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A quickie video. 15 minutes for 16 provinces by Turn 12. Started expanding on Turn 2 with Starting Army and 6 Flags. Was recruiting Hands of Justice by Turn 4, and they simply do not die unless utterly overwhelmed. Had pretty decent indies nearby for expanding, but was conservative.
Once the forts went up, aside from good income, they could spam Flags, which would win against enchanted xbows pound for pound, only limitation being that you need Temple spam for the numbers.
Stupidbless works by giving 3/4 chance to avoid a lethal hit, and unlike Ethereal it works on everything. All hits of zero HP and below are considered lethal, so Undying's kinda broken (good job whoever first noticed this, but didn't report it as a bug). As such, unless a hit outright kills the target with >19 HP in damage in this case (>10 damage if already wounded down to 1 HP), it takes a minimum of 16 hits on average to kill something, even if they're easy to hit and have no protection to speak of (Flags). Hands of Justice *are* a little harder to kill, so increase that multiple. Then factor in regen every round healing them back up. Blood Vengeance is just a way for low attack troops to deal some damage while tanking - not too many crossbowmen have high MR.
There legitimately are good methods of expansion with Royal Guard and high scales. 3 is enough added to your starting army to usually capture a weak to middling indy province, and it snowballs from there. Can be a struggle to make more than 12 provinces in the first year, but your provinces will be more valuable due to scales.
A note on positioning. While this won't always work on players, the AI's pretty simple. By putting troops towards the rear, you're pulling their troops away from their archers and mages, lowering the accuracy of said in the process, and giving a chance for the faster troops to separate themselves from the slower (all the better to consume them piecemeal). By positioning near a corner (but not quite totally at top or bottom), you're giving your troops better odds to catch a wide angle of incoming troops with Attack Closest (can also choose Attack Cav or Hold and Attack Fliers if you suspect their presence with an adequate number of troops to counter wide angle flanking with successful Attack Rear checks). While you generally don't want to position in the rear against summoner type mages (elementals and skellispam on Throne provinces mostly), Stupidbless doesn't care about Elementals, and Mari H3 smackdowns light Skellispam.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1336612967
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1336616436
Went ahead and finished the game since it was fun. Scales were trash, but the sacreds were dirt cheap and spammable, and Luck 3 spit out gold and gems quite well.
Upon reflection, Mari might be a little too strong now. While still not the fastest expanders, once they can recruit ~6 Hands per turn, it's easy to make an expansion party every 2 turns. Flags, which should be weak to crossbows, chewed them up. Chewed up everything, point of fact, except for high MR units with broad AoE (abominations, particularly). Mari has unimpressive crossbows, but easy access to Flaming Arrows and Wind Guide for mid-game, and Angel SCs from Astral and Blood for lategame. No native Death for Skull boosters, but Lamia Queens can bootstrap them in, and they have blood.
Didn't really need any of that, though. Flags rolled over everything. Only reason the game lasted anywhere near that long is thrones were positioned fairly far away, and I didn't focus on them when first getting the tech to do so. Eh, so I'm bad - Fun with Flags!
Obviously several other major blesses could be used with trash scales to make the sacreds powerful in expansion but that has the disadvantage that trash scales inhibit the use of many national features. Bloodhunting and Blood sacrifice are two features that suffer badly when death scales are used so I prefer to avoid them. Also the old mages die like flies every winter.
My own practice game used a much more modest rainbow bless that still made the sacreds useful in combat and gave decent scales that makes it worthwhile spreading the scales and doing research and bloodhunting. Imprisoned Great Enchantress with 3 in all paths and 4 in astral allowed a mix of buffs to attack, defence and damage, Solar Weapons, Unaging and +4 extra damage. This lets the flagellants hit stuff with 2 attacks at 10 attack (usually only 8 attack and 6 def) and when they do hit they hit ultra hard and the HoJ are pretty decent sacreds although far from exceptional given their chassis.
Expanding with a mixture of assassins and a prophetised Admiral to sail along the coastal provinces proved easy. Just use prophet to build one early temple and after that missionaries can ferring troops around and build temples and palisades. Once you need another expansion army recruit another Admiral or Inquisitor for inland expansion for better troop morale and proper formations and use 2 or 3 Missionaries to help with blessing all the sacred troops. I found that shielded Indy heavy infantry made a good front rank to draw fire and pin the enemy troops and then the hard hitting HoJ and Flags would sweep around and massacre.
Ah, and you're right about Blood loving Growth (who doesn't?) scales, but in LA games there are enough 10,000+ pop provinces that you can bloodhunt down without hitting the 5k diminishing returns - wasn't really a problem. Fallen Angels with Shrouds on were pretty comical, though.
Nom, dunno if it's been reported as a bug yet - don't really think it is. More like an oversight. In experimenting with ways to beat it, I've landed on a solid Fateweaving build (works great on EA Machaka) that rocks its socks off.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1337131012
I know it's nothing for player driven sacred spam to overwhelm an AI army, but those 30 Valkyries hit me in the rear with better than even numbers and Thunder Weapons and were still soundly stomped by my ~24 Lion Warriors who hung around to play.
AoE attacks from things like Abominations (and earlier cone attackers like Salamanders and stuff) also seem potent. Then again, breath weapons have been hugely buffed in Dom5 (Catoplebas are absolutely devastating now). Point is, it's Stupid, but counterable - kinda like LA Ulm.
Massed LA Crossbows will indeed shoot the Flags and even the HoJ to ribbons if they face them but that's why I use the Indy shielded HI front ranks to draw most of the fire. The sacreds follow in behind and hopefuully avoid a lot of the fire. Alternatively, with the good scales and the magic paths LA Mari has it is not a problem to build several powerful crossbow armies ourselves using Flaming Arrows, Wind Guide and Arrow Fend and fight fire arrows with fire arrows, probably to our considerable advantage since we have everything natually available as soon as the research is done unlike many nations. We just have to be careful to keep our firepower armies with massed crossbows separate from the armies relying on HoJ and Flags as friendly fire is still a horrible problem in Dom 5 and it is usually not worth trying to combine massed melee with massed firepower in the same battle.
My middle game strategy once my pretender arrives is to cast Gift of Health. This is very strong for the Flags as it both removes their afflictions over a few months and makes many of the limpers and cripples useful in battle plus it adds a nice HP buffer if we fight inside our own dominion. And that's where blood hunting and blood scarifice comes in of course, against many nations we can push our dominion and then steal their lands. Gift of health does rely on finding a source of nature mages to site search for gems before the pretender arrives but they seem fairly common in my practice games so far, I've always had at least one type of nature mage in my first 10 expansion provinces and we just have to prioritise getting 2 or 3 nature mages in year 2.
What I want to do in my current LA Mari game is investigate how effective the assassins are in the middle game. I've already proved to my satisfaction that they can be very useful in expansion and a group can clear many indy provinces cheaper than an army beating even HC commanders fairly reliably. Barbarians commanders seem tough and mages in throne provinces have bodyguards now and often kill several assassins before dying to RNG. However, in the middle game we can boost our assassins with several arts that should make it much more reliable to assassinate most commanders even the difficult ones. Lifelong Protection is the obvious item but Bottle of Living Water is another good one. The assassin can use his own crossbow to avoid closing to combat or use a better magical missile weapon or spam skeletons using Amulet of the Dead. Equipping a shroud (with my bless) would add several useful stats aiding surviveability and extra damage both in melee and for missile combat, especially for assassins that have a useful Heroic ability from the hall of fame.
Ok need to play a few more turns now, just started blood hunting last turn.
On a side note, for those who credit an overpowered bless with expansion, here's 16 provinces in 12 turns with no sacreds at all using the aforementioned Royal Guards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4w3UwCx4Us&feature=youtu.be
It's nice to have lots of gold. =\
First turn: recruit an Admiral and 2 assassins plus as many HoJ as can afford.
Second turn: Prophet Admiral and recruit 3 assassins and more troops. Send the 2 assassins to province A.
Third turn: Send prophet and all troops against one province. Assassinate 2 commanders. Send other 3 assassins to province A if needed. (helps if you use the Troubador or Starting Captain to ping the province to find out how many commanders there are). Recruit more assassins and troops.
Fourth turn: Use prophet to build temple. Assassinate any commanders left in province A. Send Captain or Troubador to ping province A (should capture it if all commanders dead). recuit more stuff etc.
Fifth turn: Recruit Missionary and Flags from temple. Attack another province with prophet. Move assassins to provinces B and C etc. Assassinate commanders. Ping provinces to count commanders etc.
It's far from optimised and I was surprised just how successful the assassins were versus priests and commanders (90 % or more). A lot more testing would be needed to find the best targets for assassins versus just using troops.
Basically it sacrifices a few early commander points for a quicker expansion when you don't take a "Stupidbless" or exaggerate your production scales to recuit a lot Royal Guards (which affects Bless and magic paths on pretender). The early research points lost from recruiting assassins versus mages should be recovered by getting better expansion and earlier recruitment of mages in expansion forts.
It seems to work and is a way of expanding with LA Mari, not sure if it is particularly good.
Need some item to make the assassins win reliably from Con 0 or Con 2. Blacksteel to start, then Coral Blades? Might have to try.
Shrouds on Assassins with Stupidbless are pretty.... T.T
Basic gear wasn't significantly impacting their win rate (even Con 2, which can be a reasonable first research target).
Probably be a good rush strat.
I actually tried to expand as LA MArignon with pretty heavy bless(using hands of justice) and imprisoned pretender and it works quiet well.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1527872179
Hands of justice with this bless under blood surge have pretty beasty stats, but their protection is still low.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1527878804