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Saxon said:
The provincial defense issue appears to be a big problem for you. A couple of points on that might help. First, the troops you get for the money are generally pretty weak. I think of them as a deterrent to keep out very small armies and some cannon fodder to support the real defense army when it arrives.
Second, look at the cost of those weak troops. For each step in provincial defense, you pay one more gold than the current defense. That means to upgrade from 3 defense, you have to pay 4 gold. Not to bad. But to upgrade from 22, you have to pay 23 gold. That is getting pricy, especially compared to what you can get for that kind of money at your castle.
Now, if you were pushing provincial defense up to 60 or 70, you were paying 60 gold for each weak unit. A lot of your resources were not utilized in the best possible fashion.
Sure, there is no upkeep, but you also can not use these troops for anything except the defense of one province. Regular units can move on both offense and defense and are much more flexible. I keep my defense at 11 unless it is a active boarder, where I try to put it to 21. You get an extra commander at these two cut offs, so it is worth going up from 10 or 20.
The money I save goes into mobile troops, temples, labs and castles.
My other comment is about the immobile pretender. I personally prefer a mobile pretender, as it give me more flexibility. For the “super players” they can plan turns in advance and handle tricky things. I get things wrong on many occasions and sometimes need to rush a pretender to battle to help out. Again, I am not saying it is not possible to do it, but for those of us who need extra help, a mobile pretender is a nice extra resource. They don’t need to be a Super combatant (SC), just their spell powers can tip a battle.
One Ermor tip is that Eyes of Aiming put into the normal priest make them pretty good at cleaning up large numbers of the lesser undead. The normal one misses a lot, but the boost to precision increases their kill rate.
You mention you didn’t want to recruit Astrologers. They are one of Arco’s trademark magic units, which in Dominions is usually a clue that you should pay extra attention to them. They are strong in astral magic. With a starshine cap and the banner of the northern star, you can boost these guys to five astral, which is huge. (speaking of which, small is big in this game. A single extra level of magic goes a long way, it is different than games with huge bonuses that don’t mean much) If you get lucky and get a mage with four astral to start, you can boost him up to six. Have a look at the crystal matrix and slave matrix. You can turn these mages into powerful killing machines that do not tire. I mentioned mind burn, but should have said soul slay. I have created a firing squad of about 20 astral mages that will kill just about anything and can teleport in to do it. Dominions has lots of ways to power up mages and some commanders and the more you find, the more you will win.
I like the other unit, the Mystic, but they can not be powered up as far. I would suggest building only Astrologers and Hearts Companions at your home castle and recruit your mystics at secondary castles. If you do not have a bless strategy, you might ignore the Hearts Companions. Sorry, I don’t remember their cost compared to the regular Hoplite units.
Finally, sure, lots of people say the game is easy. But usually it is the hard core who post and not the normal folks like you and I. The postings are biased. Also, it is a human thing. Most folks don’t like to admit they get their butt handed to them by a game, so they don’t post their failures, they post their successes.
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In the meantime I started implementing strategies from this Thread and I am doing much better. I even won the Map once (OK, to be honest I quit the game, when I contolled about 50% of the map and was convinced I would win).
Currently my local defence values range between 25 and 40 supported by as many mystics as I can build. Besides that I add summons or normal troops. That works well in most cases.
Mystics vs. Astrologers
In the beginning when I used mages only to research and almost not in battle I chose Mystics because they are slightly better in research.
Even now I still prefer Mystics. Especially in the early game their fire and water mages are very useful in battle. The astral battle spells looked rather weak to me.
Nevertheless I will have a closer look on the astrologers.
And thanks for the tip about eyes of aiming, because in my current game a war with ermor is unavoidable.