I forgot (somehow, in a near 2 hour video) to go over how to make high mobility late game siege parties. Female (flying) leader plus great eagles (or just break out the gate cleavers). Escort with Valkyries if interception by light enemy forces is possible. Further corrections will no doubt be forthcoming in the morning. Thanks again to my patrons for sponsoring this one.
Maerland pointed out a very good point with draug in the last tournament turn. They plus a relatively cheap summoned death leader can take water provinces for you which is definitely worth 30 gems or so to get there if you wont lose the provinces.
As a Helheim Main i do concur on your take with a few exceptions. No.1 Vanjarls are actually viable blood hunters. Their price is kinda deceiving as Mid-Late Helheim (if successful) kinda struggles to spend it's gold with it's Armies mostly consisting of Summons and Cap only Troops. That being said, Helheim doesn't have the best bloodhunting but it's vital for them to be able cast blood battle magic plus, of course, the demon commanders for late game. No2 Valkyries are, imo, the better late game choice than Helhirdings, as they make good use of your bless too, Raiding will be mostly done by your Thugs and having a bunch of elite flyers on rear attack can really help with messing up enemy mage lines/formations in large battles. No.3 I never play imprisoned, it just gimps your research too hard early on, as your mages suck at it. Also being under +20% rec points will cut down on your helhirding numbers a lot. Lastly, you've completely glossed over the Snow Movement Bless, surprisingly good on them ;) .
Hey I discovered your channel a week ago and got into this amazing game! The algorithm was with me that day, since now I can't stop playing Dominions I'm still a noob but it's so complex and the amount of stuff you learn just seems to never end!! I really needed a game this good it's crazy how (it seems to me) few people know it
Oh fresh meat 😂 Jokes aside, get your feet wet in multiplayer once you got the basics down... or even earlier. You can never be "ready" for the carnage anyways and the diplomacy is half the fun. Check out lucid tactics for info on discord servers and getting started in mp
Very good video, I pretty much agree with everything said in it. One point about Air elementals: Everyone know how good they are in storms because of storm power, which increase their defense to 17 making them harder to kill. Darkness is however even better for them, because as they have sprite sight, anything without darkvision will have -6attack/def against them. That makes them very hard to hit (especially with a storm up also) and they will have a much easier time trampling stuff that have -6 def.
Oh btw, I think there is a use for the Draugr, though I've only used them with Midgård before. They're in many ways comparable to wights, except you trade the magic weapon for a fear aura (and 4 gems for a fear aura is pretty cheap). Where I think you might want to use them in helheim is in a contingent as part of your corpse construct horde in fights where both sides have significant chaff and your opponents chaff is vulnerable to morale plays, to break the enemy's formation. You need a few summonings, but not that many, and keep them together rather than spread out. The fear auras will cause constant morale checks, which puts your enemy on the clock. And because they require so little research, they're a way to convert any death gems you happen to have into power far before you get access to more efficient methods. They're not amazing and not something you build an army out of, but I think they can have their place as a specialist.
Great video as always. When it comes to Gnipahellir/Gnipahålan, this is my theory on why it's spelled the latter way in Dominions, if you're curious: Gnipahellir is the spelling used in both the poetic and prose Eddor. However, in Sweden it's often translated as Gnipahålan, and Illwinter have Swedish as their native language and so would probably primarily know its Swedish spelling. Normally when they do nations nowadays they tend to research what the most appropriate spelling or transcription would from the original language, but in this case they might have skipped doing so, because 1) it's one of the earlier nations, and the old nations tend to be a bit less rigorous than the new one, 2) because Swedish has its roots in Old Norse and the grammar tends to be the same, it's easy to assume the Swedish translations are closer to the original texts than they are and 3) because Gnipahellir sounds... weird, to a modern Swede. Like, most of the time old norse words make sense in terms of grammatical structure. Here's a pointless tangent about that if you have nothing better to do lol: 'Hangadrottir' makes sense to me when I know even the most basic concept of it; 'Hanga' is basically hänga, to hang. Drott isn't a word used anymore, but makes perfect sense as king since our word for queen is still Drottning (and your pronunciation of hangadrottning seems in line with what I would expect, except the emphasized vowels are still the first a and the o - but again, that's Swedish, noone really knows what the intonation of spoken old norse was). The -ir ending denoting a plural sounds oldschool (or icelandic) since nowadays we use -er, -ar, or -or in most cases, but is perfectly legible. So, to me as a Swede, reading the word "hangadrottir" reads straightforwardly as "hanged kings" and hangadrottningen as "the hanged queen". But this is where Gnipahellir initially looks odd to me. Gnipa has an unknown meaning in this context, but hellir being used to describe caves makes perfect sense; a hål is a pit or hole in Swedish, and that coming from hell is understandable. But to me hellir reads as a plural, while hålan (or hellan or hellen) reads as singular definite article. So Gnipahellir on the surface reads to me like "Gnipa caves", while Gnipahellan reads like "the Gnipa cave". And when discussing one specific location, using singular definite just reads more natural to me. Obviously this doesn't mean that Gnipahellir is wrong and Gnipahålan right, it just means Swedish has changed further from Old Norse than Swedes sometimes intuit.
This post is full of fascinating musings and info. Just a quick note regarding the idiosyncrasies of English for any non-native English speakers: people are hanged and pictures are hung. So I suppose the proper translation would be "hanged kings," in case that's useful to anyone.
There's no mystery to it. Our entire language has changed over time, including the words for mythological concepts. It's not that we don't know the original spellings, it's just that it makes no more sense to use them than for an Englishman to suddenly speak archaic English. Hangadrott means Hang-King. It was an alias of Odin who hung himself for 9 days to gain knowledge of runes (which only revealed themselves to "the worthy").
"Gniprahålan" is the modern Swedish word for "Gnipahellir", and the creators of Dominions are Swedish. They incorporate a lot of the beliefs of their ancestors in their games, which is pretty cool.
One of those nations that's stayed an absolute powerhouse all the way since the early days of Dominions 3, back when the end game was gem generating artifacts and tartarian SCs. Very good guide.
You know what would be really cool? If you make some early, mid or late game armies, and have them fight scripted so people can get a good idea of how a larger army plays. (You could even make a some pretty solid standard enemy to fight so we could see how well different nations you review would fight them)
Yes, I need this, a national Overview on Helheim, it's the best contender for using the Dwarves of 4 directions (as in actually using darkness and storm, aka going undead)
Can’t believe that I’ve been watching for geopolitical/ strategic analysis and now I’m discovering Dominions 6 and finding out that there’s a whole playlist of fantasy geopolitics/ strategic analysis
Perun as always a great video with tons of insight and useful info for the new players out there. I will definitely use your advice and the best part of the video at 42:38 "do not please God spend your nature gems on Bears".
As siege chaff their are more options blood2 Bind Bone Fiends have map move22 wich is ok better than any other chaff and when you not like too use air gems for corpsemans you can use at construction level3 Clockwork Soldries wich are fine but i would prefer corpseman personal.
I think the main reason WC are better is the hp count. 22 hp is a lot for a high defense cav unit and makes a moderate defensive bless much stronger vs them. With 15 SR white centaur will pretty well never die to a tstrike. Most sacred cav after 15 SR either die or average 1-2 hp left. I think that most sacred cav can be countered more efficiently with a variety of tools from the evocations available. This is why to me white centaur are the best recruitable sacred in the game. Of significant note centaur are probably the best recruitable chasis in the game. Giant cost with cav upsides and giant hp.
I think it's hard to call which unit is better in a vacuum, really. Both have significant advantages over the other. Helhirdingar have notably higher defense and a glamour image which makes them a lot harder to hit in combat. They're much harder to predict (27MM+65stealth+glamour vs 22MM+40stealth no glamour) and spirit sight makes magic weapons notably cheaper as a bless. Their higher protection despite lower natprot makes the benefit more from natprot buffs, including the very solid early-game bless of Stygian Skin. However, White Centaurs have more hit points as you mention, they're 10 gold cheaper, and they go berserk. The last is crucial because it makes them significantly more killy, as well as more likely to succeed in unlucky raids where the commander is sniped. But I think an equally important aspect is the context in which they exist, what the nation has access to and such. Pangaea have ubiquitous access to wooden warriors and mossbody, pushing their de facto prot to the stratosphere, while all of Helheims buffing comes online relatively late (except for SoG/LoS which are decent but not great when on a cap-only STR mage). On the other hand, while you mention that Centaurs take thunderstrikes to the face more easily with just their bless, Pangaea have no options to increase shockres until Ground Army, while Helheim gets it easily accessible in Thunder Ward. Overall, I would say that I think White Centaurs take a hellbless better than Helhirdingar, but that Helhirdingar perform better with a slight bless in the nation they're in.
@@MrThedumbbunny I think you can well make a rainbow hellbless. To me, what makes a hellbless is more about how all-in you go, how much you tank your scales and so on. I'm not necessarily that's the optimum way to go far Pan, just that I think centaurs have kind of a higher upper cap on how much of a bless they benefit from.
@@Ragatokk 1) 13 base defense 17 with shield and 23 hp isnt paricularly easy to kill though good point they can be harrassed down. 2) they hit like a truck even after the charge. Berserk+blood surge+SoG puts them at 24 strength and 17 attack for a 27P+24B per round. Not many things take that. Even the hoof kills most ea heavy infantry with that and it only requires 4 blood bless points and surviving the first hit. Good point on the harrassed penalty though.
I feel like nations like this one should team up with the other starter heavy nations to bully the late game nerds. And vice-versa, these seem like the guys you want to kill/contain early so they don't make you bleed too much.
Any chance you could put time stamps in the future to be able to jump directly to god creation, for example? Fantastic tutorial, I really appreciate you making it.
I think it depends a lot on who is in the lobby, and the size of the game. I could still see a niche use for it in a very aggressive strategy. There are so many nations in the early age that rely on sacreds.
@@lowlife4103 You're missing my point, you'll be doing more damage with a strength bless (and that dmg is not conditional). Just make sure you pick up Magic Weapons as Eli spam is quite prevalent in EA.
Question, if you took larger as a bless and twiceborned your mages. Would they come back as a size for 4 chassis? I'm thinking of how Freaklord comes back as a Titan basically.
I think main weakness of Helheim - if you play with experienced opponents without brain issues - big chances what you will be ganged early. And while you sacreds is super good - EA have a good number of nations what can cause you troubles even 1v1. But yes, illwinter doesnt know or care about balance of the game.
I understand why Dominions 5 isn't a massively popular title. The graphics are primitive, the interface outdated and the game is frightfully complicated. But that's also part of its charm, the depth is what makes it the game it is.
This is just dipping toes into how absurdly strong Helheim is when you play it often and take it to its full, obnoxious potential. As someone who mains this nation I believe it 100% needs a nerf and should be banned from multiplayer games. Playing Helheim is like being the overpowered anime villain that requires everyone else in the game to use the power of friendship to defeat. You hijack the pace of the game from the very start and force it to revolve around you. It's unbelievably un-fun to play against and you can build your gameplan to offer essentially zero counterplay (I want to make a video on two different builds but also feel bad about revealing strategies). I've won like 75% of my games (the other 25% being my own mistakes in scripting, not really a counterplay) before late game strengths and weaknesses are even relevant. The only thing that can stop it is increasing the amount of Thrones needed to win and forcing long grueling sieges. Even then, you can plan on researching Crumble to solve siege problems (which is in Alteration, your best research path). Crumble + moving stealthy units will 1 turn siege any normal fortress.
I forgot (somehow, in a near 2 hour video) to go over how to make high mobility late game siege parties.
Female (flying) leader plus great eagles (or just break out the gate cleavers).
Escort with Valkyries if interception by light enemy forces is possible. Further corrections will no doubt be forthcoming in the morning.
Thanks again to my patrons for sponsoring this one.
Maerland pointed out a very good point with draug in the last tournament turn. They plus a relatively cheap summoned death leader can take water provinces for you which is definitely worth 30 gems or so to get there if you wont lose the provinces.
Helheim seems to be a nation where you have a job for every cap only mage you recruit before you even recruit them, and you'll never have enough.
As a Helheim Main i do concur on your take with a few exceptions.
No.1 Vanjarls are actually viable blood hunters. Their price is kinda deceiving as Mid-Late Helheim (if successful) kinda struggles to spend it's gold with it's Armies mostly consisting of Summons and Cap only Troops. That being said, Helheim doesn't have the best bloodhunting but it's vital for them to be able cast blood battle magic plus, of course, the demon commanders for late game.
No2 Valkyries are, imo, the better late game choice than Helhirdings, as they make good use of your bless too, Raiding will be mostly done by your Thugs and having a bunch of elite flyers on rear attack can really help with messing up enemy mage lines/formations in large battles.
No.3 I never play imprisoned, it just gimps your research too hard early on, as your mages suck at it. Also being under +20% rec points will cut down on your helhirding numbers a lot. Lastly, you've completely glossed over the Snow Movement Bless, surprisingly good on them ;) .
Hey I discovered your channel a week ago and got into this amazing game! The algorithm was with me that day, since now I can't stop playing Dominions I'm still a noob but it's so complex and the amount of stuff you learn just seems to never end!! I really needed a game this good it's crazy how (it seems to me) few people know it
Oh fresh meat 😂
Jokes aside, get your feet wet in multiplayer once you got the basics down... or even earlier. You can never be "ready" for the carnage anyways and the diplomacy is half the fun.
Check out lucid tactics for info on discord servers and getting started in mp
Very good video, I pretty much agree with everything said in it.
One point about Air elementals: Everyone know how good they are in storms because of storm power, which increase their defense to 17 making them harder to kill. Darkness is however even better for them, because as they have sprite sight, anything without darkvision will have -6attack/def against them. That makes them very hard to hit (especially with a storm up also) and they will have a much easier time trampling stuff that have -6 def.
Oh btw, I think there is a use for the Draugr, though I've only used them with Midgård before. They're in many ways comparable to wights, except you trade the magic weapon for a fear aura (and 4 gems for a fear aura is pretty cheap). Where I think you might want to use them in helheim is in a contingent as part of your corpse construct horde in fights where both sides have significant chaff and your opponents chaff is vulnerable to morale plays, to break the enemy's formation. You need a few summonings, but not that many, and keep them together rather than spread out. The fear auras will cause constant morale checks, which puts your enemy on the clock. And because they require so little research, they're a way to convert any death gems you happen to have into power far before you get access to more efficient methods.
They're not amazing and not something you build an army out of, but I think they can have their place as a specialist.
Great video as always. When it comes to Gnipahellir/Gnipahålan, this is my theory on why it's spelled the latter way in Dominions, if you're curious: Gnipahellir is the spelling used in both the poetic and prose Eddor. However, in Sweden it's often translated as Gnipahålan, and Illwinter have Swedish as their native language and so would probably primarily know its Swedish spelling. Normally when they do nations nowadays they tend to research what the most appropriate spelling or transcription would from the original language, but in this case they might have skipped doing so, because 1) it's one of the earlier nations, and the old nations tend to be a bit less rigorous than the new one, 2) because Swedish has its roots in Old Norse and the grammar tends to be the same, it's easy to assume the Swedish translations are closer to the original texts than they are and 3) because Gnipahellir sounds... weird, to a modern Swede. Like, most of the time old norse words make sense in terms of grammatical structure.
Here's a pointless tangent about that if you have nothing better to do lol: 'Hangadrottir' makes sense to me when I know even the most basic concept of it; 'Hanga' is basically hänga, to hang. Drott isn't a word used anymore, but makes perfect sense as king since our word for queen is still Drottning (and your pronunciation of hangadrottning seems in line with what I would expect, except the emphasized vowels are still the first a and the o - but again, that's Swedish, noone really knows what the intonation of spoken old norse was). The -ir ending denoting a plural sounds oldschool (or icelandic) since nowadays we use -er, -ar, or -or in most cases, but is perfectly legible. So, to me as a Swede, reading the word "hangadrottir" reads straightforwardly as "hanged kings" and hangadrottningen as "the hanged queen". But this is where Gnipahellir initially looks odd to me. Gnipa has an unknown meaning in this context, but hellir being used to describe caves makes perfect sense; a hål is a pit or hole in Swedish, and that coming from hell is understandable. But to me hellir reads as a plural, while hålan (or hellan or hellen) reads as singular definite article. So Gnipahellir on the surface reads to me like "Gnipa caves", while Gnipahellan reads like "the Gnipa cave". And when discussing one specific location, using singular definite just reads more natural to me. Obviously this doesn't mean that Gnipahellir is wrong and Gnipahålan right, it just means Swedish has changed further from Old Norse than Swedes sometimes intuit.
This post is full of fascinating musings and info. Just a quick note regarding the idiosyncrasies of English for any non-native English speakers: people are hanged and pictures are hung. So I suppose the proper translation would be "hanged kings," in case that's useful to anyone.
@@gantoth3705 Yes, I edited my post, because I realized "hung king" sounds like a king with a huge hog, and not a fay boar exactly...
Even the responses to the original comment are of value.
There's no mystery to it. Our entire language has changed over time, including the words for mythological concepts. It's not that we don't know the original spellings, it's just that it makes no more sense to use them than for an Englishman to suddenly speak archaic English.
Hangadrott means Hang-King. It was an alias of Odin who hung himself for 9 days to gain knowledge of runes (which only revealed themselves to "the worthy").
"Gniprahålan" is the modern Swedish word for "Gnipahellir", and the creators of Dominions are Swedish. They incorporate a lot of the beliefs of their ancestors in their games, which is pretty cool.
One of those nations that's stayed an absolute powerhouse all the way since the early days of Dominions 3, back when the end game was gem generating artifacts and tartarian SCs. Very good guide.
You know what would be really cool?
If you make some early, mid or late game armies, and have them fight scripted so people can get a good idea of how a larger army plays.
(You could even make a some pretty solid standard enemy to fight so we could see how well different nations you review would fight them)
Yes, I need this, a national Overview on Helheim, it's the best contender for using the Dwarves of 4 directions (as in actually using darkness and storm, aka going undead)
Can’t believe that I’ve been watching for geopolitical/ strategic analysis and now I’m discovering Dominions 6 and finding out that there’s a whole playlist of fantasy geopolitics/ strategic analysis
Perun as always a great video with tons of insight and useful info for the new players out there. I will definitely use your advice and the best part of the video at 42:38 "do not please God spend your nature gems on Bears".
1:26:32 Hellherdings with barkskin have 18 protection, not 16 protection.
I subscribed after seeing this video :) Thanks for the national overviews.
As siege chaff their are more options blood2 Bind Bone Fiends have map move22 wich is ok better than any other chaff and when you not like too use air gems for corpsemans you can use at construction level3 Clockwork Soldries wich are fine but i would prefer corpseman personal.
I think the main reason WC are better is the hp count. 22 hp is a lot for a high defense cav unit and makes a moderate defensive bless much stronger vs them. With 15 SR white centaur will pretty well never die to a tstrike. Most sacred cav after 15 SR either die or average 1-2 hp left. I think that most sacred cav can be countered more efficiently with a variety of tools from the evocations available. This is why to me white centaur are the best recruitable sacred in the game.
Of significant note centaur are probably the best recruitable chasis in the game. Giant cost with cav upsides and giant hp.
I think it's hard to call which unit is better in a vacuum, really. Both have significant advantages over the other. Helhirdingar have notably higher defense and a glamour image which makes them a lot harder to hit in combat. They're much harder to predict (27MM+65stealth+glamour vs 22MM+40stealth no glamour) and spirit sight makes magic weapons notably cheaper as a bless. Their higher protection despite lower natprot makes the benefit more from natprot buffs, including the very solid early-game bless of Stygian Skin. However, White Centaurs have more hit points as you mention, they're 10 gold cheaper, and they go berserk. The last is crucial because it makes them significantly more killy, as well as more likely to succeed in unlucky raids where the commander is sniped.
But I think an equally important aspect is the context in which they exist, what the nation has access to and such. Pangaea have ubiquitous access to wooden warriors and mossbody, pushing their de facto prot to the stratosphere, while all of Helheims buffing comes online relatively late (except for SoG/LoS which are decent but not great when on a cap-only STR mage). On the other hand, while you mention that Centaurs take thunderstrikes to the face more easily with just their bless, Pangaea have no options to increase shockres until Ground Army, while Helheim gets it easily accessible in Thunder Ward.
Overall, I would say that I think White Centaurs take a hellbless better than Helhirdingar, but that Helhirdingar perform better with a slight bless in the nation they're in.
@@Mewobiba i really wouldnt call a dormant/imprisoned rainbow a hellbless. I think pan really wants the diversity.
@@MrThedumbbunny I think you can well make a rainbow hellbless. To me, what makes a hellbless is more about how all-in you go, how much you tank your scales and so on. I'm not necessarily that's the optimum way to go far Pan, just that I think centaurs have kind of a higher upper cap on how much of a bless they benefit from.
centaurs don't get the mounted harassment penalty reduction, so they are quite easy to kill in melee as long as they don't shit on your units.
@@Ragatokk 1) 13 base defense 17 with shield and 23 hp isnt paricularly easy to kill though good point they can be harrassed down.
2) they hit like a truck even after the charge. Berserk+blood surge+SoG puts them at 24 strength and 17 attack for a 27P+24B per round. Not many things take that. Even the hoof kills most ea heavy infantry with that and it only requires 4 blood bless points and surviving the first hit.
Good point on the harrassed penalty though.
I feel like nations like this one should team up with the other starter heavy nations to bully the late game nerds.
And vice-versa, these seem like the guys you want to kill/contain early so they don't make you bleed too much.
Any chance you could put time stamps in the future to be able to jump directly to god creation, for example? Fantastic tutorial, I really appreciate you making it.
Yey, some dominions content!
Is Unholy Weapons a good dormant bless for Helheim? I think it would let you take on the other sacred powerhouse nations in your first and second war.
Unholy Weapons is not good bless, period :D .
I think it depends a lot on who is in the lobby, and the size of the game. I could still see a niche use for it in a very aggressive strategy. There are so many nations in the early age that rely on sacreds.
@@lowlife4103 You're missing my point, you'll be doing more damage with a strength bless (and that dmg is not conditional). Just make sure you pick up Magic Weapons as Eli spam is quite prevalent in EA.
Question, if you took larger as a bless and twiceborned your mages. Would they come back as a size for 4 chassis? I'm thinking of how Freaklord comes back as a Titan basically.
@ThoughtCrime Even with a Larger Bless?
This is very useful to me, as I am to the embarrasing myself part of my multiplayer game. :'(
My favorite power drug is Nazca xD
Drug in south slavic languages means friend :)
Nice!
that was a pleasant 100 minutes :D
Meme thumbnail. Time for good stuff.
I think main weakness of Helheim - if you play with experienced opponents without brain issues - big chances what you will be ganged early. And while you sacreds is super good - EA have a good number of nations what can cause you troubles even 1v1.
But yes, illwinter doesnt know or care about balance of the game.
Diplomacy, as always, is the best balance for overpowered nations. We just need to be honest and admit they're overpowered.
(-=
More lore
love your channel but hate loki the series lol.wish even more people liked dom5 but oh well.thanks for the nation overviews!
I understand why Dominions 5 isn't a massively popular title. The graphics are primitive, the interface outdated and the game is frightfully complicated. But that's also part of its charm, the depth is what makes it the game it is.
This is just dipping toes into how absurdly strong Helheim is when you play it often and take it to its full, obnoxious potential. As someone who mains this nation I believe it 100% needs a nerf and should be banned from multiplayer games. Playing Helheim is like being the overpowered anime villain that requires everyone else in the game to use the power of friendship to defeat. You hijack the pace of the game from the very start and force it to revolve around you. It's unbelievably un-fun to play against and you can build your gameplan to offer essentially zero counterplay (I want to make a video on two different builds but also feel bad about revealing strategies). I've won like 75% of my games (the other 25% being my own mistakes in scripting, not really a counterplay) before late game strengths and weaknesses are even relevant. The only thing that can stop it is increasing the amount of Thrones needed to win and forcing long grueling sieges. Even then, you can plan on researching Crumble to solve siege problems (which is in Alteration, your best research path). Crumble + moving stealthy units will 1 turn siege any normal fortress.
Bit late now but any further explanation on the recommended strategy’s I struggle to keep up with research