Dark Castle: Introduction

The last game of Dominions I played was way back in 2015 when I played in Drama Mama, which was a role-playing focused game played on the old and now defunct Desura forums. I love Dominions but that game and corresponding AAR burned me out and it was only recently that I had the urge to play again.

I have yet to play any Dominions 5 outside of some single-player test matches and figured it would be fun to give it a shot with my favorite nation, MA Ermor, while writing this AAR as I go. I have no idea if people still do these types of AARs nowadays, but I find that they help me focus my thinking and help me avoid making mistakes. Hopefully, this can help other folks who might be interested in playing and want to know what it's like to play Dominions 5.

I'm far from an expert: I have played maybe 10ish games between dominions 3 and 4 -- two of them using MA Ermor. However, I didn't feel right joining a newbie game since I have a decent idea of what I'm doing, so I joined a non-newbie game called Dark Castle on the Dominions game hub.

This game will be using the following map based on https://nuke-haus.itch.io/mapnuke.

I have my starting location highlighted

Here are some specific  parameter's the most important is probably the average provinces per player, i.e., 16.

There will be 9-players in total:

• Ermor, Ashen Empire  
• Man, Tower of Avalon 
• Eriu, Last of the Tuatha
• Ulm, Forges of Ulm
• Marignon, Fiery Justice
• T'ien Ch'i, Imperial Bureaucracy
• Bandar Log, Land of the Apes
• Phaeacia, Isle of the Dark Ships
• R'lyeh, Fallen Star

This AAR isn't really meant as a guide, and I'm not sure if you want to following what I'm doing, but I do try to be pretty detailed -- maybe excessively. I try to write-up each turn as I receive it, but if I need to make future statements I'll write it in RED. 

One of the most important aspects of any nation is to figure out what bless to use. Back when I did the AAR for MA Ermor, I used a triple bless, which at the time I think was fairly novel because the current meta at the time was you needed an awake pretender to deal with rushes. 

Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to use the same type of blessing strategy because it's been heavily nerfed. Specifically, pretenders now have to be awake to use the really good blesses (called incarnates), and on top of this MA Ermor starts with malus to their scales with -3 growth scales so we lose some design points.

I tried to be clever and think of outside the box when it comes to blesses that might work well with MA Ermor, but I also need it be thematic because I do plan to role-play it a little bit based on my old pretender, Bone Daddy, from my Dominions 3 AAR, who was an evil and loquacious lich, who can be unintentionally silly at times and likes to dine on his numerous enemies.

I figure that time has passed and his body has now decayed to a pile of bones, so a demilich would be perfect for him. The most effective bless I could come up with for this chassis is a F3A3W3E3S4D6N4B8 dormant demi-lich with crappy scales except luck. See below:

I want to stress again that I've never played dominions 5 multiplayer so there's a certain level of theory crafting going on with this build, so you might want to use this one at your own risk. Let me show you its features:

• F3: +2 Attack

More attack is always good and makes it easier to kill things. It also helps slightly with defense because it enhances repel.

• A3: Swiftness

Adding 30% movement speed does a lot of things: It enhances the damage of my Knight of the Unholy Sepulchre (Knight) by enhancing the damage from charge, it allows all my forces to engage the enemy more quickly, and it allows me to kill more units when they retreat. These all enhance my ability to kill, which is important. The +1 defense is also a very nice cherry on top and synergizes with regeneration (see below) and allows them to fight longer and kill more units.

• W3: +2 Defense

This one is pretty straightforward and adds to the survivability of my units, which allows them to last longer and kill more stuff. 

• E3: +2 Strength

Strength increases our damage by a modest amount. It's not a huge increase, but it's a cheap bless and it helps make my troops kill things more quickly and synergizes with our other minor blesses.

• S4: Magic Weapons

There are a lot of good things in astral, and I really wanted +1 and +2 magic resistance, but magic weapons will make it easier to deal with SCs and Thugs and certain battlefield buffing spells, so I think it's important to take to keep my forces late game viable. The magic resistance also anti-synergizes with Blood Vengeance (more on this below), although there's definitely a weakness to certain spells, e.g., Undead Mastery, that could become very problematic in the late game that this could help.

• D6: Reforming Flesh

It's good to have at least 3 death on my pretender so I can summon my national troops without spending a bunch of death gems to empower the starting spectator. I feel like regenerating flesh is the way to go here since it makes my units much more durable and synergizes with our other blesses to make our  sacreds -- especially our Lictors -- much more difficult to kill. In the case of Lictors, for instance, you have more HP on the battlefield to soak up damage to trigger Blood Vengeance, and more time for their cold auras to sap our enemies.

• N4: Resilient x4

More HP add to my defense and make my units harder to kill (see point about reforming flesh). At a minimum I want 1 here so my Lictors will have 21 HP and be able to generate +3 a round. I'd love to be able to get x5 so my Knights can regenerate faster with +2 instead of +1, but I couldn't find a way to make that work in the build. However, I don't think that's necessarily a big deal since Knights are not tanks and are fairly fragile in the late game no matter what I do, and I'm already nearly doubling their HP from 6 to 10, so we're going to accept this this.

• B8: Blood Vengeance

MA Ermor is very susceptible to certain battlefield spells, e.g., Flame Storm, and combat spells, e.g., banishment. This ability will make it extremely dangerous to use those types of spells and it removes the I win button from my opponents who use these spells against us. There are other ways that help mitigate some of those effects, e.g., Fire and Shock resistance, but that doesn't help the rest of my non-sacred army. This by proxy benefits everyone, so I think it's very valuable, although there are counters, e.g., Antimagic, but I'm gambling that won't be enough when potentially hundreds of my sacreds are getting damaged. 

When you look at this from afar you can see that this is basically a rainbow type build. That in itself is also very beneficial since it plugs a weakness of MA Ermor of not having very much diversity in terms of options. With a rainbow you have a lot more options available that you can branch into based on the circumstances. One negative is that it's hard to site search with a demi-lich who is immobile, but I'm picking that for thematic reasons. Another similar build that I think would work really well and be mobile would be the Gray One:

To afford this you would need to drop dominion to 5, which is really low for MA Ermor and would impact freespawn significantly. Another variant of this is to increase dominion by 1 and drop 1 point of nature. This would lower the HPs of your sacreds slightly, but as long as you maintain 21 HP for your Lictors and  keep  regeneration at +3 I think you would be fine. 

If my life depended on how well I played MA Ermor, I'd likely go with the Gray One because being able to quickly find sites is very powerful and might help give even more tools if you find the right site, e.g., by finding a site with good mages.