Dominion 3 Strategy & Questions

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 11:58 pm

They take a thug pretender. Seriously, you're talking about running at least 6 negative scales on a nation which doesn't need a major bless. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to get an awake god to step on people. You have access to freakin gorgons and Great Mothers, and enough Nature income to forge a turn 1 Hide Shield. Or you could use a dragon if you want another path.

With sloth AND a sleeping god, you're limited to expanding with lo-resource troops. If you got luck with gold event you could mass centaur longbowmen I guess, but without +gold events you couldn't make enough. Probably the best thing you could do would be to mass naked minotaurs, but I have no idea how effective that actually is.

Seriously though expand with your freakin god or take scales that don't cut your starting gold and resources in half.

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Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Jun 15, 2012 1:10 am

I've seen some pretty formidable bless rushes with sacred centaurs before. With the negative scales being talked about here, Pangaea could probably afford to spend points on getting magic diversity and better combat stats for their sacreds. A half-doxen well-blessed White Centaurs can take out most typical indie provinces.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Jun 15, 2012 3:00 am

Orion wrote:They take a thug pretender.

Frank did his thing with a Freak Lord for Blood 4 and site-search. Just sayin'.

tenuki · Post by **tenuki** » Fri Jun 15, 2012 2:50 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:How does MA Pangaea (with full Turmoil/Sloth) expand in the early game without a thug pretender?

Revelers are pretty hot. Hire some harpies for patrol duty and tax your cap at 200%. It's not a huge problem with growth-3.

However, your expansion will be a lot slower than it could be, and on a small map you're likely to get rushed unless your neighbors are idiots.

K · Post by K » Sat Jun 16, 2012 6:50 pm

tenuki wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:How does MA Pangaea (with full Turmoil/Sloth) expand in the early game without a thug pretender?
Revelers are pretty hot. Hire some harpies for patrol duty and tax your cap at 200%. It's not a huge problem with growth-3.

However, your expansion will be a lot slower than it could be, and on a small map you're likely to get rushed unless your neighbors are idiots.

Freespawn maenads are not to be discounted. I mean, you might lose 30-40 for every province you take, but you don't actually care because you produce huge amounts.

tenuki · Post by **tenuki** » Mon Jun 18, 2012 1:19 am

K wrote: Freespawn maenads are not to be discounted. I mean, you might lose 30-40 for every province you take, but you don't actually care because you produce huge amounts.

Even with turmoil-3, generating 30-40 maenads/turn requires about 4-5 Pans. That's 1400 or 1750 gold and 4-5 turns of recruiting. I haven't found a way yet to integrate these requirements into an early expansion strategy.

But yes, maenad freespawn is awesome. Since Pans are so expensive, the ideal way to use that would be to maximize income while still keeping turmoil-3. If I were to play MA Pan now, I'd probably take scales like T3 P3 H0 G3 L3 M1 and huge dominion (cheap temples!) with a dormant Fountain of Blood. P3 allows you to rely on those very good high-resource troops that Pangaea has access to for a fast and cheap (in terms of gold) early expansion.

In CBM the above scales simply rock. In vanilla the FoB gives you early access to Blood Stones and you get 25 extra build points to play with.

koz · Post by **koz** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 12:10 pm

Any tips/advice on EA Atlantis?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 1:03 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:Any tips/advice on EA Atlantis?

The bad is: you're not very good. The good is: you're an underwater faction in the early era, which means that you are sharing the water with EA Rlyeh and EA Oceania - and those guys bllllooooowwwww. So conquest of the seas should be a snap for you, and depending on the map you're on, that could be a seriously big deal.

Basalt Kings have a severe case of costing 500 gold and not being Niefel Jarls, but they do buff up pretty admirably (every one of them can cast Quickness, Fire Shield, and Invulnerbaility). Your Living Pillars are basically a prank, in that they don't wear helmets and have an encumbrance of 10. Just in general, your sacred stuff is impressive looking, but basically pretty worthless. You will do most of your fighting with Coral Guard. Your mages are expensive and don't actually have that much magic diversity and downright shitty research value.

Deep Ones have the MR of animals and don't wear pants, so they are super easy to murderate. About the only redeeming quality is that between high hit points and modest energy resistances they make good screening troops for enemy mages. Almost all of the heavy lifting is going to be done by Reef Dwellers and Coral Guard. They poison enemy cavalry and are personally tough for their cost. They need a lot of resources though, so you're going to need to be a productivity power.

Your god options are a blight upon the earth and waves, and there is nothing particularly good or helpful there. Fortunately your priests are a snare and a delusion and so are your sacred troops, so you don't really give a fuck about your bless (you'll end up thugging out some Kings of the Deep in the late game, but the bonuses they get from being blessed aren't super critical compared to their other spells). You get pretty good access to WEF and incredibly shit access to S (just enough to search for sites essentially). So you could do worse than to have a Lich with some Death and Astral and/or Nature to round things out. Most of your god options are Water, and you absolutely do not give a fuck about those things. You need productivity and magic, so you'll probably want a god who is not that impressive magically and doesn't show up on time.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sat Jul 07, 2012 5:24 pm

I've been thinking of how to maximize conflict in a Dominions game and prevent turtling. How about this:

Every turn you get one point for every province you own. This increases to two points at turn 10 and beyond, three at 20, four at 30, etc.

Winner is whoever has the most points at 60.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 9:49 am

The points have to be public though, otherwise it's easy for folks to run away with the game by being the "grey man" (the one not noticed).

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 10:33 am

Sort of like cummulative VP's? Only for every province one VP?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 11:25 am

You could set the number of VP provinces to be equal to the number of provinces. And then do cumulative VP with a very large number of required vps to win.

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 12:52 pm

Could people run up VP totals by 'trading' a province back and forth? Like in RISK where you must conquer a territory each turn for a RISK card, people often invade a country than choose to defend it minimally so both sides can get a RISK card, even if they're not on the offensive anywhere else.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jul 11, 2012 12:58 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:Could people run up VP totals by 'trading' a province back and forth? Like in RISK where you must conquer a territory each turn for a RISK card, people often invade a country than choose to defend it minimally so both sides can get a RISK card, even if they're not on the offensive anywhere else.

No. Cumulative VP totals are based on the total number of counted provinces owned by each player at the beginning of each turn. Since everyone takes turns simultaneously, it is not possible to get more than one point out of a province each turn.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Wed Jul 18, 2012 9:36 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:You could set the number of VP provinces to be equal to the number of provinces. And then do cumulative VP with a very large number of required vps to win.

-Username17

I was thinking that just adding up provinces each turn will lead to some people getting a huge lead and then the other players basically giving up on victory.

People need more incentive to attack in the late-game and not less.

The only problem is that the early game is disincentivized. Not sure what to do with that.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:26 pm

Sidenote: the Deep Ones for EA atlantis have magic weapons and darkvison, which slightly compensates for their MR and pantslessness if you cast darkness every fight.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:31 pm

name_here wrote:Sidenote: the Deep Ones for EA atlantis have magic weapons and darkvison, which slightly compensates for their MR and pantslessness if you cast darkness every fight.

Kind of a rough plan, what with their exactly zero native Death magic.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:43 pm

Yeah, but there's a W4D1 spell that summons water/death casters, so it's easily in empowerment reach.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 1:07 am

K wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:You could set the number of VP provinces to be equal to the number of provinces. And then do cumulative VP with a very large number of required vps to win.

-Username17
I was thinking that just adding up provinces each turn will lead to some people getting a huge lead and then the other players basically giving up on victory.

People need more incentive to attack in the late-game and not less.

The only problem is that the early game is disincentivized. Not sure what to do with that.

Realistically, I'd imagine that people would want to avoid conflicts while they still have indies to kill, but would not sit there behind NAPs researching their endgame strategies once they're done killing - the people with less provinces would probably go on the offensive immediately to stay within striking distance of the leaders.

One of the nice side-effects is that there wouldn't really be an incentive to pound on a small nation - thus making it easier for them to get back into the game. In fact, what would likely happen is a grand-alliance of the smaller nations to cut down the bigger one to size.

And of course, by the late game there'd be near constant warfare as the leader tries to survive long enough to get to the goal, while the others desperately try to kill him beforehand - after all, once he's dead, he can't get that final point. But at the same time you don't want the others to win either...

Anyway I threw together a few scenarios in Excel - I'd say that you'd want something like

(number of province)^2 / number of players

points for victory.

Soyweiser · Post by **Soyweiser** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:50 am

Due to MrSinister pointing out this board again, I visited here. (Don't worry, I will not stay and spread my CBM loving filth all over your vanilla pancake

).

I wanted to point out two things, the first, the release (well, upgrade) of Momfreeks item/spell/unit browser: https://dom3-mod-inspector.googlecode.c ... index.html The glorious Mod Inspector! (It also works with various mods, more information here: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... wtopic=886 ). Use it, it works! Go thank Momfreek. (Who made this, even after a rather violent flame war

).

I also wanted to point out Raiel(coder, gamer, IRC'er and all round nice guy)'s project Legacy of the Last Refuge, he is running a kickstarter here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/214 ... -old-schoo and tbh, it isn't going all that great. But I know how much he loves the project, and how motivated he is to make it work. So, spread the word. Any comments regarding this game can be posted here: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... wtopic=858 or on irc (#dominions irc.gamesurge.net). I hope posting this isn't bad form. But I could not find anything in the rules that forbade this (And tbh, as some of you might know Raiel, I thought this was the best place to post it).

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:53 pm

Soyweiser wrote:Due to MrSinister pointing out this board again, I visited here. (Don't worry, I will not stay and spread my CBM loving filth all over your vanilla pancake ).

I wanted to point out two things, the first, the release (well, upgrade) of Momfreeks item/spell/unit browser: https://dom3-mod-inspector.googlecode.c ... index.html The glorious Mod Inspector! (It also works with various mods, more information here: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... wtopic=886 ). Use it, it works! Go thank Momfreek. (Who made this, even after a rather violent flame war ).

That is so nice. I've been neutered since the wiki went down.

Soyweiser · Post by **Soyweiser** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:55 pm

Zinegata wrote: That is so nice. I've been neutered since the wiki went down.

... it has been up again for quite some time.

koz · Post by **koz** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 7:36 pm

*casts Raise Dead on thread*

I would appreciate general play advice on MA Pangaea. More specifically:

- Pretender design. I'm not sure exactly what Pan needs scales-wise, and whether the Gorgon is worth it.
- Are the armoured things worth taking Productivity for?
- Are hordes upon hordes of Maenads an actually viable strategy in MA?

Any and all help is, as always, greatly appreciated.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 9:10 pm

Gorgons and Great Mothers are pimp. For magic take nature to at least 4 and death 2, and earth 2. Scales should be either Turmoil 3, Heat/Cold 1~2, Growth 3, and Luck 1~2 supporting a maenid freespawn supported by nature magic and undead strategy or Order and Growth (though I'd still have luck 1 because FUCK Misfortune) for buying national troops like trampling minotaurs with great axes and lancer/archer centaurs for actual gold, supported by nature magic and undead.

You can totally build actual units for actual gold as a valid life choice, but the scales for doing so precludes you from generating sufficient quantities of freespawn with your Pans for maenid spawn to be a viable strategy; you're trading hundreds deep rows of raging chaff for expensive armored tramplers.

Individually maenids blow: your armies are basically a bunch of naked, screaming, fan-girls. However, Pangea is a Nature powerhaus, and your end game is thousands deep beserkering chaff boosted by nature's full army buffs. And yeah, unbuffed they die like screaming, naked fan-girls, but your Pan stack automatically replenishes maenid troops in the field. It's a good thing.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 10:53 pm

Carrion Woods will get you a lot of freespawn, but you'll want a decent growth. You'll also steadily lose gold income due to population loss.

That can be at cross purposes with a blood strategy, plus it can be fairly intensive in terms of Nature gem expenditure, especially if you try and suppliment your reanimation plan with Carrion Ladies or Lords.

Combined with a high dominion, stealth can be an advantage, though I have a hard time utilising a stealth army. I have had some minor success with squads Revelers camping just over my borders, just to make it slightly easier for a squad of White Centaurs to avoid patrollers and start raiding, but to be honest that success was fairly limited and I have yet to win a game by heavily leveraging stealth armies (as opposed to stealthy thugs).

That only works due to hostile dominion increasing unrest slightly, Revelers increasing it further and patrolling being penalized for unrest.

Blesses depend on whether you really want to push White Centaurs. An Earth/Nature bless does not contribute to your diversity, but massed WC can dominate.

Otherwise, you may be better off just utlising a minor bless in order to get decent Productivity scales. Your Minotaurs have a limited Shelf life, but in numbers will dominate human sized enemies. Berserk makes them less likely to rout, which is good because you will suffer plenty of losses. Catyphract are also great, and I find that you will only need 5 or so to clear an average indie province during expansion (militia, light infantry). For tougher indies I usually set them to attack archers/rear while minotaur deal with the front line.

The short of it is you'll need a decent income in order to set up a maenad factory (Pans are expensive, extra forts + more Pans add up quickly). Productivity in order to leverage big numbers of War Minotaurs or Catyphracts. Death/nature + fast research in order to leverage carrion summons. High paths and decent dominion to turn your massed WC into shock troops. Not to mention you have access to SC pretenders.

You can try and cram all of that into one package, but you'll probably have to sacrifice base Dominion, an active pretender and some of your scales in order to do so, not to mention the opportunity costs to actually bring each of these things about during a game.

You would be better off picking at most couple of aspect you want to maximise, such as their Heavy troops and Maenads, or Carrion Woods leading into a Tart factory, in order to prevent a massive deficiencies in building your Mid and Late game.