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Okay, asking here is probably a bit biased, but I am thinking of getting Dominions 3. Is it really worth the clunky interface and the extreme learning curve?

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This thread has 4,160+ replies. You figure it out.

Also, welcome to the forums!

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Did I see Crom back online? Haven’t gotten any notifications in a few days…

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Sorry about that, my server suffered another raid from the littlest pirate. He thinks that shiny led in the power button is just irresistible. And I generally don’t catch it until later when someone tells me a game down.

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Lanka:

Congrats to Nick from coming back from the depths of destruction to winning Lanka. I had felt pretty good about my chances until the R’lyeh backstab but so be it. Was a fun, learning experience and I thought Maverni did ok although great helped by a starting position that was solid and being able to whip Pan pretty early.

And of course thanks to Nick for hosting.

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Heh, yeah I should yank that game offline. I’m getting a sick and macabre satisfaction in dismantling the staling remnants of Tien Chi and Rlyeh, just to see what they had in reserve. TC in particular could have given me serious trouble if he wouldn’t have staled out.

This was a really odd game for me because it’s my first Dominions win that was come-from-behind. I basically screwed myself early and then fast talked my way out of the corner by attempting to betray my solid ally wahoo/Maverni at every turn. Can’t believe I got away with it.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the phases

  1. Early insane aggressive phase. Soapyfrog/Pan and I started like two provinces apart and I discovered this on turn three. For whatever reason, I cannot resist the allure of early blitzing someone. Of course it never works, but I always get blinded by the fabulous possibilities of owning two capitols by turn 10 and talk myself into doing it anyway. I rushed Pan with my nice Lankan sacreds and they hit back really really hard. Turns out they had a big bless strat going on too. Suddenly it was looking like I was going to be the one eliminated by turn 10.

  2. Wahoo to the rescue. Seeing my posts about my precarious position, wahoo sends me a PM pledging to hit Pan from the other side and relieve me. Since I’m not a big believer in altruism, I immediately conclude that his vision was similar to mine. He wanted to assimilate another nation early and become a powerhouse. This would leave me in a bad position because I’m take the brunt of Pan’s attacks and be a weakened husk of a nation after Maverni assimilated Pan. Logically his next move would be to rapidly assimilate me as well.

  3. Sell out Maverni (first time). I forwarded wahoo’s PMs directly on to Soapyfrog and suggested that we ought to negotiate some peace (with him getting a sweet deal and some territory from me) so he could face Pan and I could try to rebuild the shambles of my nation.

  4. I do a little rebuilding, expand up, and get a little blood hunting going on. I’m hoping that Pan/Maverni will devolve into a long bloody stalemate and keep both of them out of my hair, but it looks like Maverni is overrunning Pan. Drat.

  5. War on the giants. Niefelheim had gotten big fast behind giant sacreds but had the unfortunate position of being in the center of the map and bordering everyone. So as soon as one person started fighting the giants then everyone else saw the opportunity and piled in. This war would set the tone for me for the rest of the game. I was quite effective and did nasty thing to the giants without actually winning any big battles. All of my victories were raids against PDs but this included multiple capital sieges on the giants and multiple raider forces taking territory faster than he could take it back. I first started to flex my blood muscles in this war as I used the overpriced but research-friendly hordes from hell spell to drop raiders on him all over the place and shatter his feeble PD. Also, on an unrelated note, at some point in here Mictlan died a dominion death and got assimilated by Abysia. Would love to know how that happened.

  6. Alliance with wahoo, part two. After assimilating Pan completely Maverni was ready to rock on the giants. They didn’t have my speed or raiding style, but they had big armies that could win battles outright against giants. Basically we agreed to a north/south division of spoils from the giants, since Maverni was north of me. This stung, because my raiding gains were mostly northward and the giant capitol was north of the dividing line so I was ceding claim to that as well.

  7. Sell out Maverni (second time). With the giants collapsing in and everyone assimilating giant turf I finally got some populous provinces and really started the blood hunting. Also I finally got to invest in researchers in a serous fashion. I was waaaaay late to get going on that this game because I’d been struggling to survive for a lot of the early game. With the giants gone in the middle, it basically left the game with five big players all staring at each other and trying to decide who to attack. At this point I faced some tough choices. TC and Maverni were the big players, Abysia just a bit smaller, and both TC and Maverni wanted me on their side to form a big juggernaut. So I said, what the heck, and allied with both. My hope at this point was to get TC and Maverni fighting so I could try my hand at the smallest of the superpowers and see what I could do to Abysia. I formed division of spoils agreements with both TC and Maverni that resulted in some weird stuff like one of them taking a province from the other, having it given to me because of division-of-spoils deal, and then having to turn around and give it back to the original owner because of a divion-of-spoils deal.

  8. Abysian war (part 1). This was perhaps my finest war ever in Dominions. I won without ever participating in a big battle. While TC and Maverni, encouraged by myself, went at each other I snuck into Abysia and succeeded far more than either of them probably thought I would. I did so well because I was exploiting what I knew was a weakness in Matt Perkins game (sorry Matt). He builds awesome huge armies with good mage support but he tends to put all his eggs into one basket. It’s one big slow army so he can’t react, can’t manuever, and his attacks are predictable. I tore that army to shreds with mind hunts, whirlwinds, and demonic assassins. The demonic assassins in particular are nasty because that spell only costs five blood slaves and even a feeble blood nation will have 40-50 slaves a turn coming in. His big army suffered something like 5-6 assassination attempts a turn as it closed in on my army. Even if only one or two of them succeeded he was still bleeding commanders (many of them expensive mages) faster then he could replace them. It was also fragmenting his army since dead commanders leave orphaned troops so as he tried to move his army forward to counter me he kept leaving squads behind. By the time he got to my army his huge army was strewn across the map, largely leaderless, and easily beatable by my army because I was only engaging small chunks with each battle. Many such battles were auto-routs for Abysia because of a total lack of commanders.

Also, all during the Abysian war, I was re-iterating my assurances to Maverni and Tien Chi that I was still a staunch ally and I’d be joining them any turn now in aggressing on the other, but I just needed to clean up Abysia first.

  1. Rlyeh war. Out of the blue, Rlyeh hit me out of the sea. By all rights this should have gone real bad for me since he’d wished up abominations, GOR’d them, and empowered/equipped them. Luckily for me his timing was bad for two reasons. He hit me just as I was summoning up a bunch of big nasties intended for the army that would finally eliminate Abysia. I was just bringing out my first Wraith Lords and Mandahas and equipping them with good items and hordes of undead when the Rlyeh attack hit. Undead are the perfect counter to the life draining and mind attacking abominations, and I was able to hit back immediately and hard. This situation was making me very nervous though, with my big army tied up in Rlyeh defense and my attentions split two ways there was a good chance Abysia would regroup and push me backwards. I had taken the Mictlan capitol from them but they still had a solid heartland around their own capitol and enough economy to keep cranking out troops. To my complete surprise, Rlyeh quickly concluded that it was futile to attack my undead and wanted to agree to a treaty of status quo ante bellum so he could shift his attacks elsewhere. Seeing my big chance, I of course proceeded to . .

  2. Sell out Maverni (third time). I gave it my all to persuade Rlyeh to hit Maverni. I pointed out that Maverni had a strung out funny shaped empire, could not expect help from me no matter what they claimed, and were engaged with TC so had little to spare to defend their homeland. I’m not sure to what degree it worked, but I do know the two fought later so I’m guessing it worked to some degree.

  3. Abysian war (part 2). Now with everyone busy elsewhere I moved the big army up and smashed Abysia flat. Again, constant assassinations and my new trick the Send Horror spell prevented him from being able to assemble a big army with good mage support. I think TC smelled some opportunity here and tried to take a stab at Abysia as well but failed. Not a lot to say, I cleaned up Abysia and settled in for the endgame.

  4. Sell out Maverni (last time). Not much of a sell out, I basically just politely told wahoo that our alliance had outlasted its usefulness and he should prep for war. I’d been prepping for awhile of course, and had summoned up all the Heliophagii and all the Arch Devils as a special treat for Maverni. I’d also thrown up an Astral Corruption.

  5. Endgame (sort of lame). TC declared war on me as well, since Astral Corruption doesn’t exactly win friends and influence people, and hit me hard. My plan was to simply slow TC’s advance as much as possible and limit his gains while I wiped out Maverni. Then I could turn on TC. Unfortunately TC started staling, Rlyeh started staling, and Maverni didn’t stand much chance one-on-one at this point. My absorption of Mictlan and Abysian lands had left me the biggest player on the map so sheer attrition won out for me in the end.

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Congrats on winning!

Basically my problem with Tien Chi was that they are soooo hard to use correctly. They’re a scrip monkey nation of 1W1? random sucky casters, with several powerful but rice-paper thin casters from the capital. This makes it very hard to expand out of my capital area if i ever lose a big battle, as it takes too long to reinforce. Several times, the scripts i had created failed to cast, and my battle plans evaporated. In theory i could cast fire/water/air resist spells, powerful water attacks, ect. In practice i never got the scripts to work right, and by the time i was fighting Lanka i was done because i just couldn’t keep all the sh#t straight without writing it all down. It became far too complicated for me to keep up with all the necessary counters to every possible outcome that was there. Early Tien Chi probably is a great nation to the super-elite over at Shrapnel, but i need something more straightfoward.

Marverni was so much more powerful than me it wasn’t really funny during his invasion of my lands. I don’t understand, and have never seen, a non-SC Pretender used so well. At one point he had almost all the elemental royalty. What’s amazing is that i was able to survive for as long as i did, using similar tactics like mind hunt/vengence of the dead.

I think the four big events in the game were Marverni’s capture of Pan, the destruction of Neifelheim, Lanka’s capture of Abysia, and Ryleh’s uselessness. Because of the choices in designing that he made, Ryleh turned out to be probably the weakest water nation i’ve never played in a game. Of course Early Ryleh is not at all the same as Middle Ryleh, but the effect was that there was this lurking 4th power that should have been a dominant Astral / clam hording monstrosity, that was instead more of a 5th wheel.

I still would have liked to see what i could have done against your Demons with such a water heavy nation, but at that point the micro just overwhelmed me. I can’t keep up with countering 10 different means of attack, assassination, and battlefield spells. The worst part about it is that in theory i COULD counter them (i even had several dozen generic commanders built to handle random assassinations), but god help me, the amount of effort required turned the game into a job - a laborious, loveless, pain in the ass job - and the game just stops being fun when you’re losing armies unneccessarily because you forgot to bring along an Astral caster of 5-10 random commanders, and becomes rather more depressing.

Like i said above, i’m done with Dominions 3, except for the occasional pick-up single player game. Now i know there is no way i’ll ever win a game considering the amount of effort that winning requires. If i really were a demi-god trying to conquer the world it would be worth it, but i have other uses for my time. I think it would actually be easier to play it hotseat, though, breaking the game up over a long period of time is very tough for me. I can keep everything straight and play quickly when it’s one turn after another, but when there are 2-3 days between turns, unless i’ve written everything down i’ve forgotten half of what needs to be done and it takes me much longer a turn having to go through and re-remember everything going on. The only way i’ll ever play again is to create some kind of spreadsheet/strategy management system to keep the game straight from turn to turn. But again, that’s going into the “work” catagory.

BTW, i went Turmoil-3 Magic-1 Luck-3 and had an honest gem farm. I bet i had, at the end of the game, close to a thousand gems, probably 200 of each catagory. And no way to spend them usefully. I think you will average probably 10-20 gems a turn with Turmoil/Luck, and i took the luck goddess and so had virtually no bad luck in the capital at any point in the game.

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Sounds like all-in-one-sitting dominions games are more your style. I tend to agree actually, the commitment of playing a long term game is not really my preferance either. But I think you might enjoy more fast paced dominions games, in my experiance they have a pretty laid back atmosphere and are more about trying out strategies than winning.

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Lanka:
The only surprise to me is that Nick sold me out to Soapyfrog. Everyone was pestering R’lyeh to attack the other person. I realized that he was about to hit me 1 turn too late which made a big difference.

I could have turned on Lanka earlier but TC was the bigger threat. TC had a large empire, with solid gem income. They had taken the giant capitol which I wanted. We were already engaged in a defacto war with TC hitting me with spells and so he was my natural enemy. I was helping Abyssia as best I could to hold off TC/Lanka. Tried to talk to R’lyeh into hitting Lanka and they were doing well when they quit.

TC and I allied against lanka when we realized what was going on. Unfortunately, TC lost interest in this game otherwise I think we could have hammered Lanka down. TC had a massive, massive army with a ton of gems (and one of the reasons I wanted to make a deal with them). If TC had gone after Lanka hard, I could have really contributed by driving from heartland into Lanka’s soft underbelly. Lanka and I both had flying raiders but i could mind hunt vs his send horrors.

I came to a bit of a horrific realization mid game that R’lyeh was key. If he turned on and stayed against you, you werein big trouble. I also realized that whoever I didn’t attakc between TC/Lanka would be in a driver’s seat. I don’t think I would have changed anything except try to help R’lyem more against Lanka and not get discouraged.

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Mistspell and Inquisitor are back up, timerless.

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This is basically how I play Dominions 3 now. While long games are satisfying if you win, they are much more of an effort now. A pitboss type play, that you schedule hours of play and just play weekly, tends to be a better bet since they end in 1-2 months.

Smaller maps and victory point conditions make it ideal to combat the feeling of uselessness and usefulness and wasting time.

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I have found EA TC to be excellently suited to my playstyle, which isn’t very script intensive. Your lower-level mages are mostly useless at the start, true, but the Celestial Masters are flexible and, with Flying/Move 3, always where you need them. More importantly, you’ve got a solid infantry lineup (especially after the latest patch) and strong blessable national summons.

BTW, i went Turmoil-3 Magic-1 Luck-3 and had an honest gem farm. I bet i had, at the end of the game, close to a thousand gems, probably 200 of each catagory. And no way to spend them usefully. I think you will average probably 10-20 gems a turn with Turmoil/Luck, and i took the luck goddess and so had virtually no bad luck in the capital at any point in the game.
Turmoil/Luck? Huh. I’ve always needed a reliable gold income more than gems as TC. It’s one of the few nations that lets you build big conventional armies and actually win with them without having to mess with elaborately scripted mages. Whatever elaborate script setups I’ve tried have generally been pretty inefficient at best; setting my mages to nuke and going in with overwhelming numbers backed up by Sleepers etc. for morale generally works much better.

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It does seem like there’s an interesting rift between people who script and plan orders comprehensively for their armies and people like myself who are just content to stick the army in a basic sensible layout and not muck with it.

I’m just not that convinced scripting makes that much difference. I’d much rather work toward victory at the strategic level by making sure my armies are bigger or the enemies economy is crippled so that no matter how many battles he wins he’s still going to lose the war. As my last post indicated, I’m of the belief that anyone who puts together one huge uber army is just asking for magical harassment so I’m a firm believer in multiple smaller more flexible forces

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Scripted armies are pretty important when your surrounded by fire and ice heavy armies like Neifelheim and Abysia, or Demon heavy armies like Lanka, or Elemental SC led armes as Marverni (Marverni’s fire elemental king would literally kill hundreds of my troops every time he showed up in a battle with massive fire attacks.)

Seriously, i beat Neifelheim so easily because my scripts fired off, protecting me from the AoE cold. I lost to Abysia because my fire-resist scripts didn’t fire off, and my troops got completely demolished by ranged fire attacks. My unique troops are, um, uniquely suited for the strat because they already have 50% resist to everything anyway.

The problem is that my casters are “rice paper thin”; so, one lucky arrow would cause my important, 4F caster to die, and, literally, the whole army is now f#$%^d. The other problem is that in order to get the correct random caster would take several turns, and would still require some stat boosting items, as well as resist rings, air-cloaks, luck amulets, ect. It was a huge mission to get every caster equipped correctly, and then get the right caster to the right front lines. That’s why it literally ASTOUNDED me that you were able to beat Abysia with nothing but massive armies of Kali mulas, and hardly any spell support. I didn’t see how much you were assassinating.

The other thing with Tien Chi was that two of my biggest casters are random heroes; i have no other means of getting Death 2 without old iron crutch.

Tien Chi’s troops are nice, but they’re only nice enough. Against masses of non-human Sacred (which are quite common in Early), they die like flies without some spell support.

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Out of curiousity, anybody get a province seemingly randomly attacked by something called the “Abomination of Desolation”?

And who keeps stalling? Is it the same person? 'Cause if somebody has given up then maybe they should be set to AI or subbed or at least let everyone else know for diplomacy reasons. If its Nick stalling because he’s got nothing better to do… I understand that.

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It is me, sorry about that. Meant to play the turn and lost track. Happily my little clams are still merrily producing in my absence so no big deal.

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Crom: Timer is back on.

Mistspell: Um, what’s the port # again?

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8085

.

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Well, looks like Van has thrown in the towel and gone AI, first knowck out since Jeff imploded early in the game. Also meaning Astral Corruption probably won’t last much longer as whoever cast it will be used in a suicide mission by the wacky AI (who will also ignore its effects and try casting spells with it still in play). I’m almost sad, as I had gotten pretty good about working around it. C’est la vie. I imagine things are going to get interesting as lots of people with piles of gems try to come up with creative ways to use them.

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Mist Spell
Just waiting on the Elves now…