With the piercing damage nerfs and Ironskin buffed, your E7 Earth Snake with Earthpower and Hard Skin in Dominions 6 gets 33 protection (vs 36 in Dominions 5), but because of the piercing damage nerf, it's almost as tough vs Spears, which a lot of indies and national troops use. Combine that with the free affliction resistance from E4 and getting a magic weapon now (so it's a little harder for a single mage conjuring phantasmals to stop him), and he's probably about as strong as in Dominions 5. I believe the right way to think about it is that these changes were all made in conjunction with each other. Given that they buffed Ironskin on monsters by 2 points and reduced piercing damage against very high protection units by 2, they needed to change the Earth magic stacking feature to have protection tank monsters be about as strong as they were in Dominions 5.

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Yeah hadnt thought about that- good thought!

@TheMelnTeam

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, earth serpent with a bunch of point buffs will still be pretty hard to deal with early on. Regen point buff, something like moss on it, quickness with a repel misc item (or reinvig) + either MR or a relevant elemental resist ring...most people will choose to do something other than fighting that early on unless they're running some hellbless giant sacreds. As usual it really wants mages to help point buff it though. Also very effective against indies as usual and an instant amphibious option. The hardest nerf to it is probably just -1 production scale cap.

Turns out being a big jelly fish is not very effective against angry dudes with pointy sticks, regardless of how powerful your spiritual and psychic powers are lol

@Demiurge4

5 ай бұрын

He messed up though and sent it into a province without his candles on, so his bless wasn't active and it wasn't ethereal.

@emperorlokire7648

5 ай бұрын

@@Demiurge4 It still dies though.

@Arbaaltheundefeated

5 ай бұрын

@@Demiurge4 Having tried it just now myself, it still often enough fails expansion against regular opposition underwater with ethereal, so it would take more than an ethereal bless to have it expanding. So placement justified still, I think.

@Benjaminy2k

5 ай бұрын

Ethereal bless to buff a monster with native astral is silly anyway, but ethereal isn't enough to make it able to expand.

Oh yeah, I feel dominions knowledge overflows me

I'm pretty sure Nazca is based off of the Incan Empire, not Egypt. Mummification was a practice there, too.

@Flow86767

3 ай бұрын

Yes!!! When the Sapa Inca died, he was generally mummified and paraded around the empire before a huge funeral (generally staged in the capital Cuzco). What’s fascinating too is that these mummies where also maintained for long periods of time by caretakers, at least until the Spanish came and seized them, placed them in Lima. Due to the climate and not taking care of them, the mummies degenerated and they were soon most likely buried or destroyed, since we have not found them again if my memory is correct. It’s fascinating to me the inspiration from historical nations and mythology that the devs have taken into making these nations.

Are you going to make a (probably much shorter) video about the non-monster monster tier pretenders like the bodhisattva, the trinity of angels available to marignon, and the rest of that ilk?

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Yeah i might could do that.

@kyokyodisaster4842

5 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics Take as long as you need, these videos are fascinating.

Figured I'd chime in about the golden lion - i played a game just last week with that one and i used the same setup you described - regen and fireshield. he crapped all over every indie province, even the thrones. took out some actual enemy armies as well. basically won the game for me. great pretender.

@TTHJJD100

5 ай бұрын

Yeah. It feels like the three pretenders that have moved to min max expander meta has been golden lion, virtue, and thrice horned boar. Cheap to get them the bless they need, the virtue literally only needing fire res and nothing else is the cheapest to field.

@DonPetexX

4 ай бұрын

Really, how does one build virtue?

@TTHJJD100

4 ай бұрын

@@DonPetexX haven't played in latest patch but I'm pretty sure virtue hasn't changed. You just toss a bit of fire res on it, or fire shield fire res and depending on the nation you can get whatever you'd like after but most people just take some scales. Virtue has really high prot against indies, def not magic weapons so avoid unfrozen and some undead, and any mage provinces that look sketchy. But the area attack they have on the sword now just wipes swathes of indies.

While very, very, expensive the God Spider likes buying awe as an off path bless. At that point you have the good old Fear and Awe combo. You can make this even more expensive by taking true fear on top of that bring him to 10 fear. Dread might have been less expensive option but I didn't look at it. Only real reason to go through that though is that bless combo turns the Hunter Spider Commanders into mini versions of the God and expansion gets silly. I was honestly really surprised by how effective that worked but you really trash your scales to get it and I am not really certain it would be worth it in the long run. Edit: Huh I just double checked and you could buy awe on the God spider for Middle Age Machaka for only one scale down and still having dominion 5. So you can have fairly neutral scales while having Awe 3, Fear5. You trash the heck out of your scales getting true fear 5 on top of that. Looked at it and dread instead is only nets you one scale better than fear. So Probably just go the trash scales route if you combo with awe.

Great stuff, Lucid! In my first Dom 6 game, I figured I'd start off easy with MA Ulm. Wow, a scales nation can make _so much money,_ now. Heh, heh. Normally, in single-player, I don't bother hiring mercenaries, since the AI always out bid me (in Dom 5). Here, though, I had so much money I could hire nearly all of them. Not that I needed them - not with Ulm's troops. But it was pretty funny. After watching your first Monster God Tier List, I thought I'd play LA Man with that undead dragon expander. Yeah, it's not very thematic. I just wanted to see what it was like. And that dragon could take one province a turn, no problem. Meanwhile, I'm trying archers, since I've never tried that before, either. Against indies, it was very easy. I got cocky, though. After I ran out of provinces above ground, I sent my god after a throne underground. No problem. So then I just sent him into the next province,... with 80 or so cavemen. Oops! They killed him _very_ quickly. Lesson learned. :) Anyway, these are fun, Lucid. I hope to see you playing Dom 6 MP games again, sometime. Only if that's fun for you, of course.

The Phoenix would have much more of a role later in the game if it were full immortal rather than dominion immortal. As it is, he can't magic phase suicide into enemy armies that have a lot of priests in them, because that might flip to hostile Dominion and make his immortality not work... In addition to needing to worry about getting soul slayed. Honestly if there's a creature that should have full immortality thematically, it's the Phoenix. BTW he might be able to do the explosion strategy more successfully with Mistform; he can't expand with it directly but what you want is for the enemy troops to have time to surround him real good so that when he explodes, it kills most of the combat power of a province, especially in heat where he might set everyone on fire. I don't think going for the commanders is the way to go; killing the infantry is probably better for making it easy to clear with a weak party.

Man i was so deep down the Conquest rabbit hole i screamed about wadjet having regen so of course it heals afflictions. Just goes to show they ARE still two different games even if they both have planes now.

I just wanted to say thanks for making all these videos. I've liked the concept of Dominions, but always kind of bounced off of it. You've helped me get way more into Dominions 6.😊

While doing tier list of all pretenders would be too much, I think it would be nice to have a video about interesting pretenders in general, not only monsters. Like multiarmed titans, trinities, great siddha, vampire queen, ghost king, king in yellow, some titans with dom 2, etc.

One thing I found neat was with the son of fenrer running quickness+ recuperation for a killy expander, and strong sacreds

The spider should have multiple boot slots. Just so it can be the foil for the kraken

A reminder that when Master smith in form of Linnormr has -2 to paths so some self buffs need to be cast while in dwarf form and have transformation order.

I think you made this tier list much harder to do by adding additional 'values' to the tiers, you already have to balance beteen effectiveness and cost efficiency, and now you also must follow a small set of conditions in addition to the cost and power dilemma:3.

@rowanschoon2296

5 ай бұрын

Yeah i thought the list was very inconsistent floating mind isn't the best expander but has good chassis and 2 paths and is only 60 points

@tomaszpietrasik1528

5 ай бұрын

@@rowanschoon2296 Yeah i think it loses a lot of utility, as the 'top monsters' are measured by how good they are in somewhat of an isolation for most part, if a monster was 10% less effective at 50% price of another chassis, it would still measure lower even if its a better choice most of the time. But i dont mean to say this video is not worth watching ^^, but i think it should be watched more as monster chassis review as the tierlist itself is not as i said, very functional.

I enjoyed the demonstration videos showing how a pretender works/doesn't work to expand with.

It really is too bad they messed with corpse eater, it was powerful, but took tons of work.

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, theres a mod that changes it back to the old way called corpse eater... which is cool. But should be changed back in the base game too imo.

This and it's first video have been some of the singular most helpful videos I've watched on understanding stats and sight reading pretenders. I hope you will do a video to help us (or maybe just me lol) build titan supercombatants. I still am a bit lost to the gearing, and magical combat that goes with that. Thanks for all the great videos. It is gelling with me.

Great content! Would love to see something similar with Titans (maybe tiered on ability to be SCs or do something else interesting), or maybe even with Commanders.

can you make a video about what happens when you have scales at +4-5 or -4-5

@EricDMMiller

5 ай бұрын

Look in the manual. It's like 3 sentences and a short table. Why would you need a video about that?

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Yeah I’ll put that on the list

@The0spetsnaz0

5 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics from a beginner perspective, it took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to get scale values above/below (-)2, and I'm still figuring out when I can/should/shouldn't pump or dump those values. It seems like you need to do that to afford the magic costs of big blesses. Similarly, I always wonder how high or low I need to pump my starting dominion level. Another good video might be to just talk about how and why to go for an expensive bless. For example: is it only worth it if you have good sacred troops? How big can your blesses be with a rainbow pretender? In both videos it might be good to have a bullet point script to follow: introduction, some general rules of thumb, then 3-5 diverse examples that you can talk through why you chose what you did. For example, "I decided to build this game around the regeneration bless; you need certain things to make this worth it, and I think the only nations this would make sense for would be A, B, and C. Out of those ones, I picked C for reasons X and Y. Since it's costs so much nature magic, I picked X pretender for reasons A, B, and C. I think Pretender Y could work too, but that would take adjusting because (for example) I wanted a dormant pretender instead of imprisoned.

@EricDMMiller

5 ай бұрын

@@The0spetsnaz0 lol. I like how the initial suggestion here was to summarize like half an inch of text in the manual, and the next suggestion is asking for an explanation of how dozens (hundreds?) of variables come together to make the right decisions. One of these could be a short. One of these could have several videos per nation.

I genuinely hope Illwinter adds being able to turn sacreds into assassin's with a bless, I wanna see pretenders 1v1ing indie mages

I've used the pheonix before but not as an expander. Just as a relatively cheap F/A minor bless/scales chassis that is able to fly and far more durable than the human wizard chassis that are the main other options at that price point, which can be useful in the mid-late game

Watched the entire thing, alot of awesome information for a new player like myself. For some reason I love the bronze colossus in dom 4 tier. If you release a bunch of dom 3 and mobile dom 4 coverage ill watch that was well. Maybe for scale nation pretenders! Thanks for all the content!

@DemonsthenesDominions

5 ай бұрын

The Bronze Colossus is awesome but you can't expand with him since he requires dormant or later.

The only problem I found with beat stick gods was when some random mage or something horror marks them.

I have been testing Ormr with hard skin and chill aura for EA Rus and that thing is as mindless as it gets, turn one blind expands into own dominion have run it into 50 barbs and it still won.(plus the bless works well with the skinshifters)

4am dominions? Thats dedication

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

yeah was quite sick with covid, and just been tossing and turning in the bed all day. :gamersolute:

@Jim-ee6du

5 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics Bad luck getting covid right after dom6 releases, hope you get better soon.

@killerburner

5 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics I hope you are feeling better now, Lucid. Thank you for the content even while you are sick

Lucid is that graphic with all the changes to the nations still coming / already released / cancelled?

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Oh yeah, i knew i had something else to do! Thanks for the reminder.

Hound of hades also gets three hat slots 🎩🎩🎩

These were cool videos, thanks!

I love these.. I'm still learning dominions, playing only single player for now, and thanks to part 1 I tried using a monster for the first time ever (the earth snake, for tir na n'og), and yeah it's fun. One of the many many things I would love to get some help with is what sort of equipment is good, for commanders, for mages (boosters obviously, but except for that), and especially for titans, I would like to play around with those a little bit.

If you want to use the Jellyfish Floating Mind you can give it Death 5 for Stygian Skin. That allows it to expand early and caster SC later with soul drain. It has a very cheap base cost so adding an extra path isn't that bad.

nice i watched part 1 last night and i was like, damn. wheres part 2? well here it is!

Hopefully the dragons don't get nerfed too bad, they're currently the most powerful expanders I've ever seen, even compared to the pre-nerf dom 4 cyclops. Your recent video on the gas dragon with bonkers range is only scratching the surface and I'd bump all the dragons up to A at least, including the asian ones, since they make breaking into water a joke for cheap.

14:56 Minor thing but it's also one of the few monsters that doesn't have a research penalty

An Ai Myrmecoleon beat my Golden Lion in an unplanned fight. Both had armies and was in neither’s domain. Fun fight to watch but definitely have to give it to the Myrmecoleon, its a beast.

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

how funny because i had them battling for the same spot.

@DemonsthenesDominions

5 ай бұрын

Yeah one thing Lucid didn't talk about is winning bumps with other Pretenders; some weaker options like Crocdog are pretty good in the format.

for the stag with the little sacred stags, give them charged bodies so the stags do damage as they die? very expensive in bless though.

dunno if its the same in dom6, but in dom5 i found the phoenix to be just an absolutely incredible mage. empower in blood and you can toss him into communions, or just run him high air/fire and he can do both tricky stuff and conventional stuff definitely not an expander, but an extremely interesting mage (imho) to take dormant

Could something like the fenrir expand with a small party of national troops? He could use fear to rout the indies, while the national troops stand there and prevent surrounds.

I think it's a bit odd that the Great Archon is not on this list, I admit I am curious on your opinion of it.

Would love more tier list for "Expanders" for Dom2 and Dom3 gods maybe some of the Dom1

one thing it doesnt seem that youre considering (or maybe its bc this is solely focused on them expanding alone) is the tankier, less killy ones, could expand with your starting army turn 1, and have a second expansion army coming out turn 2-4 for some of the nations, esp ones with especially weak starting armies like the spider god on ma machaka (whereas the starting army is too weak on its own and needs to wait for extra troops). put him on fire so he aoe webs and once engaged in melee he will be fairly tanky and frontline while spear guys fire and then melee once engaged, and archers on fire and keep distance. havent tested this a ton but it might work out well and put ones in D-C teir into the can work well territory

poor xibalban serpent of the underworld, didn't even roll skeletal body

Are these Monsters really only measured on their ability to expand solo at the start?

Lucid did you forget about the invulnerability bless with death? For the god spider glamor fear plus invulnerability for example?

@DemonsthenesDominions

5 ай бұрын

Invulnerability doesn't stack with natural protection so it wouldn't help him at all.

@Wyrdloque

5 ай бұрын

God Spider with displacement and fear bless. Mirror image arrives early and makes you almost impossible to hit combined with displacement. Fear 10 + web spit to break up advancing units plus rarely getting hit at all for the first 3-4 rounds means he can expand fine into light-mid provinces. And fear and displacemen makes your sacreds great. Take him on MA Ermor and you get free scared cav to help him expand

Jellyfish is so cool and I want to see it in a game but I've never played UW in mp.

problem with antlion compared to other great expanders is that you basically have to suicide him into enemy territory to avoid the popkill; you can't just have him expand and then hold him in reserve. still a great chassis, but it means imho that the advantages of having raw prot over invuln is a wash: the reality is that even though antlion would hypothetically be more useful in mid to late game than yellowlion, he's going to be chilling in the void after expansion is done because nobody wants to feed him

@Syrenkai

5 ай бұрын

I usually have a province when I'm with antlion or Hinnom which is the home for all the maneaters. Some poor like sub 5000 pop province that I'm fine feeding down to zero. Have him build a lil fort and a lab for himself to stay entertained and be menacing.

What about the Virtue?

Poor Phoenix. The one I always looked at in dom 5 and never took, but hoped each time I would think of some good reason to take it. As for the acid dragon, I'm rating that thing way higher. Any flying monster with earth paths can eat the earth snake and ormr for breakfast as far as playability goes. At least in my humble noob book. 😂

Death on Hound begs for Soul Vortex ;)

All these hours and the supposedly best monster is some little elf/gnome thing any of the other ones could step on and squish without even noticing? :p

kamadhenu is S tier just for the god description

this video is really jittery and flickery for me, is that on my end?

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Something in my recording software... i havent seen that before.... I swear theres always something new.

@philipripper1522

5 ай бұрын

@@LucidTactics oh that's good! I mean bad, but I'm glad becuse I thought my monitor cord was going bad or something. Thanks for your videos!

@FLESKFIST

5 ай бұрын

Not for me

@poilboiler

5 ай бұрын

No, I have the same thing. It seems to be the game.

@fenmoorz

5 ай бұрын

Think so, mine was smooth

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

You desperately need an ohmygod tier for the phoenix just to make sure everyone know he is the very worst - even with the meme. :D

Tried out the Kraken and yeah without hardskin he's AWFUL on the early expansions. And I keep fucking up and accidently let him die before I get some decent equipment. Plus I hate most Water nations. They all have really awful flaws thats hard to play around with.

Earth Snake wasn't in dom3, you're thinking of 4, where it was basically the only monster pretender worth taking.

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

Ah ok you might be right there wise sensai.

I want the spider to be good and it just isn't. I thought maybe if you trashed your scales and went for a Fear and Dread combo it'd be able to make something happen but the results were disappointing.

It's really too bad that a nation unique pretender like the spider is so crappy.

@LucidTactics

5 ай бұрын

I think i underrated it a bit, i went and tested after the video. Turns out it can expand, but not great.