EA Yomi, underrated power house.

Everyone considers Yomi a bad nation, but I think they're 100% wrong. Here's how I won my game as Yomi and why everyone's conception is flawed.

I'll just paste the write up I did for the AAR and improve on it as it goes.

About Yomi

Edit 8/16/2018
I'll give a little more background info about the explanation of why I chose everything on this pretender. It'll give some new players an understanding of why each single peice was chosen specifically and very intentionally. With this basic understanding in mind you should be able to build and grow off of this build and have some wiggle space for your own experimentation and pretender builds for Yomi. Let's break it down to 3 steps:
1. Scales
2. Paths/Prenteder
3. Expansion

1.Scales:
Must haves:
Sloth2
That's it

The reason for sloth 2 and not 3 is becasue it'll take an extra turn to recruit your first Dai Oni from turn 4 -> turn5. This might not seem much, but remember expansion is exponential. And an early turn wasted waiting for a few resouces is a HUGE waste. Other nations will have a pretty big advantage over you if you take that extra turn expanding. From my experiments sloth 3 got me around 20-30provs by year 1. With sloth2 I got around 30-40. So the two medians of 25 vs 35 you're looking at a 40% difference. That income can range from 200g to 800g (mean 500g), even taking into account of their bad scales.

So taking sloth 3 could cost you 500g per turn by year1. A price I could not afford, as that is enough to buy another Dai Oni or a fort.


2. Paths/Pretender:
a. Must be rainbow in order to gain elemental/sorcery bonus.
b. Must cover all elemental resists
c. Must have major/incarnate blesses in order to expand and fight early wars
d. Must have high research (at least 50)

a. Expanders have high costs and others don't give the low path costs that human mages can accomplish
b. Sacreds are weak and actually easily to kill with some evocation. Elemental resists help thwart some of the evocations and cold/hot auras that your sacreds will be facing. No other cheap way to get the resists to them. And definitely not early enough to fight early wars. The high cost of these blesses HIGHLY recommend that you expand and war asap in order to recup the costs of the bad scales. Otherwise it's suicide to stay turtled up beyond year1.
c. I've experimented a lot and I've only had success with regen + lucky/ethereal. Regen is self explanatory, huge hp pools = big regen. Also helps with summoned sacreds. Ethereal is very good against anything that is nonmagical, which is nonexistant beyond year 1. Every nation has access to some kind of magical dmg and will break ethereal easily. Lucky is an underrated bless. It works very well with Dai Oni's 2ndary form as it essentially gives it another chance not to drop all of his items and not be useless. It also empowers all the weak human sized sacreds that power the majority of your armies.
d. Must have alt3 by turn 4. No exception. If your pretender does not have at least 50rp each turn then go back to the drawing board. Dai Oni crumble without stoneskin, and iron skin helps it tremendously. Almost guarantees wins against indies and most human nations.


3. Expansion
Use Dai Oni. That's it. By year 1 I try to have 3 or 4 dai onis since it requires 3 turns to recruit the first one then 2 turn to recruit them with more resources, that means you should have 7 turns of dai oni recruitment then 5 turns of other mage recruitment with year1. I highly recommend recruitment of 1 namanari and rest into sorcerers.

Year1 recruitment plan:
3-4 Dai oni
1 namanari
2-4 sorcs

turn 1 do nothing. Cannot recruit dai oni because of 400 starting gold
turn 2 start recruitment of dai oni. No bakemono, no bandit, nothing except dai oni
turn 3 wait...for dai oni to finish
turn 4 expand with dai oni and recruit 1 namanari
turn 5 either another dai oni if you have enough resources/gold or sorcerer
...
never recruit bakemono or bandits. They are garbage and will waste your gold. You are not an "army" nation in year 1 (until later which you become highly dependent on sacred summoned armies). You must rely on "Super combatants" even from turn 1.

extra:
4. Research
First get dai oni spells like alt3 enchant x for fireshield and conjuration3 for summon earth power, which gives you revig. Then get conjuration 4 for shiki. Then get troop buffing and self buffing spells like giant strength and wooden army,etc. Then enchant5 for skele spam

Use alt3 for early expansion
then it's up to you what to get. Either fireshield or conj3
enchantx (I frgot when) for fireshield. It'll blow through surprise indie air mages (phantasms) and skeles.
conj3 for earth power, which should give you a netpositive on revig if you copied my pretender build. This means that your dai oni will never fatigue (the biggest SC killer in the game). Unless ofcourse it's evocated on him.
conjur4 for shiki, your new best friend. Summon them asap and forever. They will win the game along with tengus.
I think Thau3 or whatever gave giant strength for army buffing (shikis/tengus)
ench5 for skele spam with d2 mages. Start producing oni shugos or use the random d2 sorcs to raid enemy. 2 or 3 of them should be sufficient through any pd.
construction was gotten at some point. Make your own discretion. dai oni will benefit. It'll help mages summon/forge more stuff.

5. site search
Get gem income ASAP. You are a gem nation.



Here’s the strategy of Yomi. You want to focus on 3 things: 1. Bless 2. Gem income 3. Aggression

1.Yomi is a bless nation. It absolutely cannot survive otherwise. It must take heavy blesses and tank their scales down to zil. Blesses are broken down into 2 things: Major or Minor. Minor are small things like 3-5 points while Major are big point purchases like regen or lucky. With Yomi you want to take the ele/sorc bonus to get every elemtnal resist you can grab, except poison cos it’s ♥♥♥♥ and never used. Yomi has to take a couple of major blesses to win the game. With these you can get creative. From my experimentations (which I completely recommend to noobs before starting in MP) I found that lucky/regen combo was the strongest.
For expansion regen is a must. Ethereal can also replace it, but it’s useless once you get past year1 against other players. Lucky is not needed for expansion, but it’s powerful for war. It’s unremovable, applies to both physical and magical dmg, doesn’t care how much dmg you can deal, does not need a turn like regen in order to be active, and it’s useful on small HP units like Yomi’s summons. Which brings me to my next point: summons.

2.Yomi is a gem nation, not gold. It relies heavily on gem income for its summons and the spare gold for forts and mages. That’s why Yomi synergizes with Bless/bad scale combo very well. Bad scales doesn’t affect the overall performance of Yomi due to the fact that it relies on summons to make up 99% of its troop composition so it doesn’t use gold and only uses gems. And with that their summons are sacred which means a heavy bless pays dividends in long term gameplay as their troops can use their bless and are not cap-recruit restricted like some other bless heavy nations. D and A gems specifically are the most useful for Yomi for their very specific purpose: shikiome and Tengus. Shiki make up the very hard hitting, brute force of Yomi while Tengus have their strategic purpose. But mainly all you wanna do is ball it up into a massive unkillable blob of death usually. With your lucky bless your sacred troops don’t care about most army killers like EQ. But of course don’t be stupid.

3.Yomi’s ♥♥♥♥ scales require you to war constantly. You should always be at war and at the earliest convenience as possible. I was hitting my neighbor’s expansion party by turn 6 and winning. You must constantly eat land and gain more gem income in order to keep up with the war machine. Yomi’s mages are lack luster and will fall off late game. By the time turn 30s come around if you haven’t placed yourself into a most certain winning position you are most likely going to lose.

History of the game

This is the text of the explanation of how I won the game. Banter is bonus. Just pick up on the strategy and where I chose to go based on what was available to me.



Beyond_GoodnEvil is over and Yomi is the victor. For all you Yomi haters. Wake up, you guys just suck. And thank you TNN for being cool. I’ll explain why Yomi is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great nation and how I won after this recap.

So here's the run down.
Early game I started in a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ location, I had 3 land connections and 1 was a cave, so basically I had only 2 connections to expand. I got as far out as I could but I only had like 15 provs by year 1. This is pretty bad seeing how I can expand 30-40 provs ez if I had at least 5 land connections. And my scales hurt a lot so I had to move out asap. During that time I noticed Ulm was near me. I scouted his bless/troops and noticed he's pretty easy to kill so I "ACCIDENTALLY" bumped my dai onis into his expansion parties. Twice. After I weakened him by killing his expansion parties I went in on him and took him down to his capital and 1 fort. He started fighting back pretty well until my shikis and tengus came online and destroyed his armies. Then he AIed and I took my time eating his capital.

Next I had to decide whether to invade Nief or Marv. Nief was about done eating all indies and looking for more meat so I knew he wanted to war someone soon. While Marv was stuck on his peninsula so I knew he would want to “break free” eventually and attack me. I was able to diplo Nief and Machaka into attacking TNN to keep my west side busy while I eat Marv. My alpha strike was pretty strong and Marv folded right away into AI at 3 turns into the war.

While I was dealing with Mekone’s AI Nief finally noticed that I was growing out of control with 3 capitals and owning 50% of the map and attacked me. By then it was too late. My income was so huge I had no trouble dealing with Nief whom cried like a baby on domg right before he AIed. By then the game was over, Machaka, still clueless, decided to attack me to moot end. I asked everyone to AI so I can finish the game.

[kurple]

@Karsk
cont.2

As for a pretender I recommend beasts, which should be candle2 pretenders like Dragons, Earth snake, colossus. They're hard to kill and kill hard. That being said 60 barbarians will likely kill most unbuffed pretenders. Learn self-cast simple buffs like stoneskin, iron skin, fireshield, regeneration, revigoration, so on. Do not underestimate fatigue - fatigue will kill even the strongest units.

[kurple]

@Karsk
Sorry I don't own D6 right now. From what I've seen it's very similar to the past game so if you follow old advice it should still stand. Obvious changes will be bless points, and pretender building but the fundamentals are the same.

Here's the steps I recommend every noob to Dominions:
1. Pick a nation you like. Whether it's the theme, looks, or whatever. I picked Maverni from a meme.
2. Just play around 50 hours. Try every unit, spell, research tree, summons. Just fuck around as there's so much to explore.
3. Play multiplayer from 50-1000 hours. Dominions is not centered around single player. Multiplayer is the core of the game.

[Karsk]

Is there any chance you might at least show a pretender that's good for learning the nation in dominions 6?

[Twogun]

when i used to make an effort at playing fairly well, i once played yomi vs good players.

i wrote a running commentary somewhere(this may have been in the Shrapnel days-it's been a long time since i took dom seriously) on just how bad this nation is vs good players.

i remember re naming the Dai Oni 'Die Onlys' because there were SO many ways to kill them economically.

good on you though, winning with them.

[OwlRaider]

This strategy is great for small maps. For larger maps with 10+ players your terrible scales and 1 dimensional attack vector will really struggle to finish the game. You can grow very big very early but since the map is too big for you to win at that point you will find yourself fighting a coalition with people prepared to kill Dai Onis at that stage and than what do you do?

[windrider03]

Good effort.
The build is OK if neighbouring other nations with chaos dominion also. Otherwise you might soon find yourself fighting in hostile order dominion. In such a scenario even with such a strong bless there are many ways to counter a Dai Oni rush. The death scale means the you are truly dead if your rush is not successful. : )

[OOTN]

Lucky is also an amusing counter to the instant kill anti demon weapons people like to use against dai oni.

[Shades]

There are no bad nations, but its not about bad players either. Some like to experiment with new tactics and some want to perfect and hone the ones they have. Those who experiment are going to go through all the options, while those who perfect their skills choose one set of tactics that suit them, and want a nation that supports their style.

[Grey Ghost]

do people really think yomi is bad?

its one of the most unique nations. go full negative scales, and enjoy the uber thugs. the free spawn mechanics are insane if you can get rolling.

[Izunyami]

Wow, now I want to try EA Yomi lol....
Can you do the same to LA R'lyeh? They seem similar but have a different flavor to their design.