Vanheim Vans too OP

[Night]

Played a campaign months ago, quit for the same reason I'm qutting this one....
http://prntscr.com/url1z6

Ive tried two different races, both got completely annhiliated, no matter what unit i produced, vs these vans horsemen, 800 units vs 200 :/ Kind of pointless playing with vanheim next to you when they just send 20 horsemen and capture your fortress then stack a bunch more on it and destroy your army with a 4:1 army size ratio...

Probably wont be playing dom5 much anymore after two consequetive bad experiences vs the same single unit, out of the hundreds the game has in it. Kind of a big waste of hours of my time when I can enjoy other games and actually have a chance at winning, instead of basically watching the CPU steam roll me with 50 units.

Ya. Keep looking over my screenshot with the taste of disappointment in my mouth. Wish I had known there was turn 1 imbalances before purchasing the game, kind of really just defeats the entire point of enjoying any of the rest of the game if i can

A. spam vans horsemen and steamroll the CPU every game or

B. expect to run into vans horsemen and get steamrolled by CPU.

Kind or makes the rest of the game lackluster, like why spend 850 gold on my top commanders when i can just go vanheim and buy a few horsemen for a fourth the price. Or why invest in research when i can just go vans and rush territory and spam some more. Like I actually had a reason to play and explore the game before knowing 1 unit wins the entire game :/

Lost hours of my time twice to 1 unit in the game. Why would I bother playing again.

[mergele]

Yep, killing trash and generic infantry units in arbitrarily large numbers is exactly the thing Vans do.
Getting rid of these types of units its precisely what magic and research is for.

[konon.ymir]

It's tricky. I would say that good sacred units like Vans are more balanced than they appear at first glance. They are an effective strategy that it is important to be prepared, but there are many other strategies that are important to use.

The first thing I can point out is that more expensive units tend to be more cost effective than cheaper units in straight up melee fights. Vans also cost 65 gold whereas you mostly have Hatun Runa's which cost 5 gold apiece and longdead, which are generally lumped into the freespawn category. The Hatun Runa's fall into the militia category and have exceptionally low morale and combat stats relative to their price. Furthermore, since you're playing Nazca, your units take up more space than human units which makes them worse in these kinds of fights, but they make up for it by being able to fly.

Vans also have glamour and are mounted so they are good at fighting while outnumbered and tend to take fewer losses in battles which they win.

Also of note is that 31 Vans died in this fight. That's 2015 gold worth of units. You lost 1757 gold worth of combat units, not including the royal Mallqui and longdead/Supayas. That is nowhere near as bad of a trade as you think it is.

Spells would also make a huge difference in this fight, so it's important not to dismiss magic out of hand. It's important to know what your top commanders (the royal Mallqui) were actually doing in this fight.

Lastly, we have no idea what kind of bless, scales, pretender chassis you have, it is totally possible to gimp your pretender in ways that give you a disadvantage.

[Razor Feather]

There are definitely ways to deal with them. Dominions is a game full of tactics that are extremely powerful in some matchups but worthless in others, and the key is in finding the right tools for the job at hand. Weak spammable troops are often practically incapable of harming high end tough units, as their attack and damage is so low that they very seldom overcome defense plus protection of their target at all, and if you have say a handful of good units mixed in with a lot of bad ones, your stronger units can get crowded out or routed by the weak ones.

Dominions is also generally just not a game where numbers alone are particularly indicative of strength. A monster pretender with the right setup can massacre hundreds of units with no support in one battle, if the enemy has nothing that can get through their defenses. However, they can then die extremely quickly against a modest number of mages with the right spells.

Also though, if you are really stressing about vans in particular, they don’t exist in late age at all, so you can play that and not need to worry about them.

[Uncle Al]

There's a counter to everything, that's the beauty of Dominions. Look at what did work - you lost 390g worth of Aucac Runa archers and they killed 715g worth of Vans.

You're trying to fight incredibly high defence mounted units with glamour (which basically means if a regular soldier, by some absolute miracle, manages to hit them, the glamour makes you miss the first time and you have to win the lottery twice to land a blow).

High defence + glamour doesn't give any protection at all against missiles (or spells) which is why your archers did rather well.

Other things that work are anything that entangles (nets, vine spells etc.) as if they're entangled their insane defence goes to zero, units with incredibly high attack skills (berserkers), area of effect magic weapons like flaming swords and area of effect spells of all kinds. Also anything with an damaging aura like a bog beast's poison clouds will absolutely wreck Vans all day long.

Human players will usually cover a lot of these weaknesses with a bless, but the AI picks blesses fairly randomly, and even against a smart human opponent there's always something that works as you can never cover everything.

Ultra high defence cavalry are tricky opponents for many people, and there should be tons of discussion about how to beat them if you search the forum. You could try searching for 'ponymen' as that's a slang term for glamour cavalry, or search on the individual nations - Helheim uses very similar units (Helhirdings).

[Exanthos]

I played a disciples game not too long ago as EA Abysia where I was pitted against both Helheim and Vanheim. They got the jump on me and blitzed me to my capital, but after I organized, I easily reclaimed all my lost land and more from them by spamming falling fires, fire elementals, and spacing out my fire-aura sacreds. I'd say EA Abysia is a hard counter to van/helheim because their heat auras and all aoe spells will remove glamour.

Just because your playstyle doesn't work against a faction doesn't mean that no playstyle does. You have to adapt to play this game well.

[scavenger]

Won't lie, have had some fights over couple games with vans used against me and they were not as effective as the pic you showed. They actually died fast, but in terms of skill, they are ok, the fact their attack/defence is ok along with a ranged option makes them a pretty good unit at first.

But will say this, 1 battle involved me using the unicorn knights (knight of avalon), and would say my knights won by a landslide. Granted it was due to them healing injuries so I can just constantly send them out to fight with few true loss's due to injuries.

Another battle involved quite a bit a elephants, won't lie, if the battle is big, I usually end up losing quite a few of those fella's, but the payout in the damage they cause is usually much greater with having around 30 of em causing as much as about 160 kills in one battle(about 27 of em died of course). So using a affordable unit with plenty of hp and trample is a pretty good sacrificial unit if you want to try to kill stuff for sure, not gauranteed but it has worked well for me unless its against a mage heavy army.

Trying to take down the unique like units with what is basically fodder won't work well unless its a fodder army that also has some decent skill. There is several nations that have some good fodder units but can't remember the name sadly.

But as others here said, magic/research can help where just units can't. That is how some units are turned from op to useless due to a research in a magic getting done then suddenly your dozen or so basic mages are suddenly able to rain down fire balls from afar or zap with lightning strikes.

[Zymeth]

Helheim is OP, Vanheim is slightly better, but maybe still too strong. YS is the worst for me - they are like Vans, but with very good armor, shield, firebearthing, fireresistant (or ice, one of these), and amphibious. With right bless, they are basicly unkillable, while Vans still can be killed with arrows or by many elite units.

edit : We can talk about conters, but in reality - a proper bless on these units (even Vans), makes them sometimes impossible to fight off in your first war.

[konon.ymir]

Also, just to clear things up, Glamour doesn't make a unit avoid the first successful hit against them. The effect that does that is Twist Fate.

[Twogun]

use aoe evo spells. and those vans will die in droves. use undead or swarm spam to occupy them while your mages spam the evos. you will lose very, very little.

you think cpu vans are hard to kill? wait till you hit MP.

listen, if failure causes you to quit, dominions isn't for you.

[Eldritch Gentleman]

You've got a horde of flying units, and literally three mages that's able to cast earth meld. Bring along some more mages next time- you can use earth meld to pin down the elves and make them vulnerable, strength of giants to make your units hit harder, and if you have the research, maws of the earth is going to wipe out swathes of the enemy while leaving your flying units untouched.

[Perro Grande]

Your 850 gold mage is useless without a decent amount of research.

Look I never really play Nazca but other MA nations like banderlog can fight Vans using mages and thau2 researched and just mass mindburn them along with as many units as you can field between them and your mages to give them more time. Don't forget to use communions to keep the mindburn barrage constant.

What I do know about Nazca is that your units generally suck, a nation like Man or Ulm could fight vans with their own recruit-able units.

If you played multiplayer you would see the other players also use the commander vans with a bunch of items that can solo kill hundreds of units, but then when you cast Charm on it the enemy might ragequit / go AI.

Vans main weakness is that they are weak to ranged attacks.

[onomastikon]

For the OP: In addition to the strategic advice here, I think the most important thing to add is that Dominions need not be Dark Souls -- you can very easily just turn down the AI strength if the challenge is too high, or also don't play against Vanheim -- you can adjust everything in game creation. You could also play small maps 1v1 against vanheim to practice, inversely. Or try something entirely different until you get a bit better, the possibilities are nearly endless!

[scavenger]

Well, have learned something that, makes some obvious sense. But its been said that magic can help you greatly if using fodder isn't enough. Had finally finished a game by grabbing the last throne that was inside lizard lands and there was a honest 700+ mage/priest army hanging near it. Don't think I ever saw mechanical dragons, siege golems, ancient ones, terra dragons, and juggernauts get destroyed so fast, they didn't even get halfway before nukes started landing.

Only way I won with that army near, was that the throne was underwater...
AI loves to spam units, especially if it is apparently their research army

[TheMeInTeam]

Single heavy thug could wipe that entire army, it does not have much mage support.

If they don't have fire resistance, spamming out some fire elementals would ruin glamour + cause vans to hurt themselves. Extremely effective if AI didn't take magic weapons, useful even if it did.

Similarly any battlefield wipe spell they don't resist would screw them over too.

[Uncle Al]

Originally posted by konon.ymir:

Also, just to clear things up, Glamour doesn't make a unit avoid the first successful hit against them. The effect that does that is Twist Fate.

Yes, sorry for the unclear phrasing. Glamour acts as mirror image 1, so each successful attack has a 50% chance of missing, maximum of one forced miss. It's still hell on high defence units, but not as good as twist fate.

Incidentally a twist fate bless on vans is positively disgusting, as the effects stack.

As a total aside, does anyone know if glamour commanders with 2+ air paths get more than one image from glamour, as they do when they cast the actual mirror image spell?