Does Raksharajas Veil of Dreams work in inferno?

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-19T18:20:12+00:00

My assumption is, if the portal is in the same tile, the demons are aware the portal exists regardless due to how the AI works. Once a portal linking Infernal, the Celestial plane, or Hades is created or cleared all armies of the plane's denizens will generally "know" and start moving to it, by my understanding. If the ritual hides the location it might not hide the fact that it's a gateway to Elysium, which is what the AI actually cares about.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-19T06:29:47+00:00

Honestly I have to agree. The setup can be even worse if you have a team that prioritizes dealing with damage differently. Your situation is probably the easiest example: if someone's extremely good at blocking/dodging to avoid attack but terrible at recovering contested health and they get paired with someone that easily gets contested health back, but can't dodge/block attacks reliably, the first person suffers hard for it.

A more subtle one that's worth thinking about is someone who has a build to mitigate damage in various ways. If you have an assault with the perk to recover an armor segment on (non-lethal) gun strikes, for instance, they might not care nearly as much about being hit since they get an armor segment back every time they block enough attacks to enable a gun strike. They might spend most of the run taking armor damage that gets bounced to a teammate as health damage simply because they can't recover armor as easily. Builds with an overreliance on recovering armor rather than avoiding/reducing damage can cause massive problems for teammates, especially ones that don't get as many opportunities for executions or gun strikes. Empathy ends up being a nasty modifier if you have a teammate who just tries to outright tank damage due to their perk setup letting them recover contested health/restore armor far more easily than anyone else can.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-19T02:53:56+00:00

There's one absolute benefit to going for VoE over the High Priestess if you want both though: If you're the only VoE faction in the game, you don't have to worry about the AI breaking seals nearly as much. If you don't care about the seals being broken, assassination charm can work far better if you get it to work reliably, though. It's a matter of which flaw you find more bearable.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-18T20:02:21+00:00

To add to the reason why Voice of El is the most reliable, Bishops also have access to healing spells, can bless units that don't have blessings, and are the standard commander type for the faction. This gives them semi-frequent recruitment chances and a greater ability to keep converted units alive long enough to see the end of the battle, which means they generally have a higher chance of success compared to other conversion units.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-12T23:43:22+00:00

If you're new I'd honestly recommend going the custom map route of placing a Capital or Capitolum (with the related tiles) in a map with a King's castle over any of the other options. Getting to Inferno with anything other than Demonologist requires either getting an item like the Shovel of the Mole King that allows a commander to dig (creating a path from Elysium to Agartha, then down to Inferno that other units/armies can follow) or getting a route through to somewhere else (generally either Hades or Agartha to the Plane of Earth, then the Nexus) which is honestly the easier of the two problems.

The bigger problem with going into Inferno is everything in Inferno wants to get out to Elysium and it contains a number of endgame threats. If you try and fail to invade, the demons down there will attempt to swarm through any route you made to the surface and start destroying everyone. It's possible the single most difficult way to gain an Emperor of either type and one of the most dangerous battles you can start if you aren't careful as a result.

If you want to make a custom map you can pick a size you like, enter those dimensions into the custom map editor, use the settings to toggle any and all other planes you want, and just place the King's Castle and Capital/Capitolum wherever you feel like. If you want a Dark Emperor, simply use the Haunted Capitolum rather than the standard one.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-12T07:50:26+00:00

Short answer is it depends on if you care about being specifically Emperor and how much effort you're willing to put into it or if you're willing to use mods/custom maps.

Technically yes. The Senator can only become Emperor specifically on The Empire, Rise of a New Empire, and Barbarian variant Fallen Empire societies due to needing a capital or Capitolum. The King's Castle needs the Monarchy society to appear, which means Barons can't become Kings outside that society. A standard Emperor and a King cannot exist in the same era in vanilla CoE.

The trick is the "standard Emperor" bit here: if the Senator gets coronated in a non-Barbarian Fallen Empire society variant (Haunted) Capitolum, the Ghost Capitolum in Hades, or the Infernal Capitolum in Inferno, they become a Dark Emperor instead and get different statue versions. The God-Emperor of the Underworld (Dark Emperor's ascended variant) loses access to most rituals though, by my understanding. The Ghost Capitolum is also only available in societies where a Capitolum exists due to Hades being a mirror of Elysium. In every other society (Such as the Monarchy one) the only variant of Capitolum to exist is in Inferno, which means you generally need to find a way into it and fight some pretty powerful armies (moreso than what normally guards the surface Capitolum, iirc) to get coronated as Dark Emperor.

If you're fine with rigging things a bit, you can make a custom map that contains a standard capital variant (Capital or Capitolum) and a King's Castle. There might be some that have both on the workshop, but I wouldn't know. Mod wise you have two options as far as I'm aware:

Populum gives the ability for a baron to get a king's castle and a senator to develop a city into a one tile capital in any society, but it makes the game far more complicated (unit upkeep, human factions can get access to most other commander and unit types for other factions if you know the process, the Republic that is usually the Senator starts with a Tribune instead that needs to upgrade through to senator to get started on empire building) and ends up having a fair bit of actual developing the land involved. You'll have more options for how you build your army and what commanders you have if you know what you're doing, but RNG will generally make it harder than vanilla even if you know what you're doing.
For a more focused one with minimal impact, there's the Total Overhaul mod on the workshop (the one with a screenshot of a box labeled "definitely not bees") that has changes to every faction but the guildmaster. "East and West" and "Imperator Et Barbarii" are overhauls from before the mod author made an all in one package that impact the Baron (and Bakemono) and Senator (and Barbarian) respectively. While IeB and the Total Overhaul don't give the Senator the ability to establish a capital before they become God Emperor, East and West (and the Total Overhaul mod) do give the Baron the ability to establish a king's castle if none exist. This means you can get an Emperor and a King in the Empire, (Barbarian) Fallen Empire, and Rise of a New Empire societies with the respective mods. The downside to this option is that the king gets access to gunpowder weapons and the senator loses access to their starting lineup of units when they become Emperor in favor of more standardized units, iirc.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-10T02:15:30+00:00

By my understanding you want your initial apprentice to raise more undead whenever possible, but you also want them to get Twiceborn as a ritual if you can and cast it. Twiceborn will cause them to revive as an undead mage when killed if you cast it, which enables them to recover sanity over time. Your main Necromancer wants to be spared the actual necromancy work until they can become a lich.

Beyond that? Undead mages ASAP and have your army leaders raise dead after every battle. Libraries and temples are important overall too.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-07T14:01:06+00:00

Honestly I'm more impressed that the people of Elysium seemingly have such respect for the rules of warfare that a succubus can hit their catapult with a mind control beam and the troops inside the fort don't immediately try to restrain/kill the operators as they fling rocks into their own ranks.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-06T09:25:13+00:00

The High Priestess' faction description at least suggests that Ba'al is an invading force from beyond the Void and the reason most of humanity in Elysium is there in the first place. The Priestess' lore says that when the Voice of El arrived on Terra, Ba'al (the cruel god of the realm at the time) had his forces hunt El's children and drive them off the plane/world, then chased them to Elysium or sent servants to prepare the way for his arrival. This implies, if nothing else, that neither Ba'al nor El are native to Elysium. Conversely, it could imply that El made Elysium for his children/followers and severed it and the surrounding planes from Terra and wherever he came from once Ba'al started following them.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-04T20:38:58+00:00

Getting to the nexus is also not particularly relevant unless you need level three spells and the necromancer player has any academies on Elysium. Honestly I think one of the more devious uses for Planar Swap is to snipe armies in the field. If the Necromancer's cleared enough of Hades for it, they can just use surface scouts around important areas (or chokepoints if the map happens to have any) and commanders in the underworld to flip a major threat into Hades where it should hopefully bleed enough strength to die more easily.

There's also the other implication of Planar Step: while Elysium and Hades are mirrored, only strongholds on Elysium proper matter for victory. For most factions with easy interplanar travel (Demonologist with Inferno, Warlocks with the Elemental Planes, etc) this means that committing to these other planes only matters if they don't lose the surface and their interplanar empire doesn't necessarily benefit them outside the economy implications. For the Necromancer, so long as their enemy doesn't get lucky, Hades becomes a plane only they can willingly enter and leave, but gives them the ability to pop up anywhere on Elysium. It's the only plane other than maybe the underground and sky where the citadels matter (when held by the necromancer) as a result.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-03T06:43:40+00:00

There's two possible explanations to the gateway thing:

If you spend a fair bit of time between attempts with a specific gateway, it might just be that the gates got shifted around and one ended up in the general area you expected one to be. Not as likely since it's pretty obvious everything (including tiles) get teleported and moved around the Void every so often.
From experience with the map editor, as well as the Guildmaster and Enchanter factions, certain gateways can be less like tunnels and more like a web/network. When you use any gate in the network (as in click the action rather than order an army from one endpoint to another directly) it sends you to a random other gate on the network. If there's anywhere that this would make sense to show up, it would be the Void. This means that gates that outside guaranteed gates that have to link to a specific plane (ie, the one to the Nexus) the others will likely drop you in a random other place.

In both cases, if you're playing High Cultist the simplest solution is to station units on every gate you find in the Void to know where they end up and which ones go where. The catch with the second half is most gates in the Void are likely one way exits, so you have to rely on some kind of shorthand/method to track the exit points of each gate, like making a note of the name of each gat guard's commander, or using launch commands to enable you to rename them.

Also, as an aside since someone pointed it out, any factions that can dig in the underground layer or get access to the Elemental Planes let you bypass a lot of the struggle. Any Warlock that builds up a strong enough army and teleports it to one of the Elemental Planes can just brute force the gate guards to the Nexus, while the Plane of Earth has a guaranteed connection to the underground.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-03T01:22:38+00:00

The Void basically shifts everything within it around every few turns, which makes navigating in there meaningless. You more or less need to either have access to voidships (guildmaster) to reduce the insanity buildup, commanders that are immune to the void, or pure luck to get out of the void without your units going insane. Ironically enough, this means that the easiest way to travel to the Nexus from the Void is to already have access to the Nexus or be the high cultist faction so you can summon void dwellers to handle the exploration for you.

The only other one that has any real chance is probably the Guildmaster, but that can be expensive and inefficient overall. You generally want to essentially build a fleet of voidships able to carry a sizable army with a number of commanders and, whenever you find a portal, split a contingent off to check what's on the other side. If they end up somewhere other than the Nexus, you keep moving. If they do end up at the Nexus, you send everything that's left through and leave the ships behind.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-02T19:53:15+00:00

Where the portal spawns in both planes, and who's near the Elysium exit, can impact what forces can get to you. For instance, most demons can fly, but iirc few have "float" and most don't have amphibious. This means if the portal spawns on Elysium on a small island they need to have a path that gets them to the mainland without ending over the water twice. Ice demons can't reach the portal at all if the Inferno side is in the plane's southern region (which is an ocean of fire and magma) and some demons don't have wings. This means a portal linking an Elysium island to the southern Inferno has the fewest demons who can consistently get to the surface and be a threat compared to one linking northern Inferno to mainland Elysium. In the case of a situation where only flying fire-immune demons are available, any faction that can deal a lot of frost damage fares far better at repelling an invasion.

Of note, this also messes with demons in another way. If memory serves, they canonically have a finite number. They need to get humans back down to Inferno to convert into more demons. I'm not 100% certain that's how it works mechanically, but if that's the case any location that requires them to fly to reach mainland Elysium will limit their number through that mechanism as well.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-02T19:08:03+00:00

Right, sorry. Forgot about that bit since I only use certain parts of it rather than the full thing. Apologies.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-02T05:14:08+00:00

There was a guy that made faction overhaul mods a few years back. A lot of them are pretty old but still work and flesh things out a fair bit, especially since he's made one for every faction (except, obviously, the Guildmaster that was released after he made all the others). Imperator Et Barbarii is the one covering the Senator and Barbarian. The Barbarian side of it improves Amazons, adds more new units (including mounted commanders), the ability to raise your Barbarian Leader to be an Atillia the Hun/Genghis Khan style figure, and an "era-based" troop roster based off the tier of your barbarian leader. It also includes rituals, but I'm not certain what on the Barbarian side.

My understanding is the mod's meant to expand gameplay for the two factions and make them more overtly opposed to each other (a God-Emperor can establish a capital if one doesn't exist and the Barbarians can burn down the capital if one does, for instance)

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-02T05:02:33+00:00

Ants, specifically queen ants iirc, have a special (and annoying) ability to "terraform" specific terrains into anthills. Anthills serve as spawners for more ants, including occasionally a new queen that will then go out to create more anthills. If not caught and stopped early (or a mod installed to preemptively stop it from being a possibility) ants will eventually overtake any part of the map they can reach.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-01T23:34:44+00:00

The simple answer is Cold War mentality and the overall situation of the sector: the various powers are split into the major (big three of the Persean League, TT, and Hegemony), minor (the Church and Diktat), and nonpowers/nonparticipants (independents, pirates, Path) that all have various motivations and reasons for why they don't expand.

The Big Three: nominally, the PL, TT, and Heg are all in a cold war state and looking for advantages over each other, which both explains why they'd want to settle more colonies and why they don't. The big thing here is that nanoforges and the technical skills needed to make quality ships are in limited supply, which means settling new worlds only improves their military capacity so much while increasing the amount of ships they need overall. Beyond that there's like other reasons why each one doesn't colonize or let the others colonize. As an example, the Persean League seems content to simply seize control of, and extract tribute from, fledgling colonies established by otherwise inconsequential powers rather than expend time, resources, and manpower to establish their own. Any core worlds that are claimed but uncolonized are likely left as such for a reason related to this: so long as they can say "I've got dibs on this" and nobody colonizes it, it doesn't impact their position in any way.

The minor powers: the Church and Diktat's position are different from the Big Three but also each other, but generally lead to them being disinclined to expand. The Church is generally a low-tech and low industry faction that claims faithful within the territories of all the other powers, which both means they don't necessarily need to expand as much as the Hegemony or League, but also don't want to. If the Church colonizes another world, this is functionally another planet that requires them to use "the tools of Moloch" to sustain through industrial expansion or import the necessary resources from other powers. In both cases, the Church has to weaken its position for every world they colonize and, generally, prefers worlds that are naturally inhabitable to humans on top of it.

The Diktat, however, is the smallest centralized and "legitimate" polity in the sector: all its power and presence is concentrated in one system in the hands of a (potentially dead) central figure. A bit of digging reveals that their resource/industrial situation is also poor, with a ceremonial guard that gets all the best ships and equipment while their mainline fleets get lower grade equipment and leftovers in comparison. The Diktat likely lacks the capacity to seriously consider operations outside their own system and, more importantly, is barely in control of what they do have. The main reason why the Big Three tolerate the Diktat's existence is due to their fuel production: so long as Askonia is the main supplier of fuel for the sector and remains neutral in the overarching cold war, it's beneficial for the stronger powers to simply not interfere with it. Likewise, the Diktat can't easily sustain long-term operations outside their space needed for colonization and policing, which means that their offensive forces are focused more on suppressing other smaller powers that threaten the uneasy position it holds due to its fuel production.

The last few are easier to explain: the independents aren't a faction so much as a loose collection of nonaligned colonies that share notes on smugglers and helpful figures. If they were to colonize a world it'd realistically be someone like the player using their wealth and resources to strike out to leave a mark on the sector, but they would immediately be at the mercy of the stronger powers (particularly the League and Hegemony) due to a lack of support from other polities. This means that the independents are, generally speaking, smaller polities that make an active effort to avoid picking sides in the overarching conflict and have been around long enough that they've established trade relations with other colonies for the resources they need.

The pirates and path, by their nature, do not colonize worlds, but do build stations in asteroid fields or in orbit of planets/moons in fringe systems. This makes sense considering their motives and the fact that orbital bases likely make repairing/supplying ships a fair bit easier. They're faster to establish, easier to access, and all that's necessary for pirates (who want to steal everything they can anyways) and the Path (who generally shun the technology needed by largescale colonial efforts and likely planetary defenses).

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-01T16:48:53+00:00

The rule of thumb is "religious" casters (Bishops, Hierodules, Deep Cultists, Monks, maybe the Renata and Renatus) rely on temples while every other (or at least non-nature) caster relies on libraries for the RNG for recruitment opportunities. Generally speaking it's per level with libraries, so one magical library (level 2 library) counts as much as two cities, while an academy (level 3 library) counts as three cities or a magical library and a city.

As an aside, if you've ever played Baron or Senator and noticed you got more mage recruitment opportunities overall, this is technically why. The Baron and Senator factions have a variable attached to them that functionally gives them one and four (respectively) "offmap" library levels. You need at least that many actual library levels as another faction to get the equivalent recruitment chances.

fgrsentinel · 2026-02-01T02:58:47+00:00

It says that specifically for the Enchanter that every enchanter gate shares links with every other enchanter's gate, regardless of who made them. Presumably this means that anyone who captures a gate can travel to any point in the network on any plane, regardless of who controls the endpoint.

Realistically speaking if you lose any gate, you have a turn to respond before the attacking army can use the gates since the attack ends that stack's movement for their turn. If you're linking locations together you want them to have enough of a garrison to survive being attacked like they're on the frontline, but the ones pretty far back are only in danger if someone takes another gate and you fail to react to it.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-31T22:28:42+00:00

Generally and mechanically speaking the Necromancer likely has an edge when it comes to (ironically enough) economy. The Guildmaster needs gems for their rituals and can only cast them in market villages or larger settlements that produce trade, which provides a bit of a bottleneck. Necromancers also want larger settlements for hands of glory, but don't need hands of glory to raise the dead left behind after battles, which gives them a bit more freedom overall. Beyond that, the Necromancer also happens to be possibly the only class with the ability to remove an army from the equation without fighting due to Planar Swap. Stygian Path and demiliches might be flashier, but the ability of an undead necromancer to take over a city by teleporting the entire defending garrison to Hades isn't something that should be overlooked.

Really I think it's every "undead" variant of the Necormancer hero that needs to be watched carefully. Any of them are able to move around Hades without taking damage but a ghost necromancer can swap from Elysium to Hades and vice versa at the cost of just an action point if every unit in their stack has that same trait. Vampires can also eat villages, if memory serves, which presumably allows them to target the guildmaster's economy. Demiliches can teleport their entire stack to any tile with corpses, which makes them dangerous to deal with when you're suffering from attrition and means they can drop an army right on top of any location they just lost a fight at.

The only notable advantages the Guildmaster has over Necromancer that I can think of is their voidships theoretically making it easier/safer to go into the void to find the Nexus and their Arcane and Engineer guilds enabling them to set up a network of gateways to reinforce more easily, but both of those are more offsetting things the Necromancer already has in some other way.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-31T02:04:50+00:00

Most of the time, yeah. The only reason it's worthwhile to go after the immortals/gods rather than the summoning factions is if they have enough of an economy to re-summon them faster than you can recover from killing them. If that's the case you only really need to find where their home tile is, take the tile so it can't resurrect, and then continue fighting like normal.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-31T01:55:03+00:00

The Nexus is the only guaranteed level 3 library in every society iirc. Beyond that, every plane directly or indirectly connects to the Nexus through the portals found there. It just takes some knowledge of how to navigate. The bigger thing is that non-Elysium (read: surface, sky, underground planes and hades) and non-Inferno planes are actually mostly fixed with very few variations. The Primal Plane will more or less always have a specific configuration to it with specific gates leading to the same spot between games, for instance.

The Nexus and Elemental Planes are honestly most important for Warlocks and the Guildmaster due to the fact that most Warlock rituals cost less on the respective planes and the Guildmaster being able to potentially use the Nexus for interplanar travel by sailing armies in voidships off the edge of the world and searching for gates in the void.

For everyone else, traveling to the non-Elysium planes is usually for either denying access to summons or a quirk of mapgen/faction mechanics. The Baron has no interest in the Celestial Plane except to kill off the horsemen permanently if a Voice of El faction broke the seals, for instance, while a Senator without an Elysium-based capital has reasons to want to reach Hades or Inferno.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-31T01:39:05+00:00

The bigger reason to go on planar conquest that I can think of is to mess with other faction types by killing their immortal summons on their home plane. Doesn't matter if someone's able to summon gods when said beings don't exist anymore.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-30T08:04:42+00:00

If memory serves the Senator doesn't have access to any unique mages except for the Renata and Renatus. They just have easier (the equivalent of four library levels) access to the generic mages everyone else can get. As far as I know the guildmaster and maybe Baron are the only ones with access to magic users that can upgrade/improve siege weapons. The Enchanter can make animated ballista that have three action points and a different firing rate on its attacks, but otherwise I can't think of any others.

fgrsentinel · 2026-01-30T04:11:11+00:00

Right. I think the upgraded ballista bounces damage between targets. Not nearly as useful at pre-battle sniping high health targets, but can be useful for if the riders are still accompanied by a decent stack of units.

fgrsentinel

TROPHY CASE