[Saxon]

Stout,

One thing I recently figured out is that high dominion on your pretender gives the awe effect. This can be a nice addition to a fighting pretender and also increases your dominion power generally. This helps to prevent the dominion kill that you suffered.

While I don’t think anyone was aiming at you, I don’t doubt they designed their pretenders with the possibility in mind. If you go back to your last turn and check out the graphs, you will see some nations have a lot of dominion and others don’t. At this stage of the game, that is largely about pretender design. People have not had time to build many temples or sacrifice too many slaves. If you had died from this at turn 50, they might have done it deliberately to you. At turn 7, they just got lucky.

If you check Ermor, one of the purple lines, you will see that I have a lot of dominion, even though I missed my first two turns. The spread is automatic and can be powerful. In my case, I mixed up late age ermor with middle age ermor and the dominion is not going to be as useful as I thought, but I should be safe from dominion kill. The others are going to have to get me some other way… I have no doubt they will try. A friendly newbie game does not imply friendly tactics!

As the others have said, this is a deep game with a lot of factors in play. I recommend a few games of single player to start out with, as MP is highly competitive and harder. This is my first MP game and what I see in the graphs and hall of fame compared to my SP games is remarkable. Folks really know how to play and make the AI look silly.