Dominions 5: Disciples Games - the hidden and obscure

 Hi folks,

Today I was typing out my workflow for running and playing Disciples team games in Dominions.  The documentation of this type of game is weak in the manual and there are some game details and organization tricks I use to make it work better.  The three paragraphs in the manual are just not enough.

Organization

The first step will be to advertise a game.   To make good advertising and find players, I choose the game size with any ideas of themes, map, or mods you'd like to use in the advertisement.  Be detailed and describe skill level, commitment, any particular rules like banning water nations or death dominion.

I have tried a few different game sizes to make for fun games that don't take years to finish.  From my experience I now prefer 12 or 16 players in 4 teams.   I tried 4 teams of 5 and managing the team communication is more difficult.  One of the features of disciples games is sharing your resources.  This means that research, forging, and global spells are easier especially if you take nations that synergize and diversify you team.  The time playing the game is small compared to the time spent talking with your team, sharing stuff, and talking with other teams for diplomacy.  If you regularly play free for all multiplayer games be prepared for a lot more time spent talking.

I've used different methods to find teams.   You can request only complete teams sign up or take individual players and help them find a team.  The team will be playing together for some months most likely so it's good to socialize and meet the players before choosing teams.  I also recommend as the host that you talk to each player and discuss commitment, turning a nation AI, policy on substitutes or stale turns.  Some players may not understand the additional effort required.

To choose nations, any of the normal methods work but I prefer using a draft selection.  Some combinations of nations in a 3 or 4 player team are overwhelmingly powerful.  Draft provides a opportunity for other teams to counter a team plan and I really enjoy the challenge of working with nations that may not quite fit together in an obvious way.  One of my current team games I am Kailasa as the pretender with Ulm and Helheim.  We negotiated a bless amongst the three of us and the bless was a great challenge for my expansion.  But it is becoming a great bless for thugs.

Pretender and Disciples

My prior guide on pretender design is applicable here but there are some unique things with disciples games.  The first is understanding which chassis are available.  The pretender can only use the dominion 3 and 4 gods so the immobiles and the titans.  Disciples can only be the dominion 1 and 2 gods so monsters and rainbows.

The second key thing is god awakening.  Your choice of awake, dormant or imprisoned works as normal for the pretender.  But it's effect on the disciples is not as clear.  The manual says the disciples wake in half the time of the pretender but there is a small random element.  If awake then they are all available turn 1.  Dormant results in disciples arriving around turn 7 but maybe 6 or 8.  I've not seen them arrive later.  Imprisoned I have not used in disciples because having them arrive around turn 18 is very late and I don't consider worth the design points.  I use dormant a lot because it is not very likely that someone's awake monster is going to be rushing you before turn 7.  Of course, your bless choice is important here.  

The third concept is the use of temperature scale.  I almost always choose on nation on the team of the opposite temperature preference from the others.  That was the motivation to choose Kailasa above.  With heat 2 preference we set our pretender to cold 1 scale giving 120 design points and excellent temperature for my team mates. My other recent team game was late age Atlantis, Ulm, and Utgard.  Ulm was pretender taking cold 3.

If you are familiar with popular ideas of pretender archtypes you can see that only a few can be done in disciples.  You have no monsters or rainbows for the pretender which eliminates some bless choices such as the all rainbow minor bless.

For disciple design, I've found a few very effective.  A monster expander with self buffing magic and perhaps some additional diversity is great.  You have 300 points to buy magic since you are not buying scales.  Another handy design is a rainbow with lots of research boost and the paths to forge most anything in the game.   It also can help site search early.  However, keep in mind that your team territory is 3 or 4 times bigger than usual.  Mobility on a disciple is very important.  I have also had excellent success with a ghost king half rainbow expander dormant.  You can forge a couple trinkets for turn 6 and off he goes.

Disciple Game Oddities

There are a number of undocumented features of disciples games that are not apparent.  I'm going to do a list with short explanation.

We are developing a couple rules of thumb on these issues.  If an effect is tied to the dominion of a nation it propogates to the disciples from the pretender.  If it is tied to something like that nations forts it does not.  This is only a rule of thumb.

1. Your commanders and armies can freely move in ally lands.  They can coexist with ally armies but may starve since you are sharing the supplies.  They do not fight together.  If there is a fight with an enemy and two or more allied armies it appears that the largest ally army fights first.  Then the smaller if the enemy survives.
2. You can search each other's provinces.  This is an excellent feature.
3. You can see each other's armies.
4. You do not get battle reports or messages from your ally's scouts.  It's worthwhile to double up on scouts for important locations.  Or perhaps scry.
5. You can claim thrones in your ally's provinces.  You do not have prophets so claiming can be a challenge especially if the pretender is immobile.  Disciples count for claiming.  It makes holy 3 priests quite valuable but there is the option of summoning bishop fish and giving them gear to breathe air.
6. You can cast instant fort spells on an ally province and they get the new fort.  This is an excellent way to lock down a throne.
7. Only the dominion of the pretender takes effect.  So you can use death nations as disciples without dying dominion.  This is a strange result and I've not seen it used effectively.
8. And more oddities just tested, if you take a freespawn nation as pretender such as Lemuria (P), R'lyeh (d), and Man (d) all three nations get Lemuria freespawn and their population dies.
9. A new oddity was just confirmed by me (Dec 12, 2020).  Mictlan with dying dominion (must sacrifice can not preach) does not affect disciples if it is pretender since it is a national link not a dominion effect.
10. I have a report from a reputable source that national benefits such as Arco's scrying and Na'Ba's hidden provinces also work for disciples if they are the pretender.  This is especially interesting as the Mictlan issue does NOT propogate to disciples.  Who knows why?
11. Phlegra's unrest propogates to disciples (appears to be connected to dominion).  Mekone's unrest does not.  (Appears to be connected to forts).

If you know of more please comment and I'll update.

Team Organization

I have found that the most effective way to communicate as a team is to form a group private chat on discord.  You can do that by starting a direct message with one player and inviting the rest from your friend list.  You can also turn that group into a voice or video call on demand.

Those group chats have pinned messages available.  So I pin a few things right away and some as the game goes on.

• A snip of the pretender and each disciple.
  
  
  
• A list of the team members with nation and password.
• A list of all the teams.
• A pin for each diplomatic agreement between teams.
• A pin for each bless you see from opponents.
  
  
  

We have often added an extra team member as a designated sub and invited them to the group chat.  If you are playing direct connect they can download any other team mate's turn and view or play it if needed.

For diplomacy I use a fairly simple method to avoid confusion.  For major agreements one player (the captain or a spokesperson) does the negotiation with the designate of the other team.  For borders or local coordination with an allied team, it is better for the players to talk directly to their neighbours.  Usually you have to work with time zones in large games.

Playing the Game

Due to the possibility to play each other's turns, I find that direct connect is a better option for disciples games.  It is slow and awkward to change emails for a teammate on llamaserver.

There are some important issues related to playing more than one nation on your team.  It can cause a cheat error and I have caused that once.  

The short answer is to avoid the cd key error, let the game manage your turn and orders files (*.trn and *.1h).  Simply log in as the first nation, play the turn, log out.  Repeat for the second nation.  Don't remove or copy any files in the game folder.  Copying the entire folder to an archive directory is safe.

To avoid that issue I use a particular workflow for disciples games.  I also manually manage folders for each turn so that I can review old turns and to allow recording for youtube.  That may not be of interest to you and it's fiddly but only takes a couple minutes a day.  Here is an example of one of my folder structures for a team game that is finished.

The folder LardTunderingJesus is the folder created by the game when you first log on to the server.  That is the primary folder where you play the game.  The other folders I manually created. Note the spaces in the archive folder which holds the older turns.  Dominions can not read spaces in folder names so that reduces clutter in the "Continue Old Game" screen.

Here is the contents of the main folder: 

You can see that it contains one *.trn file but two *.2h files.  When you log onto the server you choose the nation and enter the password.  It downloads the new turn file and deletes any other turn files.  So, in this case I logged on once as machaka, looked at the turn, and closed it.  I then logged on as R'lyeh and it deleted the *.trn file.  If the game sees two or more *.trn files it generates a cheat report and forces a stale.  Don't ever copy turn files back into the primary folder.  Only copy OUT of this folder.

You do not need the map in each folder.  Copy the map to the maps folder.  The game will download it again each time you log on if you delete it so leave it in the primary folder.  The maps are large and your folders will be bulky if you have the map in each subfolder.

You can now open prior turns and it will not affect the current turn.  I run Dominions from the root directory and not from Steam so that I can have multiple instances loaded to compare turns or for doing recording.  It's a handy thing to do but requires manual updated each patch.

There may be more oddities of disciples games so I welcome feedback preferably here.  You can chat with me on Discord or Steam too but it's nice to have the feedback in one place.  Cheers my friends!