As a rule of thumb, Illwinter's rounding has been "round to the closest, but up if exactly .5" for rolls (incl combat), and "round down" for things like unit stats, spells etc.
I tried a +5 precision farshot bless for EA Kailasa and it was just awful. My archers barely hit anything. I was really hoping elite archers would be a viable strategy in Dom6 but it doesn't look like it was. I did find the sticks and stones attack for the ape infantry to be surprisingly effective. Which goes to show when it comes to range its quantity over quality.
Yeah, Farshot is just a universally bad bless that makes sacreds worse rather than better. I'd say quality does matter, it's more on a case-by-case basis. Sticks and Stones is just a standout for ridiculous quantity at very low price.
This was my experience playing Kailasa in 5 as well, a Bandar Warrior using sticks and stones is throwing the equivalent of two human-thrown javelins per round with 30 ammunition, they have an alarmingly high and sustained damage output. They always have at least one square of potential deviation though, so they can do a lot of friendly fire, but that's why you have a front line of markatas I guess. I found high-Precision Yavana archers function a lot better at relatively short range. The formula for arrows is that they will hit targeted squares accurately within Prec/2 - 2 range and Precision over 10 counts double, so that's 5 squares with zero deviation for non-boosted Yavana Archers or 10 with a +5 Precision bless, they'll generally machine-gun down everything that gets within that range. So putting your archers directly behind the front on Fire Closest will avoid friendly fire and shooting into empty squares, and you can keep your units close together by putting your commanders with bodyguards in front on 5x hold position. There's the roll to hit the square but then there's another roll to actually hit a unit in the square. You get a bonus to hit the more densely packed a targeted square is, so you want to be shooting at the front where enemies stack up, and targets get a penalty to their dodge roll for fatigue, so get your monkey communions spamming Stellar Cascades. And make sure you take the magic weapons bless, it's a further +2 to hit. Unfatigued lone units with shields will dodge most non-magical arrows even if they hit their square, and your precision doesn't affect this roll at all, so even with highly skilled archers you still need to make sure they're not wasting all their arrows on bad targets. They only get 12 arrows apiece per battle and Yavana Archers cost about 3x what a typical unit costs, so they need to kill at least 3 targets to come out even, they need to be doing damage with most of their shots. If you have your archers using farshot to try to hit stuff 60+ tiles away, they will still deviate by 2-3 tiles, and if you're trying to hit mages standing far apart and alone in their squares, the vast majority of arrows will still hit dirt, it's not really practical no matter how much you boost your archers. Farshot is specifically good for outranging and killing other archers. Like I think in theory the main circumstance when farshot+high precision is useful is when the opponent has hundreds of shortbow archers packed shoulder to shoulder in their backline, like if Machaka is doing Flaming Arrows pygmies or something. Then they will need to move forward to get into range and they'll be deviating by ~5 tiles and probably missing your formation entirely with most shots while you'll be deviating by much less and likely killing something with every shot. Also, if you can mass sacred commanders with Trueshot Longbows, those in particular might benefit from the extra range. Changing longbows from 1/3 strength to 1/2 strength is a big buff for Kailasa's archery, Yavana or Bandar archers with a strength buff will just punch straight through typical EA armor now. They got a bunch of new summons, too, they look a lot stronger in 6.
@@xeroprotagonist Now that you mention it, I put my yavana archers in the back because I thought it would be the best way to take advantage of the farshot bless, where I thought they would be safe and have more time to shoot at enemies as they approach. That's maybe why they were missing so much. I'll try a new game with the archers up front.
I can imagine a Farshot bless being useable for EA Agartha with a Rock Hurler Ancient build, since they are already super short range (8, I think). Not sure if it would be good otherwise for Agartha lol.
Crossbows didn't get quite the debuff you think. Dom6 apparently changed how piercing and armor piercing stack so that now the combination is better against armor than it was in Dom5. Thus now normal bows have more base damage, but crossbows penetrate armor better than before. That makes them better against different targets. Also, with larger battlefields range might be more important than before which can be a slight negative for shortbows.
Very good analysis. During my games I've felt moving spells to tier 7 or 8 is a huge nerf in the amount of rp required to access the spell. I'm playing EA RUS thunder priest spam with the perma storm evocation and it'll take me 4000rp to get from evo7 to evo8 to access chain lightning and bring out their full potential.
Great video! I loved playing with Na'Ba against Indies. Two squads of 10 camels on each edge of the map, set to fire and keep distance, and no reasonable amount of indies could kill them.
One thing I haven't tested, but the description says that flaming arrows doesn't affect magic weapons, and that the flaming Arrows part of the hit still affects ethereal units. So it could be very effective vs ghosts.
I tested archers quite a bit in Dom 5, and unless you can't protect them, you want them up front. You then need to script to try to get lines to meet near them. Wind guide would make them pretty accurate then, and they'd miss less even w/o it. Also forces opponents to back-align mages if they don't want to lose some to rando targeting. However, eventually storm + arrow fend would ruin it. I guess you can counter storm now, but still probably needs to gem bait away arrow fend to get lots of value. They're pretty nice vs high def units. I was also surprised when testing composite bows in late age; stuff with 18 or less prot took non trivial damage w/o a shield. With a shield on target the archers do much less. I had initial success with fire and distance, but using it more I'm discovering it's still unreliable, which is crummy. Faster archers than enemy should be able to back away in time or disengage, even on foot, but sometimes they don't even try. This makes some cheeky expansion plays where you divide a clump of melee troops for 3-5 archers too unreliable to rely on (at least until someone figures out a way to make it consistent).
I like the more gradual aspect of flaming arrow spells. I'm playing a LA Man game (my first game with Dom6) and it really makes the flaming arrow strategy even more viable (at least against AIs). The fact that it's fire 3 instead of 4 allows you to cast it with a communion of 2 to 4 slaves, which is not a big deal.
Or with no communion if you first take a fire 1 mage. Use a gem to cast Phoenix power and then use two gems to cast Fire arrows. So this spell is now available to every fire mage in the game.
It will be extremely rare for the lowered armour negation of piercing to mean more than one extra net protection. Bows seem to be all doing at least +2 damage for human strength archers. Looks like it is an effective damage boost against anything short of blacksteel plate.
At 16 protection, -20% under Dom 5 rules rounds down to 12, while -15% under Dom 6 rules rounds up to 14, negating completely the benefit from half scaling (for 10 strength human stereotype archer). Assuming my math and the rounding rules is correct. In any way the point is that the half strength scaling buff is not as big as it first might appear (Edited because I originally wrote 17 prot but it also is true for even lower 16 prot)
The flaming arrows might be more accessible but maybe the poison arrows keep doing poison damage for more than one round? I thought once a unit was poisoned it would take damage every round even if never hit again? Or is that not true for the new arrow spells? If poison keeps adding damage this could be a very good spell.
Poison deals 10% of its built-up value in damage every round. So if a unit gets 10 poison damage, they will receive 1 a round initially (the poison value also goes down with the number used). Also, poison debuffs attack and defence depending on how much compared to hitpoints. If poison is equal to max hp it debuffs by 25%, if it's double it debuffs by 50% (and that's the max). So if poison is 50% of max hp it debuffs by 12.5% etc...
the first level flaming arrows will be a pain in the arse to combat because desperate defenders will always use it in conter-raids and it doesn't take gems...
As a rule of thumb, Illwinter's rounding has been "round to the closest, but up if exactly .5" for rolls (incl combat), and "round down" for things like unit stats, spells etc.
I tried a +5 precision farshot bless for EA Kailasa and it was just awful. My archers barely hit anything. I was really hoping elite archers would be a viable strategy in Dom6 but it doesn't look like it was.
I did find the sticks and stones attack for the ape infantry to be surprisingly effective. Which goes to show when it comes to range its quantity over quality.
Yeah, Farshot is just a universally bad bless that makes sacreds worse rather than better.
I'd say quality does matter, it's more on a case-by-case basis. Sticks and Stones is just a standout for ridiculous quantity at very low price.
This was my experience playing Kailasa in 5 as well, a Bandar Warrior using sticks and stones is throwing the equivalent of two human-thrown javelins per round with 30 ammunition, they have an alarmingly high and sustained damage output. They always have at least one square of potential deviation though, so they can do a lot of friendly fire, but that's why you have a front line of markatas I guess.
I found high-Precision Yavana archers function a lot better at relatively short range. The formula for arrows is that they will hit targeted squares accurately within Prec/2 - 2 range and Precision over 10 counts double, so that's 5 squares with zero deviation for non-boosted Yavana Archers or 10 with a +5 Precision bless, they'll generally machine-gun down everything that gets within that range. So putting your archers directly behind the front on Fire Closest will avoid friendly fire and shooting into empty squares, and you can keep your units close together by putting your commanders with bodyguards in front on 5x hold position.
There's the roll to hit the square but then there's another roll to actually hit a unit in the square. You get a bonus to hit the more densely packed a targeted square is, so you want to be shooting at the front where enemies stack up, and targets get a penalty to their dodge roll for fatigue, so get your monkey communions spamming Stellar Cascades. And make sure you take the magic weapons bless, it's a further +2 to hit. Unfatigued lone units with shields will dodge most non-magical arrows even if they hit their square, and your precision doesn't affect this roll at all, so even with highly skilled archers you still need to make sure they're not wasting all their arrows on bad targets. They only get 12 arrows apiece per battle and Yavana Archers cost about 3x what a typical unit costs, so they need to kill at least 3 targets to come out even, they need to be doing damage with most of their shots.
If you have your archers using farshot to try to hit stuff 60+ tiles away, they will still deviate by 2-3 tiles, and if you're trying to hit mages standing far apart and alone in their squares, the vast majority of arrows will still hit dirt, it's not really practical no matter how much you boost your archers. Farshot is specifically good for outranging and killing other archers. Like I think in theory the main circumstance when farshot+high precision is useful is when the opponent has hundreds of shortbow archers packed shoulder to shoulder in their backline, like if Machaka is doing Flaming Arrows pygmies or something. Then they will need to move forward to get into range and they'll be deviating by ~5 tiles and probably missing your formation entirely with most shots while you'll be deviating by much less and likely killing something with every shot. Also, if you can mass sacred commanders with Trueshot Longbows, those in particular might benefit from the extra range.
Changing longbows from 1/3 strength to 1/2 strength is a big buff for Kailasa's archery, Yavana or Bandar archers with a strength buff will just punch straight through typical EA armor now. They got a bunch of new summons, too, they look a lot stronger in 6.
@@xeroprotagonist Now that you mention it, I put my yavana archers in the back because I thought it would be the best way to take advantage of the farshot bless, where I thought they would be safe and have more time to shoot at enemies as they approach. That's maybe why they were missing so much. I'll try a new game with the archers up front.
@@xeroprotagonist Yes, you're correct, shooting from very short range really does increase their accuracy. High precision builds are viable after all.
I can imagine a Farshot bless being useable for EA Agartha with a Rock Hurler Ancient build, since they are already super short range (8, I think). Not sure if it would be good otherwise for Agartha lol.
Why your guide is so good and I didn't know about your existence
Crossbows didn't get quite the debuff you think. Dom6 apparently changed how piercing and armor piercing stack so that now the combination is better against armor than it was in Dom5. Thus now normal bows have more base damage, but crossbows penetrate armor better than before. That makes them better against different targets.
Also, with larger battlefields range might be more important than before which can be a slight negative for shortbows.
Very informative video. I had missed the changes to poison in dominions 6.
Very good analysis. During my games I've felt moving spells to tier 7 or 8 is a huge nerf in the amount of rp required to access the spell. I'm playing EA RUS thunder priest spam with the perma storm evocation and it'll take me 4000rp to get from evo7 to evo8 to access chain lightning and bring out their full potential.
Great video! I loved playing with Na'Ba against Indies. Two squads of 10 camels on each edge of the map, set to fire and keep distance, and no reasonable amount of indies could kill them.
Very interesting. Thanks!
One thing I haven't tested, but the description says that flaming arrows doesn't affect magic weapons, and that the flaming Arrows part of the hit still affects ethereal units. So it could be very effective vs ghosts.
I tested archers quite a bit in Dom 5, and unless you can't protect them, you want them up front. You then need to script to try to get lines to meet near them. Wind guide would make them pretty accurate then, and they'd miss less even w/o it. Also forces opponents to back-align mages if they don't want to lose some to rando targeting. However, eventually storm + arrow fend would ruin it. I guess you can counter storm now, but still probably needs to gem bait away arrow fend to get lots of value.
They're pretty nice vs high def units. I was also surprised when testing composite bows in late age; stuff with 18 or less prot took non trivial damage w/o a shield. With a shield on target the archers do much less.
I had initial success with fire and distance, but using it more I'm discovering it's still unreliable, which is crummy. Faster archers than enemy should be able to back away in time or disengage, even on foot, but sometimes they don't even try. This makes some cheeky expansion plays where you divide a clump of melee troops for 3-5 archers too unreliable to rely on (at least until someone figures out a way to make it consistent).
Find it odd that the mobile archer is mounted only, would have made sense for some more agile or magical ground troops too.
I like the more gradual aspect of flaming arrow spells. I'm playing a LA Man game (my first game with Dom6) and it really makes the flaming arrow strategy even more viable (at least against AIs). The fact that it's fire 3 instead of 4 allows you to cast it with a communion of 2 to 4 slaves, which is not a big deal.
Or with no communion if you first take a fire 1 mage. Use a gem to cast Phoenix power and then use two gems to cast Fire arrows. So this spell is now available to every fire mage in the game.
It will be extremely rare for the lowered armour negation of piercing to mean more than one extra net protection. Bows seem to be all doing at least +2 damage for human strength archers. Looks like it is an effective damage boost against anything short of blacksteel plate.
At 16 protection, -20% under Dom 5 rules rounds down to 12, while -15% under Dom 6 rules rounds up to 14, negating completely the benefit from half scaling (for 10 strength human stereotype archer). Assuming my math and the rounding rules is correct.
In any way the point is that the half strength scaling buff is not as big as it first might appear
(Edited because I originally wrote 17 prot but it also is true for even lower 16 prot)
@@Milorada7375 Pre-LA 16 prot is actually pretty heavy lol. Even in LA, it's still a bit heavy.
The flaming arrows might be more accessible but maybe the poison arrows keep doing poison damage for more than one round? I thought once a unit was poisoned it would take damage every round even if never hit again? Or is that not true for the new arrow spells? If poison keeps adding damage this could be a very good spell.
Poison deals 10% of its built-up value in damage every round. So if a unit gets 10 poison damage, they will receive 1 a round initially (the poison value also goes down with the number used). Also, poison debuffs attack and defence depending on how much compared to hitpoints. If poison is equal to max hp it debuffs by 25%, if it's double it debuffs by 50% (and that's the max). So if poison is 50% of max hp it debuffs by 12.5% etc...
Need a Bloody Unerring Bless that makes arrows Ap and Almost never miss.
the first level flaming arrows will be a pain in the arse to combat because desperate defenders will always use it in conter-raids and it doesn't take gems...
You should stop screaming into the microphone.
Ok karen