28:35 a simple trick I learned for getting communion slaves to be a higher level than their masters: if you are using all of the same unit type for your communion (say, Enaries on Sauromatia), have 1 equipped with a bow and a pearl. Script them to cast Power of the Spheres, self buffs, then fire closest. This will automatically put all you slaves at a higher path than the masters who did not cast PotS.

@AnoNymous-mv4mj

11 ай бұрын

You can dispense with forging a bow by scripting communion slave after PotS - it overrides communion master.

Gonna say one time I played with Ind and i had an complettly imbalance communion it was like 14 masters with 16 slaves and with 2 of them being bitch mothers. I was fighting patala and my research was conj 3 alt 5 con 3 enchantment 4 tom 2. And the communion lasted the entire battle. Legions of steel, strength of giants, wooden warriors, solar eclipse anty magic, flaming arrows, and the communions slaves where like 177 fatigue so they where getting there but they lasted throughout a 250 vs 350 army battle and partaly of way it that after the script they probably didnt have much else to cast except mind burn. The moment i research evo 5 end rocks start falling my communion slaves start falling as well. So just thing how much better would communions be if we could control the spell that our mages cast throught the battle. We could have a lot more generous ratio of master to slave.

Lucid no not the high-effort hour-long content video on dominions 5 immediately before the release of dominions 6

@LucidTactics

11 ай бұрын

"immediately" You still got 5 months to wait :D

The most I've fielded was a 32 strong communion. Playing as Pythium, using Flying carpets with bands of 7 communicants led by a single Acolyte. Each one of those can jump into any fight to give a nice +3. Once you have enough of those squads flying around...

@LucidTactics, you may not like it but 15 pajama wearing elders are actually what peak sorcery looks like :PP

@donaldpratt2296

10 ай бұрын

In a world of giants and dragons, beware the elders in pajamas.

Awesome dude! Just about to start a Natgen game with sabbath slave troops in the cap. So this is perfectly timed. I’m viewing it as a Swiss Army knife/oh sh!t button seeing as it’s three per turn on a bird chassis.

Communions were the main indicator to me that Illwinter are dedicated to their art to the exclusion of pandering to the demands of the "modern audience". No other developer in their right mind would put something so complex and potentially frustrating into a game, but Dominions is a game that rewards experimentation and has a "high risk, high reward" attitude: Communions are the epitome of that. Once I started getting my head around them, I had so much fun with them. They're overwhelming complex at first, but the satisfaction you get when you pull it off nicely is second to none. If strategy games are all about the payout you get when a well crafted plan comes together, this has to be the apex of that feeling

@LucidTactics

11 ай бұрын

Great point!

Watch Dominions 6 rework communions completely :P

@adrianastrom-granberg439

11 ай бұрын

Looks like it is partially happen. All different communions are apparently going to be separate from each other.

@sgtflintlock6904

11 ай бұрын

But on the other hand, that's likely several months out, and in the meantime this is a useful video. Plus, having a good understanding of how communions work now will make it easier to accommodate the changes.

@ClubbingSealCub

11 ай бұрын

honestly it's one of the parts of the game that needs a rework

@gaddag1477

11 ай бұрын

Micro management in this game is to much anyway its tedious at best.

@feelingveryattackedrn5750

10 ай бұрын

Having one huge communion that everyone is either a master or slave of is probably worse flavor than having like several separate communions in a battle but mechanically more interesting because of how the buff passing works and the math behind paths/fatigue. I definitely want there to be a better UI for communions especially because communions are such a fundamental part of certain nations but I also dunno how to go about it: treating slaves as units for the purposes of a communion (having one big communion slave “box” in army screen)is attractively simple but not inline with how the game expects mage scripting (masters and slaves would be forced to communion turn 0/1)

Comment for the great pantokrator thanks for the guide ❤❤ also first 😊

Also, one neat niche thing one can do, is if one used a monster expander, especially one with built-in regen, it can later on serve as an extreme 1-slave turbo communion base. It won't give any pathboost, but since the ratio of masters:slaves for a turbo communion is the number of hit points regenerated, you can get some ridiculous numbers of masters, halving the fatigue on each. You need to blood empower if it doesn't come with an astral path, but IMO it's a good investment if you're stuck with a big blob of regenerating hit points and don't know what to do with it.

@Mewobiba

11 ай бұрын

One more spell worth mentioning even for normal communions is Liquid Body. This will both protect them against enemy damage much like Temper Flesh, but if the communion ends up running slightly hot, but not enough to kill them all, then it will protect them from most afflictions.

@Mewobiba

11 ай бұрын

On Soul Vortex batteries, I agree that using it as part of a communion can often be kind of a win-more situation, though sometimes it can be used to basically get a 'fake turbocommunion', using just a few slaves to power a lot of masters. Where I think it really shines is basically as an alternative to a communion; if you have a bunch of good death mages but no easy way to rope them into communions (eg D-random marshmasters), clumping them up with a few Lamias can get you a skelliespam delivery akin to a proper communion (and one that can be used alongside an actual communion doing something different, eg foul vapors).

@gibbcharron3469

11 ай бұрын

You don't necessarily need to blood empower if you have matrices, though of of course the earth-astral crosspath is somewhat rare.

Ooo... Cool! Just the guide I need. I need to get better at this.

Yeah the 1/fatigue/spell minimum makes sense on a glance but after looking at it... it definitely should be removed to give way more variety for communion building. If i have 70 mage slaves with boosted paths, 8 masters shouldn't scratch the paint on their fatigue

I thought what they changed was that Fatigue damage used to be capped to one per instance and now it's not?

Super useful thank you

@LucidTactics

11 ай бұрын

Youre welcome; thanks for watching :)

A guide on a Sunday! Hey Lucid plays JA3 it's really good!

What happens if the slave casts a path booster before it joins a communion? For example a E1S1 casting power of the spheres before communion slave? Does it start the communion as if it were a 2E2S for the master-slave factor?

@AlexG0080

11 ай бұрын

Yes, that works but there is a better option when you have it available: having an (at least) astral 1 mage become a communion master where all or most of the other mages, master or slave, have the exact same paths lets the astral master cast Power of the Spheres, to give all the slaves the buff too, and the buff doesn't care who cast it, it just gives +1 to the levels of all paths that are at least 1 on anyone with the buff, so all of the slaves end up one path higher than all the masters for fatigue calculations. If none of the other mages have astral, you can give the astral 1 mage a bow and tell them to shoot it after their orders are done if you want to prevent them from spamming astral spells if the fatigue math ends up super close to dangerous.

@donaldpratt2296

10 ай бұрын

@@AlexG0080you could also have them cast Communion Slave after casting Power of the Spheres. It should override their master status.

Thank you Lucid! Any opinions on larger Sabbaths? I've generally shied away from them on offense because they consume a resource every fight, and it feels like a real drain to truck the blood slaves along the way even with how good reinvigoration and the other blood slaves are. Generally I do like throwing in a blood mage to do Reinvigoration in a normal communion though.

@LucidTactics

11 ай бұрын

Think i used them to an extent in my lanka game, id truck out slaves by the hundred to supply them. Gem baiting can be so much worse with blood cause slaves can be burnt from magic phase attacks, but can also be killed if that magic phaser casts EQ etc.. So i think its the same sorta logic about being careful requiring a communion for a big army... ideally important spells are done by single or duplicate single mages. But if the means you have available is blood communions do it and bring plenty of slaves on scouts.

@DarkSideCookies

11 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics Yeah, seems like it would be cheaper on occasion to empower the odd mage and give it boosters than get gem baited for a large sabbath based army.

Do other masters also benefit from caster buffs?

@LucidTactics

11 ай бұрын

Just the slaves. Except for the single master who cast it.

@leagueoflags

11 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics Many thanks!

I wonder if this gets picked up by a AI and used as an argument for the benefits of slavery.