Thoughts time:
The map made me think about Dota 2. Three lanes and a cut away in the mountains that made me think of the position of Roshan pit from many years ago now. Just an odd comment. @geggis did a fantastic job illustrating it and I hope we get to play it again at some point. The terrain was clear, the sites with increased odds of magic sites were subtle but present, every province was clear as to its features (eg: swamps looked like swamps).
Is it a newbie friendly map though? No. Start positions surrounded by forest and wasteland (province 96 - Asphodel) don’t offer a lot of inspiration when gold is necessary. Experienced players in a team, knowing what they want, where they need to be can of course indicate the difficulties with gold income or overcome it. In a game where new players are being pushed as gently as possible against the wall that is the Dominions learning curve, getting a good indication of how they are travelling is difficult to establish. I know with my own gold income I was basically burning every little bit each turn. I think three per side is a better count.
To me, a bless strategy for new players seemed like a good idea on paper. It eases the difficulty that newcomers face with independents and evaluating if their force is good enough to defeat them. The other thing I consider with a bless is the need to rush towards opponents playing some fairly aggressive moves. Vanheim (@psyanojim) managed that down the right hand side of the map, but the middle and left was at a bit of a standoff. I think more aggression was needed to help a transition into the later game, but again, difficult to expect of new players. The result of this is the scales from the other team had the desired effect of enabling a sizable economy and we were going to end up being outproduced unless we could keep them small.
The speed of expansion I think will always catch new players off guard. Dominions isn’t a game that allows a person to sit and have a breather, rebuild forces and then pick the next target at leisure.
One regret I have with this game is that there was no real big battles to show off. There was a decent skirmish between TC and Vanheim much earlier in the game, but otherwise, the slaughter of Bandar at the hands of giants seemed to be about the only one.
I think Illwinter need to spend some more time evaluating disciples games and make it more team friendly. One issue I identified is that I could not build temples in friendly lands. If I wanted to place a cheap temple in Bandar’s territory, the only way it could happen was to switch the province over, then I build the temple, then switch the province back again. Switching provinces doesn’t raze temples! It is fiddly work that wasn’t worth doing.
Secondly, I made a seduction attempt on a TC commander however the Dryad couldn’t find a safe location to retreat to, I suppose because Pangean land wasn’t adjacent to the province. However right next door was Vanheim territory, but that doesn’t count.
As far as my game went, the notable things I remember:
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Having an army rout in the early stages of the game thanks to a stray arrow into a commander.
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I devoted a lot of thought to how best to arrange my troops for defeating the throne defenders. It paid off well, only suffering a couple of satyr losses.
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Celebrating the fact I found a province with Jade Sorceresses. I could save gold and get the same number of RP each turn from recruiting them. Plus the dedicated WN paths were going to be useful (eg: Clams for Bandar). What I didn’t get though was much in the way of water gems. Pulling in 15 nature gems/turn is nice, but not useful. 4 water gems/turn wasn’t much to cheer about. It did cross my mind to ask the other team for a cheeky trade :)
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Temples everywhere! Our dominion was strong, and that made the Carrion dragons hideously strong. A 500hp beast, regenerating like crazy in battle. Shame it never came to that admittedly. I decked out my carrion dragon to self cast quicken self. That’s 8 attacks each turn, and Alt 6 was my first real research priority for soul vortex. Other spells I wanted at that point was Transformation for the Pans and later recognising the value in Iron Bane, especially if I mixed it with swarms of chaff like Maenads or cheap to recruit Satyrs. The general spell combo was Iron Bane from one Pan, followed up with Maws of the Earth for some nice AoE armor breakage while the swarms of chaff race forward. If the dragon were in the fight, I was confident it would basically kill giants easily.
One unfortunate problem with the temple spam was that it never really pushed opposing dominion. I built 11 temples total, pushing from the back of the map. That money spent could have been spent better in hindsight.
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I had harpies everywhere in my land and never really managed to catch any scouts. They served a useful purpose of helping with the small blood economy I had going, transport slaves back to labs and patrolling down unrest as required. I was never going to be able to sustain much of an economy, but I was putting myself into a position of getting around 5-10 slaves per turn. I had just finished recruiting a second Pandemoniac (B3) who looked promising in conjunction with my B2 hunter and also a Pan hero who allowed me to forge bloodstones (E1 + booster,N3,B3).
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Killing TC’s disciple I think hurt me long term more than it hurt TC. It only came about because both my forces were discovered. I got lucky by having friendly dominion in that province that turn, but it came at the cost of losing two sizable raiding parties who I was looking to send west and harrass Eriu for a bit. Also, on the issue of raiding, sorry to TC (?pyperkub) for the ongoing harrass. I can only imagine it was annoying, but you were also what looked like the nation with the bigger economy. I did halt temporarily while other plans were coming together, but they never eventuated. There were two provinces that would have cut off 3 or 4 provinces from the cap, but the instruction was to wait in the hopes that bigger fish could be fried.
One thought I developed as the raiding began was to name all my commanders of said raiding groups the same name. The idea was to try and prevent an accurate count of how many raiding parties were present (hence the name Mr Bean). Next time I’ll make sure I have commanders with the same magic paths, and try and keep the same number of units.
Think that’s about it. Not much in the way of unique sites in my part of the world. I did have a priest summoning longdead horsemen from one province at the end just because he had nothing to do. I lagged heavily with research at the beginning, but started to bring it together. Income was my biggest issue, and I would have gladly taken a small hit to resources in order to have growth or order scales. Oh, the other reason for Alteration 6 was to get transformation. Getting the throne that gave luck scales was a happy coincidence as that would have helped me immensely in transforming expensive Pans into free upkeep animals with the potential for added magic paths on top. I never made it to Alt 6, I did a quick diversion to Construction 4 and Conjuration 3 at the time.
