Opening Gambit
 

For the variety of nations I have played in games (vanilla SP), I seem to start with 400 pounds and my best mage costs 400.

I tend to spend all 400 on turn #1 building the mage, then on turn #2 I prophetize him. He's ready on turn #3, and I can't afford anything else to buy on turn #1.

Is this a good/normal/poor strategy? Knowing this game, I'm sure there will be "ifs" & "buts" & "nation strategies", I'm asking "in general" :)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Well, I always tend to make prophet the starting commander. Let him cast the Sermons of Courage/Smites, and save the true mages for their own magic stuff.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

There are nations where the best mage costs greater than four hundred gold. Also, you may want to build up your army on turn one, to get a jump on conquering provinces.
Finally the best reason to get a prophet so early on would be to spread dominion. To do so early on would mostly just be useful on small maps, as on large maps you'd have plenty of time before getting swamped by sacrifices or covert preachers.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Doesn't sound like my strategy is any good at all, then!

Yes, I had been concerned that I was losing turn #1 for any army build for expansion, hence the question.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Generally you want as many of your expensive mages as possible in the late game, and since these 400+ mages are usually cap only you want to start recruiting them ASAP. However, early expansion should pretty much always take priority over mages. Unless you have a awake SC pretender you can lean on for expansion, your first focus should be getting a second expansion party out.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

So should I take my starting party out "as-is" on turn #1? Then anything I build goes to a second new army, not to bolster my starters?

See also the other new thread I've just posted, wrt whether an awake Pretender should go with the first party?

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Most mages don't cost 400 gold. Prophetizing a mage looks like a very bad idea in my eyes, unless he's a thug/SC. And then probably not on first turn.
Having a wizard prophet means your prophet can't preach or fight and research at the same time, while a scout could do the preaching and leading of sacreds for 20 gold or somesuch.
In battle, your prophet will Bless, Smite, Sermon of courage or Fanaticise his troops. During this time, he's not casting the spells a wizard could cast, so it's suboptimal.
Bringing a prophet to battle in your dominion grants him more hp, mr... and since he's autoblessed, it can be a good idea to use a mage to self-buff, get the boost from dominion and autobless, and attack. But on turn 1 you can't buff yourself, so that's a waste.
Overall, I can see only one reason why one would make an expensive wizard a prophet early on: He costs no upkeep. So, you get a big upkeep break, but you either lose a prophet or a mage in doing so. So, I'm not sure it's worth trying.

What's the reason why you'd prophetize an expensive mage instead of a scout or commander? H3 priests come to mind, but getting to H4 is not that useful early on.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

No, generally you're going to want to wait for scouting reports turn one, so you have some idea of the resistance you will face. Hiring troops to bolster your starting army turn one is a good idea though. Some people also up the taxes on their capital turn one and patrol with they're starting army, which gives a nice income boost. Just don't forget to reset taxes the next turn.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

You have to get a feel for how strong a nations starting army is before you send it out on turn 1. The only ones that I can think of off the top of my head is MA Abysia and Ashdod though so its not very common.

Keep in mind that losing your starting army can hurt much more than getting an extra province can help.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

The main reasons include getting H4 and the fact that prophets dont cost any upkeep. A Niefel Jarl will cost you 20g/turn yo!

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Well, thematically (which is how I play- sp only, of course), the idea of someone with mystical powers (a mage) becoming a prophet is quite appealing, and the resulting priest-mage is always pretty cool to imagine.

But strategically, what I said before is best.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

You took the words out of my mouth! I can only have one prophet, I certainly don't wish to waste it on some lowly scout....

Having said that, I understand the strategic points you all explain very well --- thanks. I appreciate the point that I'm wasting a mage's magic talents on a guy who should be blessing. (And I thought I was supposed to "use" the Prophet's extra dom hit points to make him aggressive in battle, so again I was looking for a more significant guy.)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

You can only have one prophet at a time, but the prophet's biggest value is in its ability to spread your dominion, so a scout works well because it can spread dominion stealthily OR travel along with your army as a smiter and maybe a Divine Blesser. Also, you start with it, and prophetizing it doesn't take away a mage turn.

Other than H3 units, I like to prophetize a young MA Ulm Smith to groove those evocations; LA Pangaea it's worth considering your strategy before you decide where to put that H3; death-emphasis nations can benefit a lot by prophetizing an undead commander or mage.

But there's a lot to be said for prophetizing that first scout.

For a conundrum, look at the starting leaders for Sauromatia and figure out who best to prophetize.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Is there much point to going for H6? With a Sword of Justice/Injustice, prophet, maybe some Ritual of Rebirth+making your mummy a prophet anew, is it worthwhile?

Re: Opening Gambit
 

A few nation-specific holy spells (EA Ermor and Jomon have conversion spells, and EA Atlantis has a spell that raises magic resistance, but only if the unit fails the MR check) require MR checks for which the extra holy levels would add penetration. It's not worth the effort, though.

I suppose that you could have a really killer preacher if you did those tricks with an inquisitor, but I wouldn't bother.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

I often set the commander to patrol, so I can raise the taxes to 150% in the first turn, and make the scout prophet. Sometimes I prophetize some specific commander (like a H3 to get a H4), but often anyone can do the trick. In some specific cases, you might want to prophetize a specific chasis (for example, a Niefel Jarl if you want to give him the bless, and prophet stat bonuses)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Also... Smite spam iirc is much more efficient with a low enc scout than commander.

I always wait a turn and not blindly attack a cap adjacent prov on turn1. There are too many "special" indies that can trash your early army. I choose the easiest prov on turn 2 ( buy low/mid mage + appropriate troops) and often combine attack on turn 3 with my new cap army, I then transfer the mage troops and leave the Mage to site search, my preference anyway..
ssj

Re: Opening Gambit
 

I play SP Vanilla, usually with an imprisoned pretender, especially with a large map. I usually bump the taxes up to 200% for the first turn, then reduce to 100%, while patrolling with the commander. Scout scouts. Hire the best mage possible on the first turn then prophetize. For MA Man I go with the mother; the crone tends to go old age too early. Turn two I hire another combat mage. Turn three the party sorties for the easiest province and I hire another mage to start researching. Turn four I hire another scout and return party to capital if I took a lot of casualties, otherwise I head for another weak province. Then I alternate scout and research mage. I try to maximise research and grab surrounding provinces as quick as possible. I hire scouts from those indy provinces as soon as possible so that the cap can do the research mage thing. I also will hurry to generate a search mage, a ritual spell mage and a construction mage.

I have not taken the jump to playing MP; I understand that my opening will leave me pretty vulnerable to rush attacks :-)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Same as I was saying above! Though if you read, it turns out not to be the best idea :)

But in what you are saying above, why are you hiring so many scouts so early? Can't see you need many

Re: Opening Gambit
 

I guess it's the ex-spook in me... I prefer to get a bunch out in every direction, for a little intel, recce and surveillance :-)

As for the mage thing, I like to be able to bring down as much variety of artillery as possible, holy or otherwise. If I get a chance, the prophet gets as many path enhancers or empowerment as possible.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

IMHO (SP), you don't need more than one scout at the start. It's not like you're gonna be going far, or doing anything about distant lands. On the turns you're making more scouts, why not make, say, more researchers?

Re: Opening Gambit
 

There aren't very many nations for which the nation-specific scouts you can hire at forts are really better than the indy scouts. If you want lots of scouts (and that can be a useful thing), hire them in indy provinces without forts. I like to use indy scouts to build forts, too. Hire tough commanders and mages in your forts, maybe spies, rarely assassins, never scouts.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

aka putting all your eggs in the same basket.
Not only will you suffer much more should your mage die (even in SP - like really bad luck with a ninja attack or coming across Bogus's gang), but you also prevent yourself from having one more smiter on the battlefield. Instead of having one smite-mage + 1 other-artillery, you get only a single mage that casts a single of these spells.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Some other starting armies have OK odds of a turn 1 conquest (MA Ulm in addition to Ashdod and Abysia), but would not really want to risk that over a single province.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

All, thank you for the constructive criticism :-) I do see what you are saying about "all eggs in one basket"

@JB I usually get at least one province where I can recruit indy scouts pretty quick, then I can switch to just recruiting researchers. Another thing about a lot of scouts is threat detection... the AI tends to may a bee-line right for the human player; I can detect the biggest armies fairly quick with a spread of scouts. I also locate the AI capitals pretty quick, and, if I have a spy recruitment capability, extra forts can generate those spies and mass them to instill unrest in the enemy capitals neighboring provinces. And if you are playing with the magic sites mod, there is one that can produce a flying, sacred assassin-seductress... pretty crazy against invading armies and all sorts of evil stuff :-)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Fact is, unless your mage has two heads and the ability to act twice in a round, it's completelly useless for them to be able to cast Fireball (or whatever other spell he is able to) and Smite at the same time. He will use one, or the other, not both in the same round, so it's much better to have the commander be the prophet and cast the smites while your mage do it's stuff

If you don't recruit an scout in turn 2, you don't really lose that much, becouse as you say, you ussually are able to recruit indy scouts pretty quick from outside your castles. However, if you don't recruit a mage in turn 2, and that mage can research, say, 7 per turn, you'll be losing 84 research at the end of first year, 160+ at the end of second year, and 240+ at the end of third year. That's a pernament disventage: those are 1, 2 or 3 levels in magic that you wont have, and you won't be able to recover if you miss the chance to buy that mage in turn 1.
If you happen to buy 2,3,4 or more mages in the first turns, then the mistake compounds and you lose even more research. That research lost outweight, by FAR any extra adventage you might get from having a scout one or two turns earlier.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Indeed.
Also, concering the AI, put 10 PD into every province as soon as you conquer it. It really makes them more peacefull. The beeline making happenes when an AI scout sees a Human province with less then 10 PD. The AI thinks "Yay free province" and beelines for it.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

With regards to hiring mages early, the contribution of a single mage over the long term is fairly irrelevant as a consideration. What you need to be worried about are your immediate goals. One mage won't make a huge relative difference between you and other nations. What will make a difference is your early fighting strength. If you can hire non-mage commanders that will significantly increase your early fighting strength, then it can still be a valid purchase. On the other hand, you don't want to purchase non-mage commanders if they'll interfere with your ability to research critical early spells. Basically, do the math first.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

1 mage in the long turn means 80 points of research (which are two level 1 paths, or 1 path from level 1 to level 2) in the first year, or 160 in the second year. If that's relevant or not, that's up to you to decide.

However, I was not advocating against expanding, I was advocating against buying scouts. Early expansion makes up for any research lost, becouse it allows you to get a bigger country, that it's the same that having extra castles, and extra castles mean extra research. There are a lot of situations where you wouldn't buy a researcher in the first turn. For example, with Ermor MA, you are almost bound to use your first mages as commanders, as you need mages to carry undeads. Several nations with heavy bless strategy need to buy a priest in the first turns as well, and some nations expand using SC chasis (like Nieflheim with jarls).

Early expansion is the single most important thing in the first turns, bar none. However, a lot of nations (most of them), need not to wast any castle turns on that. You can expand to your first province with your initial army, then recruit an indy commander there, and go back to get your second army when it's ready in turn 3. In the meanwhile, you should be buying a mage+troops each turn, if you can afford, or just troops, if you can't. That bassically depends on how cheap are your researchers.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

I'm with you on this one!

@Zorfwaddle (what a name! :) )
The way you described it, you talked about "alternating" your mage/scout builds, from the outset. That's up to you and your playing style, from a beginner's pov I was just saying I find it a waste of effort to produce many, early scouts against SP AI.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Someone (I forget who) determined that the AI's thresholds for deciding how strong your PD is are 6, 11, 16, 21, not the multiples of 5 or 10. If that is true, the AI does not see a difference between a 6 and a 10 province defense.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Triqui, I did not think of it that way... thank you for the insight.

I do not think I lose more than 1-2 mage-worth-of-research before I stumble into a scout province. I do plant a lab if feasible for the provinces w/ a magic site that generates something useful like a sage or mages I cannot generate, for a bootstrap into a path I don't have.

That is the great thing about Dominions... so many ways to do stuff :-)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Yeah thats a story from 1996. When I got back to the States, I got a real email account and tried everything with my real name... got frustrated, hit a bunch of keys, thought a little bit and added some vowels :-)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

That's not relevant, you still lose the 80 research per year per mage you didn't buy.

Quick math:

Lets suppose you don't buy a mage in turns 2, 3 and 4, where you could, to buy 3 scouts. Let's suppose you conquer a province with mages one of those turns, and you go and buy a lab in turn 5 to buy druids. Let's assume your mages have research 7. Druids and the like have research 5

So your research for the first 12 turns is:
0+0+0+0+7+(7+7+5)+ (7+7+7+5+5) + (7*4+5*3) + (7*5
5*4 ) + (7*6+5*5)+ (7*7+5*6) + (7*8+5*7) = 384 research

Let's suppose you now buy mages in those first turns, and then you buy the same lab and buy the same druids (there's nothing forbidding you to do so)
0+7+7*2+7*3+7*4+(7*5+5)+(7*6+5*2)+(7*7+5*3)+(7*8+5 *4)+(7*9+5*5)+(7*10+5*6)+(7*11+5*7)= 600 research.

The fault in your reasoning is that you think you are just losing 1 research turn. You arent. You are missing 1 researcher, which means you lose 1 research turn per turn after the turn you missed the researcher. That compounds through time, so a 7 point researcher you missed in turn 2, by the end of year 3, you would had lost 34*7=238 research, that mage alone. If you miss mages in the, say, first 5 turns, you will be 7*34+7*33+7*32+7*31= 910 research in turn 36.

That does not mean you should buy researchers every single turn of your life due to this opportunity cost you miss if you don't. But you should miss the buy only when what you are doing produces a benefit that is greater than the oportunity cost you miss. Buying a needed commander, maybe buying a H3 priest to prophetize into H4, buying extra troops first couple of turns to get 2 expansion parties, or going to site search with a mage are worth the research cost. Buying a scout, is not.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

@Zorfwaddle
What triqui says above makes sense to me.

Not meaning to get at you all :), just interested, but the bit I don't really get is what you do with these extra scouts early anyway?? You're gonna have 3 scouts in 5 or 6 turns, plus your starter, or thereabouts. You'll have one army or so. A single scout can more or less look around near to you for you, can't it? I can only see you going to scout provinces miles away. And you mostly need to conquer your immediate neighbours in the early days (IMHO), you mostly end up attacking them anyway.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Guys, thank you for the suggestions. I started a new game and am playing using the research first/don't prophetize a heavy-duty mage strategy. I use the starting army to snatch up nearby provinces and as usual, finding one that produces scouts fairly quickly. I'm not fighting the math :-) I just like 6-7 scouts so I can get a feel as to where the AI enemy is.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

Beats me. From a practical perspective, in SP, it doesn't really matter as the AI is utterly incapable of keeping up with any half-way decent player, so somebody who wants to start finding all opponents early in the game isn't really hurting himself all that much as the opposition doesn't take advantage of his suboptimal playing.

In MP, it is very common to recruit a flood of independent scouts once you find an independent site or, if you fail to find such a site, to recruit a flood of independent scouts out of secondary fortresses once you cannot afford to recruit all mages everywhere every turn, since from the middle game onwards, detailed scouting is often essential to survival, but the capital should never, ever, recruit a scout during anything resembling normal gameplay in MP as there is (practically) always a better affordable capital-only commander mage or priest that should be recruited instead.

Re: Opening Gambit
 

you can beat the AI with no research at all (I have done). So sure, it is not needed to buy a mage in turn 2. However, it is (very) suboptimal, and I think we should make the new players to understand why. Then they can play as they want, as this is a game, and the goal is to have fun :-)

@zorfwaddle sure, in MP is even more important to have scouts. In my game with Marignon I have like 20 :-)

Re: Opening Gambit
 

This is slightly off-topic, but I'll mention a few cases where I *always* recruit on turn 1 something I want to prophetise.

Nations who can recruit demon or undead commanders. Prophetise him and make him reanimate like there is no tomorrow. For example Oni General from Yomi, reanimate Longdead or preferably soulles (walk with an army, reanimate 25 soulless after the battle, attack next province, reanimate 25 soulles, etc -> you'll have a couple hundred soulless at the end of the year, excellent nice soulless who will be targeted by enemy banishes instead of your precious demons).

Nations who have excellent thugs who become even better thugs if they are prophetised. For example Machakan Hunter Lords (script Holy Avenger, Attack -> you actually *want* the rider to die eventually, because after the puny rider dies the spider remains prophet and in friendly dominion it has about 100 HP; not only that, once it eventually dies, it should be high enough in the Hall of Fame so that you can eventually Ritual of Rebirth him as a Giant Mummy).

Nations who can recruit H3 priests should in my opionion *always* prophetise one. For example Lizard King. Fanaticism is a powerful tool, Word of Power has its uses (it will be a memorable moment when you first time paralyse with Word of Power an enemy SC still buffing up), and a H4 Banishment is a hall-sweeper vs undead and demons.

Other than that I tend to either prophetise the first commander (I don't usually prophetise the first scout, usually I am too eager to find out where my enemies are to waste the first (and only, until I find an indy province from where to recruit scouts) scout into marching with the army), because of the Smites and Sermons of Courage (those both keep the initial army going), or wait a few turns until I have enough money to recruit some other prophet chassis (giants and super-mages cost an arm and leg, and as prophets are free from upkeep it makes IMO much sense to make one of them a prophet). In my opinion, on the first turns it is much too important to get expansion parties out rather than recruit a 500gold commander to be prophetised (and thus lose two turns of expanion, and then that super prophet might just as well die in the first combat to a lucky arrow rolling umpteen sixes in row, and all you would have left would be the sore forehead because of all the banging on the table/wall).