Thanks Lucid and Sy for the series; these tournaments are some of my favorites on RU-vid. I love the analysis combined with the narrative, which came nicely full circle with this AAR episode. Grateful also for all the players enduring the marathon and adding comments along the way. I'm really looking forward to the next one.
This tournament needs some special awards. Like Arco taking the "villain award". TC: "against all odds" or "tactical master" award. Agartha: "ungrateful underling" award. Ulm: "creative build" award. Pan: "dud" award. Erythea: "pointless pettiness" award. Vaetti: "chill city-state" award. And Gath, other than the title, should have gotten the "diplo wizard" award. It's crazy how they managed to never be attacked by anyone the whole game right up to the last turns, all while being in the top 3. That's a massive achievement, even more impressive to me than anything they did on the battlefield (and they did some cool stuff)
Ulm took Withering Weapons rather than Stygian Skin along with their Regeneration/Fire Shield core, which made the build less of a hyper expansion build. I think we should still credit the build with being super creative and something that will likely inspire a lot of folks in the future.
Also worth mentioning that Xibalba might have been a fantastic early game matchup for that build; so given their position in late expansion, their best play might have been to eat Xibalba and then fight Arcosephale only once they're a two Capital power.
@@DemonsthenesDominionsI am not sure about that Xib's hard hitting sacreds with few ozzies would have probably smashed the knights as they did have 10 fire resistance.
I don't think Agartha's message is toxic. He is complaining about how things went down, but he also isn't throwing insults or anything like that. I will say, once Gath's messages made it clear it was more than 2 people working on the turns, it did cross my mind that that was an advantage for Gath. More people just means you're able to do more things. That being said, I don't think that means a hydra system is bad. And it especially doesn't mean there should be rules against people helping - that would be impossible to enforce anyway.
Multiple people working on turns was mostly the case in the very late game with DoD-farming and several huge battles per turn. But we have been talking a lot all the time and making important decisions together, which was a part why the game was fun for me.
I will say it's very difficult to manage as one person in that competitive of a lobby. I subbed in for just the last few turns of Xibalba where I generally replaced that whole team of probably 95% of things since I enjoy late game and due to overwriting Toldi's contributions on accident a couple of times. For each turn I put in 10-12 hours for a mediocre to bad scripting showing, and probably 8-10 hours of generally failed diplo. A lot of the scripting is an overwhelming amount of stuff and options, and communication just takes time. Not too unlike diplomatic talks in real life. My only issue with hydras is when it slows the game down, but I think that's manageable and it's worse to have main players like Fulic drop out. Maybe the Gath team could share their time commitments per turn to kind of show what the game required to win?
@@DarkSideCookies As a general rule, I was doing all the management work, optimization, logistics and all diplo. I was also making strategic decisions. Bernard was doing all kinds of testing and DoD farm setups, and during the really complex turns guys were doing the scripting, but scripting was always something we all went over several times after someone had created the initial script.
@@DarkSideCookiesNo calls, a lot of discussions and sending screenshots and turn files in Discord. As for the time spent, I don't remember at this point
Thanks for casting this series and thanks to all the players for offering us such juicy gameplay. This game showcases nicely some of the truly crazy things that can happen in Dominions multiplayer :D The series was well worth watching! Special thanks for the extra time spent (on top of many hours spent doing the turns) on sending messages to Lucid or writing comments here with additional insight. Always interesting to know what the players are thinking! Looking forward to seeing the Dom6 tournament ;)
More praise for Xibalba: How early they got big Ozelotl factories going on a nation that doesn't naturally get the necessary cross path was just incredible. Their economy work of figuring out how to make the Ozelotl swarm work early was really impressive. I think their key error was taking swiftness instead of shock resistance on the bless. Maybe swiftness helped expansion, but other than that, it didn't deliver visible value. Whereas the lack of shock resistance cost them battles with TC and the ability to strongly contest Gath's swarms of Storm Demons.
Thank you casters for the great final breakdown! Looking forward to watching the rest after work today. Xibalba was out of position too where all those new citadels didn't have labs except for the fort taken from Erytheia. The army that lost wasn't meant for storming, but it became a storming army for entertainment purposes. I'm really happy with seeing Ery do a lot of cool things in that battle, and it would have been difficult to take without wailing winds and winds of death to soften things up. The blue background is from the Ark artifact. The large army with 200+ dark vines was nearly entirely magic phased in. It would have been better if I redirected that stuff to the beast bat fight as well where the thing I wanted to try was horror bombing after doing a magic phase raid to horror mark. I should not have done my first horror bomb into Gath's DoDs, but it seemed as good a time as any to put in some practice scripting it. Regardless though, it was funny putting out enough stuff that all those Shed ran out of lightning. Many of the smaller mages were on their way to a mass Life After Death party I was planning on using to fix my upkeep (really easy to organize with perpetual storm).
I think that "centaur" will become a curse word to the future descendants of Tien Chi. On a more serious note, I loved this series Lucid. I love the scale, complexity, and endless fantasy of this game, but I am not really good enough to bring out those elements when I play it. Being able to see people play at the highest possible level of skill with accompanying commentary was really cool.
Thank you a lot for this magnificent job of casting that tournament! Lucid and Sy, you are incredible! I think Maven is Lawful Good (honest and proper), Hezekiah is True Neutral (the most realistic) and Bernard is Neutral Evil (paranoid horror lover)! Very balanced team with incling to Good and Ordnung. About what Aron has written. Hydra system is trully powerful and it decides a lot. BUT you can't forbid a player from taking teammates, make consultations, test extensively and so on. People who want to win will do it anyways. The only way to oppose that is to make the timer is rock-solid, like, 2 days per turn and not a second on top of it. It will make the competition more 'fare', but the quality of play WILL suffer, so... it's fine both ways I guess. Again, thanks a lot for showing this incredible game to us. I learned hella lot from it. Cheers!
I am not good alignment since I am ok doing dirty things as long as they remain undercover. Definitely not evil either. Lawful most probably as long as laws make sense. I think that Lawful neutral is an appropriate description of my character this game
As for the hydra rules, I think they're important for keeping the quality of tournament up as the game goes late. That being said, you shouldn't be allowed to bring in new/more people to your team unless it is to replace someone that left
I don't think a requirement of only bringing in new people when someone leaves makes sense. It's more fun to play with team members and to have someone who got too busy still around to pitch in where they can, even if it's just 10% of the scripting, it can still be a huge help. I am optimistic that Dominions 6 late game will be a bit less punishing than Dominions 5; the new gem duration feature means one can spend a lot less time carefully checking gem counts for having 3x as many as you scripted to spend, which is unfortunately a major time sink in dominions 5 late game turns because you can lose huge armies from giving someone a couple gems too few for the number of magic phase gem baits that you'll face. (This happened to TC in the Pythium region). Some of the quality of life changes to scripting and finding items seem impactful too. But I think the late game will still be a slog.
It's kinda unavoidable - bringing in other people, that is - like beyond Agartha's insinuations that hydra-ing invalidated a sense of individual accomplishment in specifically a game labelled "the tournament finals" dominions is a game with a community that is very social and there's a ton of practices like mentorship and the like that just naturally happen. So it's both impossible to prevent somebody from saying "hey friend of mine, check out my script for this battle, I don't play as much LA as you do, you might know something I don't". Is that bringing somebody into the team or not? It just will sorta happen. Time spent per turn based on how many people put thought into something cannot be policed. UNLESS, just do a blitz finals next time. ez pz yeah do that instead that'll go over well
One thing that I don't think was given enough emphasis was Xibalba was able to take heavy casualties repeatedly and rebuild to be a threat. They had difficulty beating other nations' doomstacks but nobody could ignore their several medium threat Ozzie armies even after they lost several stacks of them in multiple wars.
I think this Xibalba was a poster child for why WH is a lot more impactful of a mod than people give it credit for. Their early focus on Ozzies despite not having a hellbless build for them seemed very influenced by them getting the mod hero to summon some.
Also, thanksfor showing some of last turn battles me and DarkSideCookies spend quite some amount of time to script when everything were already decided. Really appretiate that❤.
Thanks for the amazing series! A truly heroic effort, both for all the players, and well as you and Sy for casting. This is really a fitting end to Dominions 5 - we really got to see the craziness that Dom can get up to. My favorite part of the tourney was, just from a coolness factor, the centaur sages exclusive armies. It's one thing to have a balanced comp with multiple threat vectors, but it was so cool to watch 200 sages drop masses of gifts and portal out, or casual squads of 15 sages running around raiding. Otherwise, we got to see tons of immaculately scripted armies.
Thank you Lucid and Sy for the insightful commentary and sharing your thoughts and predictions throughout the game, and consistently uploading videos for over a year. Looking forward to learning so much more in the Dom 6 Tournament Finals!
The Erytheian had an important error; he spent his 4 fire bless points on 2 attack and 1 morale; that would have been much better spent on 4 points of morale to help his mages deal with Wailing Winds.
1:18:44 The easily forgettable point here is the war against Arco where we won a large fight against his mage\sacred stack and got a whole lot of land including the cap out of it. Ended up being #2 in provinces after this. Far easier and far more profitable than Marignon war. A period of buildup after that (and we didn't fight TC when everyone did) led into the Vaetti war and the first spooky doomstack.
01:11:20 About the importance of the Artifacts. They have actually a huge value because they are unique. So, getting your hands on some artifact will deny it's value from all others. Soulstone was the most important, making Garmonica + Planar Boots allowed us to use Lumber Harmonica SC, we owned the Ark, the items helping DoDs farming (Aguelmer and Crown of Overmight), boosters, gemgens, battle artifacts including Mage Bane, Summit and even Oathrod of Kurgi and ALL THESE VALUE was serving Gath and WAS DENIED from other players. There were almost no competition. So essentially it gave us the perfect tools to work with and means to turn the tide of potentially unfavorable battle. F.e., we haven't actually implemented it despite me asking Maven to try to do that at the end of Vaettiheim's war, but using Oath Rod we were ready to FM his dropping Idol if we could predict where it lands. Or Lumber could wipe a huge besieged army alone without risking the valuable troops sending them to Storm the Castle. That's the flashy stuff, but the value from economical artifacts like Soulstone, Draupnir and from unique boosters we used every turn is actually even more substantional and important. I was disappointed because, as it seems, people were pursuing their own idea of how to effectively use their limited resources, and that's fine, BUT they were neglecting the real race for the artifacts happening right before their nose, lost it and as result unwillingly gave away to Gath a huge advantage. I mean, I may sound rude, but I am actually just disappointed, because even in a free for all 4chan game usually there are a lot more competition for the artifacts than I met in this finals. I am not saying that the level of this finals were lacking (no, it was incredible!), but still I think my point is more than valid, and some players can improve their view on Constr 8 and Constr 9 in dom 6. I love artifcats 💖.
Yeah, feebleminding stuff with no resist check using Oath Rod is a super cool thing It is just that maybe Idol is not the ideal target cause it is not easy to catch It is also true that economic advantage certain things give you might not be visible but is in fact huge The amount of wolves and werewolves we summoned over 60 turns is just enormous and that allowed us not using other resources on patrols etc, Draupnir over 50 turns is also 10K gold which is very valuable in times of Illwinter and Storm, and so on.
I would have been getting construction 8 for artifacts next had we had a breather, but we got dogpiled circa turn 50, and we needed every research point going into battle magic to survive. I have to say, it remains inexplicable to me that people somehow thought that leaving a position 2 Gath free to scale without interference while dogpiling TC circa turn 50 would advance their own paths to victory. I spent all my diplomatic energy on trying to avoid that outcome, because it seemed to me that Gath would most likely win if not contained at that time, and I feel quite vindicated in that opinion. I think a really important thing to understand about the "alliance all game" diplomacy strategy is that the alliance is only good for the player who wins off of it. In this game, as with the TC/Bogarus alliance in the Lernean Hydra game, such alliances often mean the nation/player with better late game scaling wins. And this time that winner was Gath, as most players would predict just given the strength of blood magic in LA, where population is not a significant constraint to blood economies.
Thanks for casting guys! Next time around it might be better to do nations in order of elimination? Get the fast ones out of the way before you talk about the big players.
Gath. 23:39 In my opinion, Marignon players were one of the strongest this game. Looking back at it, my war against them (and it was a 2v1!) was by far the most complex among other wars I had. I think they did almost the best they could have possibly done in that situation.
I think he's a good player, but he had pretty big mistakes. Marignon had a slow expansion and wasn't ready to fight either Pan or Gath in their second war, despite Gath taking a late game focused greedy build. Giving up two forts to Pan and one to Gath before taking a proper fight meant losing the war as soon as it started. Meanwhile, he spent many of his blood slaves on Devil production that he didn't deploy even though they were an effective counter to the Kohen Gadol thugs that burned most of his gems and ruined his armies.
@@DemonsthenesDominions The initial plan was that we would have had an ally vs pan in a couple of turns. So it was played passively as to not take a major loss prior to our ally joining in. But our allies had their nap with TC ended after Pan and Gath jumped us, ruining that.
@@FrenZyyGaming1yeah I know, and of course it was really hard as LA Marignon to have a great game opening where you're ready to take a 2v1 from richer neighbors that early, because you get a trash starting army and mostly high resource troops, and that makes the early game quite challenging no matter the build. My main gripe is the Devil stack rolling out too late.
38:00 T'ien Ch'i have undoubtedly played a great game, likely the best one overall when it comes to tactical layer. P S. I would like to point out that Gath was not a part of the first coalition against TC, Gath was the attempted peacemaker (because of the own selfish reasons😅)
I would personally have found the series more interesting if it was more focused on the cool battles and the analises were kept shorter. I found myself just going through the video timeline just to watch the battles and skip the rest. Maybe have a separate video for more in-depth analises when the game enters a different phase or when the status quo changes a lot. A suggestion.
Kinda glad I didn't watch this series. From this summary, it sounds like a boring storyline where the entire game was decided by a single alliance. An alliance which was essentially predestined to happened due to the temperament of the players in charge, and there are no actual interesting choices made.
I think if you watch that series, you'll see some of the coolest Dominions fights on RU-vid. Sure, the two nations that ended up on top at the end had a long term alliance, but there was no guarantee their alliance held, and regardless I don't think what's interesting about watching Dominions RU-vid is the mystery of who won. And there's tons of interesting story that cannot be compressed into this format. What's cool to me is the actual fighting and interplay between all the game's mechanics, and seeing how players defeat armies that most intermediate players would struggle to fight at that stage of the game. You'll get a ton of that from watching this series.
I'm still playing 5. Ppl who solely play multiplayer, which seems to be most feedback, do not realize how relentlessly unfun playing against the AI is. It's global super eyes of god from turn 1, using invisible commands like 'target commanders' on ranged units like poison slingers, invalidating thousands of gold in PD by exploiting how unbelievably stupid the PD is (because it's on attack instead of attack closest) with 10 separate squads of 5 units to juggle aggro, the way it will perfectly execute 'attack rear' or 'attack commander' orders, while your troops will ignore 'fire archers' orders to shoot anything including their own troops rather than the AI's special designated 'not to be targeted' units, the morale cheese where entire squads route after a few casualties because it's advantageous to the AI. In single player, you aren't in a 1v8 against your obvious opponents, there's like a DM regulator who attempts to balance out the game on every turn. Meanwhile the devs balance out fun quirky stuff like twiceborn transformation as if that is the critical flaw in a game with an AI that cheats on a level that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any other tactical strategy game. Not worth the $.
Well, you can cheat back on it. I am doing just that same sometimes when I play SP when I feel like it. Needed to be said, that cheating in MP is disgusting and absolutely pointless activity just to ruin people's time. I am totally against it. Returning to the topic, just make it fun for you. Dominions got a lot of great mods as well. They can make you feel like YOU are cheating against AI. I mean, your point are valid and correct, but you can try to change YOUR OWN way of enjoying the game with a bit of efforts and it will shine brightly anew for you, I swear, cause it was just that for me.
I've spent countless hours playing solo against the AI, and it really only got ruined for me once I started doing multiplayer. The resource and gold cheats make more sense when you realize all the things the AI can't do. The AI can't do anything about strong blesses, doesn't really use battlefield enchantments, doesn't know how to blood sacrifice, wastes virtually all its gems on some of the worst summons, frequently has terrible blesses itself, often charges pretenders in alone, can't kill thugs and the list can indeed go on. You can go entire single player games without seeing a significant mage commitment since it frequently prioritizes PD and priest recruitment first. I would encourage you to think of PD as some minor helpers (~6 PD) or as a way of doing diplomacy against the AI (50-100 PD). I wouldn't think of it as something to win battles for you by itself. You supplement 6 PD with actual troops and mages, and for 50 PD you give at least a mage with some body guards to do something like Mass Protection. Generally though, don't leave the PD alone to suffer since you can't script it. You'll want to protect it in nearly all cases. The AI attacks when it thinks it can win because it has more on the border than you do so you can manipulate the AI into silent peace deals with large amounts of units. Playing against the AI then with that knowledge it becomes fairly easy to control things except if you get jumped on by too many enemies too early. Once you get certain spells the AI can't do much.
AI cheats in basically every strategy game. Sometimes a lot; Master of Orion and Master of Magic had just incredible unit production multipliers back in the day to make up for them being pretty dumb. Also worth mentioning if you're buying 40 PD, you can afford to buy an extra Indy commander and some bodyguards and place them where you like... But I've not experienced the issues you've talked about in my single player games, so haven't felt the need.
25:00 I actually think it is the exact opposite. Marignon was threatening deathball each and every turn because of the sailing factor, and mobility is king. And it is the exact reason why coastal start was a great decision for him. The big flaw though was his inability to take the UW provinces which should have been a high priority when planning the build
If a dev makes a conscious decision to leave a feature (PD) half-assed and useless so that it can be more easily exploited by their map-hacking, cheesy, cheating AI, are they earning their $50? they might as well work for Riot on LoL.
PD definitely isn't useless, but I do think it is fairly cheesy in terms of frequently having commanders that just sit at the back and get sniped by fliers/flankers or even archery at times. Even if you PD dump 40 or 50 PD you still don't get more commanders so the PD is very cheesable. There are obviously mitigations (don't PD dump, leave some extra non-PD commanders/troops with the PD, etc.), but I do think it would be nice if at some level of PD (maybe 20, maybe higher levels like 25, 30, or every 10 or what not; maybe higher on non-fort and lower on fort?) that you at least had a full compliment of a stand at the back fighting commander (knight/melee/etc.), a stay at the back simple caster, a priest, and a fight in the troops commander (like a barb commander) - all with some guard commander troops. Something that makes it so that PD needs to be legit beat rather than very easy predictable commander cheese. I suppose something like that is probably modable though if someone wants more quality PD. (note I disagree with the overall criticism of the devs though)
