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T'ien Ch'i,

Your arrogance appalls us. You may have beaten us this time, with your underhand use of magic to shred our brave soldiers. But to win a battle is not to win a war. We will fight again.

Sauromatia.

(OOC) I must say I'm very impressed you've managed to get magic working so well as a newbie. I've still never managed to kill more than about two people per battle with it. How did you get the knack so fast?

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Maybe hes not a noob! The bastard!

Ever seen that episode of south park where butters pretends to be a freak? We will find you out!

Btw, check your PMs llamabeast

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FAJ, you too.

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I'd like to know, as long as it doesn't ruin his strategy or anything, how T'ien Ch'i is using the magic to full effect. My competence is pretty much troop buffing, and long distance artillery spells (lightning, all the fire shooters) that maybe kill 2-3 people per battle. I guess if you had like 15 astral mages casting mind burn every round it would make an impact http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

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(OOC) This is my first game as Tien Chi, my first multiplayer game in Dominions 3, my first EA game... but it's not my first Dominions experience. I played a lot of Dominions 2, and while a huge amount of the tactics are completely different, some skills carry over.

Dominions 2 Magic was grounded in the fact that there were much smaller armies. An invasion of 60 guys was taken seriously. As such, the king of the battlefield was spells like Mind Burn and Frozen Heart which autmatically hit. In Dominions 3, armies are much larger, so I made a gamble that spells with a small area of effect would almost always hit something, and thus be amazingly effective.

That gamble appears to have paid off - I didn't even research the classic 100 Percent accuracy spells I knew and loved in Dominions 2 because the changes in the game seemed lik they would make different research paths good.

So no, I'd never done this before, but I've done something completely different and could make a logical guess as to what I would need to do differently to adapt.

-Frank

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Another thing to consider is that new players frequently overlook the Path Buffing spells. These are spells which boost your power in a particular magic path (Summon Earthpower, Summon Storm Power, Power of the Spheres, Communion Master/Slave, etc). With these spells in hand you can turn a relatively weak battle mage into a powerhouse.

Examples:
Generic 2E mage, what can he cast? Legions of Steel maybe? blah. But cast Earthpower to take him to 3E and suddenly he can cast Bladewind, which will just slaughter all the lightly armored enemy.

Generic 2F mage can cast fireball. Pretty good. But buff him to 3F with phoenix power and he can cast Falling Fires. Then you can just watch your enemies burn in the huge AoE

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Also note that summon earthpower has a double bonus as it also gives extra (+4 iirc) reinvig to the caster, letting him cast even more.

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Oh, and I think our battle against Arco went about as well as could be expected.

The Great Catsby has Spoken.

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Looks like Arco's god was slain in that battle...

Confused and enraged
 

Ok, is this game updated/patched? What version is the host running?

I just got a battle message that said I lost a battle, being beaten by the defenders; killing about 95% of their troops and a commander while loseing about 30% of mine and a commander.
When I watch the replay, The enemy routs and I win the battle (by a pretty decent margin), and the commander that is reported dead is clearly alive and well.
But, the commander, after the battle, is actually dead, and the province was not taken.

This is confusing and frustrating.

I am using v3.01. What could be so different in the two versions that would change a large victory for me, to a loss for me, with the loss of my most powerful commander?