Re: Dominion effects
 

"With less gold but lots of points to spend on magic and magic scale, my thought is that players are going to go crazy making super combatant pretenders."

I was wondering about something related. The betas seem to think a 9 and two 4 magic paths are reasonable on a pretender. I've never played a MP end game and most of my pretenders have <7 in all paths combined. What does one do with that much magic!? None of the summonings or items needed over a five, likewise battlefield enchantments and defensive spells. Are globals or better offensive combat casting that important? "That" depending on what else you can use the design points for, of course.

I still want to see a truely horrific 200+pt chassis for an Ermorian combat pretender. The immense creature crawled forward disolving flesh, blood, and even the very stones in its path...

Re: Dominion effects
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Part of the idea behind the new variable bless effects was to encourage players to make less wimpy pretender, not neccesarily combat pretender but pretenders with respectable magic abilities. In dom 1 if you wanted to play competetively two paths with 6 were probably not a good design decision in most cases, hopefully now it might be.

And there are battlefield spells that require more than 5, but of course you can reach higher values by communion or items etc instead.

Re: Dominion effects
 

>What does one do with that much magic!?

In Dom I typical magic use on a god would be something like;

1> Large pretender body, Astral magic for magic duel defense - body ethereal - luck - astral shield, Earth magic for invulnerability. With this much defense a pretender can pretty much slap conventional armies around at will.

2> A single spell specialist, such as taking many levels of Air magic and a bit of Water magic, so the pretender could use quickness and then spray orb lightning. I suspect we will be seeing much more of this sort of thing in Dom II.

Of course there may be a host of new and improved magic effects in Dom II. We'll all probably be experimenting and discovering new stuff for months.

[ October 19, 2003, 00:55: Message edited by: apoger ]

Re: Dominion effects
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Dunno if this is much help, but here are my experiences:

I have yet to find any Just Right combo for the scales. What I want and what I find useful varies depending on who I'm playing, how I'm playing, who I'm playing against, and just plain what kind of mood I'm in when I set up the game.

I may well be missing some splendiferous combo, but mixing it up from game to game has been working fine for me, as long as I plan to combine them with my strengths, e.g. picking Productivity for Ulm since they need so many resources.

Re: Dominion effects
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Order is good, one of the top priorities. Magic I feel is very nice if you have cheap 1 point mages (Marignon, Pythium, Mictlan etc.) Don't underestimate Production - it can be awhile before you can put up additional castles. Furthermore, remember that most nations only can produce sacred troops in their capitals - thus, if I invest heavily in my pretender to get nice bonuses I usually take Prod +2/+3 (and/or a high adm castle). For many nations, the production of sacred units is resource (rather than dominion or gold) limited. Luck is for me not so attractive, depends on event setting and national heroes though. Growth does seem somewhat weak, yet for some reason I always hesitate to take a death scale.

For me, nation design is enormously more complicated in Dom II. Now, I start by addressing the following questions: Will I be using/rely on sacred troops? If yes, what bonuses will be most beneficial? What pretender can provide the magic at a reasonable cost? Will the pretender be used primarily for combat or site searching/forging? If primarily site searching - does the pretenders magic skills complement the national mages? And still provide useful bonuses?

Powerfull sacred troops should be most useful in short games (possibly games with Victory points conditions), games with slow research, or few magic sites. For normal settings, I am leaning towards spending points primarily on the scales instead (Vanheim and Marignon excepted). Rainbow mages might be interesting as well (The crone is now only 25 design points).

As for military - magic balance, the shift to magic dominance will occur later than in Dom I, primarily because the 'free' summonings have been removed. You can no longer (like Dom I) rely entirely on a mage based army after lvl 3 conjuration - however, eventually magic will prevail. There are just so many potent spells out there.

Re: Dominion effects
 

on dominion effects and growth

Definitely there should preferably be large population benefits for better dominion - and this shouldbe linked to more resources to mobilise more combat units etc

Goodarmy always rests on good economy which rests on large population base in ancient/feudal/medieval context.

Unless you want a silicon valley effect where critical mass of skills (say gem, site and mage-rich provinces) is decisive rather than population mass perse.

This is a good incentive for more military-inclined players to quickly beat opponents before magic power becomes too overwhelming

As an Ulm fan (which in my mind corresponds more to Teutonic Knights) this would be great!