Recommendation?

[ttomm46]

Hi
I'm a total newbie to this series..My strategy background is limited to The Civ series and a couple of rts games..

Before I invest i'd like some feedback on the game.. How hard is it to learn.? I also like my games somewhat addictive...right now my printer is down so i can't print out the tutorial for the demo, so I'm lost there..

Any opinions welcome..just want to know because 54.95 is A pretty good investment.

[Nerfix]

You know, you could run the game in windowed mode and keep the tutorial open. =)

It's not that hard. I could learn to play it as a 13 years old kid, and that was with Dominions: Priests, Prophets and Pretenders...

[Endoperez]

People here will probably tell you that the game is very addictive, and that it's well worth the price, and that the tutorial and GUI that has been improved from DomII will make the learning curve much smaller.


After quickly introducing the game to new players, I'll say that it takes a long time to learn the game. The first game or two is a game of armies, a game where you conquer independents, where your armies destroy other armies. Then you'll meet the AI, whose armies are often bigger than yours. You will hone your army management skills a bit, but will also learn to use some kind of magic to help your armies. Perhaps you summon some creatures to help there. Perhaps your mages accompany your armies to cast battle spells, or your mages protect your armies from whatever magic the AI brings to battle. Perhaps you take a blessing which gives your nations' sacred units an edge over the enemy.

If you want to play in multiplayer, you have to learn many things again. Armies can be good, but not good enough, because few mages and good spells can deal with big armies of normal units. Some strategies could still work, but those probably aren't the ones you used against the AI. Mages are good, and that makes research very important. You'll learn how to build utterly devastating combatants with the combination of different spells and items, and how to kill these monsters. I'm not sure what comes then, since I'm still in this phase. I've been playing from the days original Dominions, but only started following MP strategies with DomII, and didn't really try it myself before Dom3 had gone gold.

The game of armies is pretty simple. The game of demo magic without the big spells is manageable. The game of all paths and all school up to 9, where one must be ready to fight super-combatant pretender your opposition might have from turn 1, will take a long time.

[Shovah32]

This is a great game. I started with Dom2 at around 12 or 13 (only 14 now) and while it takes alot of time to master (i still havnt ) its so addictive you wont notice. Play a couple of single player games with different nations and pretenders to learn how you like to play and feel free to ask questions here as much as you like.

If you find a strategy you like feel free to focus on improving it but dont forget to play with other nations/strategies too, it keeps the game going and, more importantly, fun.

[Fate]

It was mentioned elseware, but I think it is really true. You have to get used to losing if you want to learn. This game is really random (most all "checks" involve a random number, and at least 8d6+, or open ended 6 sided dice, are rolled each round of melee between 2 units). You're great, ubeatable armies will be beaten, and you might get scot lucky a couple times.

Still, you can influence the outcome of battles significantly, and the game is very enjoyable. Just don't feel bad about restarting.

[KissBlade]

Hehe ... get gems, get mages, pwn armies. It's not too tough once you learn the "build orders", aka what to research for which nations, what are what I like to classify as "breakpoint" spells where your nation is at a definite advantage over most others. (Examples, Relief/skeleton spam for C'tis back in dom II, body ethereal for most astral nations, etc).

[PDF]

Fate said:
It was mentioned elseware, but I think it is really true. You have to get used to losing if you want to learn. This game is really random (most all "checks" involve a random number, and at least 8d6+, or open ended 6 sided dice, are rolled each round of melee between 2 units). You're great, ubeatable armies will be beaten, and you might get scot lucky a couple times.

Still, you can influence the outcome of battles significantly, and the game is very enjoyable. Just don't feel bad about restarting.

Huh, where did you see that ? Do we talk about the same game ?
The game has indeed really *few* randomness, the "open dice" system is here to simulate some bell-curve statistical distribution, where extreme results are always possible.
A standard attack gets Attack value + 2d6+ (open) matched vs Defense + 2d6+ , there's no 8 or 10 die rolls... Damage is assessed the same way, as is spell resistance, etc..
This allows a lowly militia to hit once in 10,000 times a fully equipped uber-unit, or makes the uber-unt miss the militia, yet it's very unlikely, *and* this aspect should be taken into account when playing : *no*unit is unbeatable !
.

Eventually victory or defeat is determined by your strategy and how it fares vs others', by diplomacy also in MP, but not luck at all !

[Agrajag]

Attached is a nice graph showing probability against result.
The X axis is the result you expect to get in the dice, and the Y axis is the probability of getting that result.
Because there are no numbers, I'll just let you know that the first line represents a chance of 1/6, and applies to results 1-5, the 0 probability is for 6, the next line is 1/36 and applies to 7-11 etc.
This should help you see exactly how random Dom is
(The results are assuming the roll is the same as in Dom2, and shows results for 1-36)
(If you want to know what I used to make the graph feel free to ask )

[ttomm46]

thank's guys.. sounds great to me..

[PDF]

Agrajag said:
Attached is a nice graph showing probability against result.
The X axis is the result you expect to get in the dice, and the Y axis is the probability of getting that result.
Because there are no numbers, I'll just let you know that the first line represents a chance of 1/6, and applies to results 1-5, the 0 probability is for 6, the next line is 1/36 and applies to 7-11 etc.
This should help you see exactly how random Dom is
(The results are assuming the roll is the same as in Dom2, and shows results for 1-36)
(If you want to know what I used to make the graph feel free to ask )

There's a nice table *with numbers* showing the various % of succeeding a 2d6+ roll on p5 of the Dom3 manual
Outside of -14 to +14 difference there's 1% or less to succeed/fail. There is still less than 10% if difference is greater that 6.
So results are fairly predictable, but yet there's always a "wild" chance !