[Ironhawk]

Yeah Darloth did a good job. The sauro player did an ok job too - however the only reason he survived was because CTis kept sucking away resources. Honorable mention goes out to whoever thought up the Rain of Toads plan, also. That was a real concern for us, as you can see in our forums. It effectively shut down Niefel for 10 or more turns. In a non-team game that would be have been a death sentence.

So, the vets had talked a couple of times throughout the game about putting together a list of advice for the noobs. We never got around to it but I thought I'd just post some ramblings:

1) Expand FAST - We specifically designed our nations for truly insane expansion speeds so you dont have to shoot for that, but you get the idea.

2) Focus on military gains, not territory gains - I think a lot of the noobs felt a false sense of security when they were able to tie up our raiders or push into vet lands. In dom3 wars, territories change hands rapidly becoming almost valueless except for their location and what you can attack/defend from them. To win, you have to destroy enemy armies and disable enemy production (capture or seige forts). If you arent doing those things you arent winning.

3) Predict Raiders, dont chase them - Dom3 movement mechanics will never allow you to catch raiders if they move away. You have to guess where they will go next to intercept them. Or use magical transport to attack them before the movement phase.

4) Dont buy more than 10 PD!! - Almost uniformly, all vets will purchase only 1pd in any of their provinces. PD are usually bad troops. PD cannot be moved if the front moves away. PD becomes insanely cost-inefficient over 15 or so. And lastly, no determined army or raider will be stopped by just PD. While there are certain exceptions to this rule based on nation and situation, I believe that all noobs should adopt it.

6) Fort production - Almost halfway through the game, we vets marveled at the fact that many noobs still had only their capital forts. Almost from turn 1, any vet will be planning where they can build thier 2nd (and maybe 3rd!) forts. Forts not only give you more mages (!!!!!!) but they also give you more troops and a defensive advantage.

6) Mages - Once any decent amount of research has been done it is suicide to send a large army out into the field without backup of mages. The number one thing that vets do when planning campaigns is figure out what assortment of mages to bring and how to script them.

7) Skelly Spam - the Ench 3 spell Raise Dead is very cheap and quite powerful. So much so that it has its own tactic name. Both my enemies could have used this very effectively early on.