lategame balance . are my concerns true ?

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
the more time i have the more i grow out of control with the vampire strat then.

This is true for any strategy.

as long as i stay in own dominion you can't kill them with anything .

Better hope you don't run into Marignon then, because any province they take will only stay in your dominion for one turn.

[DLC1]

staff of storms + storm demons eats your army without losses and sieges your castle.
course you might have your own storm demons since you seem to have a well researched and large blood industry.
or a windmage to caste the spell that makes lightning resistance.

it's all about the rules thought, most people(that i play with) dont want wish allowed in the games they play.

[Boron]

DLC1 said:
staff of storms + storm demons eats your army without losses and sieges your castle.
course you might have your own storm demons since you seem to have a well researched and large blood industry.
or a windmage to caste the spell that makes lightning resistance.

it's all about the rules thought, most people(that i play with) dont want wish allowed in the games they play.

yeah this special army probably defeats the vamps too.
but storm demons are quite hard to accumulate .
the lvl 9 spell where you get 7+ storm demons for 50 blood needs some empowering .
a good candidate to cast it is pazuzu with 1 +1blood item .

so you can wish some pazuzus to mass summon those storm demons .


fortunately storm demons are much easier to counter though for me i just need to make a few lighning resistent scs and your storm demons should be wiped out again and i can use my vampires save again against almost everything you can throw in .

so i rely MAINLY on the vampire horde but of course for special purposes i build a few scs of my own.
or i decimate your storm demons with some flames from the sky etc.

[Boron]

can you name me other troops / leaders than my mentioned immortals which you can use without equipment at all with great success when you win the dominionwar ?

so far really only DLC1 storm demon / air sc counter strat and JACK SIMTH undead mastery counter strat seem to work and probably my own suggested mass wither bones mage brigade counter strat .

so 3!! strats which are all extremely expensive compared to vampires .

and just remember i could e.g. with storm warriors / warriors of muspelheim make my vampires immune to lightning / fire .
i could mix in my own scs .

BUT vampires ALONE are already enough to defeat almost every army / sc .... .




so i suggest : remove summon allies command from vampire lords .
same with summon ghosts from wraith lords it is almost as overpowered .

make all immortal leaders (demilich / wraith lord / vampire lord ) cost 5-10 gold as upkeep .

these 2 things should be easy .
then the immortals would still be powerful but it would prohibit you to accumulate extremely huge vampire hordes lategame and 100+ immortal leaders .

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
and just remember i could e.g. with storm warriors / warriors of muspelheim make my vampires immune to lightning / fire .

Both of those spells only give 50% resistance. Wrathful skies with storm and false horrors can hold off a very large number of vampires. High-level fire magic will also quickly decimate their numbers. Flames from the sky can also kill huge numbers of vampires.

If I was planning for a game to Last to turn 100, then I would probably actually forge soul contracts with my slaves, depending on what nation I'm playing. Devils are superior troops to vampires, and if you can afford 100 vampire lords, I could afford to have 70-92 soul contracts. These also have the added benefit of being able to survive when you use heat from hell and firestorm.

[Cainehill]

Graeme Dice said:

Both of those spells only give 50% resistance. Wrathful skies with storm and false horrors can hold off a very large number of vampires. High-level fire magic will also quickly decimate their numbers. Flames from the sky can also kill huge numbers of vampires.

Decent earth magic can also decimate them - blade winds should cut a huge swath through the vampire ranks, and isn't reduced by any elemental resistance (mass protection would help, but makes them more vulnerable to fire; legions of steel is thus the only real counter I can think of).

Vampire hordes are only truly impressive against the AI in single player, or against an opponent who is out-matched anyway (in player skill, in research & gem income, or provinces & gold income).

[Thufir]

Boron said:
i think immortality is a bit too powerful .

how do you beat a vampire horde lategame ?
on turn 100 ...

While I enjoy reading these tactical analyses, I am not yet experienced enough to comment one way or another. But I have played enough strategy games to say that the statement that late game is unbalanced in no way, shape or form means that the game is unbalanced.

It's perfectly reasonable from a game design perspective to pull 3-4 nations out of 17, and say these nations will be the strong in the endgame. It's perfectly reasonable from a game play point of view, to know going in that if you're playing Ulm or Jotunheim (those are strong in the opening game, right?), that if Abysia or Caelum are in the mix, you had better have them eliminated or crippled by turn 80 (or whatever turn it might be), or your endgame will be hopeless.

Much as I find these arguments very educational, and useful for getting through my own endgame learning curve, this in no way sounds like a cause worthy of changing this game.

[Jack Simth]

You can also communiun priests with the Slave/Crystal matrices - if you split an 80-priest squad between the two, even using little H2 indy priests, you are talking about 40 effectively H6 priests. Using those nifty H4 priests some nations own, it does even better. Add a staff of storms and a bunch of lightning-immune lifeless chaff (e.g., mechanical men) to gaurd the priests; you then have penetration 2 vs. undead/deamons that does a fair chunk of damage to a rather wide area. A few banishments from the priests and the vamps will likely rout en masse (those that don't perish; after that, the only targets for the banishment is your undead commanders, so they are gone soon after), the storm demons will also fall rather quickly to the same thing (especially as they can't reach the priests due the mechanical men gaurds). The priests also help with the dominion war (which, by the way, if you are winning as a pre-requisite to the strat, makes much of the strat icing, no?) so they will be on hand anyway. After that all that is left are some anti-SC SC's (or anti-SC thugs) to deal with your SC's.

Other possibilities are heavy use of anti-commander stuff (assasins and assasination spells, to strand your vamp army), taking your capital to neutralize the immortality, other raids (you did say you were commiting your pretender, prophet and most your forces to a border dispute on dominion at a specific location, to push your dominion into opposing territory; that pretty much means your opponent can arrange to raid pretty much at will; sure, you can do the same thing with your vampires and vampire lords - but then you can't drag the air queen SC and storm demons along to deal with the vamp counters) to burn your temples and cut your dominion elsewhere. Likewise, stealth priests (anyone can find druids, a few nations have stealth priests)

Don't get me wrong - the vamp horde is a good strategy; but like any strat, especially those relying on a particular unit / commander type, there are different counters available to most nations. Dominions is a surprisingly balanced game.

[Boron]

Jack Simth said:
You can also communiun priests with the Slave/Crystal matrices - if you split an 80-priest squad between the two, even using little H2 indy priests, you are talking about 40 effectively H6 priests. Using those nifty H4 priests some nations own, it does even better. Add a staff of storms and a bunch of lightning-immune lifeless chaff (e.g., mechanical men) to gaurd the priests; you then have penetration 2 vs. undead/deamons that does a fair chunk of damage to a rather wide area. A few banishments from the priests and the vamps will likely rout en masse (those that don't perish; after that, the only targets for the banishment is your undead commanders, so they are gone soon after), the storm demons will also fall rather quickly to the same thing (especially as they can't reach the priests due the mechanical men gaurds). The priests also help with the dominion war (which, by the way, if you are winning as a pre-requisite to the strat, makes much of the strat icing, no?) so they will be on hand anyway. After that all that is left are some anti-SC SC's (or anti-SC thugs) to deal with your SC's.

Other possibilities are heavy use of anti-commander stuff (assasins and assasination spells, to strand your vamp army), taking your capital to neutralize the immortality, other raids (you did say you were commiting your pretender, prophet and most your forces to a border dispute on dominion at a specific location, to push your dominion into opposing territory; that pretty much means your opponent can arrange to raid pretty much at will; sure, you can do the same thing with your vampires and vampire lords - but then you can't drag the air queen SC and storm demons along to deal with the vamp counters) to burn your temples and cut your dominion elsewhere. Likewise, stealth priests (anyone can find druids, a few nations have stealth priests)

Don't get me wrong - the vamp horde is a good strategy; but like any strat, especially those relying on a particular unit / commander type, there are different counters available to most nations. Dominions is a surprisingly balanced game.

yeah you are right dominions is really well balanced

your priest idea is nice hm i thought it works only against undeads but you are right banisment works against DEMONS TOO
with h6 priests ........ they have probably a good chance to come through the rather high mr of demons / vamps .
if you add a w9 blessing for quickness to your priests this is probably horrible


i personally like to castle . so your raiding is far less effective . so i can defend against weak raiders with ghost riders and against stronger with some reserve scs hopefully .
one second thing :
do you forge a ring of fire resistence and a ring of cold resistence for all your priests ?

otherwise i still have left the 2 options murdering winter / flames from the sky .

crystal matrix + slave matrix require both SE .
this is a rather uncommon combo so it is not so easy to massproduce them unless you have forge up .
AND both are misc items .
so either you don't defend against flames from the sky / murdering winter at all or you can only forge 1 cheap resistence ring and for the other resistence you would need to take a more expensive solution like a ryme hauberk .
all in all this is relative expensive .
for 3 priests + equipment you could build a quite good sc too .


finally another strenghtening lategame for my strat :
i use no vampire lords as leaders for my vampires but tartarians or banelords .

so at turn 100-120 i will probably generate 200 new vampires each turn and it is always increasing .
because clamhoarding + vampire summoning increases exponentially .
from turn 20-40 you summon e.g. 1 vampire lord / turn + produce 1 clam .
turn 40-70 you increase it to 2 / turn .
then you start with wishing and increase it to 3 then 4 then 5 etc. per turn and it goes always quicker .

so if we really really continue playing until turn 150-200 i can start to even sacrifice my vampires by using them out of my dominion since i don't need to care anymore because i produce so much new each turn from allysummon in my capitol .

the only "allysummon" which comes close to this are devils from soul contracts .

all in all the nonunique (like devils from 1 archdevil) allysummons are rather limited :
ghosts from wraith lord
draconians from draconian leader
wolves from werewolves / bf ulm wolfherd
vampires from vampire lords
imps from fallen angels
sprites from fairy queens

similiar maenads from pans
devils from soul contract


the vampires + devils are the strongest ones .

if you look at the RoI the vampire lord has probably the highest in the game .
quite good unequipped immortal anti-sc unit .
and the vampires themselves are really good too .


so if i do it correct i always have much huger forces then you .
furthermore if i force you to build priests / mass wither bones squads etc. etc. this is even better because these troops are so highly specialized that i can beat them very cost effective with other things .


especially your 2 ideas with the priests or the undead mastery are good but after i saw it the first time i can quickly make a special antiforce against this .

i think vampire lords with vampires are TOO ALLROUND .
they are good against almost everything and if you need to defend they are really great too .

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
i think vampire lords with vampires are TOO ALLROUND .
they are good against almost everything and if you need to defend they are really great too .

Actually, given your previous Posts mentioning clam hoarding and using the wish spell, it sounds like Wish is the thing that is too powerful, because you can make any number of very highly overpowered late game strategies using it.

Which is why, I believe, there's an official mod that removes Wish from the game. End of problem.

Without Wish, you don't have a relatively cheap way to boost all your magic paths, you don't have the incentive to put high astral magic on your (typically immortal) pretender, and it becomes quite difficult to have _all_ the spells, items, and summonses you're talking about.