EA Yomi advice

[Nabeghlavi]

So I played as Yomi and it was prettymuch a train wreck of a game. I liked them in Dom 3 but I haven't played it in years so I was quite rusty. Starting wise, I took their "terrible at research" quite seriously so I made an awake great sage who was strong at research and could site search almost all magic sites. Scales were pretty weak and another mistake I made was misfortune 1.

Starting out, I had a pretty bad position on a pennesula next to two strong indepedants (one was barbarians). Despite preparations, my first attack was wiped out and so we were prettymuch crippled right from the start. To make things much worse, I got several negative misfortune events that hit my capital because it was the only region I controlled. I just couldn't really get a feel for how to build their armies. The oni were undisciplined and seemed expensive, I also didn't know about the fact that they liked turmoil so I think my scales hurt them as well.

Anyway, the only thing I did right was my Hannya mage won the arena battle. And what did she win? Freakin' sandals she couldn't wear :P (being a snake lady and all) I seem to recall that in Dom 3, you always won some sort of weapon. Is it random now or is it always golden sandals?

Also, one other random question is the map had a throne that looked like it was in a cave inside a mountain. How do you get inside those caves? It had a connecting line to one territory, but my units couldn't cross into the cave.

Near the end of the game, I had some interesting summon spells. I found that fire ants were actually quite effective in battle so I was summoning those but I wasn't sure what to research really etc. So just looking for pointers on how to build an effective army, scales, magic direction and pretender. That's all :P Thanks in advance!

[Dorok]

Ha ha that's refreshing, I should never wrote anymore that I had bad luck in this game or that game. :-) Got a good laugh! :-)

[Emnel]

Oh man, it's a tought one :) Yomi is considered heavily underpowered atm, but I believe it's not all that bad. I have mostly played them in Disciples game, and that changes things a bit (mostly being able to have a strong bless with awake disciple) but it's not that awful in standard game either.
You have to, however, play to their strengths.

Strengths:
+ Your demons have chaos power - they are absurdly effective in turmoil 3. It will be easy to defend.
+ Dai Oni are one of the best thugs and SC you can get. With N bless they are 1 man expantion parties.
+ Oni Generals are great thugs.
+ Your mages are very solid.
+ You can tank your scales pretty heavily (Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, even Heat 3). That free's up a lot of points.
+ You can use all those points to get great crafting/sitesearching rainbow pretender, max other scales, get desent bless, field SC pretender or (most likely) some mix of those.
+ Your best demons are all 1 res/each. That means that you don't have to have a standing army (and pay upkeep for it). As long as you keep cash reserve you can hire huge force in one turn. That's better in MP than in SP, but still valid.
+ You have access to cheap forts.
+ You have access to skely spam.
+ You have access to dirt-cheap archers and Flaming Arrows + Wind Guide.

Weaknesses:
- With turmoil you will have much lower income than others.
- Your troops are mostly undiscplined
- Your only sacreds are two commanders and a summon.
- Your troops are expensive in gold and therefore create huge upkeep.
- Your mages are not sacred and therefore create huge upkeep.
- Your A and N levels are very low and you lack S. All 3 types of gems are essential for your thug/sc wellbeing.
- You have only access to Palisades type of fort (admin 20, defence 50 everywere).
- Your demons have chaos power - they aren't too effective in very popular Order 3. It won't be easy to attack.
- Your priest suck and yet you need to fight in your own dominion.


There are few avenues of approach and I don't know yet which is the best so here are just highlights of pieces of this puzzle:

Pretender:
- Supercombatant: You may have trouble expanding quickly with your standard troops as well as demons (at least till turmoil spreads a little) so awake SC pretender is an option. Celestial Dragon, Phoenix and Ghost King are all decent option. Thx to your tanked scales you can afford it even mixing in heavy-ish bless, or some good crafting paths or just Awe granting Dominion strength. Bless like N9 will also allow you to expand with your lone Dai Oni's while high Dom strength will make sure that your turmoil spreads fast helping your demons.

- Rainbow: You have access to great mages, thugs and SC but you lack a little bit of N, A and S to make them really shine. Proper rainbow pretender will help you out with forging, site searching, summoning and research.

- Scales: Site searching with N1 and A1 is pain in the ass so those gem-granting events would be nice. Especially since turmoil already boosts event chance. Comboing Luck and Magic will not only get you so heavily needed gems and gold but also allow you to use those cheap indy (hopefuly sacred) researchers instead of your high upkeep national ones. Growth on the other hand can help you out with that low income problem and balance out this Turmoil and Sloth.

Just pick a combination you like and go. For example:
- Awake Celestial Dragon with 9 dominion, some combat/crafting paths and Growth 3.
- Dormant rainbow Great Enchantress with Luck 3, Growth 3 and Magic 3
- Imprisoned Fountain of Blood or Monolith with N9E4 bless, high scales and/or some blood to get blood economy running.

TBH neither of those were really tested but all should work if played properly :)

Once I play more standard games with Yomi I'll most likly make it into a guide, but for now it's all i have a time for. If you have some followup questions or anything, dont hesitate to ask.

[Tomsdeli]

ok SP guy here. i started to answer relaized i was making a guide 2 hours later. their are player far more astute then me to answer in that fashoin as balance isnt even know this early minus outliers.you made it clear u played dom 3 so ill skip basic stuff like most your demons need undead leadership. ok down and dirty.

dont ever take order scales.go neutral to turmoil. choas power nerfs your own guys to hard to take any order no matter how much gold u get. big dom awake pretender is best for extra dom checks early. u dont ever want to fight in a order province. you will but u would rather dom push and get thier order sclae lowered. the neg stats hurt to much.

build temples. dom check are based off current in game dom (5 temps=1 dom)now not starting dom. 5 temples take it to a higher lvl and u need those points. dont go dom 10 unless you really want a extra point of awe for a SC pretender.

use turmoil points to buy growth. O3 vs G3 equals out like (im not looking up the desura thread but its their this is what i recall off the top of my head) 12-18 turns. going turmoil 3 growth 3 your sitting at -6%. order 3 is 15% growth 3 is 9%. rought calc is you need 40 turns to break even with a O3 player other factors aside.

due to that. and this is 100% my opion dont take sloth. you cant afford more of a income hit. in fact id suggest(again my opion) dumping spare points into it. this if anything tqake with a grain of salt and two ir threee lemons. its allows you to recuit bandits and kuro- oni later but its a slight sclae upgrade gold wise.

u can forge any booster but blood dont be afraid of drain but understand your mid game spikes lower. luck is well luck. it might be great with turmoil but it might be horrid with no gold events. gold threw luck is diminished a lot in dom 4 but u can get artifacts (const 8 items) rarely.u get a few more gems but few events but few that hand out a lot of 1 type. so skimp path and empower later.

raiding sucks. attack or dont. raiding raises unrest (choas power works off turmoil or unrest) but you risk far more then u gain. spread unrest with spells to attack high order provinces. id skip blood even with rain of toads but its your call as its so easy. also fotenote is choas recruitment donst lower the ocst of things. you get a rebate next turn for the gold it saves.

all your units minus dai oni/hannya suck. you need heavy ench for flame arrow (also gets skele spam for hannyas) be4 counters as well as conj/const to get 4 fire. or rush heavy evo for some mean dmg spam from fire or death. again hannyas might need conj again to boost fire oru can burn death/fire gems to that are spare to cast spell or empoer to use. next would be const RP boosters.owl quill at const 2 isnt bad and offsets a lot of drain. const 6 u get better boosters. on that note u dont have 100% air but u got a 25% on Dai oni or 33% oni general for const 2 owl quills. my last option (my fav) alteration. u can invun/soul vortex dai oni SC or go demon army mid game with end of weakness with a few oni thugs.

only commander worth a ♥♥♥♥ to lead armys is demon general. buy them in the 1st fort u get and 1st turn. oni generals have uses esp if u dom push hard but the neg morale is a big hit. trade all troops to him for extra morale. i myself suggest not attacking second turn ever. 1st turn buy general/demons second buy more demons. 1 extra turn nets u near 10ish oni who will alow a near infinte push with your prophet and that general.

Ko oni blow. i prefer fewer with ranged attack ( aka oni) that is boosted by my STR(cause u took turmoil) makes them good at routing some indy suqads be4 they get to you. ao oni have a stun are cheaper and ignore armour. i feel it more personal choice here. but recruit a bunch of either early .overall only bandits can be scripted for your troops . if u go flame arrows do it early or not at all. arrow catchers real oppents will use and u should know that.

as of now its not a easy faction with gold costs so high and needing to tank the primary gold scale. but stick with it. they are strong but they have huge weaknesses. you can go high scales to counter turmoil. go magic to have accsess to everything in game much easier. go rainbow and hope your troops carry till u hit that i have everything build. go SC at your own risk as i dont care for thier SC. id ignore the guy above me on this. dont ever go a bless strat unless you are rushing a global of that path. if you ignore 1 path ignore water.

if u have any specific questions feel free to ask this noob. and best of luck.

[Nabeghlavi]

Thank you both for the very detailed answers! It sounds like EA Yomi is indeed at a disadvantage. Hopefully, there will eventually be more patches to boost them up a bit, or maybe there will be a cbm for 4? I think the main thing is that their best units need turmoil and also happen to cost a lot of

Anyway, I'm going to give them another shot. I'll get the scales right this time and I'm going to play on the tutorial map. I think my random start postion did me no favors last game with 2 tough indie provinces on a pennesula. I'll try another rainbow researcher, this time with the right research. Thanks again both of you for the detailed replies. I really appreciate it and read and reread everything. I'll post how my new game goes when it's done. Cheers!

[Tomsdeli]

again not looking up the desura post but they are working on CBM already. if i recall correctly (dont hold me to exact number here) they said like 70% of the material was transferable from 3 to 4. so its not even being done from ground up just altering dom 3 CBM.

[PrawnWonton]

I haven't had much success with Yomi. Chaos Power works great with EA Lanka, but it cripples Yomi either way: Take Order scales and your units, which are normally crap, are even worse. Take Turmoil and your normally crappy units become slightly less crap, but now you have no money. And Yomi desperately needs an ungodly amount of cash money.

If their units weren't so terrible, you wouldn't need massive hordes of them to accomplish anything. It doesn't help that any sunday school teacher can drop AoE banishes on your entire army. EA Lanka can get away with chaos power scales because they can field huge armies of undead and sacred demons for free, with no upkeep. So the only thing they need money for is mages at forts. But Yomi cannot do that, they have to buy their armies. But their cost:effectiveness ratio is in the toilet. Any other nation can curbstomp a much larger and more expensive Yomi army with a fraction of the cost.

Yomi's national summons are crap, except for the Dai Tengu, which no national mage can cast. Yomi is terribad at site searching and research. Dai Onis can be good thugs/SC's, but good luck ever having the money, research, and gems to outfit them before any other nation looks at you sideways and snuffs out your existence.

I suppose if you were on a very large map, and could take a ton of provinces with no resistence, and allowed to live long enough to get decent research and a lot of Dai Oni, then Yomi might be a force to deal with. But why would anyone do that when they can easily defeat Yomi within the first year or two without trying harder than they do against independents? Having Yomi as a neighbor is a fortuitous circumstance: easy pickings for free provinces and another capital's gem income.

Maybe I'm terrible (I probably am), but I just don't see what Yomi brings to the table. If you want Chaos Powered demonic hordes, Lanka is better in every way. If you want to go for burning arrow spam, any other fire nation is better, since they won't be as bad at research and site searching.

[Nabeghlavi]

Played a game w/ EA Yomi last night where I played the 1v1 tutorial map against marvani and won. Wrote a detailed post about it but it was pretty long and these steam forums only allow for 1000 characters or something lame. Tonight I decided to give it a go again, this time random map vs 2 normal ai to see how much different it was with multiple opponents. The random map was rather bad, one opponent (marvani again) was way to the north on their own continent and didnt do much of anything while I had to battle it out with ermor quite close to me. I got 2 extra forts built and was gaining momentum, but then I lost a few key battles. With turmoil 3, it's really tough to buy province defense, castles, units, and the temples you badly need. I think their priests were just smashing my oni and you don't really have many other choices for units. Both games I played an awake, great sage rainbow/researcher pretender, scales chaos 3, growth 3, luck 1 dominion 7. It's tough to fight in enemy dominion and the game kinda stalemated. After battling it out for many turns, I lost one of my own forts and couldn't take it back so I decided to call it quits. Will give it another try tomorrow. Deathnor I read your post on the desura forums. It sounds like an interesting approach. I might try your awake monolith dom 9 Turmoil 3, Production 2, Growth 3, Luck 3, Drain 2 with A2/E2/S2/N2. I'm wary of the drain but you're the expert :P Also, can you give me more specifics on what to research and exactly what order?

[Tomsdeli]

hey now. i stated up front im solo player. and near noob as far as it can go. Sp only. atm just with units alone yomi is UP due to nothing but undiscuplined. again all my personall opion.

magic scales can force your Rp fast but u have to magic not drain and you are already way short point wise. considering u need prod 3 or luck 3 to make it back to neutral scales (in the case of luck its well kinda lucky or not) as far as income u can ill afford magic as well. that coupled with drains MR bouns of .5 rounded down per scale makes its a prime candite when u already need your scales to win.

as far as other pretender design. prod 2 can be droped for W2E3. but understand. if u drop production u lose any meaningful use of bandits or kuro oni. yomi strength lies in recruting a horde fast. you dont have gold for uppkeep and if u sloth or even netrual here you count out your only scripted troops as well as top end demon. you gain certain advantages with the resources and the tiny gold income.

dont ignore frost brand as well as water breathing for troops. tacticle option coupled with guarrented hammers from a non SC or battle mage(dia oni). your dai oni are very imp no matter which role they take. neither can ill afford to spend extra turns forging if needed. dont misunderstand they will be forging. but u have to kit out thug demon generals or dia oni in either capacity.your STR is units serves a tri capacity. SC/Combat mage/Forger. those same earth gems u can save with a frost brand can be a lot of girlde/lode stones early be4 hard counters.

as far as reaserch. if u take drain you have to hit const 2. owl quills fast are a must. they offset most your drain scale (not fatuige) and give u more MR (demons for banishments). w/o owl quills u have to be knowing u lose the reaserch race by a lot. with them u break even (much like T3G3 scales) then excel at some turn point.

From here it get tricky. evo u need to make hannyas or shift reaserchers into a battle capacity. its again a trade gold or RP. ench is much the same. minus u can flame arrow a ton of dirt cheaper archer with const 6(or a 1/40 4F dai oni const 4) for a single hannya. or mass them and skele spam. I choose option 3. alteration. dia onis can SC with no items just inv/soulvortex(they might die with 0 items but you have N2 and thistle maces and some regen rings at least so mor a thug with 0 items) or go use end of weakness or any other earth spells to buff nautral proection above thier ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6.

u can even skip hannya for dia oni f3 and pheonix to flame arrow or skip that conj spell and go const 6 flaming skulls to get F4. the path is imp but not as much as understanding.

DAI ONI carry you. like EA caleum but with more path options(and decent t2 mages) your STR win or lose games. and i know plaisade costs 600 gold. dia oni 490. if ever given a choice go with dai oni. they are that important. w/o scripts from them your mid game demons get trashed. or you have no SC. and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ forgers. Ive run 3 semi kited dai onis vs 700 chaff. they win with invun/soul vortex.

[Nabeghlavi]

Thanks for the info! That's exactly what happened to me last game. My mid game demons got trashed by enemy priests. I'll try the dai oni SCs next game, I didn't realize the drain would hurt my opponents' banishment as well but it sounds good. Also, do you invest at all in Province Defense? And how many forts should you build by year 1 and year 2? I find temples to be more important but it's nice to be able to recruit the oni anywhere.

[amuys]

Dai Oni are better used for casting in the mid-late game imho than taking indie provinces from turn 1.