Battlefield conditions

Weather, darkness, terrain, water and caves in battle, and the late-battle schedule, as the manual states them, with the gaps listed.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake7 min read

A fight is shaped by where and when it happens as well as by who is in it. This page gathers what the Dominions 6 manual says about the setting of a battle: the weather, darkness, terrain and obstacles, water, caves, and the schedule a long battle follows.

Everything here is Illwinter’s own statement of the rules, except where a sentence carries a Measured mark: those are our own counts over logged battles, and each mark opens to show how we know. The manual is also short on this subject, so the last section lists what it leaves unsaid, and we do not fill those gaps with guesses.

For the fight itself, see Combat. For how routs work, see Morale and rout. For the three weapon types, see Damage types. For moving on the strategic map, see Map movement.

Weather

A land battle is usually fought under clear skies in daylight. It can instead be rainy or snowy, at random, except in a wasteland or a cave, where there is no weather.

Each kind has a condition and a chance, both set by the province’s scales:

• snow needs a cold scale of at least 1, and its chance is 15 percent times the cold scale;
• rain needs a heat scale of at least 0, and its chance is 10 percent plus 10 percent times the growth scale.

Global enchantments can change the weather in several ways. Assassination battles are a special case: they are often fought indoors, where there is no weather, and they happen at night about half the time. An assassination fought outdoors uses the same rain and snow chances as any other battle.

What weather does

The manual gives one direct effect of weather: rain adds 100 percent to the chance that a burning unit puts itself out (see the next section). It says nothing about rain or snow changing missile accuracy, range, or the movement of flying units, and we do not claim any. Weather spells appear in the manual’s spell tables only as whole-battlefield effects.

Fire and cold in battle

Two afflictions depend on the province’s scales and on the weather.

A burning unit keeps taking damage until the flames die. Each round its chance of putting them out is built from these parts:

• a base of 25 percent;
• the unit’s fire resistance, added;
• 5 for every point of the province’s cold scale, so a hot province (negative cold) lowers the chance;
• another 100 percent while it rains.

No matter what, the chance never drops below 1 percent. Units with fire resistance of 10 or more, a chill aura, mistform or ethereal bodies cannot catch fire at all.

A frozen unit suffers additional fatigue every turn until it thaws. Its chance to thaw each round mirrors the fire formula: 25 percent, plus its cold resistance, plus 5 per point of heat scale, never below 1 percent. A cold province therefore keeps units frozen longer. Cold resistance of 10 or more, a heat aura or an ethereal body means a unit cannot freeze.

The manual also says heat and chill auras grow with the matching scale and shrink with the opposite one. A heat aura covers three squares by default.

Darkness

Darkness lowers a unit’s attack, defence and precision. For ordinary units the manual gives three levels:

• night, a penalty of 3;
• Utterdark, 6;
• blindness, 9.

A unit with darkvision loses less than that, in proportion to its level, but the ability is useless once the unit is blinded. The global enchantment Utterdark puts every battle under the six-point penalty. It spares demons and blind beings, and so does having spirit sight or perfect darkvision.

Sun Awe, a variety of Awe, is switched off underground and whenever the battle is dark. See Morale and rout for what Awe does.

Terrain on the battlefield

Dominions 6 scatters bushes, rocks and other obstacles over the battlefield. Each has its own stats, and area attacks nearby can damage it. Large monsters can crush obstacles in their way; smaller units have to go around them.

The manual lists no combat bonus or penalty for fighting in a forest, in swamp or on a mountain. Those terrains matter in the manual for movement on the strategic map: survival abilities (forest, swamp, wasteland, mountain) cut the cost of crossing the matching terrain. A unit with an appropriate survival skill also has an even chance of escaping starvation altogether and a further even chance of avoiding the disease it can bring. In the same spirit, the manual says the disease of the C’tis dominion spares those with swamp survival. For crossing terrain, see Map movement.

Fighting underwater

Units can only enter an underwater province if they are amphibious or aquatic. Poor amphibians are counted among the amphibians for entering, but the manual says they differ in combat and does not say how.

Underwater, slashing and blunt weapons take an attack penalty equal to their length, while piercing weapons do not. Flails take an extra penalty. The exact rules, including weapons with two damage types, are on Damage types and are not repeated here.

Two more underwater rules appear in the manual. The chance that a profuse bleeding stops each round is halved. And a spell’s table entry can carry a flag: NUW means it cannot be cast underwater, UW that it can only be cast underwater. Many battle enchantments, such as Rain, Storm, Darkness and Twilight, are marked NUW.

Caves

Caves are one of the places with no weather. They are also outside the seasons: the manual says cave provinces, like outer planes, are not made warmer in summer or colder in winter. Fliers pay a higher map movement cost in caves than elsewhere, and the survival abilities that help in caves are matched to the cave kind: forest survival in fungus caves, mountain survival in crystal caves, swamp survival in drip caves.

As noted, Sun Awe fails underground. The manual does not say that caves are dark in the sense of the darkness penalties above, so we do not state it as a rule.

How long a battle can last

If a battle drags on, the sun sets. The manual sets out a schedule by battle turn:

• 100, Twilight: enchantments, temporary magic effects and berserking all stop, and berserk cannot start again. The Twilight effect also applies, which is a 2 point precision penalty and a 1 point boost to Glamour magic;
• 150, Nightfall: the attacking units rout, and everyone is under the darkness effect, a 3 point penalty to attack, defence and precision. In a battle that was already at night, daylight returns instead, as a Daybreak;
• 170: the defending units rout;
• 200: any units still on the field are killed.

Our counts over logged battles place the first two lines where the manual says. Twilight: Measured · n=4,210 Nightfall: Measured · n=4,025 The counts say nothing about the later steps.

Mindless units cannot rout, so at the rout steps they dissolve instead. What a routed unit does is covered in Morale and rout.

What this page does not cover

The manual does not say how rain, snow or storms change missile fire or flying units. It gives no combat figures for forest, swamp, mountains or caves. It does not describe the underwater penalty of a poor amphibian. It does not describe what individual weather spells do beyond naming them as battlefield-wide. We have not tested any of these, and nothing here claims a number for them.