Dominions 3: Noob tips?

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 6:59 am

What do you mean by anti-thematic?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 8:39 am

"Your nation is known for X, Y, and Z. To have the optimal pretender, you shouldn't pick any of those." Instead of picking a pretender who plays on the nation's strengths, you're building a pretender who fills in the gaps in those strengths. I would rather my water nation have water pretenders, as opposed to using my pretender to pick up the earth my nation might be missing in order to grab dwarven hammers.

The game strongly rewards diversity with access to more spells, but has very little reward for focus, since having one character who can cast at X9 isn't especially more useful than having two (until one dies, but presumably you aren't risking very many X9 mages).

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 9:01 am

Not necessarily. Some nations - particularly blood nations - can pretty much just rely on one sort of magic and just run away with it.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 9:38 am

Right now, I tend to rainbow into 3-4 paths, but make 1-2 of the paths my nation's themes and let the rest cover strategies I want to try. Maybe it's not optimal, but it's close enough and it helps me sleep at night.

gp1628 · Post by **gp1628** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 1:04 pm

I like to play thematic also. More RPG then Strategy.

Some nations (for some strange reason) have national spells that only they get, but they dont get mages with the ability to cast them. In those cases taking a fill-in pretender is very thematic. Or sometimes I will take some borderline pretender body and make it thematic (like Ghost King as "Honorable Ancestor") because I know he will fill a missing niche.

But in general I do prefer thematic whenever possible over some spreadsheet answer of best choice for a win. Particularly I like playing with the pretenders that are not on the "everyone gets these" list but specific to only certain nations

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 1:43 pm

There are breakpoints in magic. Also, most magic doesn't do you much good unless you have gems to power it, and you normally need mages of that type to search for those gems.

If you have an Air nation, but you only do Air 3 or less, having Air 4 on your god is a really good deal. Because then you can have the god make the Air 4 boosters and hand them to your normal casters and get stuff off the ground. Similarly if you are a blood nation that doesn't do Blood 4 or an Astral Nation that doesn't do Astral 3 (or does Astral 3 but doesn't do Astral2/Earth2).

Cross posting into Water can be workable if you also have Nature or Death, because then you can summon water mages with the water gems your god finds. Cross posting into Fire is pretty much worthless because you can't.

For MA Marignon, for example, the standard god types include an Earth/Air god (to use the Earth and Air gems the Grand Masters come up with but can't really use), a Water/Nature god (to make Nymphs to make Clams for you), and a giant Astral/Fire god (to actually cast the high end Angel summonings that are on your list but outside the range of your Grand Masters to cast). But you wouldn't make a Blood god, because you'd need the god to do all their own blood hunting and your capital damages vampires anyway.

-Username17

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 2:13 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Similarly if you are a blood nation that doesn't do Blood 4

Somewhat less so, though, since blood is so much easier to boost (based on other foruming and my own SP games + theorycraft) - blood hunting is able to be scaled up if you need it, so you empower a single mage to Blood 4.

I have no actual practical experience boosting up a Blood nation in multiplayer, so I may be wrong about this being plausible there (Abysia isn't exactly hurting for Blood 4 mages

).

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Jun 22, 2011 10:57 pm

Don't forget that Defense, Missile, and Assault are the best way to categorize most units in the game.

They are Rock, Paper, Scissors, respectively. Organizing basic troops is a rather important skill, and knowing how all units break down into one of those three is important.

All nations have all three in some manner; but you can usually get by with two out of the three. I highly discourage making armies of just one type of unit, as they will often get armies destroyed. Even a bunch of archers around which the army waits a while is better than sending a horde of dudes.

Really, it's not that hard, you figure out what role you're trying to fill; and you can generally find troops who can fill it. My last game had me controlling 18 nations so that I could give myself a crash course in overall strategies and tactics for the game as a whole, and hopefully find correlation with other content and material I've got. So far, The Art of War works out just fine.

SCs are on a "different" tier, but they're usually just super assault units.

Dealing with them is harder for most armies, and nations need anti-SC tactics geared to the SC in question. The "powerful" seeming spells that you can't really think of a good time you'd use are often good against SCs. Of course, just outproducing the enemy in SCs also works. You'll still have to watch out for things that might counter your super special units.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Jun 23, 2011 2:23 am

The main advantage of covering all types of magic is that you can more or less search for all types of gems in your territory and use them all. As opposed to just getting only Air sites if your nation only has Air.

But in the long run, gem production can be augmented by gem generation or by Blood magic. If you have either, you don't really need to worry about not finding and utilizing all sites in your territory. Abysia for instance was fine just living with its native casters - get a ton of blood income going, augment with blood stones for earth income, and you can have a very nasty end game.

Or you can simply try and rush to get top tier in one type of magic, and then try to end the game earlier.

K · Post by K » Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:06 am

Blood is also the only path anyone can get into by turn 40 if you start on turn 2 or 3. You get like 20 scouts, make them blood hunt and you'll net maybe 2-4 blood slaves a turn and that costs 400 gold.

It takes forever, but it's a way to get into something your nation doesn't do.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Jun 24, 2011 3:56 am

Or (in MP) you can trade for your first 50 slaves and empower someone to Blood 1. Having one level of blood magic helps a lot when blood hunting.

Generally speaking though, unless you have native blood casters (i.e Abysia, Mictlan) it's probably best not to invest too many resources into blood. Get some blood to have nice supplemental spells (i.e. send some Tartarians to hell) or maybe a few good summons (i.e. a vampire swarm). But if you try to play like a blood nation the real blood nations will simply outproduce you.

Also, folks with decent Nature can break into Blood by casting Lamia Queen. For a nation with Nature, it's best to wait until you have a Lamia Queen with blood before starting your blood hunting.

K · Post by K » Fri Jun 24, 2011 4:26 am

Zinegata wrote:Generally speaking though, unless you have native blood casters (i.e Abysia, Mictlan) it's probably best not to invest too many resources into blood. Get some blood to have nice supplemental spells (i.e. send some Tartarians to hell) or maybe a few good summons (i.e. a vampire swarm). But if you try to play like a blood nation the real blood nations will simply outproduce you.

Several nations are "hidden" blood nations. MA Mictlan and MA Bandar Log mostly, but there are a few more with various levels of ability. They get no Blood casters but they get easy and/or cheap Blood caster summons or have some other Blood advantage like sacrificing. I'm in a game right now with a vast demon army as MA Mictlan because I also found a site that reduces Blood ritual costs by 80%.

The trick to getting a blood economy rolling is to generally having the rest of your economy rolling. I mean, you can empower a D1 caster and slap enough crap on him to start summoning vampires and that starts an economy a lot faster than blowing 50 slaves for a B1. Of course, this assumes your research is good and you have enough research to afford a diversion into seven levels of path you won't be good at for some time.

Mostly, I bootstrap into Blood for Bloodstones if I am playing a non-Blood nation. Those things are awesome.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Jun 24, 2011 5:45 am

K wrote:Mostly, I bootstrap into Blood for Bloodstones if I am playing a non-Blood nation. Those things are awesome.

Indeed they are. Getting an Earth booster and an earth gem is very, very good for the price.

I'll also add one more thing about blood: Having good patrollers also mitigates the cost of blood somewhat. The main thing you lose when blood-hunting is income, due to the unrest generated and population lost in the blood-hunted province. Folks like LA Man with Judges, or MA TC with Eunuchs, could potentially patrol the unrest away and give you back your money.

It's not as awesome as having a cheap summon that has blood magic, but it does help get your blood economy rolling without affecting your regular economy very much.

Finally, one last thing about the rainbow vs singular approach since K mentioned an 80% discount site...

One of the advantages of having access to all magic is that you can search for all the sites. Which in turn gives you a better chance of getting unique sites that produce special casters.

Now, indie casters get a bad rap because they're often just N1. But casters from sites are different matter entirely.

For instance, there's the Shadow Seer that comes with S3, and have etheral and stealthy too. There are four flavors of Wizards with up to 4 in a single elemental path and a research bonus. Or the High Magus with something like F2 E1 S2. These are seriously awesome mages that can break you into a whole new types of magic.

For instance, in my last game I was able to start forging Rune Smashers despite having no native Fire/Water mage. I was considering empowering one of my fire mages, but when I got a site that produces F2 +2FWAE mages, empowering became unnecessary. Not to mention I could now produce mages that could rain fire remotely.

While I would not recommend basing your strategy around the off-chance that you'll get one of these special sites, it's still a huge boon for you when you do get them.

gp1628 · Post by **gp1628** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:54 pm

THE PATCH/UPGRADE IS OUT
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/ ... _page.html

Dom3Minions server will be down for patching. LLamaServer is likely to patch also. Now is the time to patch your copies.

ALSO its on SALE. The biggest sale ever for Dominions 3. All the way down to $40

Altho you might also be able to tack another 10% discount on if you are university or american military

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 3:50 pm

Seems like a pretty minor patch this time around. Mostly additional modding commands.

-Username17

gp1628 · Post by **gp1628** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 3:53 pm

I think thats all it will be from now on. This one is all Server, Linux, Laptop, and mostly Modding. I think this reflects Illwinters focus on the new project (we dont know what it is other than it is NOT a Dom4). It appears that Dom3 attentions have shifted more toward "let them do it" than "hold them off because we still want to do it all"

Whether thats a good or a bad thing is a varied opinion

gp1628 · Post by **gp1628** » Mon Jun 27, 2011 7:52 pm

Dom3Minions.com is back up (knock on virtual wood) and all games are running ver 3.27.
If anyone wants to try a game check out the Hosted Games link, and if anyone wants to start a game check out the Hosting Games link