,

About

About this website

This website is dedicated to the 31 players Dominions 5 game called “Legendary EA” that occured between mid-december 2017 and mid-april 2018. This is an After Action Report where I try to relate how this game went for me, for the fun of it and to provide insights to other players about Dominions 5 gameplay from my own experience.

If you don’t know Dominions 5, this can be read as an epic story of war and conquest in a fantasy world. Sometimes I couldn’t help using some common acronyms from the game, here’s a glossary to decrypt them. Also if you want to know more about the creatures or magical items, here’s a website gathering every information from the game.

If you are a Dominions 5 player, the gameplay is more about overall strategy than specific tactics, though sometimes these are addressed in detail.

Also, if you liked this AAR, you may like the 2 other ones I made :
MAddening MAyhem – The Way of the Dragon : a 7 players game with the Alexsa Modpack. A small, intense game that was very interesting and worth relating … and that features a lot of Dragons
Confluence Total War – A Journey with the Fay : a game with all 24 nations of the Confluence mod, this is a quick and cheap AAR without many pictures or stories, but you can check it out to see how the Fay and their god came to dominate the world

If you have Dominions …

All of the .trn and .2h files from turn 1 to turn 75 can be downloaded here, and the map that goes with it here. No mods were used. They are provided in the state they were just before sending them on the server, which means all my orders and scripting are open to review.

However, as you may know, these files being from an older version, the battles won’t run exactly the same and sometimes the results can differ from what happened in the game.

About Dominions 5

Illwinter is a swedish video game editor made of only 2 passionate developpers dedicated to create the games of their dreams. The Dominions series is the result of their passion in putting historical Mythology into an incredible video game.

It is rather difficult to describe this game. I played it hundreds of hours just to discover every nation, every creature, every spell, and try out every possible strategy I was thinking about.

Indeed, the atmosphere that emerges from this game is really unique. This is about the final apocalyptic war between the gods for supreme domination … I’ve never encountered any game like that before, it really feels like the legends from our own human mythologies … most strategy games featuring magic spells are about some random mages fighting each other for whatever reason, but here, it’s The End Of The World and the one who will emerge victorious will be The Supreme God that rules all others, the Pantokrator. In that, the music provided with the game is outstanding and help to understand the stakes.

Official website for Dominions 5 : http://www.illwinter.com/dom5/index.html

Dominions 5 soundtrack : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvxhmW3K5yo

About me and the game

Before starting this game, I had played a lot of Single Player dominions 4 (more than 400 hours) and about 200 hours of Dominions 5. As such, I was highly trained in beating normal AIs, but didn’t know the requirements of a multi-player game. Indeed, even though I was starting to master every mechanic of the game, I had no clue about what to do with more than half of the spells and magical items, and had to learn it as the game went on.

So that was my first multi-player game (well, almost first, as I had started another much smaller one 2 weeks before, but it was cancelled after one month and 40 turns). And as a first game, a big one with 31 players, quite a large map, and some very experienced players involved. So, at first, my only expectation was to have fun and survive as long as possible. But as the game grew, my understanding of the game deepened, and when my unexpected leading position became obvious, my involvement changed and I tried to go for victory.

Copyrights

I ruthlessly looted the web to get some nice pictures to adorn the site. If you own rights on one of them and wish me to remove it, send me a message, I’ll get rid of it ASAP.

Contact

To contact me, just use this e-mail : silence@magmadev.com

Choosing the nation

Note : this page relates to Dominons 5 gameplay, if you don’t know much about it, you can skip it

When I decided to join that game, I was a bit scared by its scale. 31 players one against the other was a promise of slaughter and bloodshed and I had not any hope to win. I just wanted to have fun and survive as long as possible until my more experienced opponents would choose to put me to death …

So I told to myself “Why not try something I’ve never tried, something may be a bit extreme … who knows, with some luck, I could have some good results in the early game ?” And indeed, during my single player games, I had noticed how units with a high defence attribute had a tendency to take almost no damage during battles. Of course they were vulnerable to missiles or battle magic, but in regular combat they seemed untouchable.

Considering this, I wanted to have a bless to help my sacred units to have a very strong Defence bonus. That meant that the ideal nation would be one with sacred units having an already quite high natural defence. Especially the commanders as I loved having one single commander taking down entire armies just because no one could even touch him.

So I went through the nations that had both sacred commanders and sacred units with high defence, and only 2 came up to the top : Tir Na Nog and Helheim.  Indeed, both had commanders with a huge defence of 22 and sacreds with a defence of at least 17. However, looking deeper into it, Helheim had several advantages :
– It’s commanders with 22 defence where recruitable anywhere, and for only 2 commander points instead of 4 and cap-only for TNN
– Helheim had both flying Valkyries with 17 defence and Helhirding riders with 19 defence
– I like nations with good strategic mobility, and with the Dis commanders and Valkyries, Helheim simply has the fastest flyers in the game !
– And last but not least, I prefered the lore of Helheim other TNN …

So it was my first choice, my best choice, for the intended strategy. And the gods were already with me as, even though more than half of the nations had already been taken, Helheim was still available, waiting for me to lead them to greatness.

Designing the pretender

Note : this page relates to Dominons 5 gameplay, if you don’t know much about it, you can skip it

So after choosing Helheim, I had to build the pretender to go along with them. As I said, I wanted a bless with a very high defence bonus. Also, I wasn’t really fond of awoken super-combatants and prefered rainbow blesses with lots of little bonuses that added up for a strong bless.

I needed then a pretender chassis with at least 1 point in water magic and cheap extra magic paths. Only the Frost Father fulfilled this requirement.

So I took Water 9 for the +6 defence bonus. Expensive, but I really wanted to put up this defence strategy to the extreme. Also, even though it’s good not to be hit, it’s good to be able to hit too, so I took Fire for a +2 attack bonus. I also noticed how good it could be to have magical weapons, to negate either invulnerability or ethereal abilities. So I went straight for it. I also thought at the time that the Solar weapons stacked with the regular weapon (in fact, it is a completly separate attack), so I took it too. I would have rather taken some fire resistance and magic resistance instead if I had to rethink it.

So I ended up with an interesting bless with +2 Attack, +6 defence, Magical weapons and Solar weapons.

With the remaining points, Dominion 6 looked enough. I also wanted to avoid to have my sacred recruitment limited by Recruitment points, so I added Order 1. I was also afraid resources could be an issue, so I took Productivity 1 (which I would replace with Growth 1 if I had to do it again). Finally, I tried to open as many magic paths as possible and did spread some points between air, earth and death.

My pretender was almost ready, I just needed a name to finish it. Not very inspired, I searched on Google translate how to say “Frost”/”Cold” in some northern language. I found that “Kall” meant “Cold” in swedish. Looked good. So was born Lord Kall.

Involved players

Here is the list of all the players involved in this game (some subs may be missing though) :

Abysia: KBTA
Agartha: Jakalor
Arcoscephale: Pyscobear
Atlantis: TheIronBird
Berytos: Red Rob
Caelum: Cozin
C’ti: nicknight7
Ermor: Jude
Fomoria: Psaro
Helheim: Silence
Hinnom: Lord Silverwood
Kailasa: Yowid
Lanka: Korfax
Machaka: Tibblediggins
Marverni: unimaginable23
Mictlan: zombiecat181
Niefelheim: Machine Ator
Oceania: Boba Fett
Pangaea: Inigo Montoya
Pelagia: Itwastuesday
Rus: Woodman
R’lyeh: Eldritch Gentleman
Sauromatia: EliteZeon
Therodos: Aran Zeminir, subbed by Lambert Simnel around turn 58
Tir na n’Og: ncarr99
T’ien Ch’i: Grim
Ulm: btonasse
Ur: Mekon
Vanheim: Soron
Xibalba: Darkrage_nl
Yomi: jehamo