Dominion 3 Strategy & Questions

[cthulhu]

Thanks, that's pretty decent.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Ha. Fireball, Numbness, and Blindness are all reasonably cool spells.

Here's the game folder if anyone wants to see the battle (folder title is "kingslayer", I don't know what the income and site frequency sliders are at since I didn't set up the game.):
http://www.mediafire.com/?nxl8p7l8x5lku9o

It is now Turn 24, and I'm storming Pangaea's capital after a short siege.

[Username17]

You can check the game settings at any time by hitting the escape key and clicking on "view game settings"

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

Useful, thank you. I'll mention that next time I see the others, and we won't have to take the game settings on faith anymore.

[cthulhu]

So Bandar Log....

Monkeys are awesome, but how are you actually supposed to play with these guys?

[Grek]

Use your sacreds, the monkies are arrow catchers.

[Username17]

So Bandar Log....

Monkeys are awesome, but how are you actually supposed to play with these guys?

OK, you grab an Earth 9Bless and possibly a bit of Nature. Your front line in pretty much every battle is White Ones. Blessed they are protected like Platemail and hit like greatsworders while still keeping up high skills and low encumbrance.

And the second line is a mixed bag of monkey archers of various kinds. Remember that Bandar Infantry actually throw rocks hard and far enough that they count as an archery unit for you to put right behind the White Ones.

You invest heavily in Conjuration. At first only your prophet can cast mass bless, but you can summon decent priests. You Clam, hard. You get a lot of Astral Pearls. You make a lot of Gandharvas. And late in the game you summon your national Super Combatants in preference to whatever crap non-monkey factions can make.

If you want to get into Blood, you can. You can actually summon Blood Hunters for Blood Slaves, which is a nice pyramid scheme if you put Blood 4 on your god. But mostly you're swinging around Sacred troops with medium to heavy armor that you layer an Earth 9 bless on so that they turn into heavy to super heavy troops with low encumbrance. And you have inaccurate but decent archery shooting over their heads.

You have an alternate line for early warfare/expansion in the elephants I think, but I usually don't care much.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

What about pretender design and scales?

I was looking at an Awake Rainbow with

T3/S1/H3/G1/L3/M1 D5

Air 3 Astral 3 Blood 4 Death 1 Earth 3 Fire 2 Nature 2 Water 2

Edit: Ninja'd by frank

[K]

You have an alternate line for early warfare/expansion in the elephants I think, but I usually don't care much.

Elephants makes good early expansion troops because you rarely lose them and unlike your White Ones they don't need a H3 Blesser to ensure they are all combat ready. They also kinda rock when you can make they ethereal.

Once you start contacting real resistance, they don't come into play until late in the game when making your whole army Lucky, Ironskinned, Beserking, Reliefed and possibly Mistformed is common. As Raiding Party parties they do fine too as they punch through most province defense.

[cthulhu]

What does a pretender look like for that? I'm forseeing scales with decent production anyway!

[Korwin]

Air 3 Astral 3 Blood 4 Death 1 Earth 3 Fire 2 Nature 2 Water 2

Can you give an reasoning behind your choices?

I see:
With an Water booster you can make clams or Contact Naiads to make clams.
You can make Blood Stones and Dwarfen Hammers.

What other Late Game plans do you have?

[cthulhu]

Not my work

Early in your single player Dominions career you will want to try making a Rainbow Pretender with the minimum paths necessary to make all the boosters. Here are the paths:

Air 3 Astral 3 Blood 2 Death 1 Earth 2 Fire 2 Nature 2 Water 1

Get your research up to construction 6 and forge items in the following order:

Forge Earth Boots (+1 Earth)

Forge Dwarven Hammer (no path increase but significant reduction in item costs)

Forge Starshine Skullcap (+1 Astral)

Forge Crystal Coin (+1 Astral)

Forge Ring of Sorcery (+1 Astral, Blood, Death, Nature)

Forge Ring of Wizardry (+1 to all paths)

The Ring of Wizardry gives you Air 4 to make Air boosters. The Ring of Sorcery and Ring of Wizardry give you Blood 4 to make Blood boosters. DO NOT equip the Armor of Twisting Thorns on your pretender because you cannot take it off. The Ring of Sorcery and Ring of Wizardry allow you to forge Death boosters with a Dwarven Hammer. Without them you have to forge the Skull Staff and Skullface without a hammer because the Skull Staff requires both hands. The combination of Fire and Death allow you to forge a Skull of Fire, and the Ring of Wizardry gets you to Fire 4 to make the Flame Helmet. After the Thistle Mace, you can make the Moonvine Bracelet and/or the Armor of Twisting Thorns, plus the Ring of Sorcery which gets you to Nature 5. The Water Bracelet and Ring of Wizardry allow you to forge the Robe of the Sea.

From here you can forge the Robe of the Magi by wearing the Winged Helmet, both rings, and a Blood Thorn. That gives you access to a huge list of spells and the ability to forge every artifact in the game as far as I know, since no artifacts have a path requirement higher than 6.

Playing vs the AI, so it's not ultra competitive. At the start that can search like a ninja.

[Zinegata]

Those are the minimum stats the Pretender needs to forge every item and artifact in the game. With the items, each path can be boosted to around level 6, letting the Pretender cast basically all possible rituals.

They also let you search for sites very efficiently with your Pretender early in the game.

I'm not sure about the Blood 4 though. Usually Blood 2 is enough. Probably to get the initial slave economy going?

Edit: Ninja'd.

[cthulhu]

Yeah blood 4 is because I'm playing bandar log so there are some bling summons linked to it.

[Akula]

If you go with a bless, an imprisoned Cyclops with E9 N4 Dom 7 and 3-4 net positive scales is possible. I'd go luck, and maybe take magic 3 if I can swing the points. You have a lot of cheap sacred researchers. Mix white ones and elephants while recruiting crappy mages for a few turns to get expansion going, prophetize scout and build a temple for indy priests at an early point. Research alteration if you want to rush someone or conjuration and a bit of construction if you want to turtle. You will want to get a N3 rishi out site searching early because you need the N to summon E and W which you will need to build up to get clams going. You get ~80 resources in your capital with neutral productivity and nothing conquered, which means an expansion party every 2 turns, productivity is a waste of points. You might want a fort to recruit nothing but your scouts because they are stealthy +50, which means you can park them on enemy forts and capitals without much chance at discovery. Plus you might want Atavi commanders to lead stealth archer squads, you can manage wind guide and destruction with moderate research and if a bunch of archers decloak at a critical moment.

Luck gives three things 1) Spike income, which you can turn into your very cheap nation archers if nothing else. 2) Gems, which you will use to recruit your army in the midgame. 3) Safety from random events which might flatten your PD. You don't need order because you don't need all that much gold per fort, you are looking at about 500 for your cap on most turns and maybe 280 for any non capital fort. Sometimes you will spend more gold on archers or bandar, but you will mostly get those when you need them and not have the upkeep.

[Korwin]

Not my work

Early in your single player Dominions career you will want to try making a Rainbow Pretender with the minimum paths necessary to make all the boosters. Here are the paths:

I even red that on the Wiki...

[K]

The only problem with Luck is that it caps out at three good events. So for large empires it can suck.

Luck also brings a chance for national heroes which can be a huge deal for some nations and crap for some. Sauromatia, for example, gets a pair of badass mages and a meh commander, while Lanka an astonishingly underwhelming H3 commander and a B3 Commander.

[Avoraciopoctules]

The game I posted about earlier is still going. Around year 4-5 now. I've taken most of the map, including both AI capitals, and am now leading in everything but research. This seems like a decent point to start experimenting with SCs, since I have gems to burn. I got to artifacts first, and this has resulted in the following:



I should note that most of the HP comes from being a prophet in friendly dominion. Any suggestions for spell/gear/other choices I should make to improve this guy? I'm playing against Man, and he has some pretty decent knight armies.

[Username17]

He tramples, so you're never going to use that poison blade. Since he's going to be on murdering peasants duty, you'd seriously rather have a main gauche of parrying. The offensive characteristics of a weapon are basically meaningless on a trampler (unless you intend to get into a head to head with a titan).

A better layout would be a Lucky Shortsword and a Lead Shield.

Every battle he's going to cast invulnerability, mistform, and fireshield and then attack.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

Thanks for the feedback. The main reason I picked up the poison weapon was that it gave poison immunity, and Man has nature mages. But defense sounds just as delicious. Does item-based immunity compensate for the poison weakness caused by casting Invulnerability (I'd forgotten about that spell. I was considering an E/A Staff of Elements for the stone skin before now)?

What are the crafting requirements for a Lead Shield? I haven't seen one available yet, but I could probably shuffle boosters around if I just need to enhance an existing path.

[Akula]

Or go with a Lead/Crystal Shield+Charcoal Shield and for fuck's sake, take away The Chalice and give him either a reinvigoration item, or a regeneration one.

Script would be, Invulnerability, Mistform, Summon Earthpower, Personal Luck, Attack X, Cast spells. He should vomit close range spells into the enemy until they die. As long as you are raiding, this should work. The idea is to get enough reinvigoration to allow him to blow up lots of dudes before one gets lucky and damages him.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I just switched some boosters around. I can forge Unquenched. Al Khazim is immune to fire. The sword casts Heat from Hell and is usable with a shield. However, it has a Berserk modifier. Does this mean I won't be able to do 3 rounds of buffing? Is it worth using?

[cthulhu]

Dominions 3 Strategy, looking at a pretender design advice:

Game settings!

CBM 1.6 + End game diversity (I know it's bad, I don't get choices)
Aran map (the same one used in Somethingawful's big LP game, 96 land + 11 contigious sea)
Early Age
Magic site frequency is slightly reduced (35)
15 Hall of Fame
Scores are OFF
Renaming is ON

My race: Hinnom!

Other dudes: NiefelBurger, Caelum Atlantis, 3 others TBA

Contemplation reveals that low magic site frequency and no gem gens is going to make blood magic super OP.

So I was thinking a pretender something like:

Fountain of Blood B7 Imprisoned: Dominion 9

Order 3
Production 3
Heat 3
Luck 3
Growth 3
Magic 1

The other option is the Bless, something like:

Lord of plenty (4 gems a turn) imprisoned:

E 9 N 6 D 1

O3 P0 H3 G2 L-2 M1

[Username17]

Well, traditionally people take some ind of bless god with Hinnom. But you know what? Fuck it. In CBM, blood magic is ricockulous. It costs 2 blood slaves to field a fiend of darkness. Your capitol makes that at the start of the game!. Consider grabbing an awake rainbow. CBM really masturbates to those for some reason. Your mission is to race for Blood 1 so that your Melquart can start replacing your army with fucking spine fiends, and your pretender can start making Bone Fiends. You can have a quite sizable army of demons before turn 8.

Yeah, you should have an army of Avvim, I guess. But basically your capitol is mostly going to be producing Kohens so that you can blood hunt and increase the rate at which you make bullshit standard demons. You want to get to Construction 4 pretty fast so that you can make Blood Boosters so that your Kohens can start cranking out Devils for 3 slaves a piece. But that takes a second place to getting yourself to Blood 4 so that your Kohens can make 2 Serpent Fiends for 5 slaves.

CBM is nuts when it comes to low level summoning. There really isn't a lot people can do against the Bone Fiend rush.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

So something like a

Great Sage

F4/S4/B4

Dom 6

Order 3 Prod 0 Heat 3 Growth 2 Mis 2 Magic 1

Testing out how this works:

How do you command the bone fiends? Or... you just don't make to many due to the lack of a decent undead commander and focus on the conventional demons?