Dominions Nations Evaluations ;)

[Herode]

Kristoffer O said:
I would probably place Yomi 2 early game, since they are a bit unflexible at start. They have the dai oni, but everyone knows that and they can be countered by clever players. Troops etc are also inferior vs human players. Banishment is not used by indeps to the same extent.

Agreed. I'm far from being an experienced player and I did'nt play even half the EA nations, not speaking of the other eras. But I've been playing now Dom3 for a year and I tested Yomi 2 times in MP and 2-3 times in SP games. Compared to the other EA nations I tried, I would rate Yomi something like 2 - 1 - ? - 3 - 2 (never played late game here...).

Why is that ? Dai Oni are good thugs and Hannyas are good battle mages.

But Dai oni are really expensive. They have to be equiped. They are capitol only. As thugs, they suffer from encumberance and a not so high MR. To equip them with the goos stuff is not absolutely straightforward, at least for a non expert player like my humble self.

But Hannyas lack 1 level in nature magic (for Haruspex and nature gems gathering at least).

Moreover, the standard troops (bandits & archers) are OK vs. indies but do not match a human player army at all. They sneak but do not hurt so much.

I think playing Yomi is an interesting challenge.
But difficult
But interesting

[Wrana]

Agree. Slingers with shields I think better for straightforward expansion. And common slingers are cheap as dirt which eases their massing. But Bakemono archers with stealth have other uses and they are also cheap enough.
Markatas, though... they S*CK. Actually, I think something should be done with monkeys - they have good line-of-battle troops in Bandar, but their stealthy units lack any kind of punch. If you mass Markatas enough, they will lose they stealth advantage. And they die like flies. Atavi archers get no stealth bonus and if you mass them they will be easily caught. And they lack the punch to beat anyone by themselves. Atavi infantry... they just lack either the punch or staying power. So they can't capitalise on any advance their archers could make. Either I'm missing something, or the player should restrict himself to Bandar. And while it's appropriate from an Indian caste system's point of view, I personally would like to have some way to use monkeys of lower castes other than as arrow/lance fodder. By the way, that's another nation I wouldn't give that much early game score... if not for Elephantes.

[chrispedersen]

Flame arrows.

5/1 markatas doing 6+6 ap damage.

9/3 stealth markatas doing 10+6 ap

Bandar infantry, having sticks and stones doing 16+6ap damage.

Everything on the battlefield gets +6 damage for 1 fire gem. Mix in 50 morale undead (which they can summon)- essentially 10 undead for every 100 troops will prevent morale failures (until they get turned).

Take those two easy steps and you've just tripled the effectivness of monkeys.

[Amhazair]

Units with unbreakable morale are not counted when averaging out the total morale of a squad. Thus, mixing in undead with the monkeys does nothing to help keep them from running away.

[triqui]

Amhazair said:
Units with unbreakable morale are not counted when averaging out the total morale of a squad. Thus, mixing in undead with the monkeys does nothing to help keep them from running away.

and will make them charge to the front becouse they cant use "fire" as squad order.

Besides that, is quite probable that the glamour units will be knocking your door before you have flaming arrows as Lanka or Kailasa or Bandar log, which dont have fire as national path .

Even then, it's the flaming arrow, and not the markata what keep the glamour army at bay. Markata is only useful to die in piles as cannon fodder.

[JimMorrison]

triqui said:

and will make them charge to the front becouse they cant use "fire" as squad order.

Besides that, is quite probable that the glamour units will be knocking your door before you have flaming arrows as Lanka or Kailasa or Bandar log, which dont have fire as national path .

Even then, it's the flaming arrow, and not the markata what keep the glamour army at bay. Markata is only useful to die in piles as cannon fodder.

Not true at all, I group ele/mammoths with archers all the time. Sometimes it causes small placement issues with the big beasts placed behind the archers in the squad formation, but otherwise it's basically 90% effective.

And if you don't like Markata as missile troops, it must be because you use the archers which should never be purchased. The other Markata have Sticks and Stones which get 2 attacks per round. As long as you have a line in front of them, they can barrage an enemy line - and if you did actually do a Flaming Arrows strat, you should see impressive results for your investment.


I still think there is an overabundance of confusion as to what the ratings system actually means. Or at least, a bit much personal bias from most players.

I will continue to look into what can be done about that, and can only encourage people to continue to provide whatever input they can.

[chrispedersen]

Nonsense. I do it all the time. And the markatas fight to the last monkey.

[Herode]

I still think there is an overabundance of confusion as to what the ratings system actually means. Or at least, a bit much personal bias from most players.

That's an inherent drawback of those open/subjective questions. The point is : some nations can be powerful and easy to use once you know how to do it (== once you are experienced) but still be difficult and weak in the hands of most (== standard) players.

Then, how will you rate this : after the guru's results or after the crowd's results ?
Essentially, this is a philosophical question : is a thing defined by its essential perfection or by its most common and impure manifestation ? Are you essentialist or phenomenologist ?

Now, your first 3 ratings (early/mid/late game power) can be computed without a poll. If the hosts agreed to deliver some stats on the games they are hosting at defined schedules (let's say turns 25/50/75 or whatever to be tuned by experienced domguys after the initial settings of the game), then you could collect amounts of empirical and objective data.

Also, it could be very interesting if you were able to mix this with additional data about the players themselves (basically, how many MP did they play before the current one as a measure of their experience). Though informations about players themselves may be more difficult to obtain, it should be straightforward to collect the data for or all games running with stats on (provided the hosts collaborate, of course).

[Gandalf Parker]

While I would not want to consider it as absolute "fact",
there is a sticky thread in the MP forum to list winning nations. Has anyone done some numbers on that? Just for curiosity sake?

[Amhazair]

Every so often that list comes up in discussions about this nation or that. Last time I checked the only really significant number was that almost half of all the LA games had been won by Ermor or R'lyeh.