[curtadams]

Graeme Dice said:
And gain the enormous benefit of tying your opponents army down for at least a turn so that you can destroy it instead of having to chase his army around and never be able to catch it. After all, because of the movement rules, it's impossible to catch an army that constantly moves to new provinces every turn unless you can bring in a second force that's sufficient to destroy it.

He's not tied down at all. You can leave a sieged province just as well as an ordinary one. The AI won't leave but the attacks are very predictable.

I don't really mind losing the one gold that I spent to get a scouting commander. After all, now I don't have to worry about the province defense being killed and causing my pretender to autorout. The Dom3 morale system is still just as broken in this regard as the Dom2 system.

You're really missing something if you're not using PD. For one thing, you have to be constantly running around to squish all those dang invading independents. For another, you're losing a great military tool. PD is quite respectable militarily until rather late in the game. Solo combatants are generally rather fragile; you can always back them up with a bank of archers if you're having autorout problems. In any case, even if your SC routs defending the province, he just ends up next door and you can break the siege anyway. You haven't lost anything from trying to defend.

Tax damage to population is inconsequential for a single turn of 200% taxes. Pillage is only a problem if your opponent doesn't want to actually win the game, and would rather throw away his future income to try and kill you now.

If he's not going to squish you promptly it's not "his" income. It's good strategy to injure an opponent. Much better to control a damaged province than to have somebody else control an undamaged one!

His army is right there waiting to be attacked. You don't want to travel through that province, and most popular maps don't let you move more than one province anyways thanks to terrain happy mapmakers.

You do want to travel through if you want to defend or reinforce other provinces. I normally play random maps, and I really wouldn't want to play on a map that was all forest/swamp anyway.

Armies that move into a province and armies that break siege from inside of the castle attack in the same combat.

I know I saw double attacks in Dom2. Did they change that?

That and the ability to make your opponent sit still for a turn so that you can get around the silly movement rules in dominions that keep armies from ever contacting each other unless they both attempt to move into the same province.

But he's not tied down. Incidentally, you can interfere with somebody when he's moving into your terrritory. Only if he retreats can he guarantee moving first. And if he retreats, you're winning.

Why don't you tell me how you plan to force your opponent to attack the castle in the same turn that you've moved your forces there? It's also not at all uncommon to be able to summon sufficient troops in one turn at an important castle. Especially when holding back gems to wait for the strongest summons possible is the default strategy. If you've wasted your earth gems on cave drakes, I'll be quite happy to destroy them with clockwork horrors.

You don't summon much early stuff, but once you get to level 5 or 6 you burn through gems as fast as you can. I don't agree with super summons being common. With the gold upped, even when you get to clockwork horrors and the like you just don't make enough to win. A squad of clockwork horrors is very nice but it won't even come close to wiping out an army. Besides that, most of the time your summoning squad will be in a different castle anyway.