Re: New Game
As for how Llama's question about how VP's work -- I'm pretty sure they're Axis & Allies style. That is, the number of victory points you have is determined by the number of victory provinces you hold. (The victory provinces are randomly marked at the beginning of the game, and optionally you can also set capitals to be worth VP's). So if 18 VP's are required for victory, that means as soon as a player controls 18 one-VP provinces (or 9 two-VP provinces or 6 three-VP provinces or...you get the idea), he wins.
Non-cumulative means you can't hold VP in your treasury and save them up; you have to control all the necessary victory provinces at once. So if you have 17 VP (you just need one more VP!) and someone attacks you and you lose a one-VP province, you now have 16 VP (and need two more VP to win).
When VP is enabled, there is a VP score graph; you can just check it to figure out how many VP you (and your opponents) have.
(Cumulative VP means that VP provinces produce one, two, or three VP per turn, and you DO hold VP in your treasury. I think few games use cumulative VP because it actually rewards turtling -- once you have only a couple more VP provinces than your opponents, you just have to defend your holdings and it would be quite difficult for them to knock you out or overcome your advantage by expanding.)
Not only does it lead to a clean cutoff without requiring the game to go on for zillions of turns of mopping up after it's quite clear who's going to win, I've heard it makes players more aggressive in the late game -- if you control 20%-30% of the map it encourages you to go out and make risky attacks (because you're probably within striking distance of the win) rather than just turtling and becoming impossibly strong (because if you did that an opponent might be able to out-expand you and get enough VP's for the win because your superior army/economy/research/dominion/SC is just sitting there instead of grabbing VP's).
It also encourages weaker nations to ally against the threat of a strong nation before the strong nation gets too big (because once the strong nation starts to get big enough to be able to take on everyone else at once, it has enough VP's to win) -- which keeps the game interesting.
I'd encourage the host not to check the "capitals are worth VP's" setting and have the following settings:
18 VP required to win (40% of total 45 VP)
9 one-VP provinces
9 two-VP provinces
6 three-VP provinces
These numbers are just an example. I made up these rules of thumb to help me decide what VP settings are reasonable:
a. There should be 1-2 VP provinces per player for a large (12 or more) player game. Any less and lucky placement can lead to a premature win; any more and it gets hard to keep track of them all. Also, if VP provinces are too common, they're no longer "special," so geopolitical maneuvering based on VP provinces as strategically important locations is reduced.
b. 30%-40% of the total VP's should be required to win. Any fewer and, again, lucky placement or a small regional war with a single victor can lead to a premature win; any more and the anti-turtling effects discsussed above don't work as well.
c. If capital VP's are enabled, the percentage in b. should be lower, say 23%-33%, because it takes a lot more effort to capture a capital than to grab frontier provinces in border skirmishes; if VP's are harder to get, then fewer VP's should be required.
Of course this is just my opinion; while I've played a lot of turn-based and real-time strategy games, I'm new to the Dominions series with Dom3 (and I haven't had it for all that long). So feel free to disagree with me. ^_^
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