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--- johnny-demuppetization [2021/08/10 21:16] – [Scripting Units] naaira
+++ johnny-demuppetization [2022/11/02 23:46] (current) – Johnny asked to have his guide removed from the wiki. So that's what I've done naaira
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-**WORK IN PROGRESS**
-====== Your Guide to Demuppetization ======
-<WRAP group>{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_01.gif?270|}}
-**Author:** Johnny (Discord: @johnnyjohnny#1618)
-Hello Johnny here, coming to your aid to remove the stick up your dominions playing ass! I’m going to be explaining a few concepts that elevated me to the muppeteer you know today. Essentially I’ll be bringing you to a level to stomp any rando pub game and be able to compete in any skills game with non-muppets in the mix. This guide will of course be featuring absolutely ZERO diplomacy advice. We have plenty of that horseshit available from literal career diplomats on your choice of Professor Doctor servers.
-\\ \\
-<WRAP box round>**Thanks**: \\ A huge thanks to Not-Lola, Bloax, Sy, Arco, Olli, Nipanteri, Gono, Soron, 7thPath, Baalz & Loggy who I wouldn’t have been able to improve or teach without!</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-===== The Basics =====
-The first immediate improvement any player can make is fixing common pretender design flaws,as an example piloting a sacred build on Shinuyama.
-<WRAP group><WRAP column 28px>{{:guides:demuppetization:johnny_muppet.png?50 |}}</WRAP>//“But Johnny, my build can work in X situation and I made it work!”//</WRAP>
-Yeah sure, but a build functioning in a certain lobby doesn’t mean it’s playing to that nation’s strengths or even improving that specific game’s situation in your favor. Now let’s go ahead and get the two archetypes in dominions out of the way, The 1st being Bless which means using “Bless Points” gained from taking magic paths on a pretender to give your “Sacred” units special effects the most common effect taken in these builds is “Resists” which essentially allows you to play checkers with your opponent during a rated chess game. The 2nd is known as scales, this playstyle relies on your nation’s non-sacred national roster, using effects that increase the production of said units and gain more gold to also purchase said units.
-<WRAP centeralign> **Pretender designs may be better initially skipped!**</WRAP>
-==== Example: Strong Basic Bless Archetypes ====
-<WRAP group>**1) Sacred Cavalry Nations**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Tir Na Nog Full Resists Thug Bless//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_02.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//MA Tien Chi Expansion bless//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_03.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Vanheim Awake//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_04.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-<WRAP group>**2) Sacred Infantry Nations**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Ind Hp Stacking abuse//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_05.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Man “I don’t have magic weapons”//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_06.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Vanarus Stats Expansion//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_07.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-<WRAP group>**3) Sacred Giant Nations**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Ashdod Nationally has 2 Caps//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_08.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Niefelheim I don’t have any money for regen//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_09.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Abysia Trees don’t catch on fire//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_10.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-==== Example: Strong Basic Scales Archetypes ====
-**NOTE:** Unlike Bless archetypes most scales nations can use any of the Scales Build’s archetypes
-<WRAP group>**1) Awake Researcher Nations**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//LA Ulm BE Rush into Vampires//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_11.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Bogarus Point Buff Expansion//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_12.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Shinuyama Ench 5 rush//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_13.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-<WRAP group>**2) Awake Monster Nations**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//MA Ulm Early Forts//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_14.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//MA R'lyeh Coastal Aggression//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_15.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Sceleria Mr.Drakon says I survive Year 1//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_16.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-<WRAP group>**3) Off National Caster/Titan mundane Army jumper**
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//LA Caelumites can now kill you//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_17.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Awake Skratti Trapezer//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_18.png |}}</WRAP>
-<WRAP column third centeralign>//Vanarus Dormant Titan trapezer//{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_19.png |}}</WRAP>
-</WRAP>
-**NOTE:** Caelum typically does not get the necessary paths early to use a titan as a SC so it functions as a SoG buffer when it wakes up, and then transitions into an SC role later or a Wrathful Skies trap in dom.
-<WRAP group>
-===== Johnny, what were you thinking?!? =====
-<WRAP column third right centeralign>
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_20.jpg |}}
-//Cute Bats Take Stats//</WRAP>If you’ve been paying attention to these builds you should notice that any nation with a non-giant sacred has a focus on increasing their “stats” rather than giving them more defense mechanisms like bloodbond or regen. There’s two main reasons for this:
-  - The first being the difficulty of increasing attack and defense outside of bless with the only accessible pointbuff for this being ??Quickness?? which is locked to the water path of magic.
-  - The second being the extreme improvement in the DRN system which may sound quite swingy at it’s initial 2d6 vs 2d6 but a slight increase of 2 can improve the odds of a roll succeeding as much as 34.8%! A table detailing this can also be found on the illwiki [[dominions-random-number|here]].
-Being able to immediately improve your entire sacred core this way is not immediately recognizable as strong, since most inexperienced players only see a “mere” improvement of 2 instead of a gargantuan increase of 34.8% which also compounds with the other stat blesses to make any given sacred exponentially better than enemy’s national troops and fiercely competitive with enemy sacreds.
-With stats being so strong it must seem weird then that giant sacreds would opt for regen & bloodbond, but due to the sacred’s status as a giant they already possess inhuman stats while enjoying a recruitment rate equal to humans’ sacreds due to the dom point recruitment cap. This makes it much more economical to “protect” your already great stats unit with defense mechanisms that guarantee it can stay in the fight to put their stats to work, rather than making an already good unit stellar but vulnerable to damage mechanisms that can play around their stats such as Earth Meld, or False Fetters.</WRAP>
-==== Greed ====
-**Greed** refers to pretender point use that does not directly improve your position early. Taking a stronger bless dormant at the cost of expansion, taking growth & luck scales over production & order, taking a pretender with no value other than providing full scales, are all examples of **Greed**
-All of these builds have one thing in common, which is synergy with the nation being played. You can apply this to your own builds by identifying the strength of your nation and then building around either enhancing it or covering the weaknesses in your nation’s initial strategy. I say initial because any early game dominance translates into more resources for late game allowing you to match greedy builds who took a late game oriented build either due to their lack of aggressive play from lack of early power or by directly knocking them out during your stronger early game.
-Another factor you’ll notice is the complete lack of aforementioned greed. This lack of greed is targeted at getting you as many possible early advantages in order to overcome players of equal skill level, when you feel like the lobby is full of muppets then you can go ahead and take some braindead full scales to be a passive andy.
-<WRAP group><WRAP column 28px>{{:guides:demuppetization:johnny_muppet.png?50 |}}</WRAP>//“But Johnny if I expand too much I’ll be coalitioned!”//</WRAP>
-The coalition you face from “good” expansion will be from the muppets who failed to expand and will have significantly less resources from either lack of their nation’s specific knowledge or their dogshit build. Besides the coalition usually consisting of muppets, you'll also be able to utilize more resources to fight this coalition due to your earlier power and faster acquisition of resources(Provinces/Forts/Research). After identifying the best strength / worst weakness of your nation early game and creating a pretender tailored to it you can move on to strategy!
-===== Expansion =====
-<WRAP box round third right>**Johnny's Teachings**
-  * Don't fail expansion!
-  * Determine your "Minimum takes".
-  * Manage your attrition.
-  * Raid with disposable units.
-</WRAP>
-The primary hazard to muppets is failed expansion and then the lack of tools thereafter to fight their first war (if any). This leaves a host of problems, mainly the lost opportunity to attack another player seizing their resources, and the inability to control your gamestate relying solely on the actions of other players. This leads back to the initial pretender design: If the build taken cannot expand it is a failed build no matter how crazy or broken the strategy it can pull off turn 36.
-<WRAP group><WRAP column 28px>{{:guides:demuppetization:johnny_muppet.png?50 |}}</WRAP>//“Ok Johnny I’ve picked a build that isn’t greedy but I still can’t expand well!?”//</WRAP>
-After you have taken an appropriate build you can move onto a concept called //“Minimum takes”// which applies to both expansion and later raiding. The minimum take is the least amount of troops needed in order to take a province, it varies from nation to nation and unfortunately takes either experience testing your build in single player or the advice of an experienced pilot in that nation. An example of a minimum take would be say 20 MA ulmishmen with flails in a line walking into a militia/archer/heavy infantry province of up to 45ish units.
-Another factor to consider will be attrition and considering when to bring a party back rather than continuing to attack. As you become more practiced it will look fairly obvious that your 15 infantry should not be advancing into ??Heavy Cavalry?? or ??Barbarian??s but that experience takes time to accrue. Although there are generically bad provinces for most nations’ expansion, there are exceptions to the rule such as Shinuyama’s and Yomi’s ??Bakemono Sho?? having such great attack density that they can deal with small amounts of heavy cavalry by harassing them and will kill barbarians by out damaging them due to their high damage attack but low prot. The types of units that function this way usually need to hit a certain threshold of bodies before they can take a province safely, this is especially true when using something like archers to clear barbarians!
-<WRAP column third right centeralign>
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_21.jpg |}}
-//Local muppet fails expansion and then feeds corpse to play kingmaker instead of Dominions//</WRAP>These types of exceptions make studying your nation’s roster important in order to maximise your expansion along with recruiting troops that will be able to contribute in your first war. A good idea to start analyzing your nation’s roster is to test out how easily they can take common indie types and/or PD and compare the minimum gold/res you need to take provinces. Do note that even if a unit expands well, that unit may fall off post expansion and can cost you your entire gold investment from expansion in your first war.
-Returning to minimum takes, the fundamental idea behind it is that using the smallest possible amount of troops to take a province is always the best action. But to apply this to the roster you need to identify national units that can be recruited from any fort that can
-  - Take provinces with a maximum of 2 fort turns recruitment.
-  - Be able to take multiple provinces with some attrition.
-Making up these kind of minimum-take groups is generally the job of cheap resources like low cost any fort troops.
-Switching gears now, Expensive hard-to replace units like cap-only sacreds or slow to recruit mages should generally not be used for minimum-take raiding,but rather in controlled scenarios like ambushing an enemy army or forcing a fight on top of the enemy capital. Considering cost and replaceability will allow you to utilize these kinds of resources appropriately, while still maintaining raiding pace with cheaper disposable groups.
-===== Game State or Too Late? =====
-<WRAP box round third right>**Johnny's Teachings**
-  * Focus on map rather than matchup
-  * Take your mobility into consideration
-  * Exploit your opponents' failures.
-  * Don't sign NAPs with weak players
-</WRAP>
-After passing expansion along with using relevant troops for post you now get to the pleasure of reading the game state! The main mistake here is basing your operations entirely on the nation you will be facing which more than likely doesn’t even have all of its mechanics online Year 0!
-The first thing to look for is the length of your borders with a nation along with the number of defensible features you can exploit i.e. mountain passes and river crossings.
-A good example to illustrate this would be Xibalba fighting an Abysia entirely across a five province long border separated by a river all the way down. This border would allow for a one sided war where Xibalba chooses every battle with no counterplay from Abysia possible! Conversely a MA Ulm attacking a MA Man through a one-province choke point on a mountain pass could only end in disaster for Ulm. Their only path into Man is easily protected due to the predictability of Ulm’s movements while Man can abuse their access to stealthy troops to go behind Ulm’s lines, bypassing that choke point completely!
-In general, this means that nations without stealth or movement mechanics should be looking to wage wars on large borders with neutral terrain, while nations with movement mechanics such as flight, stealth or terrain survivals should be looking for unique terrain that limits counterattacks or enables in depth delays of enemy armies through clever maneuvering. While you may not have the best matchup with nations you choose to fight this way, you will be able to secure their resources for much less risk by opting for more favorable fights with your maneuverability.
-There are some exceptions to this rule, the most common example being when another nation fails expansion without any early game mechanic to ensure their survival (Monsters,Hellbless,Etc). These nations should be engaged as soon as possible to capitalize on their weakness before they can stabilize their position. This is preferably around turn 10 - two turns before the start of year 1. Starting this war with a weaker player near the end of year 0 allows a full expansion while using forces out of reach of leftover indies to take the player’s undefended/lightly defended provinces.
-A common pitfall in situations like this is the usual non-aggression pact with the harmless player and then fighting a much harder war with someone because they grew “too large” during the expansion phase. This approach wastes early game resources that could be compounded by taking easy fights, instead throwing them away to drag someone else down to your level leaving you no closer to victory.
-<WRAP group><WRAP column 28px>{{:guides:demuppetization:johnny_muppet.png?50 |}}</WRAP>//“But Johnny I convinced five players to attack my neighbor with 20 provinces and they agreed to give me the capital!”//</WRAP>
-If you want to engage in filthy diplomacy with muppets and call it good gameplay you are both delusional and not in need of my advice to leave muppetry behind. After you’ve read the gamestate it is time to move into general strategy!
-===== General Early Game Goals =====
-<WRAP box round third right>**Johnny's Teachings**
-  * Make scouts and gain intel
-  * Secure fort locations close to your first war target(s)
-  * Ensure access to Nature mages.
-</WRAP>
-I will only be going over baseline strategy for early game. Most pitfalls here are simply because steps are skipped rather than misplayed. Putting aside expansion, your first priority is securing scouts and gathering information on all of your immediate neighbors with terrain in your favor. It is perfectly permissible to use a cap turn to double recruit scouts once on an otherwise scout scarce spawn.
-Second priority is securing fort locations with favorable movement towards your first war target(s). You want these locations close to your enemy in order to have your lower map move units be available to that conflict immediately. Conversely any fort you cannot get close to your enemy should be recruiting units with ≥12 map move in order to move two provinces a turn in friendly flags. Even if a higher map move unit is weaker than alternatives, it is still better than a unit not there at all! This may seem like a weird mindset at first glance but the majority of wars will be simply pushing province PD to **raid** meaning there is no need to prepare a stack of 100 heavy infantry to take 6 PD one at a time.
-Backpedaling a bit let us move into the third priority: Independent mages. Every nation without Nature access should be forting at least one Nature independent to site search for nature income. Any nation already owning nature nationals should be on the lookout for rarer indies but it is nowhere near as much a priority since any nation with {{path>N2}}+ can already cast ??Poison Ward?? sidestepping the first battlefield wipe ??Foul Vapors??. The strength of ??Foul Vapors?? cannot be understated. It can twist entire matchups on its merit alone and comes along with the immense power included with the rest of the Ench 5 timing. This cannot be ignored even in games without a native N/W crosspath nation due to the existence of the Jade Amazon pop type. A good general tip for finding these good indies is prioritizing taking and scouting nearby swamps and caves first as those carry the majority of the best indie types.
-===== The Art of Looting =====
-<WRAP box round third right>**Johnny's Teachings**
-  * Gold determines the early game.
-  * Fight in your opponent's lands.
-  * Raiders should be cheap but also threatening.
-</WRAP>
-Now with the necessary setup established it’s time to get into the meat of non-muppet gameplay. Early game at its core determines its winner by gold, whether through superior infrastructure replacing troops more efficiently than your opponent, or by the armies and mages pushing more of your opponent’s provinces than they can push back. In order to get to this point of superiority though you need to trade gold better than your opponent, and that means raiding!
-To efficiently raid provinces the first step is making parties cheap enough to be replaced instantly while still establishing a threat to your opponent. The best case scenario is of course taking their provinces but any devotion of mage turns/Province Defense/actual supported stacks is in your favor. The reasoning behind this is a devotion of resources to killing expendable forces, is resources not put towards their own infrastructure or towards counter attacking you directly. Constantly fighting in your opponent’s lands will ensure a victory as an eventuality, but even leaving them alive is no issue if you pick a maneuverable border as suggested, leaving your options to looting even more lands open.
-The best time to start these multifront looting expeditions is during currently active wars with no easy borders to retaliate (again maneuverability is king!). Outside of looting for the plunder, it also functions as an excellent stall tactic as mentioned before. If they are constantly needing to commit resources to throwing you out of their flags those forces aren’t being dedicated to tearing down your flags. This allows you to commit resources to research or infrastructure in order to build a research or production advantage to crush them
-==== Looter Units ====
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_22.jpg?220|}}With the concept of looting established, we can now identify some “classic” looter units. The main factors for looters will be gold efficiency first and productibility second.
-{{:nations:ma:shinuyama:bakemono-sho.png?nolink |}}First example is the mighty **??Bakemono-Sho??**. The king of raiders comes in at a staggering 7 gold with a massive 2 gold discount on highland and mountain provinces from which they can also be recruited from. Even putting aside the fact that they can form 40(!) man parties for 200 gold (+commander) Bakemono Sho also carry the coveted stealth tag allowing them to travel to any enemy province unhindered along with protecting your raiders from any counter attack!
-{{:nations:ma:xibalba:muuch_jungle_warrior.png?nolink |}}Another prime example is the majestic **??Muuch Jungle Warrior??** which is also a foreign recruit unit in forests. This unit isn’t as cheap or killy as the Bakemono-Sho but 20 of them is more than enough to take 6 PD, the most common threshold to hit. Use of the jungle muuch is reliant on good scouting but with MA Xibalba’s foreign recruit scout checking PD beforehand it is no chore!
-{{:nations:ma:pangaea:centaur_warrior.png?nolink |}}Moving away from green critters with the iconic **??Centaur Warrior??** coming in with their massive 20(!) map move letting them deep strike along with both the berserk and stealth tags. Sensing a pattern with the stealth tag so far? Centaur warriors usually aren’t used by themselves though, since buffing them with ??Protection?? from a local ??Hierophant?? is miles more efficient than massing up a respectable number of centaurs, due to berserk stacking with Barkskin, making these 20 map move raiders a real terror!
-{{:nations:ma:caelum:spire_horn_warrior.png |}}The last unit I’ll be covering is more of a category but I will be using the ??Spire Horn Warrior?? as the basic chassis example. Units with the flying tag ignore movement penalties and can “deep strike” into enemy territory allowing you to make your movements erratic and distracting. While deep strike is already powerful, the flying tag also translates onto the battlefield allowing the units to fly behind enemy lines and snipe commanders, forcing a rout. This may not seem all too notable against normally scripted armies but against PD where the AI decides the placement of units automatically there is no way to protect the PD without devoting resources to each province. This makes flying nations in particular horribly draining to fight as they can destroy any amount of pd for minimal investment and then reconvene at a moment’s notice to destroy smaller counterraiding stacks piece by piece.
-These 4 units should give a general idea of what you’re looking for in a unit to make an efficient raiding party, with the most important takeaways being the presence of stealth,flying,and/or high map move. Lacking all of these factors using 20 infantry with 12+ map move can get the job done if avenues of attack are readily available.
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_23.png |}}
-==== Thug raiding ====
-Moving on from units, there is an alternative in using mages with magical items to “thug” provinces solo. Since this method uses mostly gems to create the raider instead of gold it doesn’t compete with other parties and can be used to supplement your raiding. Thugs should never be used for 100% of raiding, since it constrains your options and doesn’t take advantage of splitting stacks or reinforcements on their way to current fronts.
-On the topic of actual thug chassis you’ll be wanting any combination of the sacred tag, cavalry, Air 2, Water 1, Earth 1, Nature 2. An insane chassis can make up for having little to none of these traits.
-<WRAP column quarter right centeralign>{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_24.jpg |}} \\ //The glorious Vine Shield//</WRAP>In the first broad category for thugs I’ll be briefly going over sacred elven cavalry, these nations are the cookie cutter resists blesses you’ll see in every game and include Tir Na Nog line, Vanheim/Helheim line, Ys, these sacred cavalry thugs run with some form of damage mitigation to complement their resists usually Mistform/Liquid body. For an elven cavalry thug you’ll want to be doing two things: First is giving them a kill mechanism which is usually accomplished with a **??Frost Brand??**, and the second being the enhancement of their defense either through removing harassment with a **??Vine Shield??** or using armor such as the **??Chain Mail of Displacement??** to increase their prot along with their defense.
-Any other chassis without a horse has a much harsher time thugging due to harassment penalties being halved for mounted units. To combat this the units will either need to be “killy” enough to rout PD before they take fatal damage or “bulky” enough to scare away local militia with their girth. The example of the usual “killy” thug would be a ??Colossi Storm Captain?? with a ??Frost Brand??, casting ??Quicken Self??, ??Flight??, attack rear. This allows him to push out a large amount of damage in the backlines usually wiping out the commander and routing the rest of the PD. This is similar to what normal flying raiders do already.
-A “bulky” thug is usually a giant nation blessed with Regeneration such as Hinnom or Ashdod. These thugs are geared with ??Enchanted Pike??s to take advantage of their 4+ size for repel, or they are given an item that causes them to berserk like a ??Flesh Eater?? in order to guarantee them to outlast the enemy PD to turn timer in case of a inordinately large PD dump.
-While I listed off different gear combinations for these thugs, it is worth noting that all thugs benefit from a ??Vine Shield??. A ??Vine Sheld?? can even make independent commanders capable of taking PD if given a ??Frostbrand?? as well.
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_25.png |}}
-===== Tactical Suicides and Homicides =====
-To start off the introduction to tactics I’ll be introducing the types of units you’ll see in dominions:
-first being the blockers which come in three flavors ranging from chaff, standard, and elite, the second being melee damage, and the last special. Now let’s begin their breakdown in order.
-A **blocker’s** role is to hold the enemy for how long depending on the type of blocker, with chaff existing to die almost immediately, standard being able to survive 1-2 swings, and elites being able to hold until fatigued out or indefinitely. While these types exist, units are never statically in one role and depending on the opponent’s national roster. Even a militia could be considered an elite blocker if facing off against something like lobo guard. Understanding how well your blockers function against your enemy is integral to spending your gold correctly. If you have an impenetrable line with your cheapest infantry already you can invest much less in blockers than if your opponent has ??Vanhere?? that will mow down your entire lineup like a blender.
-{{:guides:demuppetization:johnny_26.jpg?360&nolink |}}After blockers come **melee damage**. The only role of this unit is causing damage with survival being secondary. These are the types of units that people enjoy point buffing to maximise the value of their gold by investing more heavily in killing the enemy. Melee damage candidates range from twohanded human infantry to a large variety of giants and the occasional screaming elf man frothing at your neck. The main thing to consider for a melee damage unit is if they can break through all the blockers a rival can bring. If there is a blocker on the enemy roster that is highly effective at stopping your melee damage you will need to bring mage support to circumvent it, or clever scripting to assassinate the enemy commanders and force a rout instead.
-The last type is any unit that doesn’t fit in either role. This applies to siege chaff, archers and mind blasters. **Siege chaff** exists to tear down walls and should be placed away from pointy objects and preferably kept off the battlefield entirely. **Archers** (even crossbows) are the majority of the time completely useless, but a small investment could be made to snipe mages in robes, or in rare cases where a nation doesn’t believe in clothes such as Mictlan you can mass indie archers to prove the superiority of hats. **Mind blasters** are great and can stun lock a large variety of units enabling lossless expansion on nations like EA Agartha & MA Rlyeh. It is important to keep in mind that each mindblaster requires the upkeep of a mage (even with Olms being halved). There is still value in being able to target valuable tags in your opponent’s army but they are the first to cut when upkeep starts creeping up to half of your income.
-==== Magic! ====
-<WRAP column third right>{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_27.jpg?nolink&400 |}}
-<WRAP box round>
-**Johnny's teachings**
-  * Magic is there to //enable// new strategies.
-  * Identify your mages' role as enablers:
-  - Buffing
-  - Crowdcontrols
-  - Hard removals
-  * Don't build your strategy around evo magic.
-</WRAP></WRAP>
-After understanding your units and their role in the battlefield, you can now get into the big fun in Dominions: magic(al girls)! Before we get into spells and their actual effects, I’ll be going into mage use and when to implement it into your strategy.
-The first step to mage use is identifying what that mage accomplishes in a specific army. For example if your troops' weapons damage is below an enemy nation’s standard protection threshold a casting of ??Strength of Giants?? can change a previously swingy battle into a landslide victory. These types of problems are not always applicable though. If you’re only raiding or putting troops in line formation to wrap around and hit someone’s rear there is no need for a mage’s presence since the tactics function fine without them. Learning when your tactics aren’t sufficient without mages is a major step in improving as a player, but it can also lead to an intoxicating reliance on mages wherever possible making your use of resources inefficient and causing rippling effects in other areas such as your research and raiding potential.  This leads us to the conclusion that mages are there to enable strategies rather than make a winning strategy you are already employing stronger.
-Continuing to build on Mage's roles we can see that they vary from hard removal to stalling, and coming along with those roles are the hard restrictions enforced by their paths. The most notable examples being troop buffs locked to paths uncommon on indies such as S with ??Luck?? and ??Body Ethereal??, Nature/Water crosspath with ??Mossbody??, and Water with ??Quickness??. Outside of point buffs large army buffs are relegated mostly to Earth which can buff a smaller army with a single mage into higher protection and obscene strength.
-After you leave the buffing restrictions, you hit various amounts of removal, the most important being the spells that handle holding troops in place. Those spells are restricted to Fire, Air, Earth and Nature, in order the spells being the ??Prison of Fire?? line, ??False Fetters??, ??Earth Meld?? line, and ??Tangle Vines??/??Web??. Holding a troop in place doesn’t seem so strong at first glance but the power comes from the lack of a check to hold the unit and the subsequent 100% of a round where the unit is held in place regardless of how hard they can pass the incoming check to get out. In addition to the unit being unable to do anything while held they are also vulnerable to critical hits making it a prime option to ignore the defense mechanics of hard to kill units such as heavily armored infantry and high-defense Elven cavalry.
-Moving out of crowd control into hard removal you get a large host of options... until you realize that all of the elemental paths are shafted due to the current “all resists” meta which hoses most of these removals for many nations’ best/most valuable units. There are still a few notable removals in spite of this mostly because they’re armor negating. Those spells are restricted to Air, Astral, Water,and Fire, starting from Air with ??Lightning bolt??, Astral for ??Mind Burn?? and ??Star Fires??, Water for ??Frozen Heart??, and Fire for ??Incinerate??. Outside of armor negating removals, some spells can be put to work if resists are absent or in the case of spells like ??Shadow Blast?? if you’re willing to spend gems on removal.
-In the case of evocation type removals, it is almost always a bad idea to employ against non-muppets specifically because your opponent has more of a say over what you’re going to hit with your evocations than you. This is accomplished with a technique known as “Evo Bait” where players will use multiple high hp density squares within the range of mages to force mages to target them.
-==== Buffing ====
-<WRAP column quarter box round right>**Notable buffs**
-  * ??Luck??
-  * ??Body Ethereal??
-  * ??Mossbody??
-  * ??Quickness??
-  * ??Gift of Flight??
-  * ??Regeneration??
-</WRAP>
-Returning to buffing, it is important to recall the earlier section on stat bless and the potency of a single +2 to a stat(34.8%!).  Even the humble protection castable by a {{path>N1}} can increase a 15 protection unit to 21 protection causing a 35% swing in protection DRN rolls. Outside of any buff that directly increases stats (all good!) there are buffs that add certain tags which cause a huge swing in battle. These include the aforementioned pointbuffs ??Luck??, ??Body Ethereal??, ??Mossbody??, ??Quickness??, as well as ??Gift of Flight?? and ??Regeneration??.
-I’ll start by classifying Luck, Body Ethereal and Mossbody in one category for **survival pointbuffs**. The survival pointbuffs function by adding an extra layer of rolls a unit needs to make to deal damage to the unit. ??Luck?? negates 75% of damage that would be lethal, ??Body Ethereal?? negates 75% of non-magical damage outright, and ??Mossbody?? reduces damage by a flat 15 75% of the time. Essentially each of the protection tag pointbuffs make units survive 4 times longer than normal and they compound with each other making certain units immortal with full layering on them.
-Moving away from the protections, there's the ??Gift of Flight?? which gives the flying tag allowing the previously mentioned attack rear tactics for non-flying nations. It also grants immunity to spells like ??Earth Meld?? and ??Earthquake??. ??Quickness?? itself is a fairly unique point buff since it functions as a force multiplier, because it doubles the attack density of your squares along with granting a +2 stat bonus to both attack and defense. If it’s hard to grasp the strength of Quickness imagine having double your best units all standing in the same square. ??Regeneration?? is a bit more expensive and isn’t usually worth buffing on random mooks, but it is great for combating chip damage on expensive giant units or geared thugs.
-With all of these pointbuffs available incredibly early (Alteration 4 + Enchantment 3) it is a very strong option to use them to expedite expansion & then carry them over into your first war. With some general ideas now on what kinds of spells are useful we can now move into the literal hell of this game.
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_28.png |}}
-===== Scripting With a Kazoo to Deaf Rats =====
-<WRAP box round third right>**Johnny's teachings**
-  * Battles are usually decided with the first 5 rounds.
-  * Probe your opponent for information.
-  * Try to snipe enemy commanders.
-</WRAP>
-Finally the delightfully horrible mechanic that encourages the entire player base to play a turn 24 hours at a time scripting! In Dominions there exists two types of scripting:
-  * One for units where they can be directed to hit a specific tag either immediately or after holding 2 rounds
-  * And two for commanders where they get 5 slots of commands that can range from attacking an enemy to casting spells and then switches over to an ai script following your preset command.
-This is where the majority of this game’s complexity originates as it allows all of the baiting, trapping, stalling, outmaneuvering, and brute force tactics on the battlefield that has the player base addicted like crack cocaine.
-To start your addiction, there are a few important factors to scripting you need to understand, the first is that your troops are idiotic and suicidal and will let go of your hand at a moments notice to run into oncoming traffic. The second is that battles are usually decided within the first 5 rounds due to those being the only rounds players are able to interact with making them imperative to build around. This restraint on scripting makes each battle a fierce information war as you probe their armies’ capabilities and scripts beforehand. This also flips back on you where you’ll need to be constantly aware that your script before any battle if reused could actually be detrimental due to an enemy’s counter scripting. These “mind games” are a large part of the tactics in Dominions after you’ve improved your scripting enough to be competitive with no info, and absolutely crushing with full information. This scripting knowledge will of course come with experience and familiarity with the players in your lobby!
-Now with the value of information on the table, let’s move into herding your rats. To start off troop scripting it's always a good idea to try in some capacity to snipe commanders, since many players love to lead large stacks with a singular commander and then leave him with bodyguards at the very rear. This can lead to lots of situations where even if your troops are literal garbage they attack rear and stab a commander to death. This concept can also carry over to indies although a bit more static and easy to predict making things like cavalry+archer expansion very consistent for little cost. So generally you’ll want to avoid conventionally fighting through an enemy army that has a small quantity of unprotected commanders. Instead focus on sniping the commanders to preserve your resources. With this commonality out of the way we’ll now dive deeper into troop scripting.
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_29.png?nolink |}}
-==== Scripting Units ====
-Recalling back to the roles of units, we’ll be starting with the use of “blockers” and how to effectively use them as roadblocks or impenetrable walls. With **chaff** first up you’ll see most units in this role being fodder to the slaughter usually being in front of the pointy end of a lance or mauled by birdmen with a hatred for hats. Due to the targeting system in Dominions you’ll want to divide up chaff into lots of small squads in order to have a higher chance of enemy “elites” or Evocation mages “locking” onto the chaff and either wasting a charge bonus or an evocation casting on your otherwise worthless unit.
-With fliers in particular they’ll prefer to do a hold and attack rear script making it quite easy to bait them by having 2 singleton squads in both rear corners on hold and attack fliers. This’ll both waste the flying charge bonus and reset their script to no longer be locked onto the rear.
-While the most useful function of chaff is baiting enemy resources, it can also function as a traffic cone to temporarily hold units in place by placing them in a line directly in the path of enemy troops. You’d use these traffic cones in order to either stagger the enemy formation for a moment allowing you to maneuver around them, or to cast evocations/clouds onto your own troops without worrying about the collateral damage. Most functions of chaff will be in some shape or form a speed bump that will not accomplish anything by itself, and use of these tactics is completely reliant on effective use of your other tools while your chaff buys time.
-Getting into an actual functioning unit in your army we have the **normal blocker**. These guys can form the backbone of your army and will usually be the largest part of your formation. The main distinction between a blocker and chaff though is the blockers ability to kill enemy chaff, blockers, and melee damage dealers (and archers if your opponent believes they’re in Dom 4). While not as strong as your melee damage dealers they can usually hold the line long enough to whack any similar or lighter protection units a couple times, and can even contribute to a break in the enemy formation if their line is long enough to wrap the enemy. But you’ll need national commanders to hit a minimum leadership of 80 in order to access line formations, and then depending on if you’re buffing your army holding or running into the enemy line.
-An important note for blockers: if their line is not wide enough to cover the entire battlefield, there should be separate squads in order to catch flankers, otherwise your formation runs the risk of falling apart since even if your chaff catches the initial charge there still needs to be men to hold them in place afterwards. A good practice to follow if your opponent enjoys throwing expensive cavalry at your flanks is to use the previously mentioned crowd control spells such as Earth Meld & False Fetters since even a humble blocker can fell an Elf with a few critical hits. The function of a blocker will be to generally hold a “frontline”, in smaller battles these units breaking will decide the encounter but they should be relegated to a supporting role in larger more complex stacks.
-After we depart from the backbone of your army we’ll get into how to make/use immovable walls aka **Elite Blockers**. These are a rare breed of unit and are usually a result of stacking protections that your opponent cannot adequately deal with, the most common being defense or protection. When using elite blockers vs an unprepared stack they can win the battle on their merit alone, but elite blockers usually have some form of weakness to low level mage support making them a poor use of resources when the opponent scripts around them. Essentially your elite blockers should be screened with other units to avoid opponent’s mechanics that can remove them and then forcing your enemy’s mundane troops into an unwinnable fight afterwards.
-Good candidates for easy elite blockers include sacreds with stacked defensive mechanics (Regeneration, Bloodbond, Fortitude, Lucky, Defense, Repel) or any generically high-stated unit with pointbuffs; generally any unit can fulfill this role with enough resource investment into buffing. These units should be scripted on hold to receive buffs before hitting enemy lines or set to walk past mages on a more aggressive script trying to avoid evocations/crowd control.
-<WRAP box round>A special note is that if your entire roster already functions as elite blockers vs the rival’s roster, you should be investing resources into dealing with that nation’s answer to your elites rather than winning more by stacking protections already inherent in the unit. Example: MA Ulm bringing Earth 2 mages support to cast iron warriors instead of bringing/preparing Nature 2 mages to cast poison ward in the face of ??Foul Vapors??. </WRAP>
-Now we have a much simpler category of troops to script for, the **melee damage dealers**! These are the dudes that can hurt your enemy’s troops, usually all that’s needed for this is breaking the enemy’s protection threshold but a high attack score and/or a long weapon is sometimes necessary to catch highly elusive units with large defense scores. This category isn’t always made up of specialists since many other “weaker” units can fulfill the same role for lower quality units, usually resulting in a lack of scripting a separate melee damage dealer squad.
-If a specialist squad is needed then leaving them behind sparse screens to allow them to either surround or fill in gaps to reach the enemy fresh and unharmed is beneficial, but with the addition of mage support melee specialists can function without blockers screening by layering on survival pointbuffs which as mentioned earlier can drastically reduce the amount of troops required in a stack to overcome the enemy. The melee damage dealers role in conclusion can usually be given to units already functioning as blockers, or in dealing with more “elite” units can be relegated to specialists either through buffs or recruiting higher quality damage units such as Glaives or Great Swords.
-The last **“special”** category of units have a few distinct roles that range from aggressively useless to obscene depending on the situation. The first generally useless unit in this category being siege chaff, these units should hopefully not be on the battlefield but sticking them in the back of the formation or on retreat is usually the best move if hp routing is not an issue.
-Archers as mentioned earlier in Suicide & Homicides are a majority of the time useless, but can be set to fire none and placed forward to try to get the targeting ai to snipe naked enemy mages. This approach with archers is usually a terrible investment if done in mass, but can trip up some players who neglect to point buff their mages. Archers can be used to “counter” naked nations like Mictlan, but it usually comes down to sitting behind blockers and waiting for the arrows to hopefully hit, not even taking into account hosing spells like mist or storm making the strategy fall flat.
-As bait though the archers perform fantastically, since most archers come with relatively low prot compared to your other troops the AI prefers to target them. By using the script “fire and keep distance” you can abuse the enemy AI by luring them away from the rest of their troops/commanders and then hit them in the rear. Moving away from the traditional archer, we get to mind blasters the exception to the lameness of ranged units. The reason mind blasters are so notable are their ability to stun enemy units allowing you to disable dangerous tags such as cavalry or archers during expansion, or to fragment your enemy’s lines in post forcing them to come to your troops piecemeal. Scripting for mind blasters is usually a no brainer with the only caveat being they move forward after running out of ammunition so ensuring they get caught behind your blockers in longer battles is crucial.
-==== Scripting mages ====
-With mage roles being too large to quantify every single possible function they bring to an army, I’ll only explain some more general ideas on how to help them fulfill their roles,and how/why the army supports them.
-The mages in your army are at a certain point the only deciding factor in a battle, and as such you should treat all non-mage units as resources to support your mage core. This is rooted in the magic system only being interactable by the player through the mage’s 5 scripting slots, and any non-commander troop only having default preset orders that can only be influenced by how they are placed on the battlefield or by mage(!) interaction.
-This makes it a generally good idea to think of where your mage needs to be to fulfill a role whether buffing, removal, or otherwise and then building the army’s positions around them. This positioning is based around the fact that if a mage is out of position they can no longer enable the strategy that your troops couldn’t achieve by themselves, leading to a guaranteed defeat if that strategy was your only route to victory. Positioning of mages is of course less important if you’re going to win the battle either way, but if that is the case you should be asking yourself why you are dedicating limited resources like mages there in the first place?
-But in conclusion there is no general scripting/positioning advice besides what I’ve mentioned, that I deem necessary to go over since most scripts are decided on a case by case basis and even then it largely goes to player preference how they want to go about accomplishing their goals. With all the unit roles out of the way we can get back to some more general advice.
-==== Countering your opponent ====
-With the importance of information being mentioned so much already, it’s time to break down how much it actually affects scripting. A common situation you’ll encounter upon meeting a player in a lobby for the first time, is guessing how they’ll play based on YOUR previous experience with the nation or on how you think the nation plays. But in the majority of games people will play emotionally charged and in a gameplay perspective stupidly. This forces you to learn their scripting habits and magic build order in order to ditch your mind’s version of a player and adapt to how they actually play the nation. This concept is rooted in playing around what your opponent is actually doing rather than what they can/could do. After getting that information, the amount of options you need to prepare for drastically decreases, gaining you a much better chance at reading your opponent and outscripting them!
-{{ :guides:demuppetization:johnny_30.jpg?nolink |}}
-===== Resources & Why Less Is More =====
-Dominions at it’s core only has 3 resources, with those 3 being Pretender Points, Gold, and Gems.
-Utilizing these resources effectively will enable positive feedback loops netting you more of the latter 2 depending on the usage of your pretender points. Recalling back to pretender creation, we see our first resource pretender points. Pretender points for the majority of cases will be best spent frontloading your early game and either expediting expansion or enabling a powerful timing year 1 if 20+ province expansion is already guaranteed. Pretender points spent this way translate to earlier provinces which gives you faster access to your gold year 0 to put up earlier forts in coveted locations and allow more gold converted into troops, which generally gives you a large advantage with proper scouting since you’ll already be stabilized when someone is still finishing expansion. This relates back to gamestate, where to control your own gamestate you’ll need to have both finished your expansion earlier than other players and have information on the players surrounding you(along with forts in position to reinforce that front). In general using pretender points to control your own resources earlier in order to attack other players resources is a good idea.
-After pretender points secure your initial lands and gold along with it we can move into gold use. Before anything else, having any amount of floating gold is an incredibly bad problem to have at the end of the turn. Since it usually means you’re either not putting up forts to ramp up production or you’re underspending on your troops/mages. This gold, while seemingly unthreatening in your treasury, is constantly eating away at your battle potential either by delaying infrastructure, buying useless low path mages, or skimping on troop production. This translates floating gold into being much more detrimental than it initially lets on since any gold in your treasury isn’t troops walking at other players flags turning that gold into pressure & plunder, in comparison your floating gold is at best put into province defense which while sometimes worth it to force a win in a province without adequate forces is still a stationary gold investment that can later be wiped by mage support for a much smaller cost. So in order of importance, you want your gold first put into troops / mages, and when the cap for fort production is hit more forts. This really just boils down to getting your gold on the field by planning ahead and keeping fort production ramping up in accordance with gold income.
-Gems, unlike gold, is a randomly allocated resource that has to be found by your mages through site searching. This is optimally done by national mages with multiple paths at 2, even barring that site searching for gems your national mages can use is never a bad idea. The caveat to this mechanic though is when a site is found, it’s found for all players. This means the best way to gain gem income of other types besides your nationals is to attack players with Mages of that type, not to mention the capital income a player starts with. With gem income being tied to provinces, it improves the profit of raiding drastically since by raiding using gold you’ll both be gaining gold & gem income off of your opponent's provinces while denying them gem income, limiting their options in spells towards taking you out. This highlights raiding as a stall tactic further as mentioned before, since players will both need to dedicate resources towards retaking their flags while at the same time be put behind on getting their answers out.
-Generally a trend can be seen after you weigh investing money in troops vs infrastructure and then the benefits of taking someone else’s provinces vs developing your own. Without a doubt jacking someone else’s shit will always be more beneficial to your nation than investing inwards, this runs twofold due to you gaining new resources(and new places to site search!) while also weakening your opponent every step of the way. But defeating an opponent isn’t guaranteed, and in an equally skilled matchup the results could swing either way. To sway the matchup, it is imperative to invest more resources than your opponent while also trading favorably. To more easily trade favorably you need to have your resources fighting your opponent earlier than they can access their own. Leading to a domino effect where each resource invested earlier makes your timings significantly faster and stronger!
-What constitutes a strong timing though? A strong timing is usually defined more by your opponent’s lack of answers rather than the strength of your own strategy, meaning even something like 200 militia could be unstoppable if on someone’s capital turn 1. This leads to attacks being significantly easier the earlier they’re fought, causing a balancing act between researching good spells and rushing with literal dogshit to drag someone into the trenches. It’s also worth mentioning that any early attack on a player also hurts their timings, whether through infrastructure delays or by forcing the delabbing of mages.
-Resource use essentially comes down to using pretender points to secure gold, that makes troops to push provinces, then using gems to force earlier timings to push even more provinces(A pattern?). Every resource spent eventually finds its way back and then some. So every floating resource you see is both a battle you’re not winning this turn and an additional loss of future resources that could’ve been secured with your investment! In conclusion, taking provinces by whatever means you can possibly employ will rocket you to success even if you need to cast earth meld with a gem to get there!
-===== Johnny’s Afterword =====
-I only decided to create this guide in order to show people some general ways to improve by themselves. I never saw a problem with people finding spells to use or troops to recruit but rather always the way they use them. My only aim for this guide is that you come to your own conclusions about this game and help us make this community better than ever before! I hope to see you in the ascension wars soon.
-\\ \\ \\ \\ \\ \\ .........Fucking muppets
-===== Useful Sources =====
-Dominions 5 Manual DOMINIONS 5
-Illwiki illwiki: Dominions 5 Wiki: Welcome to illwiki!
-Pretender Calculator Pretenders Calculator for Dominions 5
-Dominions 5 Mod Inspector Dom5 Mod Inspector
-Protection Calculator Prot Calculator
-Arena Test Generator(Big Cheat) Dom5: Arena map generator
-Dominions Nexus Invite Link Discord
-Dominions Immersion Mentor Invite Link Discord
-Reach me directly @JohnnyJohnny#1618