Dominions 5 Wiki

By Cybertron2

Xibalba is a nation notorious for its bad expansion. It’s also one of the most unique nations in Dominions. It is my hope that the creation of an expansion guide will draw more people towards the bats – as although finnicky, expansion for the bats can often be quite decent.

Unlike most nations, the basic troops of Xibalba will fail in ordinary formations. As such, expansion for the bats has a lot of ‘mathy’ features to it, a lot of concepts that would otherwise be ignored, overlooked or just generally too esoteric to bother with, become necessary. The net result of this, is the formation for Xibalba have to be discovered, and ordinary expansion formations will prove ineffective. This article contains my discoveries. A lot of them require 6 groups, and therefore 2 commanders.

This part is dedicated to some of the math behind targeting in dominions. Although not strictly necessary – it informs all the formations below so I suggest at the very least skimming it. I will write this in ascending order of complexity.

Very broadly, Xibalba can expand 4 ways, which we’ll call Big Scorpion Party, nx10, nx4 and Scorpion Support. Big Scorpion Party costs the most gold, but is the strongest party – a lot of provinces that Xibalba otherwise couldn’t take with any formation can be takeable with their nation. It’s the most similar to expansion as other nations. Nx10 is a medium risk expansion technique that tries to increase the surface area of the bats so they kill more quickly. Nx4 and nx3 are low risk high attrition expansion techniques designed to snipe the commander more frequently than the above. Scorpion support can be attached to nx10 Nx4 and Nx3, and can serve 2 purposes, as a slight DPS bonus, or as a way to alter enemy targeting and protect your more important units.

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We’ll start off with the way scorpions interact with the AI. When units face the dominions AI, the targeting starts unlocked. When a unit gets close, there’s a chance the ai ‘locks on’. Once locked on, they won’t lock off. So as scorpions are either far weaker and cheaper, or far stronger and better defended than your bats (depending on the variant), it is usually beneficial to lock some of the AI targeting onto them, so your badly Armoured bats take less hits.

Then we go onto the number of groups your units are in. Broadly, a group looks for two things. An available landing square – and its targeting ‘rule’. The square means if you send 1 group, you’ll get a blob, where a lot of bats block one another from combat. If you send 2, you’ll get 2 groups both with at least some contact area. Loosely, this means, more parties, more surface area. What’s important is a new unit won’t land on a ‘filled’ tile, if it would, it checks another tile. As such, more groups = more spread.

Then we go onto how attack rear works. Essentially, every model is given a backiness value – which is = their row number + a dice roll. That value is used to determine what attack rear targets – albeit the exact specifics are unknown. However if the tile is filled, it’ll be skipped over. The result of this is that sending more groups increases the chance of one landing a true attack rear. At present it is unknown whether this is a result of the surface area above, or sequentially eliminating backiness as described here.

Finally - its worth a brief look at the targeting AI again - but in a little more detail this time. Units in midair will not be targeted. My (limited) understanding says there is a prioritized list system, where the AI first looks for models in units on attack commands (not in fly) and if that fails, then cycles down to fliers and casters. The reason this matters is with your flying units - you can 'hook' most of the independents onto a small group of landed units. The exact mechanism is unknown, but broadly this knowledge can be used to de-prioritize the targeting of the flying units.

Broadly, this uses a block of your 15 g nation recruit scorpions and your bats. This formation is designed to have the scorpions tank some hits and deal damage on the front row – and absorb the targeting of melee troops. Meanwhile, bats on hold attack rear kill quickly and take less attrition. This formation broadly has the most killing power out of EA Xibalba’s formations. It’s also slow and expensive – thanks to the scorpions. It is the only party that stands a reasonable chance against Cynocephalins (albeit you still attrition badly and its by no means a sure thing).

Starting at a base of 30 troops, and adding on blocks of 10, this party balances killing power with the chance of sniping the commanders. Loosely the point is to get lots of surface area and kill enemies quickly, but have enough density in any spot you land that your units won’t just crumble. I thank er_zero for this formation, as it is the gold standard for a lot of provinces. Generally, this is lower attrition than Formation 3, albeit there is a greater element of risk to it – as you’re doing less to manipulate the attack rear RNG

This is the formation that prompted this article. The idea loosely is to send a bunch of undersize groups on hold attack rear, and due to the way the surface area and attack rear targeting works – this is far more likely to actually attack rear. As a result, Xibalba goes from struggling to successfully attack the rear units, to doing it consistently. This formation can be done with bodyguards to ‘preserve’ its ability to expand multiple times, as it attritions heavily due to the large surface area and small troop counts + moral maluses

The totals are for two reasons. Firstly parties of 4 or less interact slightly differently with the AI, they are marginally less likely to be targeted by enemy units. When the units die to 1 hit, low morale is irrelevant. Secondly, 4 was just the total I found best for killing most enemy units. In most cases, 4 is the sweet spot, but I’m sure there’s lots of interesting variations.

To determine how many parties you need, start at a default 6*4. That is the basic optimal number. Never go below 5*3 unless you’ve done some serious testing (I haven’t bothered, this would only work on small provinces in specific circumstances). As a rule of thumb, you want another group of 4 for every 10 troops. So if there’s 70 enemies, you want 7x4. My recommendation is once you get above 6x4, the cost of failure is very high, so be cautious and take extra groups. 10x4 is the upper limit, this clears almost all provinces the x4 would.

Broadly, by attaching scorpions to the smaller formations, you reduce the number of enemies that attack your units, and in turn reduce attrition. Similarly, that little extra survivability can really help your bats (the damage units) do better.

Broadly, you have 4 troops of interest other than scorpions. Lancemen, Swordsmen, Armoured Swordsmen and Sacreds.

Lancemen are the worst, even with their lance charge they have the lowest damage. Their one advantage is their longer weapon, so repel happens less often. Generally you don’t want these. They are recruit any cave or forest.

Swordsmen are the other recruit any cave/forest unit – and the good one. They have much higher damage, meaning they fail less than the lances. The lances however, are more survivable, which comes up in the 10x formations. In the 4x formations, swords are generally king.

Armoured swordsmen are like swordsmen with Armour and +1 attack. The Armour can help for survivability, and the +1 attack is more than it looks, and is necessary in some volume for harder provinces.

Sacreds even unblessed have magic weapons. As such, they are very usesful against units that are ethereal or invulnerable. They’re expensive, so you often only want a few in an expansion force.

If you split the starting army into 2 commanders, and give each 3 groups of 2 lances 2 Armoured swordsmen, with the troops on hold attack rear and the commanders on hold hold hold hold hold (w/e, attack closest is best though), Xibalba can semi-reliably blind expand turn 1. For complicated reasons you leave them in the middle, don’t move the units (you can offset them back a tile or two but not much more). If I had to guess, it works around 75% of the time. You have 2 parties of these to start, plus whatever else you recruit. If you’re feeling dramatic and are using lucids research mod, you can use the research pips and Double Blind expand. If you’re feeling Really dramatic, take an awake expander and t1 triple blind expand.

Because attack rear works off model count, the more models in a province, the more likely attack rear is to fail. As such, you need to increase the number of parties if there are lots of enemy units if you want attack rear to work.

Not all indies move at the same speed. As such, some provinces are hold/attack rear whilst some are regular attack rear. The goal is to separate out the commanders, but the best way to do that is going to depend on the province. For example, Berdyke commanders are faster than their troops, so you have to use regular attack rear.

Standard hold attack rear formation

These are the easiest underground troops in the game for xib. They have a priest commander and 6*3 will clear it – you only need 3 troops per block since the commander is so weak. If you want to push it / only have one commander, 5*3 is fairly consistent, but has a noticeably higher fail rate. The formation is simple, just stick everyone on hold attack rear and put your commander on (hold*5 attack closest). In low volumes of these troops, 10x will attrition less, but if there’s 30+ they can kill a lot of troops, so often n*3 is better. You should use your spears on these, as you don’t really suffer the downsides on this province.

Standard hold attack rear formation If you send swords these are trivial. Otherwise theres a small chance the spears won’t kill the commander quickly. Either way, all formations work on these fairly well, but in large volumes I tend to 6*4 for safety. In small volumes, 10X is going to attrition less.

Standard hold attack rear formation

These aren’t hard but can be a little fiddly. They have ranged weapons and in large numbers can murder zots. In small numbers, they die in droves. All formations work against these, however this province can be ‘stretched too far’ – if you try 10x and send 30 bats into 30 pale ones, there’s a very real fail rate. Scorpions absorb hits fantastically on these, your units generally massacre them, and from memory you can do 6*3, but its close.

Standard hold attack rear formation – stick to X4, x3 can be incredibly risky but doable

Cave men kill quickly, have lots of hp and come in high volume. They have traditionally been a nuisance for Xibalba. Save yourself the hassle and send a 6*4 against them. In smaller quantities, 5*4 will work, and in theory you can do *3 builds, but in practice *3 has a fail rate that makes it undesirable over sending the extra 5-6 zots.

Special

Zots are easy. You need 15ish troops on hold attack/guard commander, or scorpions just loitering around so your commander doesn’t get sniped, and 2 units of 4 on attack rear. You can have more guards, but the critical volume is 2 groups of 4 on the attack, and ‘not dying in 1 round’ quantities on defence. You can do 2 groups of 3 but that’s a little riskier, 4 is clean.

Special Formation

So troglodytes are easy – but require very specific formations. Broadly, you want no lances, at least 1 but preferably 2 (or more) Armoured zots per squad, and the rest swords. You want them all in the middle on straight attack rear. If the commanders have 5 guards apiece that also helps smooth things out, but it’s not necessary – it just lowers the fail rate slightly (the success rate however is fairly good). You have to send EXACTLY 6*4 in attack rear squads. Making the squads bigger will backfire – albeit sending more is harmless (but of low value as they all die on the trog trample retreat).

So what’s going on here. Firstly, the armoured units are for the +1 attack bonus they get. It matters a lot. You’re trying to get a critical amount of damage on the troglodyte lord in 1 round, max 2. After that, everything you have will be dead. The guards are to mess with pathing. Without them, you only ever get 1 round. With 5 of them, the enemy doesn’t have a targeting malus to them as opposed to the 4x groups, plus they’re the only units not in the air when they approach, so they tend to lock on, and being slow they never arrive in time (if they do, the battle was lost already). With 2 commanders, you get 2 ‘shots’ at this, with 10 total guards.

If the groups are bigger than 4x, there’s a bad habit of trogs to clump up on them, which is terrible as you’re trying to snipe the commander. If they’re less, they can’t kill the lord in time. The straight attack rear is marginally more effective than hold attack rear, I’m not entirely sure why but I think it’s linked slightly to the turn order tick mechanism and targeting.

I’d recommend testing this a couple times before doing it in multiplayer. It’s not hard, but it’s finnicky enough that it’s much easier to mess up than the above formations. There are slight variations that can work, but loosely, the described variant works – and was chosen for a reason. For example, lances still succeed some of the time, but have a reduced success chance due to their lower damage, and because the tramplers tend to kill everything on the retreat, it’s very expensive to use sacreds here, as you’re liable to lose whatever you send.

Standard attack rear (NOT hold attack rear) formation – stick to X4, 8+ groups – lances are good here.

So berdykes have a large volume of units with repel possible weapons, good damage and mess with attack rear pathing. Also the commander is faster than the units. As such, we use a regular attack rear formation, with usually 8x4 to 10x4. Given how annoying these troops can be, I tend to use 10x4 to reduce the odds of failure. It’s expensive and it’s full attrition, but it clears the province quickly. The 10x formations don’t work on these troops. Scorpions work well, but most of the units you send other than scorpions will die.

Formation is variable

I believe these use hold attack rear usually (but I know there’s weird corner cases – soulless is just straight attack rear cause they’re slow). Broadly there’s two approaches to these. Either send a tonne of units in the X4 or X3 formation (I think x4 but I haven’t fully tested out x3), probably a full 9 or 10 groups, or send a big blob in the x10. Basically, your units will mulch these in sufficient volume, so if you have a big blob of bats, you’re liable to be very low attrition, as opposed to the x3/4 formations which are high attrition.

Special Formation

Shades depend entirely on how many fiends of darkness the commander has guarding them. At 0, a regular 4x formation can clear this on hold attack rear a good portion of the time (there is a real RNG aspect however). On 1-2, you need 1 sacred per group (kills commander fast enough), or 2 Armoured warriors per group – the latter being dicey but plausible. On 3+, unless you send 2* sacreds per group, you can’t get it consistent enough. You put the commanders at the back top corner, and try to drag the enemy units on a merry go round, trying to maximize your units contact time on the commander.

Otherwise, scorpions, standard prophet tricks and sacreds all do well here, but they’re all expensive options.

I haven’t found a good way to take this tile yet. So far, the best ideas have come from Er_Zero, which is basically send national scorpions and a tonne of bats, and even then it’s dicey. The complicating factor is broadly the fact that one commander stays at the back (caster), whilst the other stands in the middle of formations like a barbarian lord.

At a theoretical level, some sort of scorpion + hold attack rear formation should work. The caster falls to the back of the formation, the lord runs to the front like a barbarian, and your frontline kills the lord and your attack rear snipes the caster. I’ve yet to get this consistent enough to recommend it, but at a theory level, Xibalba is potentially able to exploit these 2 behaviours. That said, the dogs kill your units incredibly quickly, and take a long time to kill, so this would need to be very heavily tested before I’d recommend it.

• Lion tribe doesn’t have a barbarian

• Heavy cav commanders are hard, but often provinces like cataphracts have light cav commanders – scout ping it

• A single sacred in a party helps deal with magic commanders like jade maidens and amazons.

• Apparently this works on certain hard provinces [ER_Zero – amazons] [Send 60] 3x attack close 3x attack rear

Many thanks to ER_zero, a longtime pillar of the EA Xibalba community for all his help RE expansion. This guide wouldn’t have been possible without him. The 10x formation is his.