Dominions 5 - Asphodel - National Overview
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- Опубліковано 26 кві 2021
- This was going to be full playthrough but I had to some personal stuff come up and had to sub out of the game. We have a pretty new approach to playing asphodel - typically considered very weak. I'd like to show it in another game where i get to surprise folks with it, but i might not be playing them again for a good long while so time to share :)
- Ігри
"CARRION, MY WAYWARD SOOOOOON!" I love the way Lucid pronounces words. =)
Fuck me i laughed out loud to this
I've found that a big part of the fun in this game is to try and make things work. I don't care for things that are too balanced either as I find that can really stifle the uniqueness in games.
Just a general comment, probably some decent ones out there in the RTS realm that are both wonderfully balanced and unique.
Hmm, I went the opposite direction when I was theorycrafting Asphodel - I thought going super-low on dom was too dangerous and the popkill would always destroy your gold economy anyway so instead I was thinking you should take as high a dom as you can, embrace the popkill, spread your horrible dominion into enemy territory using your cheap forest temples and stealthy preachers (black dryads are the cheapest stealthy H2s in MA) with the goal of killing everybody on the planet, cause mass unrest with your satyrs to keep your forces hidden and pillage whatever isn't nailed down, and if anyone comes to complain about it they have to bring an army through the lands of the dead and somehow deal with your shambling horde of NNE roadkill monsters. Good to know that Asphodel can still be played in a more standard way though. The meta is definitely not solved for this game so it's good to revisit weak nations with fresh ideas every now and again.
Very interesting. I too like it that the balance pendulum doesn't swing wildly. I remember back in Dom 3 or 4, LA Ulm was considered a joke. Weak and borderline irredeemable. Then people figured out Vampire Counts and they went from irredeemable to broken in short order.
MA Abysia was in a similar boat. Once people figured out Soul Contracts, which were initially written off as too expensive, then they became quite powerful.
You remember the change in dominion mechanics right; it went from 10%*Strength to 50%+5%*Strength. The change was from Dom3 to Dom4 though.
God I want to love this nation so much. But they make it so hard lol
Thematically my favorite nation by far, but trying to take them into a MP game got me stomped real quick
SO TRUE! So much to like implemented poorly or at cross purposes to each other.
Asphodel is one of the BEST nations if you're more interested in theming/RP over multiplayer competitiveness
Roleplaying Crew where you at ?
Yes an Ashphodel game! Ashphodel is great, I think it’s theme is so cool.
Not powerful but I’ve won a game with it so it is possible. Granted I got super lucky with Indy mages, so I had super path diversity very early. Much different than the usual Ashphodel 🤐
Weapon blesses are very funny as Asphodel. I am running death weapons in a game right now, It makes the undead centaur, both the unit and the commander into beasts. 5 melee attacks is a lot.
I'd advice you to double check the reanimation mechanics. I did some reasonably solid testing a while back (can't remember the details, but something like 1000 turns of reanimation's worth for each of H1, H2 and H3) and what I found was that the difference between H1s and H2s is none or so small as to be unnoticable, but the jump from H2 to H3 was solid.
IIRC Centaurs were by far the most efficient reanimators per gem, and Dryads the worst by far, with Lords being middling but more useful in combat.
So the way to play ASphodel is to try to ignore the Asphodel bits and just play discount Pangea?
They play a lot different than pangaea, expansion is like scales pangaea expansion though. You still get lots of their freespawn with the nature priest summons, and you 'pans' are a lot different than what pangaea gets - also dont get assassins. You can also preach your dominion up in forest that have low pop for some extra freespawn.
also also, there is no reason dom1 should be any less viable than dom 10 :)
Disciple Ashphodel is the discount Pan. And it’s much better than solo Ashphodel.
I've been waiting for this nation since dom4 ermor game)
I've used these guys recently. I think the build I did was reasonable, but I made a few mistakes in the game. Fire shield ruined me, and I didn't think of counter-thugging that god that magic phased me in advance. Had I put a heavy thug (or a few) in my main stack and set them to attack large, I'd have probably been able to defeat Abysia, which is otherwise a rough matchup. IMO Asphodel should always carry some anti-fireshield/damaging thugs in armies for big fights/fire shield thugs/fire elementals. Manikins are pretty bad in a lot of fights, but they're still siege chaff. IMO use money on mages/thugging and preach up the forts.
I went with white bull and dom 2 score (preached non-cap forest forts to 7), cold dominion to make life a bit harder on fire nations in my game. The popkill hurts, but you still have significant money turns 30-40+ this way. Normal centaurs were fine (harpy commanders can lead small squads of them to kill 6 PD pretty reliably, inexpensive elfing). I would only want minotaurs if someone brought big high prot units at me, otherwise they're shelved. In terms of mages, you don't get many forts so you're better off recruiting the high cost + more research options (who also are better in combat).
In testing I found anything other than an awake god with nature 4 or more + can move to be unplayable. Researcher or monster can work, but relying on N random pan to make 2nd/3rd fort is untenable. No point in going dormant/imprisoned since your scales aren't worth enough to merit it, other than growth/magic/luck. I guess if you spawn away from forests you have no choice but to instead dump those N gems into centaurs, spam manikins + whatever units you can to follow behind the thugs, and go kill someone.
This is really neat. Looking forward to the series Lucid :D
How about: "Popkill ignores Forrest Provinces"? Probably still shit but at least then you aren't gimping your ability to recruit useful stuff. Maybe fits the theme too.
Maybe Asphodel is not the strongest, but like all the freespawn nations, it is extremely fun to play. If one can find blood on the map then with black hearts the pans become great assasins which can kill SCs. It is also a nation that is heavily dependent on the map for the forest provinces. Having said that, with the stealthy centaur and the enormous amounts of chaff, it has all the opportunity to secure a good bit of the map in expansion and its first war.
Like you have mentioned in the video I've found that lowest dominion is a must, also growth scales, luck. Forget about relying on recruitable sacreds, if you get a good gold income then the normal centaur are pretty good raiders too.
Their dragon god is a pretty good SC (the trade-off is that you'd have to take 2 dominion instead of 1 :)), and the hero Ettin Mandragora is just awesome. It's my favourite SC in the game. Last time I played Asphodel I empowered it with water and air (expensive but fun) for mobility and quickness and I think it had like 27 attacks per round :) and with an air helm I could cloud trapeze this guy.
The bless needs MR (just like ermor and lemuria) fire and shock resistances, undead regen (combined with the national divine spells regrowth and carrion regrowth your sacreds and scs get double the regen).
The chaff become a liability for battles at some point, so you have to balance the number of weaker units vs your better ones that actually do damage, but they're okay as far as locking down forts.
The key to this nation early on are the national summons - the carrion centaur. They are your unit generators, more so than forests. This is where all your nature gems should be going into during expansion, after that use the grow fortress spell in the forests. You'd want to prophetise a Carrion Lord as well to lead your armies with that carrion growth spell.
Twiceborning the pans and some dryad hags is a good way to save on upkeep and they make for pretty good stealthy thugs. Your enlarged-double-regeneration thugs are amazing man.
The awake researcher/rainbow is a good idea because this nation needs the early research and the flexibility that this god provides.
You don't need to worry that much about finding blood in a game, the death/nature crosspath gives you access to Lamia queens with blood random 👍
Very interested in seeing how this one plays out. Thanks for picking a bit of a different nation
Growth 3 is only 0.6% growth so with 1% popkill you end up with 0.4% popkill (the same as death 2)
ah I was thinking it was .03 per scale for some reason
@@LucidTactics Funny thing is that I thought it was 0.1% per scale, but fortunately I did check before I wrote my comment (pretty sure it was only 0.1 at some point, probably in dom4)
I'm admittedly still afraid to run low dom from the xibalba/mictlan sac days. Very interested in seeing how this plays out in practice.
Someone draw up some fan art of a giant horned beastman exiting a plane with several bags and zipping right by the luggage pickup area without stopping. The Carry-On Lord.
Any opinion on Blood magic? While it's late game, there is the Three Red Seconds, there's also Wizard tower. I don't know the game very well and the magic is hard to memorize, but if I recall correctly, those spells make forts.
Asphodel is the only Death-holy-Nature in game, which is the pass to transformation to size 6-twiceborn- holy wight mage of size 4-6 for a price of 10 death gems + nature gems for transformation (if starting from dyad hag)
"Scales 1, gonna spread candles with preaching"
Imagine getting memed by stealth preacher nation like Man
Oh no, he's doing Asphodel
Could you play asphodel as a nation of high dom dead forests and separate low dom expensive chaff recruitment forts? That way the popkill will be somewhat isolated.
>Asphodel game
YEEESSSS, FINALLY
Ah, I see. After playing LA R'yleih you seek to make the various "Trash-Tiers" work well, or at least work lol.
So if you go both Growth and Magic scales can you get a bunch of Elephants?
This will be an interesting watch. Assphodel does indeed seem to be ass but your strategy looks sound.
Would you not be very susceptible to Dom pushes though? Some sneaky priests or heretics could be nasty to deal with
Would be interesting to do a comparison for Asphodel between vanilla and DE, DE did alot for them and they have some unique strength
DE made them borderline broken
great sacreds that hit hard and can be blessed making them almost the same as pangea with slightly less strength but a much better aura that cant be cancelled out
free spawn in every single province means you always have some fleshbags to stop the enemy charge
no more popkill means they just shit out money and units
@@giorgilobjanidze5667 eh, the sacreds lost berserk, which is a fair bit more than "slightly less strength". And with that income penalty they're ot exactly " shitting out money". They're also sloth reliant, so while they're strong defensively, offensively vs prod or general scales nations (of which there's a whole bunch in MA) they're debuffed offensively.
Don't get me wrong, they definitely gained a ton of power, but on a D-S tier scale I'd say they've moved from weakest D to a strong B or weak A, but not broken by any means.
@@humbugnonsens9098 well the thing is being a death nation is already a pretty big buff especially one as strong as asphodel add to that the fact that the sacreds have a sleep aura that literally cant be blocked or ignored or mitagated short of an mr check that procs all the time and now you have a pretty good sacred unit
The freespawn has been made a lot better too with the addition of statue and other stronger manikins
Plus a lot more late game summons like the lord of the forest carrion that is a super combatant with nature and death
Overall they went from a f to a solid a tier ngl
although its very much based on early game how hard they steamroll
@@giorgilobjanidze5667 trading earth+blood for death is at best a sidegrade. And sleep aura is mitigated heavily by Antimagic. And the addition of the statue is a very minor buff.
I've played this nation several times in SP and I think you're worrying too much about the lack of good forts, you probably only need one expansion fort early on. You won't have enough gold to worry much about recruiting mages until you invade the neighbours and you can capture their forts. 😊 You need to play away games, they have gold and forts you can use.
I prefer a dormant rainbow mage with good magic scales (to boost research as well as freespawn). The magic weapons and fire resist lets you deal with your worst middle game counter to your armies, fire shields on troops and fire elementals.
Also you are getting too wound up about dominion killing your pop, it is going to happen no matter what you do and when you build temples max dominion is going to go up anyway. If you start with 2, 3 or 4 you will be able to recruit a few Black Centaurs each turn for several years, probably somewhere near 100 in total before the recruitment points or resources drop too low in the capital Then you have to deal with the consequences and not lose them all in one dreadful battle. My solution (in SP) is to distribute most of the Black centaurs as bodyguards to centaur thugs (recruited in forest/temple/lab) with cheap thug gear (sword, kithaironic, shield). These make long range stealthy fast moving raiders. They are self blessing and limited buffing but can be supported by other fluffing mages as you did. They can converge to deal with fire shield stuff and can support your heavy undead thugs if a bigger tough distraction is needed. They are a constant outflanking threat to the back line of mages for any army.
Black centaurs can be supplemented to some extent by Centaur mages, with Saggitarius sacreds, so these have magic weapons but note they are slower and not stealthy or by Centaurs Warriors, stealthy but no magic weapons, or just have a healthy mix of all of them depending on what is needed. Note these fast moving thugs with bodyguards are easy to heavily buff for several rounds before attacking, just use a screen of throw away chaff to distract the enemy while your mages do the fluffing.
Is it going to be worth it to get your one black centaur per turn?
I tought that the enlarge spell and amulet of giants doesn't stack. In your testgame, they only got size +1, but +60% HP (30% for the spell, and 30% for the item). So they half way stack.
So what happens to the total HP, if you put enlarge spell + larger bless + amulet of giants + crown of titans on a size 2 or size 3 sacred commander?
there are only two enlarges that stack, the amulet and everything else
@@LucidTactics does that mean the amulet stacks with other items (eg crown of titans)?
@@humbugnonsens9098 yeah
Isn't it a bit of a problem that your dominion goes up if you build more than 3 temples (in addition to the one in your cap)?
Yeah we dont build more than 3. Saves a lot of money though you have to comit to preaching a good bit - your good mages though dont require temples.
Also, this isnt going up as a full series, ill show early game vs AI, but i might flash up how it ended up late game so you can get a sense that its viable. Think i was the biggest player when we called it a draw.
@@LucidTactics Why not a full series?
Sacred units with vines trigger weapon blesses with each vine. Unholy weapons and rush somebody who relies on sacreds?
I think this comment will be to late however look at the archon (chicken head) and trinity rainbow (1 eye three hags) they have a sweet spot in scales calculations and trinity is great research and Archon can alchemize fire gems into emergency gold
You know what would be really coold for Asphodel to get? A Life After Death affecting animals and reanimating them as carrion beasts of appropriate size.
Not excatly the most overpowered thing ever, but both useful and thematic.
Does life after death work on the manikins?
they are life less so sadly no
There's no real reason to get high dominon since you're caped to 4 free spawn I don't remember if the forests specific free spawn is effected by dominon but it's also caped at 4 that means you don't need to pump the dom strength in forests unless it's a really bad province that can't produce 4 or more centaurs.
You already talked about the earth astral cross path so not much to say on that but it's worth considering adding 3fire or 3air on pretender for site searching fire for alchemy and air for fairies.
Additional the earth cross path on the panics is probably the strongest living variant you can get Gaia's strength and earth power and in the late game Gaia's blessing
What? You are not capped at 4 freespawn a turn.
The thing this nation needs is more death gems in capital.
With amulet you get to size 4, and then after casting enlarge you are still size 4. Why'd you do both?
You still get another +30% hit points, so the Carrion Lords were at +60%.
oh cool, thanks!
@@tarsis6123 i wonder if that has to do with the amulet being +1 size up to 4. Cant test right now but would be interesting if you could make a size 2 into size 4 (could be relevant for repel thugs and vs certain tramplers)
idk why asphodel even needs tobe a popkill nation. Just remove the popkill and make a nation that wants high dominin. There aren't a lot of nations (none?) that do domkills as their primary mechanic. Asphodel could be that nation.
Eh, simply removing popkill would bring it too close to pangaea imo. I like DEs approach of turning it into a sloth dominion, but being a popkill with recruitables isn't inherently bad - Therodos is a perfectly fine nation. And I don't think domkill as *the* primary mechanic is a fun idea. A complementary strategy for some nations, sure, and it already is (mainly blood sac nations with decent priests), but I don't see why that would fit for asphodel.
Looking forward to the salty turns as lucid is bum rush all in’d by npc players
Hellenika mod made a few little improvement in this nation....still sucks, but they have a couple neat things. : P I've dicked about with the nation a bit and boy...none of those thugs ideas ever crossed my mind...this game is really next level layered. :D
Hellenika Asphodel would be a solid nation in vanilla imo. High quality troops, hymn of rot and blossom limiting popkill, dryad hags become powerful battlefield casters, dark slumber from the start etc. It only looks bad compared to the power level of the more powerful Hellenika nations. Within Hellenika I'd say it rates in the ballpark of Niefelheim and Tien Chi, above say Yomi.
I've always wanted to see a LA Rlyeh game. I love the nation conceptually but man is it terrible.
Try dominions enhanced. LA Rlyeh in that is probably one of my favourite nations
LA R'lyeh is actually really strong... as a disiple :P
@@Hapsasa i like DEs approach in theory, but it's still micro hell far beyond say, Ermor. Hell it's even worse to play than vanilla LA rlyeh, though no doubt more powerful. But to get income you must patrol, which kills your pop and requires your less-awful freespawn, and all the commanders to lead patrolling cant do shit half the time (literally) due to insanity.
LA Rlyeh is so fucked gameplaywise that it'd take a restructuring from the ground up, which DE can't do.
Get undead regen go ham with twiceborned transformed hags for demi tarts
Good? Probably not but so much fun 😂
Balanced buff: make all the freespawn sacred
They did my goth dryad gf dirty by removing suduction :P
You could cut that overview down to two, maybe three words...
My God's he made a review for the worst team AND he's doing a playthrough as them...
What has he gotten himself into 😂
Good video.
What were they thinking when they gave them such crappy forts
900 gold for a useless fort is bad design IMO. The game mechanic purist in me says they should just remove the option to build forts using gold entirely. I don't like mechanics in games that effectively allow players (especially newbies) to shoot themselves in the foot. The need for a 900gp fort is so edge-case that I don't think it's even a legitimate edge-case. When would you be able to afford that fort and not reasonably be expected to have access to bramble forts or wizard towers instead? I'm not an expert, but that's my hot take.
it is needed on non forested thrones "early" however no other use except that
@@werotan Right but when are you going to have 900 gp "early"? That's the edge-case that I think is too edge to be anything more than a newb trap. I don't like newb traps.
The restriction to palisades is by far enough. The price increase is just unnecessary.
@@werotan The palisade is useful for two other things; it allows the recruitment of indy mages on any tile, since the bramble fort only works in forests and it also allows the recruitment of the full range of commanders and troops anywhere on land. Gold income is always a big problem so recruitment is often limited especially if you recruit a lot of centaur warriors at 35 each although recruitment points can also become a limitation with turmoil 3 sloth 3 scales.
@@WadeStar it is a normal palisade like every other nation gets but for some reason 900 gold instead of 600, not sure why. If you build it in a forest, with a temple and lab the combination is actually cheaper than some other nations limited to palisades as the max fort they can build themselves. You save 450 gold on temple and lab and pay 300 extra for palisade.
This higher price on palisades does two things, it encourages you to use bramble forts but they're expensive in gems and also it encourages you to build in forests for the discount on temple and labs. This is clearly a conscious design decision by the developers but weakens an already weak nation and could perhaps be removed.