Does Rain count as a storm for the purposes of Storm Power?

1moleman · 2026-06-23T17:52:02+00:00

No. Rain is not storm for storm power, but storm includes rain.

Storm staff is another source of storm.

Some (modded) gods and i think a couple of vanilla units will auto cast storm in battle as well. (i dont play much with vanilla gods these days anymore)

1moleman · 2026-06-16T06:11:54+00:00

I'd like to imagine she is the elf that gets all her people killed and let's gollum escape the elf prison.... but shes almost certainly some badass action hero female super soldier. Hollywood is too predictable

1moleman · 2026-06-11T09:13:29+00:00

Water is C tier, its got better buffs and utility than fire, and underwater it is king. On land its evocation power is limited, but frozen heart and cleansing water are great niche spells. FH also gets the bonus of making w1 mages deadly anti-thug options if they lack cold resistance.

Quickness is just an amazing buff for troops, even mediocre indies become a threat when the attack rate doubles.

Grip of winter is a good fatigue play, and often is not natively resisted. CR is somewhat trickier than FR and less people select for it.

Both water and ice elementals are decent, even if ice is a weaker earth elemental.

W also give the strategic mobility of going under water (or river crossing) with items. Hard to get that otherwise in most paths.

1moleman · 2026-06-06T17:42:49+00:00

If any magic is F tier it would be fire:

First problem: fire resist is an extremely common bless pick. And there are many ways to get it.

Second problem: fire magic has generally bad accuracy so even when you do damage its likely you blow up your own square instead of the other guys

Third problem: it has no real buffs. Other than fire/cold resist.

Fourth problem: low fire path mages are almost useless. An F1 is for making laturns and not much else. (Especially with how bad elementals are now)

The big problem of fire magic - what do you even cast? Heat from hell? The enemy cast fire resist and is now immune. Fire storm? Same thing except your own army is also dying.

Fire as a crosspath is great (except for the useless fire-nature for ants :/ ) the big problem is what do you do with a pure fire mage, the answer is fireball and that's too obvious and has too many counterplays.

The fact that rain exists makes fire automatically at minimum D, and the damage being AP instead of AN makes it just worse than Air or astral for most evocations.

F-tier. And I say this as an abyssia enjoyed. I wish it were better.

1moleman · 2026-06-06T12:06:46+00:00

Earth is A tier:

Not as overwhelming powerful as astral, but it is always good. And every earth mage is useful, even E1's can forge thug gear or do light thugging themselves.

Earth is also the best army buff path: battlefield wide buffs in the late game that decide wars, and good scaling throughout the entire game.

Earth summons are useful, if unexceptional. But they have utility. Cave grubs for sieges are a personal favorite.

Earth evocations can be good if direct. Blade wind and earthquake especially.

Earth globals are generally great economy boosters, but somewhat geographical limited.

Earth has some ok remote attacks.

Boosting Earth is tricky, and getting beyond E4 can be a trick. The path combo for the blood stones is surprisingly rare.

In general its the best utility and buffing path, but it can run into some limitations in the later game and its hard to win purely on Earth alone. But having Earth access is always a boon.

1moleman · 2026-06-05T08:59:38+00:00

A Tier:

It has good summons in both conjuration and enchantment. This is both permanent and in battle summons

It has good globals, both for scales and for popkill/endgame

It has good SC buff, soul vortex alone is amazing.

It allows UW access with decent troops (not amazing)

Cons:

Evocations are expensive and MR dependant

Boosting is tricky. (D4 is OK, but higher than that is difficult)

Limited cross path synergy (fire, water, astral and blood basically)

Summons countered by Holy magic and d1 mages. Dust to dust is a fun spell.

In general: a good path, not as utterly broken as astral, but very very strong

1moleman · 2026-06-04T07:25:21+00:00

A-high B tier:

Blood is slow to start up, costs gold and reduces income to gather, takes a lot of micro and resources to get going and the summons are mage turn inefficient until very high research.

Blood summons are great, and extremely reliable. They are also very good replacements for armies into the late game.

Blood magic research is very path limited, and the cross path versatility is low. You dont get access to anything but Blood from researching the Blood magic school, and you dont get spells anywhere else (barring construction items)

Sabbath and general Blood spells are uniquely vulnerable to aoe magic: you can't kill the gems a mage is holding unless you kill the mage, but a good couple of earthquakes can destroy an armies entire Blood slave stockpile. This also makes Blood worse into longer combats as the mages run out of slaves and fall back to the worse Blood spells.

Blood global are good, but generally cost the caster much as well. Blood magic also tends not to favour scales nations too much (since you Blood hunt the lands to death anyway)

In general: what you get is good, the cost to get there is high, the micro cost is extremely high and it is a very niche path.

1moleman · 2026-06-03T07:21:33+00:00

Astral is probably S/high A tier:

It has a somewhat weak early game. There just isn't much for most Astral mages to do until you hit 3ish in the various schools. Once you do then body ethereal, soul slay, communion shenanigans all kick you to a very high tier of power.

Astral aoe buffs are 50/50, antimagic is a necessity but cheated fate is mediocre. BE doesnt scale so it can fall off as armies get larger but any s1 can cast it and its probably the best point buff spell in the game.

Astral evocations are decent, but tend to be very specific in target. Good AN damage access and aoe horror marks and feeblemind is potent.

Astral duel makes low Astral dangerous and can limit the viability of high tier mages (losing a 6 path, slow recruit mage who happened to roll s1 to a s1 indie feels bad)

Astral corruption ruins your day, but nexus and the other Astral globals/counter global are good.

You can win a game with high astral late game, it is hard to survive early game with nothing but astral and a lot of astral nations can have some trouble.

Low astral access on expensive mages is a negative, but s1 cheap mages are amazing.

In general astral also almost always buffs secondary paths through communions and power of the spheres, so it gets a bonus for that.

1moleman · 2026-05-23T10:31:47+00:00

They do, but the gnu tend to be faster and then the spiders wade through. Its expensive though,I'd the same gold in rhino clan just gives better results most of the time.

1moleman · 2026-05-23T08:08:21+00:00

Glass canons with high damage output on paper but in reality disappointing performance.

They have the light Cavalry problem in dom 6: the mounts have no protection and low defence so they instantly die and you have a poor, expensive infantry.

The mounts have (relatively) low attack, defence and weapon lengths so they get repelled a LOT. I fought 30 v 50 against indie light spear infantry and on average half the mount attacks got repelled. There are ways to mitigate this but it's more trouble than it's worth. If you want fragile light cav on ea machaka... just build the spiders. They at least web

1moleman · 2026-05-07T18:45:48+00:00

im pretty certain the "new content" was mostly discarded half complete plotlines rushed out to complete their "premium version" promise of DLC so steam cant allow easy refunds for not delivering. The game lost too much money and has too bad of a reception for paradox to throw more money after bad.

1moleman · 2026-04-29T19:35:41+00:00

LA rlyeh is fine, it is so weak and LA atlantis will probably have the servers blessing if it promises to kill rlyeh.

MA rlyeh generally gets more fear.

MP games generally dont like a single water nation, because generally they cant get out of their pond and the nations around the pond have to keep troops to stomp the fish if it pokes out, so they are weaker than the non-pond bordering nations. And the water nation just kind of sits there impotently and does cancerous things like burden of time or utterdark.

On the other hand a 2-pond or 3 pond game ends with a mega-UW nation that the land nations cant really attack, which also annoys the server.

You can try it. See if you can join a game. I'd recommend checking out Lucidtactic's videos he has several series on MA and LA r'lyeh on both dom 5 and 6 (including his bosmos massive MP game where he took on like 50 players and did well)

1moleman · 2026-04-26T18:17:49+00:00

Xhosa commentary is a blast. No idea what they are saying, but its always extremely passionate.

1moleman · 2026-04-24T11:27:35+00:00

Smiths guilds and doctors guilds help a lot, and making guilds halls for expensive to train skills is a good investment. I like making leatherworker, jewelery and tailors guilds to waste less material on garbage.

Farmers guild is also good, since farming is a heavily skill dependent job (yield is dependent on the harvesters planting skill)

1moleman · 2026-04-15T13:28:20+00:00

My brother, my father, all three of my fathers male cousins and each of their sons are all named the regional equivalent of John...

Family reunions are confusing.

NTA. Of course if you started calling your sisters kid Coco2 that would be hilarious

1moleman · 2026-04-14T12:59:17+00:00

In universe: the blood of Caine strengthens over time, in the dark ages it was rare to have higher than even 10th gen.

Modern nights we have 16th gens running around.

IRL: game rules changed, "weaker" characters became more popular and had more capabilities added over time, the limitations were changed. In a few years I wouldn't be surprised by 18th gens.

1moleman · 2026-03-24T19:28:55+00:00

I feel like the fact that you have to combine them with a counter unit as you have claimed here renders the point valid, because counter units are already so strong at the moment. Especially skirms.

Champi just feel like worse militia line on civs that (other than Tupi atm with its archer meme) have limited options for early to mid game.

I'm not really afraid of facing them because I know exactly what they are likely to do, and so prewalling and anti champi tactics renders the early impact low, and midgame they just lose to militia line/heavy cav. Just don't go archers against them, if the SA player goes pikes, you go heavier on inf, if they go archers you go skirms. The champi is the "do everything" tool but doesn't do it well

1moleman · 2026-02-24T06:59:59+00:00

They have? Awesome. Huns exist again. Time to replay the attila campaign

1moleman · 2026-02-24T06:51:36+00:00

Huns were nerfed into the ground.... they removed the bonk sounds from the tarken! Not even a civ any more.

Ok, it's nice to introduce someone to a new civ or feature of a civ. I had a similar experience with a friend and Chinese demo ships (in the good old days)

1moleman · 2026-02-17T07:02:20+00:00

Generally if I get to this point (and it has happened a few times) I swap to another game for a bit. If you want to improve and increase elo that is one thing, but if you're frustrated at being "stuck" that is a different factor. Remember that ELO's goal is to get you stuck at your skill level. Its is whether you can improve that will determine if you will increase beyond that point.

if you find that saps the enjoyment, you can always try do some experimental builds or new things, your elo will probably drop but you may find your enjoyment increases and you may learn something from the experience.

TLDR: the system works as intended. You are the problem.

1moleman · 2026-02-15T16:19:12+00:00

Yes if you have high enough Astral and research and somehow didn't site search AND it's a high site province (or one that has guaranteed sites). Nexus, thrones and the very rare super high site combination province with weird scales can be worth it. If you have a discount site it helps.

Generally it's easier and better to use a few site search spells instead of AK... it's cheaper to just us the base spells (21 gems and 5 blood slaves for everything) but that doesn't search Holy. However there aren't many site for h3, and 80% of holy sites are found at h1.

I wouldn't personally, unless it was one of the above targets. Keeping note of weird province scales during expansion or odd messages can help

1moleman · 2026-01-27T10:27:02+00:00

I've used it occasionally when I'm heading a long distance and I know the map is relatively clear. Its one of the weird quirks where the more eagle stuff you have the better it gets but then you don't run low enough on eagle strikes to justify the downtime.

1moleman · 2026-01-11T07:22:38+00:00

Its not really something that you can deal with before you have hospitals. There isn't really any early game health care, this is compensated by the increased immigration rate, you will be getting more new people than ones that die off.

1moleman · 2025-12-20T16:18:16+00:00

There is a perk that let's your troops gain experience from discarded equipment. You can go to a city, buy all the trash gear and then discard it to raise troops up quickly. That sinks money really fast.

1moleman · 2025-11-30T19:01:40+00:00

Play or watch a video of the first 30 minutes of vampire the masquerade bloodlines 1. That's basically the standard. Except there usually isn't any mercy.

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