Conquest of Elysium 5 Announced!

[TheFjordFox]

I've been having trouble with the forces of Inferno. It seems as if every time I start, a portal is opened up before I get a chance to grow, and they roll over me. Maybe this is a recent addition. The game is challenging enough as it was, I can't seem to find a way to overcome this new challenge.

In villages, hamlets etc, I believe one of them on any given map generated, there will be one or more mad cultists. If these are not killed at any point, they will open a gate to inferno later in the game. Killing them before they open the gates will solve this problem in most cases. Sometimes it's no up to you to do that tho, you need to rely on the AI taking them on. Which can be dodgy. There are other ways to open a gate to inferno as well, but in my experience this is the main one.

However, and I'm not sure about this, but it seems that if you do this, removing one end-game crisis, another one will just randomly take it's place instead. Take this with a grain of salt however.

[solops]

Well I'm starting to get the hang of the game, playing as a human baron I've managed to get a reasonably sized army marching around the map and taking valuable money-making positions.  It feels a lot more familiar to a traditional 4X than Dominions 5.  Seems like it would be interesting in multiplayer but I'm not sure how much player interaction / diplomacy there is here compared to Dom 5.

Al, what is the difference between CoE and Dom?

[al_infierno]

Well I'm starting to get the hang of the game, playing as a human baron I've managed to get a reasonably sized army marching around the map and taking valuable money-making positions.  It feels a lot more familiar to a traditional 4X than Dominions 5.  Seems like it would be interesting in multiplayer but I'm not sure how much player interaction / diplomacy there is here compared to Dom 5.

Al, what is the difference between CoE and Dom?

On a broad level, CoE is more straight forward and plays a lot faster.  You don't have to fiddle with army compositions, spell cast orders, and things like that - you just attach troops to a general and march them around the map to kill stuff and take valuable tiles, a la Heroes of Might and Magic.  The battles are still automated, so you don't have much control over the battles compared to Dom, so it's kind of a balance between convenience versus depth of strategy.  It's refreshing to play after spending a lot of time in mid-to-late game Dominions.

Also, there are destructible obstacles like trees, fortress gates, etc which makes things battles bit more interesting.

The world map resembles Civ IV with the square tile-based generation, and lots of empty terrain tiles in between valuable tiles like mines and oasis.  Also, you move around generals with an "action point" style system like in Civ games.  The income and troop production is also very reminiscent of Civ - you'll have to wait several turns and use your starting army wisely to grab some valuable tiles so you can get an income rolling before you're really able to raise a sizeable army.  It's not like Dom where you're basically rushing to pump out troops and grab everything in sight ASAP.  Your economy is slow to start, and roaming independent armies like pirates and wild animals will periodically attack you and try to take valuable tiles away.

In a sense, I would describe it as being like a cross between HoMM and Civilization IV with a classic Illwinter asymmetric game design.  The Human Baron plays completely differently to the Troll King or the Kobold Lord, etc.

[Tanaka]

Conquest of Elysium 5.32, the Guildmaster update:

This update brings a new playable class to Elysium, the Guildmaster. By establishing different types of guilds in towns, he will get benefits depending on what type of guild it is. E.g. the shipwrights guild will enable the construction of better ships and the assassins guild will enable assassination contracts. Ships have been tweaked as the guildmaster is a ship using class and it is now much faster to travel by sea than on land. There is also some new stuff for the Demonologist, the Dryad Queen and the Kobold King as well as plenty of bug fixes and tweaks.

General:
New playable class: Guildmaster
New type of items: Soul Contracts
Soul contract ritual for Demonologist
New terrain: Mausoleum
Traveling on a boat now only cost 1/2 AP per step for the sailors
New monster: Gryphon (old gryphon is now known as great gryphon)
Kobolds' main dragons might get spellcasting abilities
Better handling of overpopulation
Increased max size of battlefield
New independent groups
Kelp forests could be destroyed into a plains, fixed
New battle map for fights in an oasis
No ports in small lakes
Can now change spells for greedy commanders
Can no longer tunnel in combat on frozen water squares
Units will no longer go berserk from disease damage
Game could crash during world creation, fixed
Can now chop down spider thickets
Elemental event could carry over from one game to next, fixed
Arcane tempest no longer affects terrain or boats
Destroying pillar no longer consumes AP from underlings
Change commander by ctrl-right click now updates text too
Net & web can no longer affect immobile units
battle crash bug fixed
Ant hills can no longer be blessed
Crusade and Inquisition now takes veils into account
Maps and teleport scrolls are now less common
Use current dir as fallback if failing to create proper save dir
More type of special forests/jungles can now be chopped down
Independents with burned down forests could kill dryad queen during world creation
Lifeless units couldn't equip heart of life, fixed
Merchant could come ashore in bridges and fords, fixed
Juggernaut is now more aggressive
Dryad Queen can now get a Blood Bull from the Blood Orgy ritual
Size of default game window larger on high DPI screens
Fixed follow dead leader bug
Animate Tools can now be done on iron only locations too
Motte and Bailey didn't contain any lifeforce, fixed
Bone Imp got pierce resistance
Tip fixes
Typo and stat fixes


AI
AI better at using ships
Dwarf AI improvement


Modding
New ritual commands: turncastcount, castcount
New item command: nodrop
New monster/item command: voidship, farsightsea
Mods are now properly reenabled after returning to main menu
Fix for terraingroups together with magic items
Fix for terrain groups -40 and -41