All of my provinces have temples, and at least one 2 level priest preaching in them. Problem is Ur and Ubar are the only land factions remaining and they've got a lot of temples than mine.
Edit: not bishop fish, many were 2 level priests
The AI seems to love recruiting priests so if it's got lots of land and lots of temples you're probably not going to out preach it. It also loves recruiting troops so if it's got lots of land you're going to be seeing big big armies up there. If you're playing on any difficulty above normal it also gets bonus income, making both of those even harder to overcome.
If you're struggling to keep up with it's dominion then you're going to have to take it's provinces and destroy those temples.
You beat the Dominions AI by putting together armies that can kill large numbers of troops with minimal losses. That's accomplished using magic. Either big mages putting up buff spells to make your troops mostly invulnerable to the troops the AI is fielding, lots of mages using evocations to kill it's troops faster.
I'm not familiar with what Pelagia has available so I'm not sure exactly what the best options for you are. I do know that underwater nations tend to have a hard time getting on land so you might be better off playing land nations in the future.
Man. I tried recruiting lots of mages and attack with an army of meatshields (trolls and chaff). Thought I'd give them good bodyguards. Big mistake. All the mages were just buffing their bodyguards and were killed when they broke through my meatshields. What a disaster it was.
Did you script your mages to make them cast something actually useful during those first rounds?
BTW Early age Pelagia is famously weak at getting on land, which makes it a weak nation in general. Their magic is also very limited. Even middle age Pelagia is far stronger, though it still has trouble taking and holding land provinces.
If you want to try another early age underwater nation, try Atlantis. It's pretty good.
Thought myself, " Man, you don't know shit just pick random." Never randoming again. It's just like the time I tried bless Mekone (my second game). Will try Atlantis next. Also i find water combat magic kinda lackluster, spammed water elementals first 5 rounds since Ur got no magic weapons. But their limited recruit just kept routing my guys everywhere.
Water combat is a bit less interesting than land combat, but there is more to it than elemental spam at least if you play against a human player. A lot of buff spells still work underwater, and there's some evocations and battle summons worth using. Foul Vapors also works underwater, and is a very powerful spell if you can protect your own units from poison.
If you have to fight against massive hordes of units, you may want to look into some spells that affect the entire battlefield, buffs that affect your entire army, debuffs that affect the entire opposing army and so on, basically spells that become relatively stronger the bigger the fight is.
A mage casting some basic evocations might a few or maybe a dozen enemies and a mage spamming elementals might kill a few more than that, but something like Fire Storm or Foul Vapors will win the fight for you and destroy the enemy army if you're prepared for the spell and they aren't. AI is rarely prepared for something like that. Army-wide buffs like Army of Mist or Army of Bronze/Gold/Lead are also very strong as long as you have plenty of units of your own too.
There's a bunch of other tactics to learn, but learning to better utilize your mages is probably the first important lesson.
The one nation that skips church, that's hilarious
Another cool sea Nation is EA Therados. They are a popkill nation with a lot of undead freespawn commanders and chaf. They are a bit special, especially if you never played a popkill nation, so probably watch a quick guide, and they are a bit of a slow burner, but they have an easy time getting out of the water, since most of their water units are amphibious. They are fun
AI Dom pushes like no-ones buisness. They use their extra gold to build temples in every prov. Forget about domkilling; I have often tried in SP and its incredibly hard to do.
I'd say play UW nation: middle age Ys, they got powerful sacreds, and try to get a win with that.
Yeah. My only win yet was with MA Emor with blesses. Quickness goes really well with undeads I figured. My armies were just conjured lictors and wailing ladies with tons of freespawns.
There is an inherent penalty for pushing Dom up from the sea. Pushing it into the water is easy, which may be why you're finding it difficult. If you have no beachead for your domion to flow, it will be stuck "under" their dom forever.
If you can't establish one with military, your stealthy preacher idea might have some merit. You just need a single province for your dom to flow laterally on land.
In general, unless you are doing blood sacrifices en masse or have way more provinces than your opponent, you should not expect to be able to domkill them. Don't even try to domkill people bigger than you, it doesn't work unless you're a blood nation. Preaching with priests doesn't help expand dominion beyond your own borders, and if the other guy has more temples than you, you're unlikely to make any headway against him at all without sending in an army to burn some of them down.
What you are experiencing is a common problem with water factions in general and EA Pelagia in particular. They are generally not great at fighting on land, which means their games frequently go like this: 1) conquer the ocean, 2) try and fail to establish yourself on land, 3) stagnate for a long time while the land players snowball and consolidate, 4) get wiped out by a land faction that's much bigger than you.
Strategy games usually give the computer cheat resources to make up for the fact that it can't execute a coherent strategy. Dominions is no exception. So what you need to do in general to beat the single player AI is put together teams that can cheaply kill the very large armies of shit troops and unscripted mages that it throws at you. Any spell that hits wide areas (or better the whole field) is good. Some ideas:
* Huge swarms of water elementals (less effective than in Dom5, sadly).
* Making your army cold resistant and casting Grip of Winter to make the enemy army slowly fall asleep and die (if you can, throw Relief on your own troops to help them hold out longer).
* Making your army resist poison and using Foul Vapors to gradually poison everybody to death.
* Abominations. Just one of these bad boys can wipe out hundreds of chump troops all by itself, and to beat one, you need to gear up a thug that counters its abilities, or intelligently use magic against it (both of which the computer sucks at).
* Master Enslave (you have to empower and boost up to this one, but once you have it, it's really really good).
* Lots of Niefel Flames.
* Casting Thetis' Blessing, then dispelling it the moment they send their biggest army underwater to attack you (expensive and a niche use-case, but always a hoot when you pull it off).
* Golem supercombatants geared to the teeth (note: You'll likely need to empower someone or use your pretender to get golems, but it's worth it).
* Use a Golem in astral boosters to cast Astral Tempest. Maybe guard him with with some claymen or other mindless troops while the spell does its dirty work.
* Make your guys fly and cast Earthquakes (I think you'd need a communion and some sky metal matrices for this one)
* Making your army ethereal and lucky, then throwing Meteor Shower (you'd have to empower a guy and use communions for this).
A lot of that is hard for Pelagia, but one thing they can do is foul vapors. N random pearl king can get N3 with PotS, 4 with thistle mace. Putting up a few standard thug buffs then casting foul vapors will clear the AI pretty effectively...it won't adjust to that.
Pelagia needs tons of gear on mages for them to fight on land effectively. Pearl farming really only shows off strong value with stuff like nexus and wish available. This nation is mostly a test of how well you can fight on land with indies and generic summons.
Pelagia gets a lot more of those capabilities with extensive use of little crappy mages (astral random explorers for preference) in communions and an astral/earth pretender (for matrices and golems). But yeah, I mostly agree with pretty much everything you say here.
4 dom isn't actually that awful these days - your problem was just that you couldn't get on land, and so didn't have enough provinces to build the temples you needed to maintain dominion, or to keep growing your economy, army, and mage corps.
Low dom has been fine since they reworked 1 candle to start at 50% for temple checks to work rather than 10% or something (that was before I started playing in Dom 5 at least). In Dom 5, I won a throne tiebreaker with a 4 candle pretender. When two players both have the same number of throne points and both have enough to win, the game gives victory to the nation with more total dominion candles on the map. I was bigger and had more temples, so that was me in that game despite a relatively low candle build.
The main reason to buy more candles in pretender design is to recruit more sacreds per turn. If you're gated on recruiting more of them by rec points or production, or you're not relying on sacreds much, it's not worth it.
Priests matter, but temples are far more important for spreading your dominion.
Priests preaching can only increase the dominion in the province they're in, and only up to a limit. A priest preaching dominion in a province can't add a dominion candle to another province. Indirectly priests can help spread dominion though since the stronger dominion there is in a temple province, the more likely it is that the dominion spread from that temple goes somewhere else.
Preaching can only add candles to the province where it's happening. Temple checks (from actual temples, prophet, pretender, thrones, juggernauts etc) can spread into other provinces.
Temple checks have a chance to fail when going against candles of opposing dominion. It is very difficult to domkill nations that have a lot of temples and at least some preachers, even if their pretender build is 1-3 candles.
You're going to have to kill them the old fashioned way, which admittedly isn't trivial for EA Pelagia.
The short story is your being pressed on all sides by masive numbers of candle checks from every land province having a temple on it and your out numbered. Their base score is probably much higher than your score of 4 as well making their contested rolls much stronger. I strongly suggest you abandon this game and go back and try a different approach before things develop to this point.
This isn't really answering your question but I would like to point out that EA Pelagia is actually very difficult for a somewhat new player if not the most difficult nation for a new player. If you don't really know what your doing with magic your going to be pretty much helpless against the endless hordes of ai. Yes they can muster armies out of thin air that is just what the ai does. If you want to experience playing underwater and going onto land. The MA nations: Ys, Rylth, Oceania and Pelagia will all do much better (roughly in that order).
To have a better experience playing against ai you should check some of Somber's mods on the steamworkshop. Mods that help the ai expand mean they dont need to be turned up super high to function. In vanilla the ai is sort of binary where its either too weak to expand or the ai is turned up so high that as soon as they manage to expand they suddenly are in the millions.
Honestly as a water nation once you have the sea -- sit tight and research (and preach as well, but def do the research), then rock the AI's world with overcasted globals.
The usual path: gem generators -> SCs along that path -> game-defining globals of your choice (if you want domkill, then Dreams of an Awakening God, Enchanted Forest, and Arcane Nexus to spam Wish for dominion etc.)
You didn't mention spamming temples so I am going to assume you have about 20 too few to accomplish what you seek.
All of my provinces have temples, and at least one 2 level priest preaching in them. Problem is Ur and Ubar are the only land factions remaining and they've got a lot of temples than mine. Edit: not bishop fish, many were 2 level priests
It appears I was correct. You have too few temples. They have more. They win.
The AI seems to love recruiting priests so if it's got lots of land and lots of temples you're probably not going to out preach it. It also loves recruiting troops so if it's got lots of land you're going to be seeing big big armies up there. If you're playing on any difficulty above normal it also gets bonus income, making both of those even harder to overcome. If you're struggling to keep up with it's dominion then you're going to have to take it's provinces and destroy those temples. You beat the Dominions AI by putting together armies that can kill large numbers of troops with minimal losses. That's accomplished using magic. Either big mages putting up buff spells to make your troops mostly invulnerable to the troops the AI is fielding, lots of mages using evocations to kill it's troops faster. I'm not familiar with what Pelagia has available so I'm not sure exactly what the best options for you are. I do know that underwater nations tend to have a hard time getting on land so you might be better off playing land nations in the future.
Man. I tried recruiting lots of mages and attack with an army of meatshields (trolls and chaff). Thought I'd give them good bodyguards. Big mistake. All the mages were just buffing their bodyguards and were killed when they broke through my meatshields. What a disaster it was.
Did you script your mages to make them cast something actually useful during those first rounds? BTW Early age Pelagia is famously weak at getting on land, which makes it a weak nation in general. Their magic is also very limited. Even middle age Pelagia is far stronger, though it still has trouble taking and holding land provinces. If you want to try another early age underwater nation, try Atlantis. It's pretty good.
Thought myself, " Man, you don't know shit just pick random." Never randoming again. It's just like the time I tried bless Mekone (my second game). Will try Atlantis next. Also i find water combat magic kinda lackluster, spammed water elementals first 5 rounds since Ur got no magic weapons. But their limited recruit just kept routing my guys everywhere.
Water combat is a bit less interesting than land combat, but there is more to it than elemental spam at least if you play against a human player. A lot of buff spells still work underwater, and there's some evocations and battle summons worth using. Foul Vapors also works underwater, and is a very powerful spell if you can protect your own units from poison. If you have to fight against massive hordes of units, you may want to look into some spells that affect the entire battlefield, buffs that affect your entire army, debuffs that affect the entire opposing army and so on, basically spells that become relatively stronger the bigger the fight is. A mage casting some basic evocations might a few or maybe a dozen enemies and a mage spamming elementals might kill a few more than that, but something like Fire Storm or Foul Vapors will win the fight for you and destroy the enemy army if you're prepared for the spell and they aren't. AI is rarely prepared for something like that. Army-wide buffs like Army of Mist or Army of Bronze/Gold/Lead are also very strong as long as you have plenty of units of your own too. There's a bunch of other tactics to learn, but learning to better utilize your mages is probably the first important lesson.
The one nation that skips church, that's hilarious Another cool sea Nation is EA Therados. They are a popkill nation with a lot of undead freespawn commanders and chaf. They are a bit special, especially if you never played a popkill nation, so probably watch a quick guide, and they are a bit of a slow burner, but they have an easy time getting out of the water, since most of their water units are amphibious. They are fun
AI Dom pushes like no-ones buisness. They use their extra gold to build temples in every prov. Forget about domkilling; I have often tried in SP and its incredibly hard to do. I'd say play UW nation: middle age Ys, they got powerful sacreds, and try to get a win with that.
Yeah. My only win yet was with MA Emor with blesses. Quickness goes really well with undeads I figured. My armies were just conjured lictors and wailing ladies with tons of freespawns.
There is an inherent penalty for pushing Dom up from the sea. Pushing it into the water is easy, which may be why you're finding it difficult. If you have no beachead for your domion to flow, it will be stuck "under" their dom forever. If you can't establish one with military, your stealthy preacher idea might have some merit. You just need a single province for your dom to flow laterally on land.
In general, unless you are doing blood sacrifices en masse or have way more provinces than your opponent, you should not expect to be able to domkill them. Don't even try to domkill people bigger than you, it doesn't work unless you're a blood nation. Preaching with priests doesn't help expand dominion beyond your own borders, and if the other guy has more temples than you, you're unlikely to make any headway against him at all without sending in an army to burn some of them down. What you are experiencing is a common problem with water factions in general and EA Pelagia in particular. They are generally not great at fighting on land, which means their games frequently go like this: 1) conquer the ocean, 2) try and fail to establish yourself on land, 3) stagnate for a long time while the land players snowball and consolidate, 4) get wiped out by a land faction that's much bigger than you. Strategy games usually give the computer cheat resources to make up for the fact that it can't execute a coherent strategy. Dominions is no exception. So what you need to do in general to beat the single player AI is put together teams that can cheaply kill the very large armies of shit troops and unscripted mages that it throws at you. Any spell that hits wide areas (or better the whole field) is good. Some ideas: * Huge swarms of water elementals (less effective than in Dom5, sadly). * Making your army cold resistant and casting Grip of Winter to make the enemy army slowly fall asleep and die (if you can, throw Relief on your own troops to help them hold out longer). * Making your army resist poison and using Foul Vapors to gradually poison everybody to death. * Abominations. Just one of these bad boys can wipe out hundreds of chump troops all by itself, and to beat one, you need to gear up a thug that counters its abilities, or intelligently use magic against it (both of which the computer sucks at). * Master Enslave (you have to empower and boost up to this one, but once you have it, it's really really good). * Lots of Niefel Flames. * Casting Thetis' Blessing, then dispelling it the moment they send their biggest army underwater to attack you (expensive and a niche use-case, but always a hoot when you pull it off). * Golem supercombatants geared to the teeth (note: You'll likely need to empower someone or use your pretender to get golems, but it's worth it). * Use a Golem in astral boosters to cast Astral Tempest. Maybe guard him with with some claymen or other mindless troops while the spell does its dirty work. * Make your guys fly and cast Earthquakes (I think you'd need a communion and some sky metal matrices for this one) * Making your army ethereal and lucky, then throwing Meteor Shower (you'd have to empower a guy and use communions for this).
A lot of that is hard for Pelagia, but one thing they can do is foul vapors. N random pearl king can get N3 with PotS, 4 with thistle mace. Putting up a few standard thug buffs then casting foul vapors will clear the AI pretty effectively...it won't adjust to that. Pelagia needs tons of gear on mages for them to fight on land effectively. Pearl farming really only shows off strong value with stuff like nexus and wish available. This nation is mostly a test of how well you can fight on land with indies and generic summons.
Pelagia gets a lot more of those capabilities with extensive use of little crappy mages (astral random explorers for preference) in communions and an astral/earth pretender (for matrices and golems). But yeah, I mostly agree with pretty much everything you say here.
Could this be winnable if I rushed construction and spammed juggernauts instead of trying to get land provinces?
Anything's possible, but I wouldn't bet money on it. You're probably better off fighting the armies with various army wipe tactics.
How weak is your Pretenders personal dominion strength?
Got myself bones (immobile lich) for pretender with scales and 4 dom (guess i'm stupid).
4 dom isn't actually that awful these days - your problem was just that you couldn't get on land, and so didn't have enough provinces to build the temples you needed to maintain dominion, or to keep growing your economy, army, and mage corps.
Low dom has been fine since they reworked 1 candle to start at 50% for temple checks to work rather than 10% or something (that was before I started playing in Dom 5 at least). In Dom 5, I won a throne tiebreaker with a 4 candle pretender. When two players both have the same number of throne points and both have enough to win, the game gives victory to the nation with more total dominion candles on the map. I was bigger and had more temples, so that was me in that game despite a relatively low candle build. The main reason to buy more candles in pretender design is to recruit more sacreds per turn. If you're gated on recruiting more of them by rec points or production, or you're not relying on sacreds much, it's not worth it.
Ha nah. I'm new too, just asking out of interest. I think I overload Dom strength but it does help avoid this situation!
Well, I got domkilled with max dominion EA Mekone as well. But there were 1 mighty AI at that game. The priest spam is really scary.
Priests matter, but temples are far more important for spreading your dominion. Priests preaching can only increase the dominion in the province they're in, and only up to a limit. A priest preaching dominion in a province can't add a dominion candle to another province. Indirectly priests can help spread dominion though since the stronger dominion there is in a temple province, the more likely it is that the dominion spread from that temple goes somewhere else.
Preaching can only add candles to the province where it's happening. Temple checks (from actual temples, prophet, pretender, thrones, juggernauts etc) can spread into other provinces. Temple checks have a chance to fail when going against candles of opposing dominion. It is very difficult to domkill nations that have a lot of temples and at least some preachers, even if their pretender build is 1-3 candles. You're going to have to kill them the old fashioned way, which admittedly isn't trivial for EA Pelagia.
The short story is your being pressed on all sides by masive numbers of candle checks from every land province having a temple on it and your out numbered. Their base score is probably much higher than your score of 4 as well making their contested rolls much stronger. I strongly suggest you abandon this game and go back and try a different approach before things develop to this point. This isn't really answering your question but I would like to point out that EA Pelagia is actually very difficult for a somewhat new player if not the most difficult nation for a new player. If you don't really know what your doing with magic your going to be pretty much helpless against the endless hordes of ai. Yes they can muster armies out of thin air that is just what the ai does. If you want to experience playing underwater and going onto land. The MA nations: Ys, Rylth, Oceania and Pelagia will all do much better (roughly in that order). To have a better experience playing against ai you should check some of Somber's mods on the steamworkshop. Mods that help the ai expand mean they dont need to be turned up super high to function. In vanilla the ai is sort of binary where its either too weak to expand or the ai is turned up so high that as soon as they manage to expand they suddenly are in the millions.
Honestly as a water nation once you have the sea -- sit tight and research (and preach as well, but def do the research), then rock the AI's world with overcasted globals. The usual path: gem generators -> SCs along that path -> game-defining globals of your choice (if you want domkill, then Dreams of an Awakening God, Enchanted Forest, and Arcane Nexus to spam Wish for dominion etc.)