I’ve been writing a series of posts about the fun strategies you can use in Dominions 5. I hope my posts inspire someone else to start playing the game, either now or when Dominions 6 launches in January of 2024. Last time was skellyspam, this time it’s physmoss.

To begin with, lets understand what happens when one unit swings their sword at another. They first roll to see if their attack skill beats the enemy’s defense skill. Then if so, they “hit,” and get to roll for damage. Their Strength + Weapon damage is rolled against the enemy’s Protection, and if they roll higher then they deal damage according to how well they rolled.

Already we can see the strategy developing, units with high Protection are difficult to harm. But having lots of Strength, powerful weapons, or just an overwhelming number of attacks can still be used to take them down.

But what is Protection? It’s the sum of your armor value plus whatever “natural protection” the unit may possess, so a being made out of stone will naturally have high “natural protection” even if wearing little, while a squishy human can still get a lot of protection from a suit of plate mail. This is step 1 of “physmoss,” having a very high protection. Mages normally wear robes, but you can craft them a suit of armor. Then they can cast something like “ironskin” on themselves to bump their natural protection into the stratosphere. The sum of that armor plus their ironskin makes for one tough nut to crack.

But some units have high strength, and crits can roll for high damage anyway. Just having a lot of protection isn’t enough. We can get further by having “physical resistance,” which halves the damage taken from all weapons. This is the “phys” of “physmoss,” and spells like “liquid body” or “temper flesh” can both give physical resistance. Then on top of that we add a bit of regeneration, either with a ring of regeneration or with a nature mage casting a spell. That means after accounting for high protection and physical resistance, what little damage the mage does take, they can regenerate at the end of each combat round.

But the pièce de résistance is the “mossbody” spell, the “moss” part of “physmoss.” You see, after all the protection and resistances are subtracted out, mossbody then subtracts a flat 15 from any damage taken. In a game where most units will be lucky to deal 15 damage against unarmored enemies, that’s huge.

So with all this put together, the mage has high protection, physical resistance, mossbody, and regeneration. Their protection is so great that barely anything with every harm them. What little harms them will have its damage halved by physical resistance. And after physical resistance, mossbody will reduce the damage even further. And the tiny slivers of damage still taken are then regenerated by regeneration.

This combination of spells can make a mage absolutely unkillable. You can send them against hundreds of units and they won’t die. They’ll barely kill, but they definitely won’t die. And eventually even a squishy mage with just a mean left hook can KO enough enemies that the rest get the hint and run off, leaving the mage victorious on the field. A single mage with physmoss can defeat an entire army that forgot to pack a mage of their own who can cast protection-bypassing spells. 

And that’s what makes the combination so powerful, it’s not completely invulnerability, but it lets a single mage take on armies, forcing the enemy to bring all their resources together if they want to take the mage down. It’s a hilarious tactic when it works and is really fun to boot. So try it yourself if you ever give Dominions a go.