Nation builds to smash EA Heims in teh phace.

[Foodstamp]

I thought it would be interesting to start a thread dedicated to beating early w9/f9 blessed helheim/vanheim and/or beating the various double bless strategies for Neifelheim.

In this thread rather than go through what is wrong and unbalanced about these three nations, it would be interesting to see nation setups built to destroy these nations using the current version of the game.

Here is the current setup I plan to try out and refine to kill these nations. Please comment on anything you see wrong with the build and ways I can improve it.

Nation : Abysia (I've never played this nation)

Pretender: "Lord of the Desert Sun" (Imprisoned)

Magic Paths: 9 fire, 9 Nature

Scales:
3 order
1 sloth
3 heat
3 death
1 luck
1 magic

Starting Dominion 6

The idea behind this setup is to use the extreme heat scale against the heim nations, particularly Neifelheim. My hope is that it will help in making their primary blessed units less invincible.

The Nature is to stack the berserker ability gained with the existing berserker ability on Abysia's sacred unit. With fire 9 for flaming weapons and the extra attack bonus stacked with the berserker, these units should be able to atleast hit the glamour units and do enough damage to harm the giants. (Am I correct on this assumption?)

Abysia seems to get quite a few very nice mages that seem like they would make good battle mages with a little evocation researched. Not to mention they have a high end caster / priest that gets Holy 3.

Finally, alot of the Abysian units radiate heat, which damages the heat vulnerable Neifel units.

I am going to try this setup in single player versus myself playing neifelheim, vanheim and helheim. I will be controlling all 4 nations and just cheeseball massing giants, vans and helhirdings with the 3 heims to see how a standard Abysian army with a heavy mix of sacreds and mages perform.

Feel free to post advice and criticisms about this build, as well as your own Nation builds to counter EA heims.

[Shovah32]

The nature 9 isnt really needed imo, n4 to avoid afflictions would be more than enough and would allow you to take:
Lord of the Desert Sun
f9n4
Dom5
Order 3
Prod 2(aby is resource heavy)
Heat 3
Death 1
Misfortune 2
Magic 1
Dormant

With that set-up your sacreds will be slightly weaker but you will be able to crank them out faster (along with your other high resource troops), will have more gold, wont have mages constantly dying and you will have your god alot sooner (a guy with 90 base health, fairly good base stats, full slots, the ability to cast personal regen and a f9 fireshield is very nice).

Your research (with your pretender to help) should be based mostly in evocation atleast until you reach fireball (for small-medium armies), firecloud (for van/hel) and possibly falling fires (if you find yourself facing large armies you couldnt handle otherwise) and construction. It lets you kit out your pretender, forge various helpful items and make uber-slayers against van/helheim (a demon-bred slayer with boots of giant strength, burning pearl and ring of the warrior can take out most non-ethereal commanders with health of 20 or less and, with 2 flaming weapons could probably take on some niefels, especially with a robe of shadows).

Also, dont under-estimate the low fireshield on your sacreds, vrs the van/hel armies (who rely on defence and multiple low length weapons) and niefels (who take extra fire damage) it can be the difference between winning and losing. To go with your sacreds take either flail infantry (vrs van/hel) or battle-axe infantry (vrs niefelheim) to slaughter them. Vrs van/hel your fire resistance will help immensely vrs the common f9 bless and vrs the giants your high strength (especially on your dual morning star burning ones) lets you take them out where other nations struggle.

[dirtywick]

I mean, if you're trying to fatigue them to death, wouldn't you want to have a really strong starting dominion to try and keep them in heat 3? If I was them against Abysia I'd try and push my Cold dominion onto you, and a stronger dominion helps you fight that off and keep the advantage.

Also, perhaps if you're going to use the sacreds a W9 blessing would be better, they'll get 4 attacks and a sorely needed defense skill. They'll probably get sqaushed quickly by the giants because of their high STR so 4 attacks might be better to make them count when they do attack.

Against the other heims though, I think you're set up good. The abysian heat will knock off glamour making them reasonable targets without the heat and the F9 bless is probably better.

Another thing to consider is the Spectral Infantry, the national summon. They're really good ethereal units for the cost that also radiate heat, but need a D1F1 to summon them. A lot of those could potentially be good, but you'd almost have to design a pretender to do it or hope to get lucky finding a death mage somewhere and empowering it, as they get no death picks.

Some things to think about anyway.

[Foodstamp]

Dirtywick and shovah, Do you two think that Abysia is a good nation to base an anti-heim strategy on, or are there better choices in EA?

Here is a new pretender setup trying to mesh both of your comments:

Pretender: Lord of Summer Plague (Imprisoned)

9fire/6death

Scales:
3 Order
2 Production
3 heat
3 death
2 misfortune
2 magic (could lower this to increase another scale?

Starting Dominion 9

Changes: Took out nature and added death to increase the chances of afflictions if the sacreds hit. Pretender starts with death to cast national spells.

Still no good versus neifelheim?

[dirtywick]

I think against Vanheim and Helheim, it'd be great. The radiant heat of any of the units can knock the glamour off, and without that they're not much better than any other nations units, and certainly not better than your infantry toe to toe. Those giants are tough though.

I'm just throwing this out there, but you know who might be better against Niefelheim though? Yomi. I noticed that Bonds of Fire and later Prison of Fire works pretty well against regular units, and it requires a high morale to break free, and Frighten, Panic, and later Terror are all available to them somewhat easily through a Hannya, or other mages, and they're also all from Thaum. Against the smaller armies of giants, locking them down and lowering their morale so they can't escape and peppering them with arrows and flames from the Aka-Oni might be worth a try. They'd at least have to bring more than just blessed giants to deal with that I'd think and may be enough to stop a rush in MP.

But I usually stick to SP so maybe there's something I'm not seeing there.

[Foodstamp]

Thats the kind of stuff I am looking for. A nation build designed to fight the heims every step of the way, or atleast force the player to build more than one unit type. I will give the yomi units a look and also the spells

[alexti]

My suggestion would be:
Caelum,
Rainbow sage (2-2-2-2-4-3-2-1)
Order 3
Prod 2
Death 3
Cold 2
Misfortune 3
Magic 3
Dom 5

Idea is to research evocation (2 for lightning bolt, 4 for thunder strike). Build 2nd fort ASAP to hire more mages. Against Niefel's it's easy, just enough screening troops to let your mages electrocute the giants. Against Helheim you need to recruit mammoths. They can hold for quite a while vs helherdings and let mages electrocute them. If you reach evo-4, things get pretty easy. Thunder strike is very effective.

The problem with this strategy is you just playing against Niefelheim/Helheim. If you meet somebody with mass of regular troops you're in trouble

[Stryke11]

It's too bad it needs to be like that, that you have to choose a specific race and specific magic path to be able to compete against another specific race - at the expense of sucking against every other race. Don't get me wrong, I like the paper/rock/scissors mentality, but it should be within each race and not between them. For example in most RTS' each race is different and has a strength, but by utilyzing that strength (and tactics, which frankly, uber blessed EA Heims don't even need to think about) they have the potential to beat any other race. You won't hear a Starcraft player saying "oh, they're Zerg? Well, I guess that means I have to be Protoss because Terrans don't have a chance against Zerg."

Ideally, each race should have something that makes them competitive no matter what period in the game and no matter who they are up against.

[Foodstamp]

Stryke11 I agree,

I think maybe some of the drastic changes in the game were not tested enough when going from Dominions 2 to Dominions 3. The two changes that I think have had a huge impact on this situation are the double income changes and the sleeping/imprisoned pretenders freeing up points.

That being said, TBS games have always been insanely hard to balance. The reason why is because not every side has access to the same units, because that would make the game boring. Alot of RTS games solve this by giving a nation 1 unique unit or a very tiny boost in one area (Age of Empire series).

But in TBS games, we demand variety! We want one nation to be different than the next, and this leads to exploitably powerful strategies. Then heap on the two drastic changes mentioned, and the game gets thrown totally out of wack. In the dominions 3 life span, we will probably see other FOTM strategies that may even make the heim thing pale in comparison, but that is the nature of these types of games.

[alexti]

Stryke11 said:
It's too bad it needs to be like that, that you have to choose a specific race and specific magic path to be able to compete against another specific race - at the expense of sucking against every other race. Don't get me wrong, I like the paper/rock/scissors mentality, but it should be within each race and not between them.

I think you're overemphasizing here. Really, there're only couple of nations that are out of balance due to balance strategies (and I don't think Niefelheim is one of them). With Helheim's loss of sacred at any fort it's probably not overpowered on large maps either. Other than those few nations the balance is pretty good. Even Helheim on small map is not a guaranteed win. And specially crafted anti-Helheim Caelum is not hopeless against other nations. You still have good scales, you can field a lot of regular troops, you have access to all magic paths through your pretender and after branching out into other schools of magic you can make your mages useful in the battle vs other nations too.