Subscribe to download
Magic Explodes

Magic Explodes (MEX) is a mod that has been around since dominions 4. Originally made by Summer, Bloax, and Not-Lola, a lot of people have worked on it since then and it's morphed intensely. Currently it's made by Not-Lola, Friggodin, and I. In simplest terms, Magic Explodes is a mod that makes Magic.. explode. Originally designed as a way to make evocations Suck Less, it instead ended up balancing much of dominions content to a higher balance standard. Use of cast time changes, number of targets, makes weaker effects and spells still a good idea to cast sometimes. Massive amounts of path scaling added to all kinds of things means that a fire-4 mage is a vastly different battlefield proposition to a fire-1 one, able to bathe the world in flame where the f1 might be dangerous on a personal level but isn't able to delete armies.

The typical form of a Magic Explodes army is summoned units (crabs, animals, claymen, imps, who knows) backed by mages doing various things while their summoned hordes die horribly. Gold-bought units are secondary to simply making more forts for mages, and rarely used outside of the first 6 turns. Clever use of mages and positioning of your evocation-batteries or summoning circles matters hugely, and both weight of mages and scripting matter far more than bless or weight of units.

It's a bit of a love letter to evocation and dom3's cbm lategame, but it has turned out to be rather fun in actual play, being a 'faster' dominions game with more fantastical units and spells being tossed around.

So it's a monster mash, x10 mod?

It does function as that, but I and others wanted to step away from the meta where losing an army was a massive loss that potentially ruined your chances of winning the game - make a game where losing things wasn't as big a deal, and clever plays could make up the gap more easily. It's not perfect, but Magic Explodes actually does this to some degree. It took a greater amount of changes than I had thought, or anyone did
really, but the meta is definitively changed.