High PD kinda useless.
 

I'm playing Pythium and I have lots of money so I invest in PD usually up to 50-60 in provinces bordering my enemies.

Often, the enemy (in my case Machaka and Jotun) will send in a small force but have them flanking my rear. My PD should easily be able to handle the attack however my commanders often get killed usually by running towards the flanking units and fatally attacking them.

I suppose I could add extra commanders and have them guarded by extra troops but I feel this defeats the purpose of no upkeep PD.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Not really. I tend to utilize the local units to pad my PD. For many that means a leader with archers set at a flank. For others that means a leader with cavalry set at a flank. Actually just a commander, with better orders, can help

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm just frustrated that PD alone isn't enough and that you need to add extra commanders to have an effective defense.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Some nations seem to get better returns for PD as well. I noticed that EA Arco PD is VERY effective.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I don't have much experience, but I have had good experience with the Arco PD.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

In Dom2, I set just about every province to 11 defense. In Dom3 I have found 21 to be reasonable. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Like Gandalf, I too compliment trouble spots with a local commander or two. In strategic choke points (if the gold is available) I crank it up to 30+, but that is rare and usually pretty late in the game.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

High PD for MA Ulm has never let me down. Although in my current Pythium game Mictlan of all nations routinely rolls my PD of 60+ and Oceania too. Makes me wonder if the money spent is worth it. I think out of maybe 15 attacks per turn to provinces undefended except for PD around 60, 2-3 are successful.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

you should only build pd's at choke points and even then it's best to pad it up with one or two battle mages. I use pd often as chaff and anti call of the wind forces, nothing more.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

[quote]
bleach168 said:
I'm playing Pythium and I have lots of money so I invest in PD usually up to 50-60 in provinces bordering my enemies.[/qutoe]

Are you aware that that much province defense is costing you 1830 gold? You could have bought 183 troops for that cost.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Jotunheim gets a great return from PD. Since they are so expensive to maintain as an army. And a 6 in PD for them is equal to 11 for other nations

And no matter how you are swayed by this discussion ALWAYS put at least 1 into PD. If you dont then when it gets taken you wont know if it was an army or a scout because you will get no battle report on it.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

This was true in Dom2 but is it correct in Dom3?

Jotunheim only get 1/2 a Jotun militia upto PD 20 ie...10 units. Easy to defeat I have found.

Compare to Man, same era, gets 1 Spearman, 2xMilitia ie 60 units at PD 20. Tough to defeat especially eary game.

Things have changed. How worthwhile PD is, depends on the individual nation now.

Also at 21+ u r getting better quality troops for yr PD, which also effect things.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I usually bump it up from anywhere between 5 and 31 depending on where the province is located. Adding a respectable amount of PD makes sure your oppenent is using a real army to take the province.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I just purchased this game and have only begun to play my first game, so I am a total newbie. I've yet to play another person, so bumping up your Province Defense high and turtling up might lose you the game against a human. I don't know.

But in my game, where I'm playing against several computers, I up my Province Defense to the max in every province and use my army to snatch weakly-defended provinces, trying to avoid a costly battle. Since I've scaled towards a high income, it's somewhat easy. I'm trying to kill off my opponents with temples and a 10 dominion pretender. It's pretty anticlimatic way of playing though. These are normal computers too, so that may be the problem.

Anyway, if the computers actually defended each province well or ranked up a high Province Defense, I might avoid attacking, as replacing 200-300 men and merging them takes time. I think the biggest thing about Province Defense, and it explains it in the loading screen between turns is that, Province Defense returns full force if not defeated and at no cost to the player.

This is a great game by the way.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Yes I realize that. I don't want to pay the upkeep on 183 troops or have to replace losses.

I guess I will take Kissblade's advice and add some battlemages or something. At least until PD commanders don't suicide into the enemy.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Putting so much money into PD isnt the answer. If you are having to defend a front against an enemy then you should be stationing real armies there to do the defending. Since PD is usually so weak and (as you have just seen) extremely easy to defeat by any non-trivial force, its best to keep your levels b/w 10-20 for spy catching and maybe repelling the odd raid. Beyond that it loses all its bang for the buck and you are better off recruiting more national mages and troops.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

An occassional higher level can be good, but those are just occassional. Raising PD over, say, level 40 by paying for it is very expensive, and shouldn't really be done. Level 40 is already very high, but I quess it might have a situational use any way.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

You know what, instead of spending all that gold on PD, I think I will just spam forts (and labs) all along my borders. Once Gateway is fixed, it should be easy to defend my borders.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

A much better use of your money http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Hmm, spamming forts along an active border and not manning them is a bit dangerous. If your enemy grabs one, they have a nice base to build from and you have to retake it at some cost. I prefer defending against with a more flexible border, where you can lose and re-take a province relativly easily. But as some one else wrote, if you have real problems on the border, you should have a real army to deal with it. Once you defeat the attacking force, you may wish to go and visit the enemy provinces for a little chat. After all, the best defense is a good offense...

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

PD is certainly a double-edged sword cost vs. effectivness wise. It's one of the most interesting features of Dom for me. I usaually dont go above 31 in any given province. Sometimes when I take an enemy province deep in thier lands and am waiting for reinforcements I'll bump it up to 50+ as a stalling tactic. It brings a smile to my face when they throw a big army at it and, win or lose, it costs them mass casualties.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Consider PD in terms of maintainence free chaff, but _not_ as a replacement for troops. If you had something like 30 PD plus 10-20 troops, maybe a mage or priest (for sermon of courage), you'd probably find that much more effective - the PD soaks up the losses but is renewed so long as you win the battles, while the mage and real troops help ensure that you win, both because of troops quality and because of tactics.

Yes, you have to pay upkeep on those troops there - but upkeep is probably cheaper than the equivalent of 183 troops getting lost because PD sucks. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Even better, you can move those troops and mages as your border shifts, while your investment in 50 PD turns out to be a very poor investment once you've expanded enough beyond that province and it never gets attacked.

(Kind of disheartening to read that PD has actually been nerfed even more, vis a vis Jotuns and whatnot. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif )

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

It hasn't been nerfed per se. Jotunheim provincial defense is weaker now, but not because it was made weaker, but because larger armies are more common and they are one of the nations whose province defence wasn't boosted. They might not be one of the nations with very good PD any more.

Man, as an example, seems to have very good PD now. They get spearmen and 2 militia for every point of PD, which is lots of chaff. Further, their better troops at 20+ PD are Longbowmen AND Tower Guards! In MA, they have Bards as second leader! 10 Longbowmen, 10 Tower Guards, 30 Spearmen and 60 Militia sound good? What if the militia came back if they died? What if you increased that, or recruited some indy archers in addition to the longbows?

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I think there's a point where buying PD is no longer efective and just putting some troops and mages is much more effective.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

PD is just right. It's should not be able to stop large and decisive armies on their own, but they should stop small incursions and help your own troops to defend provinces which they do perfectly well.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

The only problem I have with PD, is the initial capital defense Vs bad events. In dom 2 I don't remember having my capital taken by indies so often, even with a lot of misfortune. In dom 3 in about 15 games it happened 5 or 6 times during the 15 or so first turns, and each time my capital was attacked the PD was easily defeated, be it by knights, raiders or even barbarians.

Later in the game you can of course have a priest with troops perma patroling your capital, but so early it's really annoying. I think if the initial PD is not raised/made more efficient, the invasion event chances or number of units should be reduced before turn 20 or so (especially when you have not taken misfortune 3, in most cases I had just 1). Anyway perhaps I have just very bad luck myself.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Well PD is not much more effective than in Dom2, *but* you usually have more money to invest in, so whereas in Dom2 we put either 2 or 11 PD, it's now rather 11 or 21+.
So small raiding armies can be stopped, but as armies are larger also it's more or less the same, unless vs spells that didn't "rescale" such as Calls ..
But, and that's my point http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif, now stealthy scouts and armies are much more easily detected and defeated.
IMHO that's the real change : I wasn't very fond of stealthy strategies in D2 but now they're even weaker...

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Yep, Jotun milita is like 1/2 compared to the other nation PDs.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I think PD is very effective against the AI as it tends to send every turn lots of troops to attack but never enough to win. My PD killed about 400 enemy troops each turn (in ca. 5 provinces). I had a PD strength of about 60+ and supported it with mages (i used trollkings and each of them got in the hall of fame after 10 turns with 500 kills each http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif)

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

They were WAY to strong in Dom2 so they got hit hard with the nerf stick (A bit too hard I think). I have a feeling that they will get a bit better in a patch sometime in the future.

In Don2 a PD of 31 with the Mechanical PD global enchantment was able to stop large armies on it's own. If you added a priest with 5 archer bodyguards you could even stop most Undead hordes that came your way.

Sammual

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

This is exactly what I would expect and this is what it's doing for me (playing Abysia, expensive troops!). However I haven't run into cavalry yet, if they flank and kill my commander I probably won't be happy either. Still, learn and adapt http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Yeah PD is well-used as renewable fodder. Tho when playing agains the AI, I found that the best use of PD was convincing the AI that you were "strong". Putting heavy PD on aggressive AI borders made them think twice about attacking you, and it seems the AIs are technically at peace until they make thier first attack on you or vice versa.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Keep in mind also that everything has its pros and cons. Particularly in this game. If you think its worthless it usually means to look at it again. Using the gold on queued units can be better but not every time.

PD is a way to catch spys and scouts.

PD is a way to defend a province such as one with a lab without cluttering up the commander and units displays.

PD is instant and does not rely on resources to make them.
There have been times when I had alot of money and was about to be attacked someplace which I really didnt want to lose. Cranking up the PD there was something I considered to be perfectly acceptable in costs.

Taking a forward location at great losses can mean its a good time to pump some of your capital gold into PD for that province to give you time to create and move up a replacement mobile army.

Gandalf Parker

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Some nations such as Pythium have weak province defense and some nations such as Jotun have very powerful province defense. The main reason I stopped playing Machaka was because their province defense had me losing provinces deep inside my territory to little weak spells like call of the winds. On a map of 400+ provinces it's unrealistic to place troops and commanders in all provinces for spells like 'call of the winds'. Sure eventually a global spell can be casted to help, yet I'd rather be investing my gems in an offensive strategy instead of placing a band-aid on some weakness in the nation.

Hopefully we'll see some improvements with province defense in the upcoming patches.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Yes even tho Dominion_3 has more gold available the computer opponents rarely invest in province defense. Personally I would setup the computer opponents to place a minimum of 8pts in province defense and then have them invest 2% of their total gold into province defense for existing provinces. And provinces with forts/castles and/or high gem income should have a minimum of 15 province defense.
It's sad attacking a computer opponent only to discover their average province only has a total of 4pts in province defense after 35 game turns passed.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/fear.gif

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

PD was changed already. Jotunheim, as an example, gets just few giants. Other nations get lots of (often weak) troops.


Commander at def 1: Machaka Chief
Units at def 1+: 3xMachaka Militia, Machaka Warrior
Commander at def 20: Machaka Commander
Units at def 20+: Machaka Hoplite

Stronger than it used to, but still quite weak. However, you can afford to buy more province defense. You might be forced to go a big higher with Machaka than you would with other nations, but you have Heat 2 for extra points. 60 units you get from PD 15 should rout a Call of the Winds.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Thanks for the info Endoperez... I might give Machaka another try.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

From what people have posted, Jotunheim gets only 1/2 a troop per point of PD, that's half what they got in Dom2. I call that nerfed, wouldn't you?

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

For Border provinces i try to go pd20, maybe as high as 30-40 if its very important or i have no army near. As a general rule of thumb i try to place one recruited archer/crossbow in a province (atleast) for each point of pd. I add battle mages if i have cheap mages with great spells (any nation with e2+ is good(as are many others), summon earthpower, spam bladewind) because, while you often want them with your main armies the sort of damage they can do is amazing (nether bolts, bladewind, falling frost/fires, a few of the clouds ect)

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Thank Bruce. That's from the manual. You know, from the nation lists. All the PDs are listed there. And all the castles they build on various terrains are listed there.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Half a Jotun Militia and half a Jotun Javelinist. That's about one point per PD. Javelins thrown with Jotun strength have pretty good range and insane damage.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

We could write a song around that.
You say NERFED
I say BALANCED
If we collect a bunch of those and match them up in rhymed pairs it would probably sing very well. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Gandalf are you high/drunk/more mentally 'unique' than usual?

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Lack of sleep. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
My son is having bad nights.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Ok, I've got to try 1 point of Jotun PD.

I want to see a battle with those 2 units.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

I think it is great at choke points. You shove it up to 40 and you have top level infantry. If you back them with a good archer squad they become hard to beat.

I had a 194 man force in a 40 PD provine and was hit by almost 400 troops. They lost 176 to my 1 man. Yes, I was using flaming arrows and had 100 longbowmen. All my infantry was set on guard commander and the enemy troops never made it to my troops. I was planning to make them pay for that choke point and never thought I could win.

Over 1000 troops and two Gods died trying to take that province. I held with minimal reinforcements and just a three or four spell casters. That 40 PD was the best spent money of the game.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Except that it wasn't. There's little point in raising defense beyond the point where it costs more per additional troop than those troops would cost you to buy in the first place, and that breakpoint is around 20 for most nations. Beyond 20, you are throwing gold away on immobile troops that cost more than their equivalent mobile versions. It wasn't the province defense that allowed you to defeat your enemies, it was the flaming arrows from 100 longbows.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Immobile troops but without upkeep. Even at twice the price if you have to defend the province turn after turn and if you succeed a sufficient time it's not a bad investment.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Well that depends on the situation. Mobile troops use food supplies, can pickup afflictions, die permanently and the more mobile troops purchased the greater their gold upkeep.
The units from province defense don't need food supplies, won't die permanently and have no gold upkeep.
I agree... the flaming arrows from 100 longbows definitely was the reason for holding the province.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

BUT..... those 40 troops died every time.

They slowed the advance to allow my archers multiple shots. If I had used my infantry then my archers would have wiped out my infantry in no time. That is the biggest draw back to archers especialy with flaming arrows.

That 40 PD saved me many hundreds of troops that I would have killed not counting the enemies efforts if they had not been weakened before they came hand to hand with my infantry. There were three kingdoms that made at least ten respectable efforts between them to take that province.

Mind you I did have to replace my infantry a few times as some attacks were very strong.

That is what a choke point is. If I had had the money I would have bought more PD. But the other two fronts were sucking me dry.

Re: High PD kinda useless.
 

Also, even at 40 PD the price of raising the cost by one is just 40. For e.g. Man, they get 2 Militia, 1 Spearman, 1 Longbowman and 1 Tower Guard. That's less than their recruitment price.

MA Mictlan gets 3 Warriors and 1 Jaguar Warriors, and a Mictlan Priest that can bless the Jaguars!

EA Pangaea gets 3 satyrs and a Centaur and a Centaur Warrior at every two points. 41+42 or 83 gold for 6 satyrs, a Centaur Warrior and a Centaur doens't seem that bad to me.

LA Pangaea gets 1 Satys (of the Sneak variety) and 1,5 Satyr Hoplites, and additional Satyr and half a Centaur Cataphract. 83 gold for 3 Satyrs, 3 Satyr Hoplites and a Centaur Cataphract?

There are of course many nations for which 40 PD is high, but I'm not sure they are the majority. MA and LA Marignon both get Pikeneer, Halberdier and Crossbowman. 41 gp for 3 units is high.

LA Jotunheim gets 2 Huskarls and ½ a Jotun Javelinist. 83 gp for 4 humans and one giant is expensive. Other Jotunheim themes get few giants, also becomes "not worth it" faster.

But then again, Ermor has nice PD over all the nation's eras. 3 weaker troops and a Hastatus, and the better leader is a mage - that's still good at 41 gp.