Mages in Dominions may forge magic items with a massive variety of effects. Similar to casting a ritual, forging an item has a path requirement, gem cost and requires the mage to take an entire turn at a lab.
Unlocking the ability to forge more powerful magic items is the primary use of the magic school of Construction, which provides a new tier of items at research levels 2, 4, 6 and 8.
Magic items may only be equipped on a commander with the proper slots. Gift of Reason and Divine Name must therefore be used to equip a regular unit with items.
Like gems, magic items can be passed between commanders in a province, they can also be withdrawn from and stored in the magic item treasury if a lab is present.
Many items have beneficial effects off the battlefield such as enhancing research ability, reducing forge costs or boosting the wearer's magic paths. Others are simply weapons or armor, to be given to a commander to help them fighting. Careful choice of equipment is an important part of building an effective thug or supercombatant.
Similar to spells (albeit rarer), some nations have national items that cannot be forged by others. Some nations also get a discount when forging certain items.
Most items do not stack with themselves at all, see stackable items for known exceptions.
Each unit, including non-commanders, has a specified number of slots that is inherent to their chassis, an unmounted humanoid generally has two hand slots, a head slot, a body slot, a feet slot and two miscellaneous slots. Other units may not have a tangible set of feet or don't use their own feet, have four arms, additional heads or no head at all, details like these are reflected in a unit's slots.
Slot availability can be modified by afflictions such as the loss of one or both arms.
When a unit transforms into a chassis lacking slots which were filled with items, the items are lost. When the transformation happened outside of a turn roll, the "Redo turn from scratch" option in the game menu is the only way to restore the lost items.
Magic items will replace a unit's starting equipment in certain situations. Armor and headpieces will generally only replace what the unit is wearing in that spot. Equipping a weapon will always remove every built in weapon the commander has to use their hands for, no matter how many hand slots remain unused, this prevents the commander from incurring an attack penalty. Shields however will only replace starting weapons if there is an insufficient number of hand slots, although The Copper Arm may break this interaction in certain situations. Natural weapons that aren't hands will never be replaced by an item.
While most commanders can wear any headpiece in their head slot, some cannot wear regular helmets and are therefore limited to wearing crowns, be it due to head shape, hornedness or just plain snootiness. Commanders with this limitation feature a crown icon on their head slot instead of a helmet.
Hand slots will alternate between weapon slots with a sword icon and shield slots with a shield icon, weapon slots may not be used to equip a shield.
Besides having a cost and forging requirement, some items have common traits:
All items requiring Construction 8 to forge are unique artifacts. Only one of each artifact may exist at any time. If an artifact is lost, it can be reforged by any player with Construction 8. If multiple players attempt to forge the same artifact on the same turn, one player is randomly chosen to succeed in the forging, while the other players lose the forging cost.
Additionally, using the default game settings, a player may only forge a single artifact per turn.
Certain items allow the wearer to cast a specific combat- or ritual magic. Casting a spell this way will disregard path- and research requirements, cost and lack of a laboratory.
The spells are always cast using the minimum requirements for the spell, scaling therefore does not apply even when used by a high level mage. This means that using combat spell items with non-mages is a viable option as it fills their otherwise useless script and unlike mages they will only ever pick an item spell when following the "Cast spells" general order. The precision stat of the caster may still apply.
Combat spells cast with an item will increase fatigue by 5-10 instead of the regular fatigue cost and are seemingly unaffected by encumbrance, casting from items is therefore generally much less demanding for mages.
Combat spells unlocked this way will appear at the top of the spell list for scripting while rituals appear as an order.
Some items are capable of boosting the wearer's magic paths. These magic boosters can grant a mage access to higher level items as well as combat magic and rituals.
Magic boosters will not boost magic paths that the wearer doesn't have at least a single point in.
Many (cross-)paths allow players to reach high level magic using a low level mage with little to no empowering, by simply boosting the mage with items until they can summon a higher level mage and passing on their boosters, see MelficeBelmont's Boosting & Access Guide for detailed information on boosting each path.
After a battle, each item from dead commanders has a chance to be found by a random commander as follows:
Item | Chance to find |
---|---|
Enemy's Const2 item | 30% |
Enemy's Const4 item | 45% |
Enemy's Const6 item | 60% |
Enemy's Const8 item | 75% |
Enemy's Cursed item | 90% |
Any own item | 100% |
However, if the randomly picked commander has no free slots for the item it found, the item is lost anyway. Some items are marked "nopickup" and are lost when the commander dies in battle. These include Soul Contracts, items that replace body parts such as Crystal Heart and Eye of Aiming, and a few more.
If a commander dies outside of battle, such as from disease, Transformation or a Seeking Arrow, the items are lost unless there is a lab in the province. If there is a lab, the items are saved and go in there.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of every item known to fully or partially stack with itself.
Some magic items cannot be forged and have to be obtained through other means.
A very small number of units, mostly pretenders, start with an unforgeable magic item. For example, Jomon's Ryujin start with a Dragon Pearl.
The majority of unforgeable magic items can only be obtained through killing the independents which carry them when they spawn as a random event or at the start of the game.
Magic | |
---|---|
Concepts | Blood Hunting • Communions • Empowerment • Gems • Items • Magic Sites • Research |
Categories | Combat Magic • Ritual Magic • Notable Spells |
Paths | Fire • Air • Water • Earth • Astral • Death • Nature • Blood • Holy |
Schools | Conjuration • Alteration • Evocation • Construction • Enchantment • Thaumaturgy • Blood • Divine |