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[Criptfeind]

Yeah, better probably.

Spoiler: This is what quick map gen looks like now (click to show/hide)

You have the main world layouts which give you predefined shapes. The top options are completely random, circle, few small lakes, one big sea, 2 medium seas, and one big twisty windy sea. Bottom two options are one landmass where everyone starts on either coast, or one map where no one starts in the middle (probably don't use wrapping on that).

Then you have underground layout options between none, completely random, small caves, one big cave, 2 medium caves, and one big circle cave.

ymmv about how much you get out of these new options. For me personally thus far I quite like the few small lakes option since I never liked how water was done in the previous random generation. Small lakes adds enough water for interesting geography and for amphibious nations to fight over it and get their benefits without it becoming totally dominant in how the game is played out. And also not enough water for water nations.

I'm still playing around with the cave options to get a feel for what I like best. Giving everyone little small caves to have in their back pockets is interesting but the other options are probably better.

Spoiler: They also added blueprinting for the pregenerated random map tool (click to show/hide)

Where you can do a very simple painting out the shape for a randomly generated map. Tbh I would have liked to see the addition of layouts to the pregenerated tool so you could use them and the advanced settings together, but I guess you can basically just blueprint your way to whatever you want.

I've also heard, but have not played around with this, that there's a change to how the premade random maps work, they can apparently be saved as generic land/sea maps and then when the game starts the actual terrain can be randomly generated? That means you can make (maybe manually or just with the blueprinting) a setup you like in general as far as land/sea goes with fair starting points and stuff but the exact terrain will change every game and nations with a start preference will  have their starting province turn into their preferred terrain. Which might be a double edged sword for some nations, it used to really suck if you were something like Hinnom without waste access, but now that there's modifiers to population growth based on the terrain you might not want to start in a desert? The difference between wasteland and plains is pretty huge, it's the same as 3 growth scales.

[ChairmanPoo]

Ita looking good. Not a lot of pretender moda yet tho

[nenjin]

Those sound great. I would easily spend 45 minutes generating maps to play on looking for the right blend of features and this sounds like it will make my life a little easier.

[USEC_OFFICER]

I have uploaded my silly halfling mod to the Steam workshop. It's definitely not balanced, and I'm sure I missed some stuff when updating it to Dominions 6, but it's nice to shove it out into the world.

If nothing else, it means I can now focus on making more silly halfling nations.

[E. Albright]

I wish I had the time and motivation to go to work updating NationGen to D6. I definitely do not, no matter how ripe for harvest all the new material is.

The most I might manage is finally finishing my MA hybrid/starchild nation mod, since some of the modding changes actually make it reasonable to do some of the things that turned into a roadblock there. Not that I even really have time to do this. We Shall See.

[dragdeler]

So... I tried this out and it's cool... how is it allways the same users that know the coolest games?


What I don't understand tho: how aren't all nations with tall units stronger? It definitly feels like either you have an (elemental) gimmick (flying and waterdwelling nations seem to be blergh, also undead seems basically unstoppable if you fail short of destroying them and they can launch a counterwave), gimmicks will work very well against some opponents and less against others (counter basically), or you just bring the tallest and strongest dudes. What am I not getting? I seem to be simply unable to do viable starts with any nations that fields size 3 chaff type units; even Ind with everybody autoblessed, trying a bunch of big blesses turns out allways kind of underwhelming... How do you even build anything ressembling a thug by turn 10-15 (rushing construction, basically) with size 3 commanders? Whereas my sp game with LA gath felt trivial to win and I must admit I didn't really know what I was doing, my blesses were a bunch of elemental resistances that didn't see much use because when I realized how they steamroll, I basically got lazy about trying out items and spells etc. I researched a bucketload of stuff in that game I never used... Then I put it in my head to play something very different and I haven't been able to have a good game with mictlan since. Both nations can produce sacreds outside of their capital, with gath it felt like I didn't actually need them, with mictlan I struggled so hard to expand and get income I never got to a point where I could be spending much money in a second fort. We talking pathetic early losses. At least now I know I'd rather avoid negative luck scales, lol. Or is it my choice of pretenders that don't go well with humansized armies, do they actually need a big strong monster to snowball?

[Criptfeind]

Hey, welcome to the game, glad to hear you are thinking it's cool.

I'll try to answer some of your questions.

Why aren't giants the strongest? Giant troops struggle with gold efficiency and attack density compared to elite human troops. Many giants can only fit 1 to a square (Gittites are pretty tiny, basically just slightly bigger men, so they can do better here and fit 2 to a square, or even better one Gittite and one Gibbor) whereas humans can fit 3 to a square. Furthermore many giants are going to cost significantly more then a human unit. If you have giants and you're fighting an enemy that has 3-5 heavy hitting human infantry per giant you have, what will happen is they'll meet in battle, the giant will squish one human per turn as meanwhile the humans are landing several strikes per turn against the giant. The giant will kill a couple of humans and then die, and on net the human nation will have lost more troops but less gold.

Of course there's a ton of variables to this equation, how good the giants are, how good the humans are, and if your giants are sacred there are some blesses that work better on sacred giants then on human sacreds. The Hinnom/Ashdod/Gath line of giants are often a bit more elite then other giant nations as well which tends to help them out (of course, the other giant nations have their own benefits)

As for other nations, not every nation wants a big bless, the frank reality is that not every sacred is worth investing points in over getting more income from your scales so you can get more mages and non sacred troops. Many human nations fall into this category where they want only a small bless, sometimes even a bless not to help their troops but to make their mages better, and they focus on either a large monster god to help them expand or income scales to help them build more everything. Although Mictlan is typically a nation that wants to focus on it's sacreds (although that can somewhat depend on the age you're in)

Some human nations can expand perfectly fine. Some do want a expander (typically a big monster) to assist them early on, either because they need it or because getting a large territory early is the best way for them to go forward. Dom6 is much harder to expand in then previous games, so there might be more nations that need a expanders help.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Something worth mentioning is that the AI isn't amazing in Dominions and is pretty reliant on waves of units to do anything. This is the sort of situation where thugs (and certain types of giants) are best at. Plenty of spells can kill thugs and giants or weaken them for regular units to kill, but the AI isn't good at using them effectively. So it's not surprising that you had an easier time with Gath, which can make good thugs early, instead of Mictlan or Ind which would need research and gems to make them.

For the human (and humanish) nations it does depend a lot on who they are. MA Ulm has a ton of heavy infantry that expands well, whereas Mictlan is more modestly armoured and more dependent on numbers. The Late Age is also the roughest to expand in, since indies are better equipped and knights and crossbows are more commonplace. Dominions 6 making indies tougher also doesn't help. You might want to turn the strength of independents down a step or two, or commit to playing a few test games to figure out expansion before doing a serious game.

Nation choice and pretender design being massively important and extremely front-loaded is kind of a flaw of Dominions. Once you figure things out it's not a problem, but it makes starting out and learning things rough.

_{I have no idea how helpful any of that is.}

[dragdeler]

Sure it's helpful when I'm doing these vague'ish prompts I'm kinda looking for any opinion or perspective or whatever, I just want to read more stuff on the game.



I gave up on mictlan +rainbow, did the same thing with machaka and that works much better thanks to my spider boys... I ergh... It's probably not that great of a use of points to pick the weakest chassis with lvl3 in all paths, just to make searching sites more hasslefree, but this current game is the first time I'm actually smithing stuff within a reasonable timeframe, not just once the game is on a winning trajectory. I truely don't get how guides can advise people to use thugs to solo independent regions, how the hell do you make something truely tanky with tier 4 construction? How would you possibly do it it any quicker than that.


I like discovering builds myself and I'm barely reading up on any of that stuff is just that a lot of info I require is tangential to it... I would like to try out MP some time... Like I wouldn't care enough to train one nation before jumping into to it. But you know when I read of memeblesses it feels like I'm just going to get curbstomped by people who learned and follow well established practices.

[Criptfeind]

It's probably not that great of a use of points to pick the weakest chassis with lvl3 in all paths,

This used to be pretty meta for many nations in dominions 5, and although it was nerffed in some ways (but buffed in others) in dominions 6 it's still looking like a very strong option for many nations.

I truely don't get how guides can advise people to use thugs to solo independent regions, how the hell do you make something truely tanky with tier 4 construction? How would you possibly do it it any quicker than that.

You are reading a guide for dominions 5. Dominions 6 nerfed this in a lot of ways, indies are much stronger, all items were moved up a construction level, several of the important thug spells were nerfed. But even in dominions 5 only very specific nations could do thug expansion efficiently (and idk what guide you are reading, but they wouldn't do it with construction 4, expansion doesn't last long enough to get to 4, they'd use construction 0 items mostly, maybe construction 2 by the end of expansion.)

I like discovering builds myself and I'm barely reading up on any of that stuff is just that a lot of info I require is tangential to it... I would like to try out MP some time... Like I wouldn't care enough to train one nation before jumping into to it. But you know when I read of memeblesses it feels like I'm just going to get curbstomped by people who learned and follow well established practices.

A lot of game knowledge from dominions 5 is still relevant so you'd probably loose horribly if you went against veteran players but there's not really established best practices as of yet, the games been out a month and a single multiplayer game tends to take 2-3 months to play. Well, either way, the multiplayer community on discord is decently big enough that you can very easily join a beginner game and play against other newbies. As for practicing a nation, playing the game in singleplayer is nearly useless for prepping for multiplayer, the game has a huge amount of depth and complexity that the AI simply can't use the way a player can. Instead if you want to prepare for multiplayer what you need to do is practice your opening first year of expansion until you can consistently get at least 12 ideally in the area of 15ish provinces taken in the first year. If you can expand well enough you'll do fine in a beginner game.

Edit: As for Mictlan as USEC_OFFICER said, indie troop quality and quantity tends to increase over the ages. Most player nations also get higher quality troops in the later ages but Mictlan is a noticeable exception. They have sorta mediocre troops in the early age and they stay the same throughout the various iterations of the nation and thus are truly quite awful in the late age. So I wouldn't be surprised if you might struggle a bit if you're playing them in the late age. If that's so, giving them a try in a earlier age might help out.

[dragdeler]

  it was early ages 

Wait, months? Is there no option to limit turns? Here I was feeling like I will need to step up my game from triple checking every territory. Also do people like to play giant maps? That seems stressful and brainwrecking.

[Il Palazzo]

We've tried large maps a number of times in our Dom3-5 games. Can't imagine this one's gonna be any different.
They're not generally conductive to terribly interesting matches, imo. Tends to feel like you're playing single-player for a while, and then turns out somebody blobbed out of proportion and the game ends (or doesn't, because it takes too long to do everything and people lose interest).

[USEC_OFFICER]

Wait, months? Is there no option to limit turns?

Dominions multiplayer is asynchronous, and traditionally players have 24~48 hours to submit their turns. Being a niche game with a spread-out community, 'a turn every day or two' accommodates all sorts of schedules and timezones. Games usually take over 60 turns to end, so you can see why games can take months to play.

Blitz games (everyone coordinating to do rapid-fire turns) do exist but that might be too intense for a beginner. Having the extra time to plan and look over your options is very useful for learning and playing well. That said, if you want to join a beginner blitz game, go ahead. In the end, it's up to you how you want to do multiplayer.

[Criptfeind]

Map size is typically dependent on player numbers. I'd say like, 8-15ish players is normal? And then maps tend to have like 15-20 provinces per player. My current game is 11 players with 216 provinces. You can of course play larger or smaller games both in province count and player numbers, but I'd say that's what I see as "Normalish"

Also yeah, nothing wrong with being a blitz player if you decide that's how you want to play. Most of the community plays the turn a day longform style, but there's I think some of the population doing blitzes too.

[chaoticag]

Middle age Ulm is, and likely will be for a long while, one of my favorite nations to boot up the game to soon as a new game is released and that is along the lines of a nation I would recommend heavily for a beginner. They're relatively simple, can be quite powerful against the AI, and really benefit from taking the right scales. I'd probably recommend MA Marignon next, because it shows the importance of hitting your research goals and bringing out your battle mages, and/or playing with blesses.

In general I would recommend one or two quick games working with one game concept that you can specialize in before jumping into anything like blood magic nations or anything more complex.