Please feel free to discuss possibly routing options and tactics that could be useful for improvements towards runs.
I will organize useful information into a guide I have been working on to be used in general for those that wish to do runs with information pertaining to the game as it unfolds.
Much is yet to be found and or confirmed as there is very little information about the game available else where.
There is a WIP guide in the "Guides" section that is not and most likely not ever be 100% coverage but will detail out what is important for knowing the game and more specifically for speedruns.
There has been allot of new stuff found and discussed over the last few weeks, and there will be a overhauled/new guide write up to detail out the game and the new stuff found while running this game.
Categories are still technically WIP as there may be some changes to them relating back to the new information found. Good Ending may just end up being the Actual Any% as it is the definitive end of the game since it is the only way to get credit roll, however pending on other elements even if you beat the games outlined objective you can still not get the credit roll so hence why it is there for now. On the lower difficulties (normal and below) its fairly easy to complete all of the championship matches even tho you only need 3 to get to the Grand Championship. Brutal Fights - mode : has a few odd things that seem to break fights in some circumstances so its still unclear what exactly is going on with this. For now this is not allowed to be included in runs as it is not by default on. Twitch mode : is still not allowed due to how it effects the runs at this time, unless its direct impact is made optional it will not be allowed to be used in runs.
Please do suggest and discuss on anything with myself or other runners.
@Turbodog702 has started putting together a series of Tutorial information video guides geared towards Domina Any% speedruns as of current. These cover the basics in what we considered valuable and in a depth relative to understanding the game and its mechanics when applying them to a speedrun. These videos will at some point be found on Turbodog's Youtube channel and have been divided into parts to cover the different elements of Domina as a game and its mechanics as well as Speedrun strategies that are currently being used for starting out and general progression towards the end of the game. Another person to credit for information talked about is also Tehspycrab who also did routing and testing within Domina as well which we do mention, who is responsible for the two gladiator setup alternative which we also discuss among other things.
As the game as a speedrun seems fairly locked down already for Any% that could change over time with updates if they are impact-full enough to alter these strategies somehow, but as the current patch v1.1.15 what we discuss is what we feel most optimal in a general sense for this particular category and routing strategies used.
We did talk about a possible All Fights category or 1-Man categories, but still something to think about possibly besides current Any% which atm doesn't seem like there is still room for more to learn or change for routing variance at this moment.
It would interesting to see if there will be more developer support to update the game to increase the challenge vs reward aspect across the board to hopefully make less favorable or alternative decisions in the game more viable then the current routing and strategies used as they make the game a fairly easy walk in the park with little to no room for variance to possibly switch up the game and outcomes that would require better adaptation towards.
Things as far as having a entertain audience and something fun to watch even as a speedrun would be a way to only have twitch integration pull names from chat while playing rather then still having a impact on the game but still be able to participate with cheering but no gained rewards as to still have some minimal interaction be possible for those that wish to use it rather then completely disallow the games feature to be used at all.
Things we also have talked about as well is how interesting that Brutal Fights option can affect certain mechanics in unintended ways that other wise would completely break the game and sometimes preform undesirable or hilarious results. We still have very little information on this but as this option is off by default we currently disallow this option as well in current runs.
@tehspycrab There is hardly anything that is relevant enough or detailed enough out there from others so far beyond what myself Turbodog and you have found while exploring the game. But yes this would be a place for discussions and logging unless we see the need to go more in detail with certain things in their own thread which we may want to for certain things for sure. I have not found much info on the blessings nor screen shots of many of them, so its a hard process as well but w.e we are working on will be awesome to share and see where that puts us with the game and direction for it and other potential things to explore.
Defiantly agree with these and I'm pretty certain myself that 100 AI gladiators gain no benefits from things that would increase this value since it is capped at 100. Sold Blessings do in fact give 50 gold, and yes the Palus tooltip while technically correct is misleading for sure.
If you want my help with any of this stuff or what ever part you wanna work on the most we can certainly do that. I think getting a screen shot at least of all the blessings that are possible in game would be a good first step but a large one at that. That will allow us to break down what the card actually is doing and allow us to go more into detail and testing things when we know what more of them are and which ones are which etc.
Testing moral at this time seems least important but it does have some sort of at least minimal affect on various things in the game.
Hey, back again after the weird account/post deletion hiccup.
Here's the list of the blessings I have screenshots of so far. Warning though, the list is largely unsorted with the exception of a few very similar cards grouped together.
Riposte Run Speed Boost Roll Speed Boost Roll Master Recover Cards Hold Ground Indefatigable I Indefatigable II AI Reaction Boost Rebuff Tolerance Hold Ground Auto heal Wild Animal Weapon Master Dual Wield Master Attack Stance Eagle's Eye Defensive Priority Bleed Resist Divine Vision Cursed Weapon Max Stamina Defense Train Speed Agility Train speed Strength Train Speed Weapon Train Speed Equipment Steward Armor Stewardship Weapon Steward Equipment Salvage Helm Breaker 2X Production 5X Production 10X Production Reduced Training Time 15% Reduced Training Time 33% Reduced Delay Reduced Training coin 15% Reduced Training Coin 33%
The cards I know for a fact that exist yet I am missing screenshots of are:
Weapon throw master Armor breaker Shield breaker [I have forgotten the name of this one but it is the "curse" with that increases damage but keeps your gladiator at half health max]
There also may be other cards that I am unaware of. Any ideas of how best to sort these would be appreciated, and for making them easily available, i.e should each card be it's own individual image or just one massive image with them all and text.
There are 2 curses that half health of gladiators afaik. But nice welcome back lol. If you can get separate images of them and dump them to a folder to upload I think that would be good then make an organized image of them as well would be best. That way we can use them as we want.
Alright then, I'll separate out the screenshots into individual images of the cards themselves. Hopefully RNG lets someone get screenshots of those last(?) 5 cards soon. If the mood strikes me anytime soon I'll also start typing up the text of the cards for easy searching and possible use in future guides.
Be worth while and maybe we can work on updating/creating a new guide I was working on that is now very out of date thanks to you and turbo lol.
Oops, haha. Sounds good. Let me know if you manage to grab screenshots of those missing cards before I do.
I generally forget to screen cap while doing runs tho i guess i could just take stills from the videos if they crop up.....
I swear this is the most tedious thing I have ever put my mind to doing. Anyway, update with some good news. In addition to finding a couple cards I had totally missed earlier (namely Poison Blade and Serrated Poison Blade) and having stolen the screenshot from a VOD of one of your run attempts for "Throw Master" (Thanks @MASH !) I have found most of the missing cards.
To my knowledge I am missing at most 3 cards. Those being "Armor Breaker", The second half health curse, that I still have not seen but you have, and one I don't know if it exists or not: "Weapon Breaker." I don't think I've ever seen one but given the cards in "Steward" category it would make sense to me.
Not sure if you want me to just go ahead and isolate the screenshots of what I have so we can start getting a guide going, or if we should still wait for those last 2-3 cards.
If you package up the files i can start working on a doc in which we can use them in and edit together on that should work for what we will need at least starting with the Blessings and moving forward as we want and update as we go.
Okay, got all the cards isolated and included a txt file with text version of what they all say.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/morkktqt5pxazj9/AABB-hNyY4PLGb3MQiOyLAxla
So recently on Patch v1.1.18 I have done some recent testing and trial runs mainly focused at Pro Gamer which is going to require a very different way to stabilize at start up which also would work for Hard since they share allot of similarities. Now I have got this info for us to explore more and think about.
Starting values per difficulty; Easy - 1000x coin, 400x water, 800x food, 80x wine | 2 well-geared AI 100 gladiators and 1 AI 100 slave | 1 random card and 1 return cards. | 3 days takes 17 seconds approximately no inputs. Mild - 1000x coin, 400x water, 800x food, 80x wine | 2 semi-geared AI 100 gladiators and 1 AI 100 slave | 1 random card and 1 return cards. | 3 days takes 16 seconds approximately no inputs. Normal - 1000x coin, 400x water, 800x food, 80x wine | 2 geared AI 100 gladiators and 1 AI 100 slave | 1 random card and 1 return cards. | 3 days takes 15 seconds approximately no inputs. Hard - 500x coin, 200x water, 400x food, 40x wine | 1 AI 100 slave | 1 random card. | 3 days takes 14 seconds approximately no inputs. Pro Gamer - 500x coin, 200x water, 400x food, 40x wine | 1 AI 100 slave | 1 random card. | 3 days takes 13 seconds approximately no inputs.
Events still depending on difficulty will vary more harsh events on higher difficulties, and more favorable events on lower difficulties. On top of the events some of them are specific to certain difficulties I should start tracking which ones and the frequency at some point.
Timing for 3 days was done from the very start of the game once hitting "OK" till the first scheduled event popped up which is exactly 3 in game days from a fresh file for every difficulty. Tool-tip does state that difficulty does affect in game speed but again my testing is not 100% as it was done all manually multiple times but there is a very noticeable speed difference to me from Easy to Normal and from Normal to Pro Gamer. so between them I'm less sure about.
So far the only way I have been able to get a chance and stabilize at the start of Pro Gamer has been to do the following; Sell naked gladiator and buy a gladiator that is not naked for around 200-250 max gold. Set their training for strength as normal and upgrade their weapon to wooden sword if not already. Train Humility at the Doctore and set auto train. Buy x5 water from market. Hire the Medicus and set auto heal and train Antibiotics. Hire Architect and build 5 stone pits. Reject the first 2-3 fights until your gladiator is healed to full.
So with all of this Hard and for sure Pro Gamer is basically impossible it seems to do a no reject run / all victories without killing the run, right off the start.
If we were to have new or interesting categories/subs , we would need to make sure that they work well after we have explored more of the game and this information.
I will be starting a plan to track events per difficulty and the occurrence of them while doing test runs. If there are suggestions on better ways to maybe look at tracking these more accurately as this may be useful let me know.
Also would like to here some thoughts on this stuff or other ideas etc.
Another thing to note recently that may have been there before but possibly not functioning as intended but there is a qwerk to how the difficulty slider works, as in sliding it to far one direction while it may not change the actual stated difficulty it does affect things in the game such as starting resources and in game time flow. I have contacted the developer of the game to ask about this issue and this was a feature in the game that was coded it, however he may look into fixing the slider so that it locks to positions that actually change values in game. Knowing this now ill change some things on the boards in time as of currently there is 2 starting values for each difficulty based on more testing but there could be more or less pending on if a adjustment to how the slider works will be made or not.
So my previous post while still correct in some instances for the starting resources per difficulty it will vary a bit for Normal as you can start with the same resources as Hard/Pro Gamer but my assumption is that there is other things like rewards and over difficulty curve and events that are also adjusted along with this. For now I will refer to the lowest value of each difficulty as A and the other known highest value as B till we know more. for the time being I suggest that the sliders be set to the lowest just as it turns to the difficulty you want, for Easy i suggest putting it as far left as possible.
More and more stuff I'm learning with this game as time goes on which is good, as had my first crash in a long time as well. last known crash i had was back before patch v1.1.0
As much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news amidst all this new information, from what I have seen, enemy gladiators scale in difficulty with each win you get, from what little I can tell without cap, meaning that an "All victories" is looking more and more like an impossibility.
yes I am aware that with each victory for scheduled fights that the curve goes up each time, as the game always wants to create a challenge by design. Previous playthroughs on a more casual setting I was doing all fights but achieving all victories is something that is not really to be expected due to how harsh the nature of the game is. It would be a fun thing to try and do but from more and more trials of doing so its not possible no matter the difficulty at least on the newest patches.
I would like to figure out some other interesting categories to look at as well at some point but atm just the any% stuff is turning out to be more interesting with new stuff being found recently. So as for now things will remain as we have been doing so until we can decided what to do or see if the developers are willing to work with us to fix some issues such as the slider fixed positions as an example.