Thanks for the welcome, Stormbinder. Doesn’t look like I’m gonna be around much longer though!
My email is HawkeyeFierce on gmail. I would definitely like to be added to the notification list.
Enidigm
1962
Now that i’ve had some time to play with it:
Dawn of Dominions: What a fantastic map, wtg Jason Lutes! It’s the first fixed map that really has personality. I especially like the Agarthan cave lands, and find Agartha a fun nation to play moreso on this map than any other. And great job Illwinter on implementing a “cave” battlefield terrain!
I’d also like to finally thank Bruce Geryk on the excellent manual. When i pop open Flight Simulator X, from the largest software company in the world, and it doesn’t even half 1/50 of the pages, and an even smaller fraction of the humor, history, and attention to detail that the Dom3 manual has, it really puts things into perspective. And props to Shrapnel Games for being willing to publish it!
Rollory
1963
Is the Lictor mail notification down? I notice a new turn is ready but no mail.
The turn hosted in the last 30 minutes, perhaps the email is just still lost in the ether of the internet? I know I got a copy of it.
If you don’t get it at all in the next few hours let me know and I’ll look into it.
Hetzer
1965
From Pa, first bureaucrat, prophet of heinrich,
Today we have seen the last charge of shinuyama, he himself and everyone that could hold a weapon charged our lines. Under a heavy rain of arrows his force went down. His summoned elementals reached our lines and wreaked havoc but our numbers prevailed. As everybody fled the battlefield shinuyama took a last stand and casted combatspell after combatspell. Our charging bowmen at least reached him and mowed him down.
Heinrich personally has made a haiku for him:
A bright and pleasant
autumn day to make
death’s journey
Lum
1966
Seconded. It’s an oldschool manual and I love it to death. Spent about 3 hours at an auto shop reading it while waiting. When was the last time you could say that about a game manual?
Do we need a server? I have a linux box not doing much that I could host a game on if no one else wants to, but it will probably take some fumbling about.
If you need help getting the dom3 software setup or would like my scripts for email notification and so forth, let me know.
Is anyone else getting heartily sick of big bless strategies? Everywhere I go in all the games I’m in I seem to be running across blessed vans or blessed giants or blessed centaurs.
Maybe it’s just me but it’s really getting annoying. I never liked blessings much in dom2 but I didn’t mind it either, it could be an interesting twist that somebody wasn’t expecting. Now that imprisoned pretenders means lots-o-design points it seems like everyone is doing big bless or dual big bless strategies.
Lum
1969
Shoot the scripts to me at sjennings@brokentoys.org. Thanks!
Does the linux version have a server daemon, or do I just need to keep the graphic version up and running? Is there any server admin FAQ threads on the Shrapnel forum? I guess I could just, you know, go look :)
Enidigm
1970
Urraparound and Dawn of D are small maps, and really reward powerful fast attacks.
An older, larger map with more chokepoints like Cradle might be less amenable to “rush” strategies.
I have three games I’m in, one each on all three of the maps you mention. On Cradle I got rushed the worst (Hi Clark) and on Urraparand I didn’t get rushed at all. Go figure eh?
The thing about bless strategies that really ticks me off is that they eclipse even a lot of late game magical strategies. What am I going to summon to compete with F9W9 vans? Or F9N9 giants? It seems like most of my favorite dom2 tricks are now obsolete.
I’m not going to say dom3 is broken, but it has changed the required style of play to be competitive and the change is to a style I can’t say I like.
Rollory
1972
I think you’re giving up too easy. Power blessings are a one-trick pony; once you find the right way to break it, they’ve got very little left to fall back on. The first time you meet them it’s nasty, but if you keep it in mind as something you might need to deal with, I think there are ways. Some of the spells I never would’ve looked twice at before seem appropriate.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the Dom2 game where you were playing Machaka with a SC vampire queen, and she just walked right through about 200 of my troops. I had no idea how to respond to that at the time - if you had wanted to, you could’ve gone right on back to my capital with the same success. After more experimentation, turns out there were counters to it.
Rywill
1973
It is sort of annoying, though, because it seems like such a simple and mindless strategy, and it may require (I’m still fooling around with my own counters) retooling your empire to fight it. Rollory’s comparison to the couple of really good SC pretenders in Dom2 (Vampire Queen or Ghost King, for example) is a good one. I would also compare it to Dom2 undead Ermor. They’re very powerful setups that don’t require a lot to run. Although they can certainly be countered, doing so seems to require that your magic and recruiting are all geared around reacting to a single opponent. The problem is that that may leave you open to being killed by Player #3. To return to the Ermor example, anyone can react to undead Ermor by building loads of temples and recruiting loads of priests (including using your home territory recruits for high-level priests). But that sucks up a lot of your money and recruting slots, and you suddenly find yourself very priest-heavy when some non-undead empire hits you from the other side.
It’s tough. Most other empires/strategies have multiple counters. Maybe the bless-heavy strategy does too and that will come out as time goes on.
Clark
1974
I never used bless in Dom2 because the huge negative scales one had to take were insane. But the extra points from imprisoned pretenders makes it a huge advantage to take a good bless. It turns regularly recruited sacred troops equal to a geared-out thug. In fact the F9W9 Vans are so overpowered, a Van/Mid/Hel player would be silly not to take it.
The problem from a point of balance is that there is little downside to the bless strat. You can take decent scales and still get it. The sacreds cost half the upkeep of other troops. And who needs their pretender early on? Unless it is Immortal, you risk afflications and death without the gear and spells that only come midgame anyway.
It is fun to play around with possible bless strategies - another design option that gives you a lot of choices. The issue is that not taking bless puts you at what I would opine is a significant disadvantage.
I should point out that for some nations, a bless strategy is really important, even central. Now that said, certain nations using the double bless are just a liiittle too crazy strong.
It’s a tough balancing act because if you spend the crazy points you need to get a double bless, then you’d best hope it’s fairly decisive. On the other hand it should be possible to counter, which in the case of power blessed vans for example it seems like any counter is actually out of reach for most nations until the late game.
The thing is, they aren’t a one trick pony. A blesser has all the available tricks up their sleeve that I do, plus the nasty bless trick. They don’t have to sell out for bad scales anymore to get a big bless, the imprisoned pretender means a good bless and good scales, or a good double bless and semi-okay scales.
Nasty SC pretenders in dom2 were sort of annoying but there were definitely counters available to anyone and it was a one shot trick that could fail at any time. Hit squads of 25 sacred giants or vans on the other hand can be cranked off as required.
I was going to go out fighting!! I did manage to force your spearmen to run away in fear, though…that has to account for something, considering the only troops I had was Militia (besides the elementals I summoned, and my 4 commanders). I am thinking this is the last of me in this game, though (Squidz), as that was indeed the final charge. I had in my mind, the final charge of the Samurai in The Last Samurai (lol)…
Well said, I agree with that. I don’t have any problem with Mictlan running big blesses. Mictlan’s troops are garbage, they need the bless just to be competitive.
I really think that blesses should be decoupled from pretender magical ability and turned into something that just costs design points on their own. With a big sliding scale so that the first minor bless effect is cheap (or even free) but ramping it up to a major effect or adding a second effect is a big deal.
I also think non-imprisoned pretenders should get huge research bonuses so that the people who didn’t take imprisoned pretenders can get an early magic edge to counter the blessed troops rushing them from all sides.
For those of you in the Hoplite game:
a) Sorry to be out of the loop for a bit - my home computer died, and the video card replacement has turned into a saga.
b) PICK AN ERA! (for those of you who haven’t indicated a preference.) Those of you who haven’t voted, you’ve got until tomorrow, and if there’s a tie at that point, I’ll just flip a coin. I’ll go back and check all the past messages to be sure the totals are up todate later on today.
c) We need a host. (If Lum is up for hosting, that would be great - Nick’s offer of scripts is very kind - thanks Nick! Sorry about those Helhirdlings in Dawn…).
d) Send me a PM with your email address. I will put together a list of everybody’s email address for diplomacy and game announcements. For those of you new to Dominions, in game diplomacy takes a turn to reach your target, then a turn to come back, and people generally prefer email.
e) once we’ve got an era, I’ll randomly assign the brave, courageous people who have chosen RANDOM.
Once all that’s taken care of, we should be able to get this show on the road.
Re: Hoplite
Once we pick an era, I’ll pick a nation. :)
PMing you my email right now. Otherwise I forget…just ask whoever setup the last two games I played in :).
