Dominion 3 Strategy & Questions

koz · Post by **koz** » Mon Dec 26, 2011 6:33 pm

Thanks for that. Another question - I have trouble casting a lot of ritual spells, which seem to have fatigue costs in the thousands. My mages refuse to cast them (as it would be fatal), but I'm not sure what to do about it. I've heard about communions, but near as I can tell, they can only be used in combat - what about for rituals?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 26, 2011 6:51 pm

Ritual spells don't actually cost fatigue. They cost gems. Every hundred fatigue is one gem. If your casters are in a lab, and they have sufficient paths to cast the spell, and you tell them to cast the spell in question, and they still aren't casting it - I suggest checking your gems. Because if the spell requires 10 gems and you have eight, they'll just balk.

-Username17

koz · Post by **koz** » Mon Dec 26, 2011 7:12 pm

Thanks Frank, that helped.

I remember that you said MA Man was good to learn with. What factions in EA and LA (as well as MA, I guess) are also (reasonably) newbie-friendly?

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Dec 26, 2011 7:43 pm

MA Marignon works pretty well. Their units are mostly high armor, high moral so they beat up indies well without any fancy tactics or magic support. Their mages come in two flavors: high level priests with a hint of fire who spam fatigue free divine spells, and fire/astral priests who stand in the back and gleefully ignite the battlefield and later voltron together using communions to seriously burninate the countryside/buff their troops. Eventually they can start summoning angels who make excellent thugs and help diversify your magic paths.

Normally I wouldn't recommend T'ien Ch'i as a beginner faction because they have access to almost every spell in the game as well as a diverse set of specialized troops. However, LA T'ien Ch'i trades out some of the super magic for awesome cavalry and superior province defense (PD), which makes them less overwhelming and more new-player friendly. I would recommend playing 3 or 4 short test games as them where you just focus on one aspect of the nation at a time and then later try and sew it all together.

You have the mixed army game: your troops include light, medium and heavy versions of guys with superior shields, guys with superior bows, guys with glaives, guys with spears, guys with pikes, mounted archers, heavy mounted archers, heavy cavalry and spirit-possessed super mounted archers. You can experiment with arrow screening, flanking attacks, hold-and-attack cavalry charges as well as mixing hard-hitting, shieldless troop formations around your tougher, road-block shield troops to achieve the desired "U" attack around an enemy infantry blob without losing too many shock troops in the process.

You have the bless strategy game: all of their mages are sacred and their cap-only sacreds are quite good, so you can turn your little old men into artillery pieces and your spirit cavalry into murder-machines.

You have the forging/thug game where you use your excellent site-searching and forging abilities to equip khans, banes and sleepers into army-stompers.

And finally you have the combined arms game where you have your little old men follow your armies around and cast force multipliers like Wind Guide, Strength of Giants, Mass Protection, Legions of Steel, etc., etc. to turn your rank-and-file recruits into elite combatants. Playing T'ien Ch'i makes you a better player and, unlike EA and MA T'ien Ch'i, you can always fall back on the fact that you have awesome horsemen when the task of scripting your mage-priests starts making your brain hurt.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 2:40 am

I'm going to be playing a 1v1 (plus AIs) game against a less-skilled player in Dom3 pretty soon, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to convince them to try a new nation by taking a handicap myself.

Thus, Independent Kingdom:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=46854

This mod nation is designed to use indie units pretty much exclusively. And not good indie units. Knights are cap-only soldiers, and your fancy cap-only mages are Enchantresses. There are some new pretender options, but they don't compare well to vanilla choices.

This nation is really weak. But trying to play it effectively might be quite interesting. Anybody have advice for how that might be possible? Particularly, what MA nations would make preferable enemies? I think this vs. MA Agartha might make for an interesting match.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 2:46 am

Mister_Sinister wrote:I remember that you said MA Man was good to learn with. What factions in EA and LA (as well as MA, I guess) are also (reasonably) newbie-friendly?

First of all, for most learning games, I would suggest to take a Rainbow Pretender like the one suggested in the Magic booster guide. Your objective will be to make her able to cast every ritual and forge every artifact at the end of the game so you can try it all out.

I'm a fan of EA Ermor as a teaching faction, not because it's powerful, but because it's a relatively "baseline" faction with decent national troops and decent mages. For your early expansion, you can rely almost entirely on your infantry army to beat up indies (just recruit Principes) without having to worry about cavalry and scripting too much. You can then transition to learning how to use simple battlefield magic (Augur Elders casting fireball) to doing communions and stuff (Augur Elders communing with Augurs to cast bigger spells).

Ermor gets weirder in MA though, and becomes a totally different faction in LA, so they're not ideal learning nations in later ages.

MA Man is similar, but the mages are a bit suckier and you won't be doing communions. MA Marignon is a very close analogue to EA Ermor - with communion fire mages later on, so it's a good choice.

But for my top MA learning pick, I'd actually recommend Vanheim. They have a unit (Skinshifters) that you can just rely on so you don't have to worry about army management too much. Plus, they have blood magic, so you can try out learning blood hunting and blood communions, plus their suite is mainly Air with a bit of Earth so you get to try something else.

For LA, TC is a good choice. If you've mastered the art of boosting, you can actually decide to not have a Rainbow Pretender for once since TC already comes with very diverse magic. Try out a bless Pretender to go with your relatively decent Ancestor Vessels and numerous sacred mages.

koz · Post by **koz** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 2:58 am

Av, would you be willing to include me in the teaching game? I'm willing to use a random faction if you think my lack-of-experience would make me too much competition.

Everyone else: Thanks for the advice, I'll give those a try.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 4:23 am

I would, but it's not going to start until the other guy gets back from vacation, which could be a while. I'd be willing to play a game with you if you want, though. PM me with with your settings / mod preferences.

If this is your first multiplayer game, I recommend Silent Seas or Aran as maps to minimize setup confusion, and no mods unless you want me to play Independent Kingdom.

koz · Post by **koz** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 5:50 am

PM sent.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 8:56 am

The basics of the game for the early part are mostly about scripting troops. To get better at that, I suggest playing a faction that has a lot of the kinds of troops. You won't get better at scripting while playing Niefelheim, because they make small numbers of thugs that "charge in and start killing people". You'll get better at scripting using factions that have armored infantry, fragile infantry, archers, cavalry, and mages who don't double as army slaying personal badasses. Hence my suggestion of starting with MA Man. In the Late Age, Man also works (though not quite as well because of their "everyone gets a crossbow" policy that distorts scripts), and I'll also agree with using LA Tien Chi.

The Early Era is just not a good learning platform. It has a lot of easy factions to play - Niefelheim, Abyssia, Hinnom and so on can pretty much just grab a Nature Cyclops, put him in prison, and start conquering the world with super sacreds. But you don't learn scripting subtleties doing that. Probably your best bets would be Ermor or Mictlan. The benefits of Ermor have been described by Zinegata, but basically you have elite spearmen with tower shields and javelins and you can learn about screening pretty well. Mictlan is harder, because you have no good shielded units and your terrifying jaguar warriors are arrow-bait. So you have to combine disposable screen troops with killer elite units who need blessings to achieve their potential. You also have just plain difficult dominion management to worry about. Both of those are good learning experiences I suppose, but they won't give you the indie troop primer the way Ma Man will.

After that, it's about learning spellcasting. That's... complicated. There are a lot of spells that are useful in a lot of weird circumstances. It's actually my number one complaint about CBM is that the author boosts all kinds of spells that are already incredibly powerful but kind of situational. Anyway, the absolute number one way to learn spell scripting and ritual magic is to play Early Era Tien Chi.

There's a Guide for it, which I wrote several patches ago, so a few things are different now. But it's a good place to start.

-Username17

koz · Post by **koz** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 8:59 am

Again, thanks Frank - your analyses are always helpful.

You and many others have mentioned the idea of 'scripting'. While I sorta get what this entails, there really don't seem to be many guides on the basic 'do's and don't's' of this. I'd like to learn more, because it seems like a useful thing to know, but I don't have enough experience to really understand if I'm doing the right things or not.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 10:27 am

Scripting is a little tricky. What is good for one situation may be disastrous for another. I suspect this is why people are advising you do a little experimentation with a range of unit types.

With units, scripting to their strengths is advantageous. For example, placing a squad of cavaly to one side and scripting them to attack archers can help minimise the damage they inflict to lightly armoured troops.

Melee units that possess a close ranged attack, such as a javelin, can be scripted to fire closest. They will throw their javelin, then once the enemy is close enough, or they have used all ammunition, they will engage in melee. This order tends to break up formations though, which has mixed benefits (easy for an opposing squad to pick off in melee, less casualties from AoEs).

Many low level buffs have a close (short) range. Sometimes it can pay to have them Hold and Attack in order for them to benefit from such spells. Depending on the opposition, such an order could make the unit a sitting target or allow them time to get powered up.

It gets even more complicated when scripting commander orders, especially spellcasting. The biggest bit of advice I can provide is to look at spell details like range, fatigue cost and gem cost. If the spell can't be cast for whatever reason, such as the target is too far away, the mage is too tired or the mage does not have the gems required to cast the spell, they will do something else.

As you gain more familiarity with what units are capable of, certain scripting options become more intuitive. The thing I enjoy about this game is the complexity and options available means there are always more tricks and increasingly sophisticated tactics to play around with.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 11:59 am

Mister_Sinister wrote:Again, thanks Frank - your analyses are always helpful.

You and many others have mentioned the idea of 'scripting'. While I sorta get what this entails, there really don't seem to be many guides on the basic 'do's and don't's' of this. I'd like to learn more, because it seems like a useful thing to know, but I don't have enough experience to really understand if I'm doing the right things or not.

There are generally two kinds of scripting - Army scripting (telling your troops how to behave), and spell scripting (casting a sequence of spells for big battlefield effects).

Army scripting can make a big difference in army vs army fights. It can be the difference between turning back an early Elephant rush or a short and exciting game. However, I will also note that it tends to lose its value later on. Positioning your cavalry properly for a lance charge becomes less important if the enemy can just set the battlefield on fire

.

I personally prefer to play nations with decently strong national troops (so I don't have to think about army scripting too much except for screening mages), so I can jump as quickly as possible to the magic-tossing part of the game.

However, some good basics are in this guide:

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Placement

With the general idea being you want a couple of kinds of formations, namely:

1) "Line Holders" - which is a big block of high-morale troops (who won't run away) whose job is to block the center and absorb the enemy's melee troops. You will generally always have at least one of these formations in your army unless you're aiming to do some mischief.

2) Flankers/Attack squads - which are highly skilled melee troops who try to take the enemy's main force by flank and cause casualties (cavalry is good at this, especially if they can wrap around and hit the main body from behind).

3) Archers - who shoot stuff from behind the main line and inflict casualties.

4) Various decoys - whose job is to absorb arrow/melee damage so that your Line Holders last longer without routing.

As an example, let me cite one of the battles I fought in a multiplayer game:

I was LA Man, and my opponent was Patala.

The Patalans had a huge elephant army, that would simply crush and trample any infantry the could reach. On top of that, they had regular infantry and archers to back the Elephants up too.

I was on the defensive. I had a large army of high-morale, well-armored soldiers (Tower Guards) supported by provincial defense militia.

If I simply allowed the Tower Guards and militia to mix together, the elephants would have simply trampled them both together.

So I changed my formation from the default. I placed the Tower Guards behind the militia, fully expecting the militia to get pasted (they were decoys). However, I hoped that munching through the militia would also exhaust the Elephants, since Elephant suffered fatigue whenever they trampled.

I also ordered the Tower Guards to hold their position and shoot (This is one of the weird things about LA Man's troops that Frank mentioned). So while the Elephants were off killing the militia, they would take heavy crossbow fire from my Tower Guards. I hoped that the exhaustion, combined with the casualties caused by crossbow fire, would cause the Elephants to panic and rout.

And it worked. The Elephants charged and overran the militia, killing almost all of them. But they were fatigued and suffered too many casualties, causing them to rout before they reached the Tower Guards. Better yet, the Elephants then trampled their own troops on the way to the rear, letting my Tower Guards to easily mop up the rest of the army.

We won the battle, and the war soon thereafter.

=====

Spell scripting is a different and just as complicated an art. At its simplest, you can just have all your caster spam Fireball, but you aren't going to be able to access the best and most powerful spells unless you do more complicated stuff. An end-game spellcasting script is a carefully choreographed sequence of events, with casters forming communions, boosting each other's spell power via other spells (i.e. Phoenix Power), and then casting huge spells with the aid of gems.

Get it wrong, and your mages will either do nothing (and most likely get killed), or do something really horrible that could cause them to wipe out their own army.

As a quick example, in my LA Man game I really, really wanted to cast Flaming Arrows.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Flaming_Arrows

But my most powerful Fire Mage was only Fire 1, whereas the spell needed Fire 4. I also didn't have access to Magic Boosters for Fire yet, as I only had Construction 4. So I did this:

1) I created a communion using the Slave Matrix item. I had my Fire 1 caster become a Master supported by two Slaves. This increased his Fire magic to 2.

2) The Fire mage then casted Phoenix Power. That increased his Fire Magic up to 3.

3) I then made sure the mage had several Fire gems. It takes one Gem to cast Flaming Arrows natively, but I gave him another one because the mage would automatically use any extra gems to increase his Fire magic by another level.

So the Fire Mage ate the extra gem, boosted himself to Fire 4, then finally cast Flaming arrows with the last gem.

4) Also, I had a different set of casters casting this:

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Wind_Guide

So my huge army of longbowmen were firing hyper-accurate magic arrows.

And that's one of the simpler mid-game spell scripts. Crazier stuff happens when you want to use stuff like Mass_Enslave...

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Tue Dec 27, 2011 1:05 pm

Communions can be problematic. A massive communion is difficult to pull off quickly, especially on the offensive. This can leave your mages vulnerable to some fairly nasty battle-wide spells. It is a great way to spread personal spells around though.

Soul Vortex + Pheonix Pyre, for example.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 2:04 am

That assumes your opponent has a caster powerful enough to do a battlefield mass-kill spell on his own though - and that's not really very common.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 3:49 am

I could get in on the game if Sinister doesn't mind. I've played a moderate amount of single-player and have a definite edge in army scripting, but have never played multiplayer save for subbing in to preside over T'ien Ch'i's inglorious downfall.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 4:28 am

If this is going to be a generic newbie game, I would like in. I played in the one game, and was generically terrible as Man. And haven't played any other multiplayer.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 4:46 am

Orion wrote:I could get in on the game if Sinister doesn't mind. I've played a moderate amount of single-player and have a definite edge in army scripting, but have never played multiplayer save for subbing in to preside over T'ien Ch'i's inglorious downfall.

Kaelik wrote:If this is going to be a generic newbie game, I would like in. I played in the one game, and was generically terrible as Man. And haven't played any other multiplayer.

Sorry, but the game with Mister_Sinister has already hit turn 23. However, I would totally be willing to host another game, maybe using Llamaserver if we are playing with more than 2 humans, as soon as this game is done with. Friday or Saturday might make good starting points, considering my current work schedule.

koz · Post by **koz** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 6:10 am

I'm game for another one. Out of academic interest, I'd like to either do EA Archo or Agartha, OR MA random.

Akula · Post by **Akula** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 7:54 am

Blood Hunting: I know this is almost 2 pages ago, but I am pretty sure that some of your blood hunt numbers are off K, the success rate is 40% per effective blood mage level iirc (effective blood magic level being blood level plus douse bonus). For most nations with recruit anywhere hunters the best option is to get construction 4 and hunt with cheap sacred b1s holding sanguine dousing rods. You can use three hunters like this sustainably (for the most part) with a 0% tax rate. MA abby is a notable exception because they only make warlocks and those guys always have blood 3 or better so you hunt them 2 or 3 to a province with no need for SDRs.

New Players: People have advised starting with a rainbow mage, this is a bad idea because magic is hard to use effectively in dom3. Managing the turns of a rainbow pretender takes a very concrete idea of what you are doing and what you need. Rainbows are the most difficult and complex pretenders to make use of, play around with them once you are comfortable with things like expanding (without mercs) and the balance of early research and site searching.

My advice on learning to play, start with a nation with strong access to an elemental path and take a dominion 10 awake wyrm. The wyrm is a solid pretender that is capable of soloing indies (stay away from knights, barbarians, and lizard people), he will ensure a steady expansion rate even if you make mistakes with your national troops. Get evo 4-5 and the AI is your oyster, they will never adapt to falling fires or thunderstrike spam, use the time to try summons, battlefield buffs, raiding parties, and thugs/supercombatants, get comfortable with the interface and the basics of placement. But most importantly, learn to deploy mages and make them effective, I think that MA Man in particular is an awful nation in this regard because they have really bad battle magic paths and their only reliable combat mage is slow, old, and frail.

Communions: I have very little experience with these, but mass kill effects are more common against death ball communions than Zinegata indicates. Even if players only have a few mages capable of generating the effect, if you bring a 50 man strong communion to a fight, those mages will magically show up. A linebacker communion is a workable tactic, but it is also a specialized one. You neither want nor need the mages in your army to all benefit from soul vortex and pheonix pyre, those are spells that only thugs and SCs need running on themselves.

Mister_Sinister wrote:I'm game for another one. Out of academic interest, I'd like to either do EA Archo or Agartha, OR MA random.

EA Agartha is awful as has been previously stated. If you really want to play them, the only advice I can offer is that you have sacred giants and they do okay with F4E9N4, you must take a strong dom and heat scales, and that getting conj 3-4 evo 4 and const 4 is where you start to actually do real stuff. Basically the bless makes you have a lot of meatshields and with conj and evo you can have your mages stand behind them and actually do thing or summon some dudes and make them provide damage, after that you get darkness ASAP and everyone gets to be as blind as you are, which is pretty nice. Don't try to make sacred giant SCs, it will end in tears. This strategy has critical weaknesses in that friendly fire will be a constant companion, while your giants work under that bless, most other bless units can do more with less, and you basically don't have gem gens unless you get lucky with the indy mages.

Arco is a lot better of a nation, brought down by the company that they generally have to keep in the EA. I can talk about strategy for them, but I would have to do some testing and it should have its own post really.

I would be up for some kind of newbie game. I have played in two multiplayer games and still consider myself new, though if others disagree with that assessment I'll withdraw my interest.

Winnah · Post by **Winnah** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:01 am

Akula wrote:You neither want nor need the mages in your army to all benefit from soul vortex and pheonix pyre, those are spells that only thugs and SCs need running on themselves.

Your average researcher, no. Vampire Lords or a similar powerful unit, yes. Mid and Late game thug scripting is far more efficient when the benefits are immediately being transferred to the front line. Again, works better on the defensive. Maybe it's just me, but I happen to like kamikaze strikes, especially when I can get a big chain reaction firing off.

For your standard, fragile unit, spells like mistform, body ethereal and reinvigotation are worth consideration as spells for a communion master to cast.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:03 am

The Blood Equation is 10% + 40%/Blood Rating (max 100%). The most efficient blood hunter is the early era Mictlan Priest with a Sanguine Dousing Rod - 90% success rate on a guy who costs 2 upkeep. But Sanguine Dousing Rods are efficient on every blood hunter. Even without a hammer, they cost 5 slaves, and every point of blood increases the base catch by 1. They therefore pay themselves off in less than half a year even when they don't add any success chance.

Also note that you generate unrest for each slave you muster up and you generate unrest for each blood hunting attempt. So if you can get the same number of slaves out of less actual bloodhunters, that is easier to clean up. So Sanguine Dousing Rods can be thought of as suppressing unrest for factions like Abyssia and MA Pan that don't literally need them.

-Username17

koz · Post by **koz** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:29 am

No offence, Akula, but I think you sell yourself far short in your skill at Dominions 3 in comparison to newbies like me.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 9:47 am

EA Arco is a nightmare of mage scripting. Your army is frankly awful, being composed entirely of humans who haven't invented iron. Then your build-anywhere mages are the most random thing in the whole universe. They literally have between 2 and 5 paths drawn from four different paths of magic with a maximum value of 2 in any path. They are pretty much designed to do weird communion shit, but the point is that you have 28 different potential Mystics that could all warrant different combat scripts depending on your opponent and your tech level. And to make matters worse, of the four paths of magic that your mystics specialize in, only one of them is even a tertiary path for your capital-only Oread. She is primarily a Nature/Air caster, and your build-anywhere mages don't touch those paths at all.

-Username17

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Wed Dec 28, 2011 1:33 pm

Akula wrote:New Players: People have advised starting with a rainbow mage, this is a bad idea because magic is hard to use effectively in dom3. Managing the turns of a rainbow pretender takes a very concrete idea of what you are doing and what you need. Rainbows are the most difficult and complex pretenders to make use of, play around with them once you are comfortable with things like expanding (without mercs) and the balance of early research and site searching.

Oh certainly, I wouldn't advise Rainbow mages for a multiplayer demo game due to its complexities.

But if you have a nation with strong national troops and you follow the Magic Booster Guide religiously you should be able to easily expand while snatching a research lead against the AI. This is why I recommend EA Ermor or MA Vanheim. These guys have units (Principes and Skinshifters respectively) who can smash through indies very easily in the early game, and who can then get Fire / Air evocation magic support later on to clean up any annoying A.I. enemies.

Once the AI has been forced into irrelvancy, you can then forge all the artifacts and cast all the rituals you'll ever want to try them out. It is MUCH easier to practice a communion that way.

I've done expansion-focused games with Wyrms, but they simply don't have the same learning value as having a game where you get to try all the spells. It's like having your own private laboratory.

Communions: I have very little experience with these, but mass kill effects are more common against death ball communions than Zinegata indicates. Even if players only have a few mages capable of generating the effect, if you bring a 50 man strong communion to a fight, those mages will magically show up. A linebacker communion is a workable tactic, but it is also a specialized one. You neither want nor need the mages in your army to all benefit from soul vortex and pheonix pyre, those are spells that only thugs and SCs need running on themselves.

In order to properly disrupt communions, you need to be able to natively cast army-kill spells on the first round. Not very many mages in MA and LA can do this, so it will most likely be a Pretender or a Capital-only mage doing the mass-kill spell.

I would be up for some kind of newbie game. I have played in two multiplayer games and still consider myself new, though if others disagree with that assessment I'll withdraw my interest.

Being able to put up a 100-stone blood economy puts you very much in the intermediate, if not advanced, class Akula

.

Also, Orion, your scripting is also good enough to put you in the advanced class too

.