Dominions 6 - Mekone Strategy at a Glance
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 มิ.ย. 2024
- A new series where I do my best to give my first impressions on how I would recommend playing some of the nations of Dominion 6. A lot has changed and I hope my perspective as a Dominions 5 veteran helps you get started!
Do note I have not actually played a full multiplayer game as many of these as the game has only come out recently. I may redo some of these videos with more practical experience and information in the future.
If you have other ideas or suggestions on playing the nation, please write them in the comments below for others to see and discuss!
Shoutout to Sturm for creating the viewable summons at the pretender screen mod
Here are also some discord guides from ExasperatedCultist
Thugging 101: / discord
Okay, Pretenders!: / discord
Fort Placement: / discord
00:00 Summary
00:25 Units
00:57 Commanders
02:20 Summons
03:59 Roster Gameplan
05:34 Spell Recommendations
07:31 Sorcery Chart
08:18 Pretender Design (Utility)
09:15 Gameplay
Here are my written notes if that helps too
Mekone
Summary: Giant slaver-warriors inspired by ancient Greek Sparta. Highest quality gilded hoplites backed by powerful elemental magic and hordes of enslaved humans.
Unit Summary
Great slave human javelineers that can be massed versus low-protection enemies.
Top-tier hoplites in both heavy and light armored flavors with access to magic weapons.
Great stats across the board, but few in number.
Commander Summary
Mostly old age sacred mages.
Consistent access to Fire/Earth, inconsistent access to water/air.
Great leadership/stats on every mage.
Ephor, black robe, is particularly important, you must have one in every fort during the fall or suffer unrest penalties and miss out on a free assassin.
Summons Summary
Keres are greek jinn with a fear aura, and hidden blood/death paths if you divine name them. Keep them in mind if you have death access.
Hound of Twilight is cheap, has magic weapons, and a fear aura. hard to get the paths to cast, worth casting though if you can.
Brass Bull looks good in dominions 6. May be worth casting depending on what nation youre up against, better versus humans.
Spartae are a combat summon and are fantastic, especially for raiding.
Non-National Summon -
Green Lion
Kryptes
Combined Roster Summary
Massed peltast do great versus low armored high damage troops, think berserkers.
Hoplites do great in general, but few in number.
Both benefit greatly from fire/earth buffs, hoplites are more resistant to offscript evocations.
Great thugging potential on every mage. Polemarch needs little gear to function, cyclops can sometimes magic phase.
The nation desperately needs to break into sorcery paths and that needs to be the #1 goal from turn 1.
The pretender can assist in breaking into certain paths, but prioritizing independent mages is important. Nature at the minimum.
Weak to sudden fatigue plays, and late game sorcery if player fails to expand their magic diversity.
Spell Recommendations
Temper Armors+
Stoneskin+
Weapons of Sharpness+
Furious Warriors+
Heat from Hell
Elemental Wards
Gift of Flight+
Acid Rain+
Gift of Formlessness+
Sow Dragon Teeth
Pretender Design
Scales and late-game diversity. Prioritizing production.
The nation does not need help expanding, nor does it need super combatants or a powerful blessing.
It needs to break into sorcery paths consistently late game.
Gameplay
(Early)
Massed gigante hoplites trounce most of what EA can throw at you. Recruit Cyclops when possible to add more resources.
Aim for 7 armored hoplites/turn + a Polemarch in your capital, MINIMUM.
Research spells that Polemarchs can use to buff troops then Earthpower/Temper Armors is a great starting point.
First-level palisades grant 2CP, no need to upgrade until later.
1st Mage in every fort is an EPHOR/black robe. Rename these to "DONT MOVE." and always have at least 1 in each fort.
Kryptes with true shot longbows are very good versus humans. Add other equipment as necessary, be creative and oppressive here.
(Midgame)
Aim to cover your elemental weaknesses here. Elemental wards.
Pick and choose whether you want to use iron skin or stone skin for protection based on what spells your opponent brings.
When possible, add flame ward/heat from hell every fight. Fire in a jar crafted with dwarven hammers helps here.
--Heat from hell counteracts grip of winter, meaning you can safely stone skin your troops and not be as concerned about frost fatigue.
Include spells from your pretender's diversity path where possible.
(Late)
Branch out into the remaining sorcery paths. Protect your important mages that have boosters for key battlefield spells.
Now that fewer mages cover more troops, start having diverse armies to counter your opponents.
Your troops have quality but will need a lot of diverse magical help here. - เกม
One mistake: Basileus are not the only water magic access. Cyclops can also roll water. and in fact a cyclops can get as high as water 4. (F3W3 [which is possible with boosters] allows them to forge a staff of elemental mastery )
Regarding pretender paths: i would recommend at least N3 for both unaging to help with all the old dudes. And also to allow you to gift of reason Kers (requires D2) to break into blood later (as can most greek-based nations)
Youre right. Its an important minigame for mekone to do.
F3 cyclops makes fire helmet.
W1 cyclops makes water ring, then robe.
W1f2 cyclops puts on all 3 boosters and make staff.
A2 cyclops can use staff to make A helmet, then the horn.
@@ZanGames I also recommend the leadership fire bless on your pretender along with D2 ( you can get the 2nd fire booster, and your troops all tend to have fairly poor morale in general so having that extra leadership and morale really helps to corral the low morale slaves)
@@moleman7632 definitely a great option! When going the peltast route we need A Lot
Haven't played them yet in Dom6 which changed things around a lot, but the testing I did in 5 led me to some different conclusions - they'll tend to struggle with gold income if you play them by just trying to make their highest quality units, going too heavy on cyclopes early will cripple you with upkeep, trying to spam gigantes while ignoring the human side of the unit roster also results in excessive upkeep, if you do the math their income penalty from their unrest in cities is somewhat balanced out by the fact they get advanced fortified cities with high income bonuses so max-upgrading forts can be important. For the price of 1 gigante you can buy 5 helotes and upkeep 10, and they run into fatigue/harassment problems if they have to fight while heavily outnumbered in their heavy armor, gigantes should be the elite of your army, not the whole thing.
When you're going for magic diversity I think it's useful to empower cyclopes to take advantage of their master smith trait. Because of how gem transmutation works I think it benefits you to prioritize breaking into astral first, that's why I like the Titan of Forethought that comes with astral. A pretender with high astral who can forge rings of sorcery/wizardry will give your empowered cyclopes the ability to forge basically anything.
I really like the titan of forethought too! He trades the E/S access of the archon for built in disease healer to help keep your old dudes alive. Inspiring researcher is good too. (Realistically so you dont have to spend F gems to clear disease).
I need to lean on the slaves more. I feel like my dom5 Mekone game I was exclusively slaves, now in dom6 i'm exclusively gigante. I need to fix that, combined arms is the way.
Great review! My small contribution, apologies if covered, would be you have great buffing paths for archers so don't feel bad foreign recruiting indy archers to work with your peltasts.
Great suggestion!
I'd argue Kryptes have pretty bad stat lines for Giants at 11/11, and certainly compares to recruitable assassins, which often come with 13/13 stats and built in armor and poisoned weapons. But certainly being a giant means that the ROI on gearing them is greatly increase thanks to their high strength, HP, and MR.
Absolutely right.
One thing to note is that Dom 6 reduced the power of elementals, which was something Mekone had a lot of access to. You still have lots of access to battlefield clears, which I think is critical to avoid being overwhelmed by chaff.
I think you're spot on that the lack of any sorcery is definitely the weakness Mekone need to be most aware of (maybe worth sacrificing scales for some kind of dormant sorcery site searcher? Not sure how that math figures out). Forcing it's way into blood is also never a bad option, and having the extra threat vector is nice.
I've never been a big fan of elemental spam, so the nerf in dom6 didn't really affect me much thankfully :P
But definitely an option other players pursued in 5 that may be effected in 6.
Cant even buff the damn things anymore!
@@ZanGames You can still buff elementals, spiritform do not prevents all buffs. It is mostly some of the nature, earth and water buffs that don't work on spiritform. Air buffs (air shield and mistform) Astral (body ethereal) and all the new glamor buffs works Just fine.
@@Kris_Lighthawk those are good points. I'll miss giving them 20 prot. (now13?) But those are good buffs you mentioned
Love these mini reviews. I’d love to see one for the the updated Eriu since they changed for Dom 6
Buddy... I wanted to do a big one for Eriu, but I got clapped in multiplayer.
So an Eriu one might take a bit. Their early game is awful, their sacreds are awful, and that new cattle raider is WAY too expensive. Its good, but 19g each is a big ask.
Just the chart at 7:35 showing the sorcery break in paths is incredibly useful.
Thank you! I'll expand on that one some day eventually.
This is the one I've been waiting for!
A little rusty! Hope it doesnt disappoint!
I was lied to there's no Domino's in this video
Now that is a fun game. Too bad the internet plays it differently than my family does...
I copied your Archaon and found I had a spare 10 points to spend which was enough to boost his fire to 2, giving me another bless point.
I chose mountain survival to help the mages move around the map. lol.
I suppose you could also take a point of misfortune to get some more paths elsewhere but I suppose that might undo a bit of the scales build in general. idk
Oof, thats a rookie mistake on my part. Great catch!
Misfortune is fine for most people. I just hate it every time I try it. I know some smarter people did math thats its a net positive due to the extra points...but ugh.
Great Archon chassis has a very nice diplo benefit of being able to Alchemise stuff for other players (and yourself). This can make you invaluable to others, thereby discouraging aggression against you.
I hadn't considered that in dominions 6, i'm hurt by the alchemy change! Do you feel that alchemy in its current state is stronger compared to 5? If so, why?
@@ZanGames Hmm… I guess it’s a less abusable now? Meaning, less common therefore making whoever can do it efficiently a more valuable partner.
Alchemy 100 would get you...700g for 10 fire gems? That's honestly not bad. Can bump it up to 875 for 10? In dom5 numbers those are really good actually. I guess its just you cant do it all in one burst.
The last time I did it I did the diplo thing you mentioned. I lied a little on my conversation rate so that I could skim extra off the top. I cant remember the rate I was doing it at, all I remember was converting about 500ish fire gems for other people and 200 for myself. Ended up with 50-60k gold. Had to give out most of it, but yeahhhh that was fun. A lot of hoops to jump through to set it all up.
Couple questions - firstly, do you think it's viable to make a pretender that straddles between the blood and glamour options? I happen to like glamour magic but also don't want to touch an earth-based faction with no access to blood stones, and it looks like the D3 part only comes in specifically with vampires, if you left those off would it be possible to replace it with G3 to get the best of both worlds? Or is that overstretched a bit.
Secondly, regarding gift of formlessness, you seem to recommend it constantly on all factions, but I'd have thought the minus strength is problematic when applying to weaker units. Bit of a weird question to ask here since gigantes are the usecase I'd more expect for it, but is there a rough heuristic for figuring out when it's a good idea to throw on gift? I assume that for troops that are intended purely to hold the line and nothing else it makes sense, but is protection strong enough such that you still want to put it on even offensive troops that would suffer from the strength decrease (so more human-scale rather than gigantes since they have strength to spare) regardless of how it weakens them? -4 feels like a lot in many cases, so it's mainly the unconditional nature of the recommendation that puzzles me.
Edit: maybe it wasn't included since this was the first one of these done, but it's a bit weird to me that you didn't recommend it to put on Piconye's defenders which seem incredibly well-suited to this (since they aren't expected to kill much especially if you're doing a defender + crosswielder strat) but did on other nations, for example.
For your first question, one thing i like about nations like these is that I dont believe there is a single right answer in pretender design. So one can absolutely pick the paths they are more comfortable with for their diversity! Empowering is always an option later too, if expensive.
Gift of formlessness is very strong, but also very hard to use. The strength malus is not a big a deal since we can both buff strength and add armor piercing to attacks fairly easy. I think on this nation the bigger issue is sparing the mages to cast it. Its possible i am overvaluing it on some of these nations. I know for a fact nidavangr likes it, because they can combine it with mossbody.
I probably would have added / cast it as piconye. Defenders are a perfect target for it. I either skimmed past it in the rush to keep the video short, or it was so new to me in dom6 i didnt know it was a thing yet.
Great questions, thank you so much!
Edit: to expand on glamour magic
Glamour-earth can summon gnomes, which are g2n2e2.
Glamour-nature can summon fay stuff, but *must* be in a forest to do so.
Blood-Glamour I think can summon succubi, which are glamour 2 mages now.
Side question, what are your favorite things to do with glamour magic? I'm running around as Feminie using it and testing things out. I found i preferred group luck over gift of splendor for example. (Having both would be better, but yaknow...)
@@ZanGames Well, I don't think I have that much more experience than you in this area, but the main things not mentioned that I like using are the various blur effects (shadow warriors and friends), project self (kinda like a teleport/return on damage combo in that you can just throw it at far-off provinces, except you're allowed to have the projection properly attempt to take a province since it won't flee, and it's amphibious due to being an illusion), twilight into nightfall for a cheaper and lower-tech version of Darkness,various lategame rituals, and various direct-damage spells. To elaborate on the last two:
I mostly played around with lategame rituals in my Y's run, which frankly didn't need the help (and I get that most spells that are that high-level are probably fairly overtuned) but I was still quite impressed. For specifically Y's (technically any water/glamour nation but they seem most suited) you get lure of the deep, which'll kill a good portion of any enemy units in your dominion on the coast, and in a more general case Eternal Twilight can kill stuff everywhere + damage the economy, and dreams of the awakening god.. well, when I cast it I proceeded to accidentally dom-kill every remaining AI within 10 or so turns without even meaning to. An entertaining way to finish.
And as for direct damage, going by level: while ephemeral bolt is a bit of a poor start (unless the target has 22+ prot it's just worse than the tier-earlier flame bolt, wtf, at least it's only half the fatigue), false fire compares very well with a conventional fireball - it has lower stats for range and more concentrated damage (though better damage in the wider area) but the decreased range and damage is exactly equal to the increment of one path above the level, so for a case like a feminine sorceress, you're looking at the same damage for both, with false fire having half the fatigue due to having its level exceeded + the aforementioned improved wide-aoe damage. Ephemeral blast has a neat niche in being scaling-aoe with non-negative precision available earlier than anything comparable + is armour-negating, you have to go 2 levels of evoc further to evoc 6 to find something comparable/better (astral fires, banefire, etc). Over in Thaum, Visions of Death is almost identical to incinerate, no aoe and MR negates sucks (though not being vulnerable to fire res is nice) but it comes a level earlier, thaum 4 compared to alt 5. Back to evoc at 7, shimmering fields is a lot like flame storm, but once again much earlier, and it starts being more damage above protection 13 which is not unreasonable to reach. I can't speak as to their effectiveness since I've not used glamour/wind mages, but wailing winds sure looks like it would end a fight on its own vs the right faction, I can only assume legion's demise will do so even more thoroughly as the only one-sided battlefield-wide damage spell I've seen.
Oh, and I guess all the aforementioned buffs (awe luck blur) probably stack in horrifying ways once you get battlefield-wide versions, I'm assuming that's the reason why dreamwild legion is level 9, but you're way more experienced than I am so I highly doubt that info is useful lol.
Anyways, need to catch up on your feminie run so I can make sure I'm not just telling you things you already know. My own run as them is incomplete, got frustrated with Pan's overall unit quality and not being able to take a decent fight with them, plus it's possible to research *so hard* with that faction that you can wind up spending way too much money on researchers, which was how my first run went downhill, and I'm still not convinced I went down the right path. Hope at least some of this is useful, I hadn't realised the specific false fires - fireball comparison until typing this and doing the maths, so hopefully I'm saving you a similar process.
Ok final addendum I promise - dragon master is bizarrely late for how cheap/low-path it is, but if you ever want to summon 3 drakes at a time (or more with other sources of dragon master) then you can. When playing Rus-line nations, they have one of the only summonable dragons that actually benefits from dragon master (Zmey, does so despite lacking dragon/drake in the name, but the inspector says it's a dragon and I trust it) so when playing as exactly Vanarus you can take advantage of it via vanabog, otherwise grabbing a glamour/fire pretender seems like the move. But this is getting *quite* far afield from the original topic lol.
I've had a little bit of testing into almost everything you mentioned across my various games, we share the same opinion on a lot of things! So thats great! Dom6 is new enough we are all equally experienced, so dont count yourself out there!
Legions demise may need to be looked at imo, its very strong and there is no false damage regen option to even pretend to counter it. I'll use it one day soon and update everyone. I would go nitpick your post, but honestly everything you said matches up with what I have tested / used in a real game.
One thing to note on project self is that it ONLY exists in the magic phase. Meaning it will only participate in combat alongside other magic phase attacks, OR stealth attacks from the same province. Fun spell.
Also, the Zmey thing. I am currently using that in a game... Its as strong as you think. Especially since Vanarus, for example, can craft the two dragon master items too. So you could potentially get 5 Zmey for 5 Fire gems... Many hoops to jump through. There are technically F / G randoms on their sages...so if you can give them enough boosters to cast dragon master + the items... But maybe I am the one saying too much now hehehe...
Thank you for the very detailed post!
I'm like 95% sure Unaging has no effect on Mekone mages as they have an "old" tag in the code.
Hey there! The Ephor and Geronte are sometimes old age regardless of the unaging bless.
Archon and Basileus, the ones I personally care about the most, are always young! (And Polemarch ofc)
@@ZanGames Interesting. I'll need to do more testing, I guess but yeah - now that I think about it I recall all of the Archons being not old in my Unaging game. Will need to check how it looks like without it.
That being said at least in Dom5 I found myself recruiting a lot of Ephors (and no Gerontes) since they lab monkey we'll enough while still being very useful for crafting and combat if needed.
I actually managed to win a Mekone Dom5 game after crushing an early game sacred rush with them.