Dominions 5 Strategy - Why Anakites Are Scary
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- Опубліковано 3 сер 2024
- In a couple of videos I've mentioned Anakites - here's a brief demonstration of why exactly I'm wary of them, in a multiplayer context. Obviously this isn't the only thing Ashdod has going for it, but in any game Ashdod's a part of you have to take into consideration the possibility that the Ashdod player will pull something like this, which affects the kinds of pretender builds you can bring and how you plan to play the game out. Similar things can be done with some other nations - EA Mictlan and MA Nazca are the two most prominent examples that come to mind - but Ashdod is probably the simplest example.
Dominions 5 Discord server: / discord - Ігри
"Ermor is a dead man"
A kneeslapper xD
Quickness was bugged for a few months on Dominions 5 launch so that you got 4x as many attacks, imagine that :P Everybody basically knew it was stupidly OP, but only after some play-testing did somebody on the Steam forums discover this.
It was actually worse than better on most things, as it made them fatigue out way too quickly.
In addition to this, once Asdod gets a few forts up and starts spamming sages with lanterns their research explodes as well. I'd rather have the Zamzummites wither bones or empower them in blood and get a vampire train rolling than use them as rare skelespammers though.
There is one major downside to taking misfortune and drain. The magic fading event will eat a lot of your gem stockpile which can be extremely devastating since you can no longer cheat it by having your commanders carry the gems. Just something to keep in mind.
It's only 2d6 of each gem type, and you're not particularly gem-intensive as megabless Ashdod so you really don't give a shit.
Your earth gems might disappear once you make ~3 pairs of earth boots and start spamming earthquake to counter supercritical skelespam, but those are gems well spent and you should have enough to do that by the time it becomes relevant.
I remember playing as LA Pythium with a blessing of Regeneration and Hard Skin, which probably is not a very good bless but i still do not lose a single Hydra and less then a dozen hatchlings the entire game. The Hydras were so deadly, i could not take human troups into battle, because the Hydras would kill those too.
Is this something that only works with MA Ashdod Anakites, or can it work with Hinnom Rephaites or Gath Gibbors?
Can you please link the Discord server you are talking about at the beginning?
Sure! I'll add a Discord invite to the video descriptions.
So I dont think Ive ever seen you take an imprisoned Pretender God. Apart from the obvious "they just arnt around for ages" thing, is there any particular reason you never take one? Wouldnt the bonus points for your God ofset the disadvantages? Would love to see a similar video to this on the subject of Awake, Asleep and Imprisoned Pretenders.
Cheers dude! Love your videos :D
With how blesses work in Dom5 a JailGod is worth considering if your satisfied with great scales and Minor Blesses.
The only nation that comes to mind (granted im not that much well versed :P) would be tien chi :P
Kingfisher An imprisoned pretender is definitely useful for some nations - specifically those that have no outstanding weaknesses that need filling. I tend to enjoy relatively 'unbalanced' nations though, and for those you usually either want help expanding or at least want your pretender to activate fairly early to help you do things. It's possible to more or less max out important scales with a dormant pretender if that's what you want, and the disadvantage of just losing out on whatever your pretender could do for you for more than half the game is fairly significant.
Does Ashdod have disease healer? Otherwise C'tis would have quite potent defense with their dominion alone, as diseasing those big guys will really hurt.
Diseased or not, they're still going to shred things - and there's more where they came from.
I am pretty sure that Pangaea (EA and MA) can expand just as fast (if not even faster) with white centaurs, and since they don't need much production (white centaurs are only 12 resources) they don't need to take quite as bad scales.
With a good bless, just 5 white centaurs can take weak independent provinces and 10 of them can take any non-throne province.
They do probably suffer a bit more attrition than giants, but they are so fast that reinforcements can very easily be moved to the frontline (black harpies are excellent for moving centaurs) and their very high map move (+ forestry) means that late expansion armies can get to the front even faster than with giants.
Satyrs may be able to "swarm anything indie", but there is no way they can do it cheaper than white centaurs with a good bless. 6 white centaurs cost 330 gold, for that amount you can get 36 cheep satyrs or 25 satyr warriors. 6 white centaurs can take an averange indie province with ease, and only if you have bad luck will you perhaps lose one. 36 cheep satyrs or 25 satyr warriors can also take an averange indie province, but not nearly as easily and not not without losing an significant amount of the satyrs, and if you have bad luck your (poor morale) satyrs will end up routing.
Not only is expanding with white centaurs faster, because you don't constantly have to replace your expanding armies, but after the the expansion fase are over you will,have a powerful army of experienced white centaurs, while if you expand with satyrs, the majority of the units you build for expansion will now be death.
If I ever was to play Pangaea without a good bless, I would never recruit weak satyrs, but expand with centaur warriors instead.
Destruction is a good way of dealing with Anakites, but Pangaea don't exactly have fast research, so if they are attacked early they are not going to have destruction yet...
If you want to compete in terms of expansion speed, then nothing beats Ashdod with an E7N7 white bull hitting a new province each turn. And it's still very disgustingly fast even if you go for the "safe" approach of leading anakites with adons instead of priests.
Of course, this is not what a w10e5b4 (or even a dormant w10e5n7b4) anakite is about; it's about being a nightmare to counter.
Destruction will do a good job on fortitude/regen anakites, but quickness bsurge anakites just so happen to have excellent stat lines - so all you accomplish by removing their armor is turn them into very angry, quickened barbarians with magic weapons and four attacks that vapourize units every turn.
There's a reason the scales are as they are; all you need with a megamurderbless like that is to spam out a shitload of anakites and slowly get counters to their counters online with all the gold you earn from eating players and territory.
Disappointed in the lack of advice on countering them.
Be MA ulm.
Other than spamming the tanky ulmish infantry I’ve yet to find solid counter.
@@cogwheel6076 Asphodel freespawn sleepvines?
Is this really due to just how good the Anakites are, or the Quickness bless?
This expansion is impressive, but Eriu or Vanheim with a Quickness bless could take whole provinces with just a Sidhe Lord or Vanjarl. And what about the Giants and their units per square? If you fought Eriu head to head for example, he could have 3 Daoine Sidhe with the exact same bless if he wanted. Three attacks the Giants two, or 6 to 4 with a Quickness bless on both sides..
Then there are nations like Marignon. You can roughly get two Knights of the Chalice for each Anakite. Granted that hoof attack isn't that great, but they do have the lance on the charge.
Knights of the Chalice are not cap only. In the end Eriu will hit holy point limits, so their "value" per recruiting opportunity is lower (6 Anakites >> 6 Daoine SIdhe). Then again Sidhe Champions are 135 gold, to the Anakite's 115 (and 19 resources to 91). If they get to multiple forts, they could literally outpace your sacred production by putting Sidhe Champions on the frontlines.
Hmmm Vanherses cost 140 gold for Vanheim.
Dunno, like to see these Anakites go up against similar elite units with a similar elite bless. I know Knights of the Chalice aren't as good as Anakites, but my experience is that "elite" cavalry (sacred or no) just rips indies apart when you get a critical mass of them (like 10 to 15). Knights of Avalon, MA Ulm's Black Knights, MA Maringnon's Royal Guards.
Oh yeah, Quickness will help a lot, but I played Mekone once in EA, and I hit some godforsaken indie province with like 20 elephants. Utterly annihiliated abou 40 Gigante Hoplites. The Anakites are only size 5, but I guess that defense is so high the Trample shouldn't be a big deal.
BTW, with bad scales how are you recruiting 6 Anakites (6x91=546 resources), and one Adon every round (86 resources). That should take 627 resources if my math is right.
Kang Kodoss I was recruiting Sheshai Anakites, not Ahiman Anakites, which only cost ~50 resources each and have Berserk so they won't fail morale checks and run away at random. And the difference between Anakites and most other sacreds is that they are giants, meaning they hit hard enough to kill almost anything size 3 or lower in one shot and they have enough HP to tank multiple hits, while *also* having attack/defense values comparable to elite cavalry. That means that even when they take hits - from being surrounded, for example - they aren't going to attrit away nearly as quickly as most other sacreds, and they're much less vulnerable to getting ruined by a single bad roll than human-size sacreds are.
He's not recruiting 6 anakites and an adon each turn, he's queueing up an adon (eating 86 resources) alongside six Sheshai anakites (who cost 48 resources), with only the amount of Sheshais that have enough resources after the Adon's share of resources being produced, with the first one with insufficient resources carrying over the remainder of the resources onto the next turn. On this next turn, it's still six sheshais queued up, now with one of them being discounted by the remainder of the resources of the previous turn, alongside the Adon not eating up the initial 86 resources.
As for quickness, it seems like you're forgetting to look at a very important part of why anakites are so good;
the Daoine Sidhe you mention (which are just EA TNN's non-sacred non-cap elf infantry, except now cap-only sacreds) have the same stats as the anakites - which is important as it means neither have an advantage in terms of hitting eachother - but there is a very big difference between the two units.
The elves have 9 body protection, 13 hp, and have one attack that does 15 (piercing, but still 15) damage.
The anakites have 15 body protection, 50 hp, and two attacks which do /29/ (this one is even magical!) and /21/ damage.
The effective Damage-Per-Turn after protection of the elves isn't anything particularly impressive on units with 16 protection or more (which said anakites tend to have after being buffed), while the anakites do disgusting amounts of damage to anything that isn't an earth 6 Drakon with 31 protection thanks to its hardskin bless.
An example of where this would be relevant in PvP would be if you were against, say, MA C'Tis;
Quickness anakites would rip through *anything* they have to offer, while quickness elves would find themselves hitting a brick wall against C'Tis if C'Tis answered with spamming out a shitload of Sobek Warriors (who happen to have both 20 prot and 25 hp)
Quickened elf ponymen also tend to be very vulnerable to RNGesus being unkind to them, while the anakites are basically guaranteed to just steamroll through a province unless it's a throne or some very lucky and very numerous barbarians - but the ponyman would also definitely die horribly to that.
Quickness vanheres, on the other hand - are just as intimidating as anakites. Though for EA Vanheim I prefer this build:
dl.dropbox.com/s/vxy3vqqpkd4177a/cheeky_dormant.png
As it is just as disgusting as quickness vanheres, except it scales far better throughout the duration of the game as people aren't able to counter you with fire elemental spam - and then also with you spamming lightning and/or casting wrathful skies.
23 provinces for garbage scales is not so huge.
Is there a reason you don't seem to fear Rephaites as much as Anakites? Is Ashdod better at massing sacreds than Hinnom, or are these types of super sacreds just easier to deal with in the EA?
The problem with Rephaites is they eat population, and eat it pretty quickly, so even though they're more powerful than Anakites technically, in practice people don't want to recruit them because they tank your income permanently.
The real issue with Rephaite warriors is not that they cause permanent income damage (that's just an annoyance), but the combination of the following issues:
You have no Holy 2 commander to go along with them, and blessing a lot of giants (more than 8) is difficult with a single H1 (more than one commander is too slow for quick expansion) without them running off into combat unblessed.
Melqarts (the Adon replacement in a blessrush scenario) are incredibly expensive (485 gold and 101 resources vs 290 gold and 86 resources) compared to Adons, while being said H1 priests.
Rephaite Warriors are weaker versions of Sheshai Anakites without the berserking aspect (which means they're vulnerable to frighten spam)
And perhaps most importantly of all, rephaites cause 2 unrest a pop - per turn - while a melqart causes 8.
If you pop out a melqart and 8 rephaite warriors every two turns (with 3 of them sitting in your cap for two turns), that's 30 unrest (and -300 population) every two turns on your capital.
This means that you're going to need a patrolling party on your capital to prevent being recruitment-locked from just simply spamming out hungry hungry giants.
Damn. Those are some harsh penalties. Just out of curiosity is there a nation that can just naturally deal with Anakite swarms by just following their normal strategy? Or do they all have to use some form of specific counter? And just to be clear I'm not talking scripting tricks, I mean some combination of research and or troops that Anakites don't do well against.
sr71silver The new nation - Phlegra - can *kind of* do it by massing Cyclops Warriors, which are generally shitty units but hit very hard. Enough of them can kill Anakites, though probably not cost-efficiently. Nazca can do it by spamming their own sacred summonable condors with a cancer bless of their own, though a fire/shock resistance bless on the Anakites neuters that strategy somewhat. Otherwise, it's very hard to handle.
MA Ulm's guardians are basically the only troops that can somewhat deal with them, what with them having their (perhaps even more overpowered) 15 armor-negating fatigue damage (that's 45 per square of guardians hitting you) applying halberds that don't even need to hit for this effect to apply.
Beyond that, they're not really particularly vulnerable to anything short of massive amounts of skeleton spam behind foul vapours and preferrably rigor mortis. Though if it's quickness anakites, there's a good chance they'll be able to cleave through everything and get to your casters before they pass out due to too many skeletons. The Regen/fortitude (the most commonly seen) kind of anakites won't be as fortunate, though there may be some issue with killing the actual anakites.
Of course, this is before we take into account that Ashdod itself is usually perfectly able to counter your counter to them with their own mages; what with having good skelespam themselves, and the ability to spam earthquake without giving a damn.
So, were the blessings nerfed since this video? I noticed that the blessings are incarnate.
Nope, they're exactly the same!
Some things have been changed. You need magic scales for quickness and some other things, meaning you can't trash all your scales for a blessing like this.
Basically, you want quickness? You want ethereal sacred warriors? You want the top-tier blesses? You're gonna have to sacrifice EVERYTHING, but you're not allowed to sacrifice everything, so you'll have to sacrifice things you actually care about.
@@beauc7992 Does quickness proc on first strike lance hits? Because that would be hilarious on white centaurs.
I tried something like this ones in multiplayer, I died to a dozen black centaurs after less then 15 turns. They never lost a single units while taking literal every province, my Anakites did shit :(
So basically, if you have any good sacred unit worth focusing on - quickness is the way to go.
It's just a shame it's incarnate only.
I thought you named him to cancer anakin at first
Earth Meld?
It helps, but Anakites are strong enough that they don't get stuck for long and they kill so quickly that you're likely to see units routing basically on contact - plus they're 1 per square, so Earth Meld often hits only a few of them and you have to really spam it out to reliably lock down a whole squad. Which means you're deploying not only tons of units but also multiple E2 or better mages just to stop a random squad of like 6 Anakites, which Ashdod can crap out in two turns and sort of toss in your direction. Requiring other players to deploy whole armies with significant magic support just to kill quickly-generated expansion parties is kind of emblematic of just how strong Anakites are.
Couldn’t you have had an imprisoned pretender and not have to tank your scales so badly
does that work differently in Dom five
Oh you answered my question in the video
Ashdood Ashdude?
This build is no more possible. Dont watch for nothing.
How so?
@@qaz120120 Quickness requires magic scales of at least 1. This is magic scales -3.
I dont know about dom 5 but in dom 4 you could do the same and much more effectively as MA Mictlan...all thanks to quickness and massing of sacred flyers
I'd recommend not bothering with adons early on and just make a bunch of the national priests, adons are weaker than anakites till you get research for them anyways (adons dont have real helmets so they can have bad things happen). I like going 2 priests/ emite / 2 priests etc. and you get an expansion party of 2-3 anakites out every turn like that. Or more if you are going sheshai anakites, i prefer ahimans by a large amount.
I find priests too prone to run off into combat and die horribly after running out of bless targets, and Adons - being anakites themselves - won't have such mishaps. They are also a much better long-term investment in that they're very difficult to assassinate unlike most assassination targets.
Later they still remain important buff-machines; as astral adons can cast antimagic once you hit ench 4 on your way to "Horde of Skeletons" ench 5, and body ethereal (handy for storming castles) once you hit alteration 4,
earth adons can cast summon earthpower (conj 3) -> legions of steel (construction 3) or strength of giants (ench 3) if you need to kill some thick-skinned pretender, and fire adons are sort of the guys who drew the shortest straw of the bunch, being delegated to bless spam and fire elemental spam until you hit Phoenix Pyre in alt 7.
special shoutouts to earth adons due to them being able to cast earthquake (evo 5) once you put earth boots (cons 4 earth 2) on them
Doesn't matter that they are a better long term investment if your expansion is half as fast because you are only sending squads out every other turn instead of every turn. Their priests are pretty durable anyways and i think a regen bless is just better than quickness so they stay alive completely fine. And if you are just casting with them both Zamzumittes or Talmai elders are just better at it. I don't think you should really make adons until you actually intend to start thugging them.
Yes it does, because accruing adons is a very slow thing to do - and the qualities I described are a very good thing to incidentally have alongside 100% foolproof expansion parties.
Regen/Fortitude anakites are very powerful in different ways than quickness anakites (and unlock some super-communion options), but I find that quickness + fire/shock res + bsurge (+ regen if dormant and very cheeky) is generally much harder to counter and thus better for actually crushing people rather than indies.
If you'd like to play more with the magic side of Ashdod then Regen/Fortitude (or perhaps even fire/shock res + reinvig) is definitely the way to go though.
since it doesn't let me edit this post i'd like to correct that it's the regen/fortitude part that unlocks super-communion opportunities (by putting shrouds of the battle saint on emites/sages with astral, or outright using a blessed astral adon as a communion slave)
Well regardless of accruing adons you will be accruing zamzummites at some point with them being the source of your crosspaths and best mage, might as well recruit those now and adons later because they are so much superior for site searching/researching. Not saying to wait until exactly when you hit construction 4/alt 4 to start making adons just that you dont really need them in your first year or 2.
M'vorach (sp?) Knights from Y's are even better. At least in Dom 4. I'd assume same in Dom 5. Maybe Ashdod has better long-term prospects with their sacreds? Not sure.
Morvac'h knights are fairly shitty compared to anakites - they have significantly weaker attacks and much less HP, and are much harder to pump out with a big bless compared to anakites due to requiring ridiculous amounts of resources *and* recruitment points.
This fact is not made better by forcing you into a coastal start where only resources from adjacent underwater provinces are pulled (i.e. usually 2 provinces).
On a decent map you can pump out 7 (9 on a good one) sheshai anakites and an adon every two turns with 3 turmoil 3 prod, as opposed to the mighty 1 morgen princess and 4 morvach knights that you can pump out every second turn with 2 order and 3 prod almost regardless of the map.
Add to that shitty pretender choices in contrast to having access to the best immobile chassis (golden idol) as Ashdod and you couldn't be further from the truth when stating that morvach knights are "even better".
at least you have several good options as for what blesses to go with for ashdod, alongside great spell support that can counter your few weaknesses
I think you took my original comment too seriously. I appreciate the thought you put into your reply regardless.