Countering Evo (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb)

Fireball-b-Gone.

Foreword

Newer players to mp often talk about evo spamming like it is the default mode of dominions, or their terrible trouble in dealing with it or armies they have lost to it. Sometimes screenshots are shared of 40 mages shooting gifts of heaven at stationary, block formation guys.

I'm writing this guide because there are simple things you can do about this problem, and these things are why more experienced players often say evo sucks.

Preconditions

There are certain things that you should have in general almost regardless of what your enemy is doing. If you don't have them you will lose regardless of deploying evo counters - the evo counters will often still work, it just won't matter, as you've lost for other reasons (even if it's still Fireballs getting most of the kills on your men or whatever).

Have a plan; bringing infantry to a battle is not a plan. Bringing cavalry to a battle is not a plan. Bringing archers to a battle is not a plan. Bringing mages to a battle is not a plan. A plan is looking at how the battle will unfold, what you've brought, what you've scripted, what things you do to the enemy, what things you tank, and determining (correctly or incorrectly) that you will win.

Sometimes plans can be quite speculative, if you don't understand the game mechanics or haven't gained knowledge of what the enemy army is composed of or scripted to do. However having a plan is still superior to no plan. The 'default plan' of 'throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and hope it sticks' does not work well in dominions.

Bring a damage mechanic; Humans with maces or bows or whatever are rarely a good damage mechanic. They deliver it slowly, miss, and often are negated by enemy armour or buffs. They require a lot of time to do much damage and certain spells or tactics can entirely negate anything they are doing and turn them from an asset into a liability. Foul vapours, elemental trampling, str-boosted sacreds - these are damage mechanics. Evo can fill this role, if not countered, or if certain steps are taken to counter the counters.

If you bring no real source of damage that will kill the enemy army with any kind of speed, and the enemy brings a crappy source of damage (like fireball), the enemy will win. Not having a damage mechanic is often why evo is seemingly the cause of a victory - a battle went to turn 37, giving mages 37 turns to toss inaccurate damage at a big mass of idiots and thus rout them.

Hedge your bets; bring a bit more than you need, put a trailing line to guard against flyers, add an extra communion slave, secure a retreat path, add an extra gem to the guy casting the important spell - if your plan is too bare bones, you will tend to lose when one random thing goes wrong.

And the important part here is, you can't figure out if your plan was a good one or not if you lost due to not hedging and then a random spire horn guy stabbing your vapours caster. Which is very much key to making have a plan work.

The Meat Of The Sandwich - Countering Those FILTHY Evocations

Line Formation - No, really. Mages are terrible at hitting spells on troops.
Terrible.

Your average mage has the eyesight of an 80-year old. With cataracts. Recently illwinter changed precision so that mages no longer automatically miss fast moving units (regardless of if they're moving) but they still over-lead units (even stationary ones or ones that move 1 square) or just miss. Line formation is, was, and remains the primary means of countering evocation use.

Mist, Storm, Darkness, Solar Eclipse - These spells all vastly lower precision, making mages that already are prone to missing miss harder. They can quickly become a far greater danger to their own side than to yours (or to everyone). Casting Mist alone can cut damage from evocations to a quarter of what it would otherwise be. This is the second most powerful means of countering evocations, and combined with line formation is by far the most powerful and often the easiest counter that shuts down evocation hard.

Evo-Baiting - Mages with a small squad in range will often shoot spells at that squad rather than moving up to cast spells at something out of range. Mages with a juicy box-formation target will often prefer that to casting spells at a line formation of lower-hp or fewer/square troops (mostly hp). This can be used to buy several turns of time from even 'huge mage stacks' to execute your own plan (40 thunderstrikes blowing up some ogres while you toss 20 quickened earth eles into their doomstack is always fun).

Painting Resists - The spells that grant elemental resists only grant 5 resist of that type (other than poison). This might not seem like much when you're looking at '22' falling fires damage or something. But most 'evo' spells are affected by armour/natprot or rely on secondary effects that do far less damage - thunderstrike, the posterchild spell for evo spamming does the vast majority of its damage from the secondary 9-aoe 1-damage (+roll) armour-negating effect. With 5 shock resistance, that expensive, inaccurate spell kills at most 1 square (if it hits). Likewise, fireball relies on Heat Shock to be less than a flaming waste of time, and 5 fire resist counts as 10 vs fatigue damage. 1 mage casting Fire Ward or w/e can negate the effects of 5 or 10 mages casting evocations, all by themselves.

Basic Buffs - In general in dominions, if you have buffs you should be painting them. Often the unsung hero of a 'mighty evocation spam army' is actually buffs that mean the evocations have the 30 turns they need to actually work. However buffs actually directly counter evocations in a few ways that aren't immediately obvious. Marble Warriors on troops with armour, for example, largely hedges out all non-armour-negating spells from ever doing damage. Even armour-piercing spells tend to struggle to do damage through marble + armour. Spells like Luck are especially egregious for countering 3/4 of 'super damage spells' like gifts from heaven. Even 'crappy' buffs like Haste can counter evocations by making moving troops harder to hit for mages and creating gappier formations with more dead spots for evos to kill nothing more than grass.

Ranging - Many evocations have range that doesn't cover the whole battlefield, or even much of it. If the enemy is in the rear of their deployment zone and you are in the rear of yours, most evocations won't reach - giving you time to buff or do whatever you're doing (casting Darkness, say). Other times you have access to flying or fast moving units that can toss themselves at the enemy line and distract evocations (the casting AI loves to shoot closer guys over farther guys - and doesn't care quite as much about potentially roasting some friendlies along the way) even after receiving Luck or something to help their longevity in that role.

Soaking/Tarpit - Swarm, Creeping Doom, Horde of Skeletons, Raise Dead, Howl, Corpse Constructs, Elementals (of various kinds). There are relatively cheap ways to generate warm bodies that are either tough or mostly good for taking hits. Battle-summoned guys don't count as their full hp score for the purposes of hp-routing your army (iirc it's 10%) so in situations where you can't just easily kill an enemy army, you can generate some things to take hits that don't cost gold (or are relatively cheaper) to take the hits while you more slowly kill the enemy army. Howl is famous in this role. Often people use these methods without a kill mechanic, and rely on 'producing so much stuff the enemy can't evo hard enough'. This is generally pretty wasteful and nowhere near as elegant as tossing up mist, casting Haste, and just having a frothing axeman come screaming out of the fog and behead some wizard. It also tends to fail when people can't or don't bring enough tarpit to tank the evocations or the enemy brings some other kind of damage (elementals, firestorm) that doesn't mind numbers much. Used as part of a more comprehensive anti-evo strategy though, it is far more robust.

Partial Counters - Some strategies counter evos just as part of countering the army directly. Fast earthquake casts, a turn-timer thug, wailing winds, wind of death spam, rigor/grip fatigue plays, master enslave, mass air elementals, basically anything designed to stomp an army fast without really 'engaging' with it will also counter evos. But as it also 'counters' the entire enemy army in one go, I don't really consider them as specifically evo counters. But hey - they work! Smoke'em if you got'em.

Backfield Troop Baiting - A subset of Ranging enemy evocations is luring enemy troops out past the effective range of their evocations, and butchering them wholesale such that the enemy mages are hp-routed. This is the ultimate goal of any ranging strategy but tends to come up more where the enemy has something that is instant death for your forces and you need a way to never be in range at all (such as MA Ulm casting Iron Blizzard vs an army of Agarthan magic beings (magma children and the like)). It involves using Guard Commander or very slow moving troops on hold and attack, or using melee-capable archers with long range (who won't walk forward if shooting their bows), or summoning elementals or the like only on turns 4 and 5 of the script (or even using longer-cast-time/high fatigue spells to artificially lengthen the time before the later slots of your script get cast).

Sacreds - Cheap, non-incarnate bless options can give you 10 or even 15 resist in every single type of elemental damage. Often, this counters the vast majority of the evocation tree. There's nothing much more to be said about this - allresiststats is just that brokenly powerful.

These methods can be mixed and matched - Nothing stops you from outranging while you put up mist and darkness, and then having the cavalry you painted with Haste charge the enemy line to pull tstrikes onto the enemy infantry while your infantry hold and attack at max range and get painted with Lightning Resistance to less the effect of the tstrikes when they finally do engage. And having a small group of peasants advance with no lightning resist off to the side to take the first few (dozen) tstrikes. And etc etc. You can negate some really horrendous amounts of evocation with very few mages if you start to mix and match these techniques.

So with all this on their plate, what's the evocation-loving pretender to do?

The Salad Option - Countering the Counters

So. You want to kill people with fire. My friend, trust me when I say I understand. However you may need to do a bit of legwork to burn your foes to a crisp (/blast them with lightning /choke them with endless poison /freeze them to their now-brittle bones). Using evocation in Dominions once your opponent knows the common counters is often a matter of reading their placement and organizing your mages and troops to match their setup. This can be hard, or sometimes explode in your face. But when the enemy army is burning, their sacreds are defeated, and their mages driven before you is it not worth it? Well, not really.

Nevertheless.

Sometimes you still gotta toss the lightning bolt.

Prec-boosting - Wind Guide, Aim, and Eagle Eyes are the only prec-boosting spells in the game (other than maybe some national ones?). They don't stack. They grant +4 prec, which is not enough to counter the effects of the prec-lowering spells, but it can still help. The big thing to avoid is putting up Storm and thinking Wind Guide will counter the Storm - it won't. If you want accuracy with spells like thunderstrike, you need a superhumanly accurate mage (like a caelumite, or an elf) with Wind Guide, and for enemies to not be too far away, and for there to be no prec-lowering spells cast. Projectile based spells (the ones that fly across the battlefield, like fireball) are less accurate inherently than ones that happen instantly (like lightning bolt/tstrike) and even with 100 precision will still often miss.

Affixing - If you can make some Tough Guys who can Hold enemy infantry somewhere, and you can arrange for that to happen near your mages, and you can make your guys Tough enough that they live for a fair few turns the enemy will agglutinate around your Tough Guys and form a much more tempting target for evocations. It helps if your Tough Guys also resist your evocations as they will get hit but if not.. eh. Ascension is a messy business.

Advancing - 'Advance and Cast' is a bit of an iffy command. But 'Attack Once' is very reliable. Your mages will spend a turn they are scripted to Attack Once walking forwards towards the enemy - not always the closest enemy, just like 'an' enemy. Having a script like 'Attack Attack <Evocation Spell> <Evocation Spell> <Evocation Spell> Cast Spells' helps deal with ranging issues, if you have a protective shell of troops advancing in front of the mages. This is like 'close infantry support', and it helps precision a lot by being closer.

Basic Buffs - A lot of the problems with evocation are easier to manage if your troops are buffed and thus take a million years to die in melee and resist the (friendly) evocations you're tossing at their enemies. This is often the reason evocations succeed 'in the wild', having troops simply tough enough to stand and take whatever the enemy is dishing out while fireballs just go bloody everywhere.

Highly Accurate Evocations - Lightning Bolt is the gold standard of evocations that reliably hit and reliably do something. In darkness, rain, sleet or snow lightning bolt is going to go somewhere and probably hit an enemy and usually that enemy will take damage. It goes a long way. It's fatigue-light to cast. Pillar of Fire is the only real competition it has in this role, and by the time Pillar appears the game is usually over. But some evocations are simply more accurate than others, for example Falling Fires will hit far more often than Fireball in situations where enemies are not clustered nicely waiting for you to shoot them. Spells that happen 'instantly' on the square instead of flying over there, spells that hit aoe (fireball, falling fires, gifts of heaven) rather than a bunch of single targets ('bolt' spells, blade wind etc), spells with good prec scores (and especially ones that don't have a '-3' or whatever in their precision entry) will all hit a lot more.

Clouds - Cloud spells (sulphur haze, freezing mist, fire cloud, poison cloud) hit anyone inside the cloud, a bunch of times per turn. They lower the damage they do and do it in increments or something. This means the armour-negating clouds (haze, freezing mist, poison) can very quickly kill units inside them but do almost nothing vs appropriate resists (5 negates most of their damage, 10 all of it generally). Due to the 'hitting wherever they're placed constantly' thing they tend to ignore the normal rules that govern evocations and even low prec clouds can be valuable. They will kill your own guys unless protected against them, however.

The First Turn Banger - A full forward setup when you expect the enemy to be in range of some wide-aoe no-♥♥♥♥♥ evocation (like blade wind, nether darts, etc) can sometimes catch enemy mages or mage-blobs (if you've threatened flyers to make them cluster their mages) before they get their buffs off, especially longer cast-time buffs that are common in lategame. Until the Stoneskin hits, a guy in robes is a guy in robes. If a flying buzzsaw hits him, even if he's still alive he's probably just fumbled his spell. Does this often work? No. Does it sometimes work? Yep. Like the 'lucky arrow' taking out a key mage, this can sometimes give disproportionate results to the mage investment and often forces the enemy to use short-cast-time buffs on their mages even if it fails, thus making them use mages in every army doing that instead of something more useful. This is often a good idea to do when you have other things you want your mages casting from a full-front position after the initial salvo, like Earth Meld or Summon Fire Elemental.


Battlefield Wide Effects - Stuff like Firestorm, Soul Drain, Rigor Mortis, Earthquake, Foul Vapours etc hit the whole battlefield. They are damage effects but they aren't really traditional evocations and don't interact with this whole formation/countertactic/precision ecosystem. Mostly you just compare the damage/effect the thing does vs the resistances/prot/etc of the units you want them to kill and if the effect > defense, then it's worth casting. Foul Vapours is also a cloud and does a bunch of bonus stuff that makes it super overpowered compared to nearly all other battlefield wide effects. Note that these pretty much all friendly fire.

Fire, Fury, Wrack and Ruin

The role in which evocations tend to excel is at 'cleaning up' weaker armies/nations after a significant economic advantage has been gained (such as via diplomacy). In that role it often seems more powerful than it is. However when facing such goldcost-superior forces, you may need to play around with the above techniques to find setups and combinations that work for your situation and skillset. Formations and placement and timing and range are pretty complicated and people tend to find they can make different kinds of things work than what other people suggest.

This guide is meant to give you some generic things that do work, but everything can (and should) be tweaked by you. Yes, you.

Finally, if you like evocations don't let me talk you into not using them. All kinds of things can be used that are sub-par in dominions, and if using evocations leads to more fun for the player, they may actually win more games using them due to having more diligence and investment in the positions they are playing rather than using stronger tactics that leave them bored or disinterested.

Don't let your dreams stay dreams

[AD3]

Good job

[Pogril]

Great guide. I only browsed it tbh, but did you mention the mirror strat for counter evo? Fighting fire with fire can work here, depending. The best and worst advice is just to play more MP games. Just like the worst form of vice is advice.

[The Murderous Titanium Puffin]

Damn well-written conclusion.

[Chungus Khan]

Great tips, great guide, much appreciated! Where did you get the art, I love it

[onomastikon]

Nicely done, again another good write up from a strong player - thanks

[makapse]

By broken, he means, they are way too OP. A full sacred army with a lvl3 army blesser means by turn 2, all your army has got enough resists to negate nearly all elemental damage

[[Korvfest] Johan]

Those last lines, truth!

[Axayacatl]

You say elemental resists for sacreds is broken? It is a bug?

[KyuuMann]

Are some of the techniques outlined in this guide applicable on archers/crossbows as well?