This post named in honor of one of the pretenders from a hilarious Disciples game I watched ages ago. I’m continuing my series of posts about the fun strategies you can use in Dominions 5. I still 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 physmoss, this time it’s Thunder Strike.

“Evocation” is the general magic-y word for “big spells that do damage.” Fireballs, shockwaves, if it directly hits someone, it’s usually evocation. I think the separating of magic spells like this first came from D&D, but the tradition has carried on in Dominions.

In Dominions though, not all Evocation is created equal.  Some spells really aren’t worth it, and casting “retail evocation” aka low level tiny spells is a sign that times are desperate and you don’t have the mage firepower for Big Boy spells. But one of those Big Boy spells, indeed a spell so powerful it people might build their pretender specifically to counter it, is Thunder Strike.

Let’s start with the good: Thunder Strike deals a boatload of armor negating shock damage to a square, and then a smaller amount of shock damage to all the squares around it. That means any units sitting where the Thunder Strike hits get instantly deleted, no matter how good their armor, while surrounding units can still be stunned by the small shockwave that surrounds the big strike. So this spell not only deals with ultra-powerful enemy units (like the physmoss mage from last post), but also ties down large enemy armies by shocking their units and stunning them for a turn or two. It may not seem like a lot, but stunning some troops can break apart their formation and allow your own army to defeat them in detail.

The only counter to Thunder Strike is Shock Resistance, which is a very hard resistance to get. This is why some nations will specifically build their pretender around defeating Thunder Strike: if the pretender has high level Air or Earth magic, they can bless their sacred troops with Shock Resistance. That will help immensely against the large stunning shockwave, but still may not be enough to save units from the big Thunder Strike at the center.

But now here’s the bad news: Thunder Strike requires a mage to be Air 3. Remember that Hordes of Skeletons from before required just Death 2, higher levels of magic are much less common than lower levels. Mages with magic of Level 1 are everywhere. Level 2 is usually doable. Level 3 and above is exceptionally rare. So while it’s easy for your enemies to amass the Death 2 mages needed for skellyspam, it’s hard to find the Air 3 mages needed for a Thunder Strike counter.

But there is one hope for an aspiring Thunder Striker: and it’s called Storm Power.

Storm Power is an Air 2 spell that adds +1 to a mage’s Air Magic. In essence, it turns an Air 2 mage into an Air 3. BUT it can only be cast when a storm is already raging.  And creating a storm on the battlefield requires… Air 3 yet again. So Air 2 mages alone can’t make this work, but everything can come together if they can get just a single Air 3 mage.

The trick is that the Air 3 mage will cast Summon Storm, then the Air 2 mages all cast Storm Power. And now that everyone is an Air 3 mage, they can start blasting out Thunder Strikes like there’s no tomorrow. This is a huge ability, and Thunder Strike plus Storm Power is a key tech level for most air nations in the game like Vanheim and Caelum. 

The best part is that summoning a Storm will also power up Air Elementals, who Air 3 mages can also summon. Air Elementals can fly directly into the enemy’s lines, barely take damage because they’re Ethereal, AND ignore shock damage. So you can also summon a few of them during the storm and let them tear apart the enemy army while you’re dropping Thunder Strikes on their heads. It’s a brutal strategy.

This is why Air 3 is such a key breakpoint for mage power. Air 2 is OK, but Air 3 is key. The ability to summon storms and turn everyone into a Thunder Striker overturns a lot of strategies and forces your enemies to come up with effective counters to deal with you. 

One fun nation I love is Ur: The First City. Ur gets Gudus as a mainstay mage, and 1/2 of Gudus are Air 2. Unfortunately, Ur can’t natively recruit any Air 3 mages, so it seems they’re out of contention for Thunder Striking. But they can use a national spell to summon an Ugalla, which is an Air 3 mage in its own right. So by summoning an Ugalla, Ur can turn itself into a Thunder Striking powerhouse on par with any other.

And Thunder Strikes have a huge range as well. They can hit well into the back-line and destroy an enemy’s mage corps. So if the enemy sets up skellyspam, Thunder Strike can be a legitimate counter, as you delete their mages to slow the tide of skeletons.

So that’s yet another tactic I really enjoy. It’s stereotypically done by the “Elven” nations (Vanheim, Helheim those sort) but I’ve also made it work with my favorite nation, Ur. Feel free to try it yourself when Dominions 6 comes out.

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.

I recently wrote a post about how I’m always thinking about Dominions 5 but I’m never playing it. In writing about why I like it, I realize that a lot of it comes down to the sheer number of cool strategies to employ. But it’s hard to get across the huge depth of strategy in a single post, so why not do so in multiple posts? In the next few posts, I’ll give you a taste of all the cool and awesome things you can do in Dominions, and if you think it’s interesting you can do some of them yourself when Dominions 6 comes out in January.

In Dominions, armies clash in great battles. The army with better weapons, better discipline, or better strength may win, unless the other army has bigger numbers on their side. And what’s a bigger number than infinity? That’s the idea behind skelly-spam, have your mages raise an infinite horde of undead to fight for you, overwhelming the enemy in sheer volume until even the strongest soldiers are ground down by weight of numbers.

There’s a lot of ways to do skelly-spam though, it isn’t just a button you can press to win. The mainstay skelly-spam spell is “Horde of Skeletons” which can be cast by a Death 2 mage after you’ve researched Enchantment Level 5. So to use skelly-spam, you need a nation with lots of access to Death 2 mages, Death 1 won’t cut it. Death 3 is also good, because higher level mages cast the spell using less fatigue. If mages are casting constantly, they’ll reach 100 fatigue and fall unconscious, no longer casting until their fatigue returns to 99 or below. But a Death 3 mage can cast a lot more “Horde of Skeletons” spells than a Death 2 before reaching that point.

So to TRULY overwhelm the enemy in skeletons, you need lots of high level death mages to cast it non stop. Some nations can easily recruit lots of death mages, but others may have trouble. Fortunately, there’s a second option.

Nations with ok death access but lots of astral or blood can also use communions to level-up their skelly-spam. When mages form a communion, the Communion Masters cast spells more easily and transfer the fatigue to the Communion Slaves. Those slaves don’t cast anything, but do regenerate fatigue. However, if their fatigue goes above 200, they start taking damage and quickly die. So in a communion, the masters can keep spamming out skeletons so long as the slaves stay below 200 fatigue. This lets death mages unleash even MORE skeletons than they otherwise could.

But it doesn’t stop there, because you can level up your communions into “turbo communions.” When a slave’s fatigue is above 200, they take damage, but what if they could regenerate that damage? Then the masters could keep casting for even more skeletons as long as the damage to the slaves is less than their regeneration. 

Jotunheim is the poster-child for turbo communions. They have “Skrattir” (plural of Skratti) who naturally regenerate 1/10 of their massive HP each turn. They can then have their Gygjas be the communions masters, while the Skrattir are communion slaves. Not only that, one of the Gygjas can cast “personal regeneration” on themselves, and that benefit will transfer to the slaves as well. Now the Skrattir regenerate 2/10 of their HP per turn. Now the Gygjas can cast “Horde of Skeletons” until the end of time, safe in the knowledge that the Skrattir can tank the damage.

The battlefield effects of this are awesome. Most mages will use their power to buff up (increase the power of) their own troops, then quickly fall unconscious after a few spells. The Gygjas are meanwhile raising an army of the undead. Then, the two armies will meet each other, Jotunheim with an army of the living plus the dead, and the enemy with their army of the living. Jotunheim may be ground down by the enemy’s superior power, but the Gygjas will still be raising the undead. For every Jotunheim soldier that falls, 2 more skeletons will take its place. Eventually, the enemy army will be overwhelmed with numbers and will run away, chased off the field by a tidalwave of skeletons.

So I hope I’ve impressed upon you one of the fun and awesome things you can do in dominions. Skellyspam may seem simple, but it’s a fine art of combat and deathly effective when used well.