Re: New to Dom 3
 

There is actually a number of them
http://www.dom3minions.com/HostedGames.htm

Any that have AIs included can be played solo. Or you can try to get a few people together for a game by posting a thread in this forum, or in Chat, or mentioning it in IRC

Disclaimer: I dont recommend the Chaos games for new players.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

Chaos is Chaos. Only sneaky armies can handle them.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

The F9W9 imprisoned pretender works for Mictlan because they have good cheap recruitable everywhere sacreds, plus sacred summons. (And even then it's a great bless against the AI, not so much against other players. It gives maximum killing power, but not much for survivability. A good player will use blockers, archers and spells to slaughter the jaguars before they reach anything important.) Since most nations don't have such good sacreds they won't benefit as much from it, so it's not worth it for them. Or they'll have few big tough sacreds who benefit more from being made even harder to kill.
Essentially you can't take a build for one nation and throw it onto another one.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

The easiest nation I learned on was Niefelheim. They're great with a Earth-9 Water-9 or Earth-9 Nature-9 or, my favorite, Earth-9 Water-6 Nature-6. They go into battle and their cold-aura just kills almost everything. Anything else out there gets killed by the giant axe. Because they're so big and have so many HPs, their protection lets them live a few rounds, and their regeneration lets them recoup back up to full (and reduces afflictions). This nation is also good for learning how to kit-out thugs. It's a bit expensive, though, so I would recommend Order 3.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

The standard Neifel bless is E9Nx. Water might be nice, but isn't really needed. The cold aura kills, not the axe strokes. Regen, reinvig and the extra protection keep them alive long enough for the cold to work. In fact, W9 means they do pick up a fatigue since the reinvig isn't enough to cancel out the extra attacks. They start with fairly low defense and get swarmed so the defense bonus from the lesser W bless doesn't really help much.

That leaves you with more pretender points for halfway decent scales.

You can give Neifel Jarls reinvig gear so they can cast Quicken Self and lots of other buffs.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

E9N6 is probably the most competitive. Any more Nature gets expensive fast (and not everyone likes Berserk on their Sacreds). Less, and you're down to 5% Regen, which is almost not worth it.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

I am going to be purchasing Dom 3 in a few days as well. It seems the release of elemental was a good thing for Dom 3.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

LOL
Hmmm....
I hadnt considered that. All thru the development of Elemental I understand that Dom3 was often used in comparison. There might be some direct fallout.

Im still hopeful but so far Elemental seems like an example of what I refer to often when people say they are thinking about buying Dom3. "Ive paid as much for games that lasted a month on my machine, but Dom3 has lasted for years." So far Im still waiting to be convinced that this is more than a one-month game.

The only other great example of those-other-games that Elemental could be is if within a month someone posted an always-win walk-thru.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

Gandalf: It is a "more than a one month" game, in that you apparently have to wait "more than one month" after you purchase it, for the devs to render it playable.

While that's happening, Stardock thoughtfully encourages you to explore their interactive adventure, "Adventures in Betatesting!", an exciting massive multiplayer for fans and ex-fans of the game, that Stardock actually plays with you.

It has immense replayability for potentially years to come, as you get to help Stardock magically transform broken and absent lines of code into a working game, right before your very eyes.

So it's really 2 games for the price of one.

Re: New to Dom 3
 

Well at least you apparently get ONE FULL YEAR of FREE updates and patches.
So I guess as long as they get it working before that year is over then people wont be able to complain TOO much.

Playing with the devs is usually a benefit of being in a beta-test group. Im not sure how well that will work with an open beta like Elementals to play in every game. But there are people here who have espoused the wonderful benefits of a fully open beta where the devs can suffer the slings and arrows of their loyal and caring fanbase. I am sure that polished company such as StarDock will be showing us the right way to do such things just as they led the way to a download system that all of the small game companies will (or should be) duplicating soon.


Gandalf Parker
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