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Play With Your Buddies / Dominions 6 Release Day Playthrough [Singleplayer, EA Yomi]
« on: January 17, 2024, 06:05:54 pm »
Illwinter's strategy game Dominions 6 released today. Frankly, it wasn't on my radar at all, but it was a pleasant surprise given all the fun I've had in the past with Dominions 5. To celebrate, I thought I would put out a playthrough, mainly for those curious about what has changed and the state of the game on release.
This will be written primarily as a comparison to Dom5 (it's a complicated game, and I'll have to assume a broad familiarity with Dominions from the reader to avoid getting bogged down with every detail).
This first post is mostly going to be very boring setup.
Right off the bat, the game title screen looks basically the same. The ugly as sin 3D background, the same loading screen, same UI, etc. I'm not complaining; I'd expect nothing less! Or nothing more, I should say.
However, the map creation immediately piques my interest:
What's this? Not only are there new options for the shape of a random world, there's this "Underground Layout" business. I'm aware that Illwinter has another strategy game ("Conquest of Elysium" I think it's called) which has additional planes that the main terrestrial map connects to (though I've never played it). It seems they've added this feature to Dominions as well, at least for a new underground plane (which is welcome given how terrible the randomly generated cave terrain tended to be in Dom5).
For this game, I selected the donut world and the third underground layout from the right.
For the AI player selection, I go with 5 random land nations and 2 random water nations. For myself, I select EA Yomi:
This is probably the nation I played the most in Dom5 (I also played it in the most recent Bay12 MP match), so it seemed a natural choice for my first try in Dom6. It's also something of a "cave" nation, which seems appropriate given the new plane. Nothing much seems to have changed, except that temples are now 300g for Yomi to build (I seem to remember them being 200g).
There are a few ways to play Yomi, but I'll base my strategy this game around one of its powerful "thug" units, the Dai Oni:
In dom5, with the right bless these cute little guys are perfectly capable of clearing an independent province on their own, offering a very "greedy" expansion strategy that's high-risk (but can potentially acquire many provinces with zero losses and relatively little long-term expense). I'd like to get at least two of them going as quickly as possible to do this, though I immediately notice that the gold cost has been increased relative to dom5 (which concerns me given Yomi's general poverty). Later they can cast powerful supporting spells if need be, but are mainly useful in melee. For actual armies, I'll probably rely primarily on the zero-upkeep oni Yomi gets gets for "free" from building temples, but the tiny little goblins with pikes are also surprisingly good (though they'll be weaker in this version due the the unit size changes, as now only 5 can fit in a square instead of 6 in Dom5).
Between the Dai Oni gold cost, temple gold cost, and goblin size change it seems Yomi has gotten somewhat weaker in Dom6, but maybe that's a premature judgement.
Next, pretender god creation! But before even looking at the options for the pretender god itself, I'm much more curious about what's changed with the 'bless' mechanics (a buff applied to a nation's special 'sacred' troops, in my case just the Dai Oni and weaker Oni Sugo commander).
The mechanics for bless creation have changed significantly. Instead of having the bless points themselves be tied to a specific magic path, they're all in one pool now (and it seems all magic paths above 1 contribute bless points). For example, Fire x4 + Air x2 would give you (3+1=4) bless points, and all 4 points could be used for any fire or air effect that you otherwise meet the path requirements for. This means it's now possible to take more bless effects from the same category than before, by taking bless points from other paths to "subsidize" it (like if you really wanted a ton of water blesses or something, you could take other cheaper paths and use their points on water blesses).
There have also been a few changes to the bless effects themselves (most notably a new set for the new "glamour" magic path). The major/minor elemental resistances have been condensed into one effect, some effects have been shuffled around, and a few new effects added.
With that infodump out of the way, here's my pretender:
A boring 'rainbow' enchantress, but I want to see if there are new magic sites, craftable items, etc. Awe is the most important part of the bless, which happily also means taking the new glamour path. These effects are all defensive, but a Dai Oni is hardly lacking in the "offense" department.
IIRC my taking 'Drain' scales as Yomi raised some eyebrows in the last Bay12 MP game. I think it works well, provided we can still craft owl quills and skull mentors (the awake god will research our way to Construction 4 while we basically recruit nothing but Dai Oni at first).
One notable change over Dom5 is that I'm limited to +/-2 in all scales (except 'Turmoil', due to Yomi getting +1 to maximum turmoil indicated on a prior screen). The Oni Kunshu pretender gives +1 to turmoil limit as well, but this is tragically pointless as it remains capped at 3.
Finally, we're ready to start playing the game. Well, except for the game settings screen:
"Diplomacy is binding"? Interesting! We'll see how the AI handles this.
"Artifact yearning"? What? No clue on this one. It says it triggers at Construction 9, maybe we'll push for that.
"Legendary spell research" apparently means that all level 9 spells need to be researched individually, instead of getting all of them at once.
I dump a bunch of thrones in, maybe we'll see something new. And with that, setup is complete...
This will be written primarily as a comparison to Dom5 (it's a complicated game, and I'll have to assume a broad familiarity with Dominions from the reader to avoid getting bogged down with every detail).
This first post is mostly going to be very boring setup.
Right off the bat, the game title screen looks basically the same. The ugly as sin 3D background, the same loading screen, same UI, etc. I'm not complaining; I'd expect nothing less! Or nothing more, I should say.
However, the map creation immediately piques my interest:
Spoiler: Map creation (click to show/hide)
What's this? Not only are there new options for the shape of a random world, there's this "Underground Layout" business. I'm aware that Illwinter has another strategy game ("Conquest of Elysium" I think it's called) which has additional planes that the main terrestrial map connects to (though I've never played it). It seems they've added this feature to Dominions as well, at least for a new underground plane (which is welcome given how terrible the randomly generated cave terrain tended to be in Dom5).
For this game, I selected the donut world and the third underground layout from the right.
For the AI player selection, I go with 5 random land nations and 2 random water nations. For myself, I select EA Yomi:
Spoiler: Yomi (click to show/hide)
This is probably the nation I played the most in Dom5 (I also played it in the most recent Bay12 MP match), so it seemed a natural choice for my first try in Dom6. It's also something of a "cave" nation, which seems appropriate given the new plane. Nothing much seems to have changed, except that temples are now 300g for Yomi to build (I seem to remember them being 200g).
There are a few ways to play Yomi, but I'll base my strategy this game around one of its powerful "thug" units, the Dai Oni:
Spoiler: Dai Oni (click to show/hide)
In dom5, with the right bless these cute little guys are perfectly capable of clearing an independent province on their own, offering a very "greedy" expansion strategy that's high-risk (but can potentially acquire many provinces with zero losses and relatively little long-term expense). I'd like to get at least two of them going as quickly as possible to do this, though I immediately notice that the gold cost has been increased relative to dom5 (which concerns me given Yomi's general poverty). Later they can cast powerful supporting spells if need be, but are mainly useful in melee. For actual armies, I'll probably rely primarily on the zero-upkeep oni Yomi gets gets for "free" from building temples, but the tiny little goblins with pikes are also surprisingly good (though they'll be weaker in this version due the the unit size changes, as now only 5 can fit in a square instead of 6 in Dom5).
Between the Dai Oni gold cost, temple gold cost, and goblin size change it seems Yomi has gotten somewhat weaker in Dom6, but maybe that's a premature judgement.
Next, pretender god creation! But before even looking at the options for the pretender god itself, I'm much more curious about what's changed with the 'bless' mechanics (a buff applied to a nation's special 'sacred' troops, in my case just the Dai Oni and weaker Oni Sugo commander).
The mechanics for bless creation have changed significantly. Instead of having the bless points themselves be tied to a specific magic path, they're all in one pool now (and it seems all magic paths above 1 contribute bless points). For example, Fire x4 + Air x2 would give you (3+1=4) bless points, and all 4 points could be used for any fire or air effect that you otherwise meet the path requirements for. This means it's now possible to take more bless effects from the same category than before, by taking bless points from other paths to "subsidize" it (like if you really wanted a ton of water blesses or something, you could take other cheaper paths and use their points on water blesses).
There have also been a few changes to the bless effects themselves (most notably a new set for the new "glamour" magic path). The major/minor elemental resistances have been condensed into one effect, some effects have been shuffled around, and a few new effects added.
Spoiler: New bless effects (click to show/hide)
With that infodump out of the way, here's my pretender:
A boring 'rainbow' enchantress, but I want to see if there are new magic sites, craftable items, etc. Awe is the most important part of the bless, which happily also means taking the new glamour path. These effects are all defensive, but a Dai Oni is hardly lacking in the "offense" department.
IIRC my taking 'Drain' scales as Yomi raised some eyebrows in the last Bay12 MP game. I think it works well, provided we can still craft owl quills and skull mentors (the awake god will research our way to Construction 4 while we basically recruit nothing but Dai Oni at first).
One notable change over Dom5 is that I'm limited to +/-2 in all scales (except 'Turmoil', due to Yomi getting +1 to maximum turmoil indicated on a prior screen). The Oni Kunshu pretender gives +1 to turmoil limit as well, but this is tragically pointless as it remains capped at 3.
Finally, we're ready to start playing the game. Well, except for the game settings screen:
Spoiler: Thrill at the sight of my Game Settings! (click to show/hide)
"Diplomacy is binding"? Interesting! We'll see how the AI handles this.
"Artifact yearning"? What? No clue on this one. It says it triggers at Construction 9, maybe we'll push for that.
"Legendary spell research" apparently means that all level 9 spells need to be researched individually, instead of getting all of them at once.
I dump a bunch of thrones in, maybe we'll see something new. And with that, setup is complete...
