Bay 12 Games Forum

Stats for scenery is new. As is spells to animate scenery.

Sure enough, Alteration 3 has an "Animate tree" spell (with a battlefield-wide version at Alteration 9, which has to be a joke). Given that Animate Tree can be cast without gems by any nature 1 mage,  it's honestly probably better than what most of my gemless nature mages usually end up doing.

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Turn 4

After the last retreat, I decided it was a mistake to recruit the Namanari on turn 1 and that I really ought to have recruited a Demon General instead. The Dai Oni needs another turn to finish (then the Demon general will need a turn after that), so the prophet builds our first new temple while the Oni Sugo researches (badly). After the temple is done, the bandits will regroup in Yomi with the Demon General and attack a neighboring barbarian province. The temple will produce free Oni forever once built, although a temple built in mountains or caves would produce better Oni (but fewer of them).


Barbarians mince lone Dai Oni, so what I tell myself is that an army was going to be needed for that province anyway.

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Turn 5

After reading my comment about the cowardly Oni Sugo spending too much time in the gym, this naturally happens:


The Oni Sugo is a fairly good unit on the whole, but I probably won't recruit many of them. Level 2 death is enough to cast Alteration 6's "Soul Vortex" with the aid of a gem and their random elemental path is usually useful, but Dai Oni are just much better.

Speaking of which, the first Dai Oni is ready to go. It thankfully has enough map move to skip over our recently conquered province to a plains province in the south (adjacent to a rich "city" farmland):



Meanwhile, first contact with one of rivals:


There's now a diplomatic menu... I could actually propose a non-aggression pact with the AI.

How does scrying and teleporting works with fog of war? Looks like in EA you wouldn't be able to scry on someplace that you didn't, pretty much, already had scout in.

I'm assuming you just have to get a scout to border the province once, and then the terrain itself will remain visible forever. Scouting is an extravagance we may not be able to afford for a while here, though...

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Turn 2

We immediately get a new event!


I guess our God-senses started tingling. All the thrones are now revealed:


I'm guessing it happened because we started with an awake pretender. Perhaps a sleeping one wouldn't see this.

In the previous post, we showed a rich farmland province next to us. The preliminary scouting shows some chumps who couldn't *possibly* pose us any threat (you know the sort I mean). Naturally I move in to attack...


Eeh. They changed the mouse buttons for clicking/moving units, but otherwise it's basically the same. I script the archers in the front, while the Oni Sugo throws a couple javilins/fireballs before running in (hopefully timed to coincide with the undisciplined ko-oni reaching the front, who cannot be scripted):


Incidentally, we started with quite a few more troops than in Dom 5. I suspect they wanted to help the AI break out earlier.

Thankfully we have enough to start recruiting the first Dai Oni (in the MP I got a terrible event on turn 1 that derailed this):


-- and I also spy a Death scale on one of our nearby thrones:


If the death scale is from the throne, it'd have to be Throne of Pestilence (but that looks like quite the beefy force defending a level 1 throne). Maybe it's just some other hidden site. Hopefully.

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.

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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.

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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...

I remember being taken aback by the over-simplicity of the economy when it was first announced, though in practice my only real complaint with the economic system is how static the total market value is (especially after the change removing player-owned planets' contribution to demand).

I think the static "hazard rating" of planets is also a problem. In my campaigns I've ended up neglecting setting up any colonies until most of the sector is explored, by which point there's little left to do in the game. It would feel much better to settle for a crap planet early on, knowing its hazard rating sources could be reduced later by some means (I think there's one way to reduce the effect of cold/dark planets in this version, but that's it).

The other main gripe is the questionable punitive expedition system from other factions, but it looks like that will addressed very well in the next version.

Looks like it was initially just "Republic of China" (meaning only Taiwan) and then changed once to "Taiwan and China" (meaning both Taiwan and the mainland).

In western countries, it's recognized that Taiwan is functionally an independent country and it's treated as completely separate from the People's Republic of China on the mainland (i.e. using the word "China" alone never refers to both Taiwan and the mainland, in the west the word only refers to the mainland).

The PRC officially does not recognize this (and has been able to diplomatically compel most governments into avoiding official statements implying Taiwan's functional independence) but in reality the PRC has no direct power over the government of Taiwan and the United States maintains this status quo by threatening to attack the PRC if they invaded Taiwan (though even the United States government will not officially claim that Taiwan is a separate country).

Even the Taiwanese government leaves its own status ambiguous, not declaring itself independent but also implicitly accepting its status as a sort of American bargaining chip (now a valuable possession for western countries in its own right as their primary semiconductor producer). This ambiguity is purely a polite fiction, because ultimately western countries are perfectly happy to give a few cheap meaningless words to the PRC diplomats while continuing to make whatever deals they like with Taiwan separately.

Last year one of the players in the Bay12 Dominions 5 match lost access to their forum account, and it took over a month for registering a new one to go through. I bet the Toad has sped that along since the steam release, but it could be a factor for more guests vs users.

Windows, Firefox. Must be some modification to the forum made specially for this board, since I haven't encountered such issue on other SMF-based forums in the past. Only the "full" editor seems to be affected (after clicking "reply" link at the bottom or when making a new thread/editing a post). If I am correct, the very next line will show that Quick Reply form is unaffected.
Is it?

If you're curious what exactly your system is writing into in the browser's text area when you type, this TamperMonkey script will check:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Read Bay12 text
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      1.0
// @description 
// @author       
// @match        http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?action=post*
// @icon         data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==
// @grant        none
// @run-at       context-menu
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    let msg_box = document.getElementById("message");
    let contents = msg_box.value;
    let output_string = "";

    for (let i = 0; i < contents.length; ++i) {
        let c = contents.charCodeAt(i);
        let hex_char = c.toString(16);
        if (c > 31 && c < 127) { output_string += contents.charAt(i); }
        else if (c > 127) {
            output_string += "{UTF-16:";
            output_string += hex_char;
            output_string += "}";
        }
        else if (c === 0x0A) { output_string += "{NEWLINE}\n"; }
        else {
            output_string += "{ASCII:";
            output_string += hex_char;
            output_string += "}";
        }
    }
    alert(output_string);
})();
To use, add TamperMonkey to firefox, create a new userscript with that text, then right click somewhere on the 'post replies' page and select "TamperMonkey > Read Bay12 text" after typing something in. It should output something like this in an alert box:

the quick
brown fox
jumps

over the
lazy dog
保大

the quick{NEWLINE}
brown fox{NEWLINE}
jumps{NEWLINE}
{NEWLINE}
over the{NEWLINE}
lazy dog{NEWLINE}
{UTF-16:4fdd}{UTF-16:5927}

Which one are you?