW (blue), presumably intent on taking that throne there. He's using Living Pillars here mostly, which are incredibly tough dudes with decent damage and horrible encumbrance (they fatigue out very quickly). This would indicate his human rainbow mage has some sort of reinvigoration bless along with other rainbow bless bonuses. Rainbow bless here means a bless with multiple small bonuses (like +2 attack skill) from multiple low-level magic paths on the pretender god; the opposite is for instance our regeneration bless, from a single high path on our god.

We also found another useless, unrest increasing Brigand Lair site in Senextro (red). A joyous occasion. However we've also found 3 death sites for a total of 4 death gems per turn, bringing us up to +10 death gems per turn (red underline). That's pretty good luck, and will translate into some useful skull mentors to boost our research when we finally reach construction 4 in like 2 turns. As for infrastructure, we're making a lab in the amazon province (north of red) and recruiting a Gyga; we've finally stopped with the Skinshifters, but we are adding a few monkey archers in the monkey province since we don't have money for another mage anyway. The monkeys won't go to waste regardless - at an extremely cheap 7 gold each they are decent patrollers for when we start blood hunting.

That concludes the turn. Join us next time, when we'll continue our Sitzkrieg against Yomi and fail to recruit Nifel Jarls!

 

[Reinhardt]

And notably unlike the Jarl our Skinshifters would kill a massive amount of bakemono even if they lost - which the tiny Yomi can't replace well, basically winning US the war even if we lose the battle.

 

[mondblut]

Hinnom asked to move through the province we'd conquered previously (black) so he can merge his north and south forces most expediently in (green). Eh, why not.

Someone's getting cucked out of even those two pitiful provinces he expected to get from that "war".

 

[sqeecoo]

Someone's getting cucked out of even those two pitiful provinces he expected to get from that "war".

Hey, the LP is not called Giant Wusses for nothing. But at this point I'm fully expecting to get these provinces back immediately - I always try to represent my thinking at the time, and I won't intentionally foreshadow any possible betrayals in the future. THE SUSPENSE

 

[Demo.Graph]

Your idea sounds good and I was definitely underestimating the power of Jarls at the time, so I decided to replicate your test. Nifel Jarl in Heat 2 with Horror Helm, Enchanted Ring Mail, and Blessing + Skeletal Body script. However it didn't go so well:

I suspect that fatigue from SB might have been a reason for this, unless you've positioned behind to rest.
You've made me look through the numbers and if I'm not mistaken it went as follows.
It's -1 def per 10 fatigue, -1 atk per 20 fat.
So after casting SB you've turned a jarl from 16+6=22 def to 20 vs jari atk of 11. It means that first attack to-hit chance went from 3% to 5% and cumulative to-hit chance from 6 attacks per round went from 31% to 48%.
SB had increased jarl's prot against spears, but even without it a jarl in heat (no homo), in heat 2, has 13+18=31 prot vs 15 dmg jari (or is it 15-1?). A difference of 16 (or 17) means that even without SB most damaging attacks would be glancing blows, unless it's a crit or an exploding damage roll. And with 20 more fatigue from SB you've just increased a chance of a headshot.

But at this point I'm fully expecting to get these provinces back immediately

SPOILERS

Keep going, it's great.

 

[sqeecoo]

Hmmm. Not sure where you are getting the defense numbers - the Jarl has 16 defense in Heat 2 which includes shield block, not 22. And 14 body protection (where is the +18 from?). SB gives pierce resist, halving all damage from piercing damage (I think after reduction from prot) and making it an AMAZING spell to cast against the bakemono who all have spears. Half damage, basically.
Well worth the total of 19 fatigue the Jarl was at after buffs: each caster level above the required halves fatigue, so SB is really 10 fatigue + spell casting encubmerance (6). The Jarl was scripted to hold after casting, that's a good point, but the PD has a dude with free wolves at the start of battle (this was true in Grim's test as well) who engaged the Jarl in melee basically immediately after the second spell anyway.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Edit: Ok, disregard me, dom inspector (and you) say that 18 def already includes parry. Then yeah, SB fat shouldn't be that significant, leading to 70->87 hitrate increase.
18 is an additional prot from shield strike.

 

[vazha]

Someone ban the kkkommissar from this thread. He's wasting valuable rage points that would be better invested in bringing the glory to Redlabored. His latest rant has almost the same word count as his last updatan, goddammit.

 

[sqeecoo]

Edit: Ok, disregard me, dom inspector (and you) say that 18 def already includes parry. Then yeah, SB fat shouldn't be that significant, leading to 70->87 hitrate increase.
18 is an additional prot from shield strike.

Dominions math is HARD. It's like scripting big Dominions armies: you feel you've got the idea, add up the buffs and send your guys forward, no biggie. But you forget an obscure rule or two that completely messes up your plan and everything goes horribly wrong. We'll have at least one example of that in the future of this LP.
Here I think the situations is even worse for our Jarl - because of the huge density of the bakemono (6 per square), the Jarl will be getting massive harassment penalties from all the attacks he is taking, making his defense almost nullified for most of the attacks and having most of the bakemono do on average some damage as they are just hitting the prot 14. A bit less protection actually since piercing attacks reduce prot by, what, 20%? I don't even remember at the moment, that's one more thing to you gotta take into account. Goddammit. So it's basically a race between the bakemono damage and the Jarl's massive HP and regen on one hand and the Jarl's fear and cold auras routing and freezing the bakemono. It can definitely go in the Jarls favor, but it's a risky prospect - although I'm too lazy to do the actual math to see how risky exactly.

 

[Reinhardt]

Someone ban the kkkommissar from this thread

You can't ban the KOMMISSAR! KOMMISSAR bans YOU!

 

[Galdred]

Someone ban the kkkommissar from this thread. He's wasting valuable rage points that would be better invested in bringing the glory to Redlabored. His latest rant has almost the same word count as his last updatan, goddammit.

That energy is far from being wasted!
It is what makes the thread insightful and a good part of its entertaining value!

 

[KoolNoodles]

Reads thread, notably Grimwulf contributions.

 

[Infinitum]

Bumping for the blood slaves.

 

[Helly]

Who won?

 

[sqeecoo]

I'm having a bout of laziness, but this is not (necessarily) over!

 

[Infinitum]

Won't anyone think of the blood slaves!?

 

[sqeecoo]

The issue bros is that there has been a pretty big patch that heavily changed the Jotun line of nations specifically, and now running my old turns under the new patch messes them up. Does anyone know of a handy way to have a second installation of dominions with the previous patch? Currently trying to remove one from the inventory, maybe that'll work.

I'll provide a recap of the game at least though, if I don't manage to solve this.

 

[Infinitum]

That's disappointing. Oh well, these things Illwinter happens. Eagerly awaiting round 2 then?

 

[Galdred]

We really need some closure for this LP! A short recap will do, as long as there are enough "hooks" for Grimwulf to comment