Newbie Game EA (Running)

[Shovah32]

I never claimed i was new, i simply admitted that i suck and was allowed in.

And as for me and tien chi having a war, it was more like 2 assasins killing 2 mages then making peace...

[Ironhawk]

About VPs: I explicitly opted not to use VPs in this game so that you guys would have to play to the bitter end. If you'd ended too early then you never would have gotten experience with spells (and the tactics needed to defeat them) like Murdering Winter or Ghost Riders. Anyway, in games w/o VPs, what normally happens is that one nation comes pretty clearly out on top. Then you can discuss with all the players whether you think your position is unchallengable, particularly with the #2 player. If there is agreement, you just declare someone the winner.

As for Frank or Shovah being too experienced for this game: It's possible that they were. There is no system for ranking dominions players or evaluating thier experience. I had to make a judgement call and I made it, so that's that. In the end what matters is the experience you gained as a result of this game, which i think was pretty huge for everyone.

[Foodstamp]

Well being thrown up against better players taught me alot. The veteran players that snuck into this game had a firm grasp of magic usage that I hope to learn from. In my future games I plan to use some of the strategies I saw implemented in this game or I heard talked about on this thread.

So while the first nooby game of Dominions 3 may be won by a veteran player, I think that if all the true noobies take something from the game, we end up coming out ahead.

[FrankTrollman]

We had our first big fight with Ulm, and it generally went our way as far as the army vs. army portion went.

The take-home message is that having all of your troops do one thing is ultimately futile. One tactic, no matter how good, no matter how strong, no matter how many troops are behind it - can be adapted to.

Ulm sent an army composed of essentially four things:

Clockwork Horrors (240 units)
Archers (250 units)
Hydra Hatchlings (26 Units)
Warrior Smiths (26 Units)

And various sundry minor participants to round the totals out to 31 Leaders, 319 Normal Units, and 243 Magic Beings. It was slaughtered. I don't mean just that it lost 10 Leaders, 229 Normal Units, and all 243 Magical Beings - I mean that it managed to kill no leaders, no undead, and only 36 normal units (out of 151) and 1 Magic Being (out of 6).

What went wrong? The problem here was a lack of versatility. Because there were so few types of units on the field, the forces of Tien Chi were able to make a battle plan around the upcoming onslaught and severely undermined his army because it hinged on only a few effects.

Things in Dominions have counters. No exceptions. So an army of Clockwork Horrors can be countered. And army of 240 Clockwork Horrors can be countered the same way. In this case it was by casting:

Quagmire
Curse of Stones
Swarm

The combination was devastating. His Clockwork Horrors moved less far because of the swampy ground, gained extra fatigue because of the Curse of Stones, and were delayed for precious turns slicing through Dragonflies. As a result, they ran out of Fatigue before they even saw battle with my main army. When they were finally trampled to death en mass by the chariots, they didn't even hold up their hands in resistance.

Next up, the archers. A quarter of a thousand Ulmish maidens of the bow. Backed up by Fire Arrows even. Unfortunately, an entirely archery dependent army is of relatively little use when faced with an Arrow Shield. Enter Arrow Fend, a spell that grants Air Shield to the entire army. We cast it on the first turn.

The army of Ulm was destroyed. Cleaning it up won't be easy or fast, there's a hundred units retreating in various directions,a nd he still has Bane Lord Super Combatants wandering the lands killing Province Defense. It's quite an offensive.

But because the main thrust was simply the same thing repeated dozens or hundreds of times, a small collection of strange magics was able to slay his entire army with negligible losses.

The take home lesson: don't put all your Faith in one thing. Any thing. I don't care how good it is. I don't care how strong it looks. I don't care how easy it is to reiterate the same tactic over and over again. There's a counter for everything. And if your entire army is the same, your entire army can be countered by one thing. A throw together force of Tien Chi militia can analyze your force composition and put up a force less than 40% your size and slaughter you down with losses over 13 times what you dish out in return.

Really it's the same problem that Yomi had. An army of 300 copies of one thing isn't six times better than an army of 50 copies of that same thing.

-Frank

[FAJ]

What could Yomi have done to stop you from casting murdering winter? What troops does Yomi even have access to to combat your forces? What could I have done?

I didn't have any good independants, or if i did the province had 12-20 reasources. My castles can only produce chaff troops of hp9 and low prot, or archers of the same quality. That, or incredibly overpriced Oni, which have 6 or less protection anyways. We get no sacred troops; our battle mages are either 500 gold a piece, or the Hannyas which burn and fatigue our own troops!

I understand WHY my armies were easily beaten, just not HOW it could have been avoided. Especially given my ignorence of the magic system and available spells.

[FrankTrollman]

What could Yomi have done to stop you from casting murdering winter?

One of your Forces was 1/3rd Undead, that's all Cold Immune. You also have access to a lot of Earth power that could have thrown up some Crushers, Clockwork Horrors, or Mechanical Men. Murdering Winter does a small amount of Armor Negating cold damage (7+ Cold Scale according to the manual) to a percentage of every troop in the province. It costs fifty gems, so it's not a good deal unless it's going to kill a lot of units. Now in this case, you had a large army in a cold province that was almost all Bakemono - that's a perfect target for that.

But if you'd split things up, so that you had three armies instead of 2, so that each army had a mixture of Onis, Bakemono, Undead, and Constructs, then there wouldn't have been a good target for Murdering Winter.

That's ultimately what I meant by keeping it a secret so that you wouldn't have a chance to repossition your units. A mixed force or a divided army would have taken pretty miniscule losses against that spell for the cost (remembering that every Murdering Winter is essentially a Troll Court that I don't have).

My castles can only produce chaff troops of hp9 and low prot, or archers of the same quality.

Don't put your faith in archers alone. Your castles also produce Oni. In fact, your nation is called "land of the oni" for a reason. The Ao Oni are immune to murdering Winter, but even the Aka Oni has 14 hit points - that means that he'll live through even the nastiest cold snap.

Of course, the Bakemono Archers themselves only cost 8 gold. An army of 300 of them really is only 2400 gold worth of troops. That's less than 20 Wind Riders, and you'd already heard that the armies of Tien Chi went through that with only horrendous losses. To a very real degree, you get what you pay for. And Bakemono Archers even in large numbers are not a large force by the standards of the day (compare: Ulm is throwing around an army that had 250 Ulmish Archers and 243 cold immune constructs - that's an army).

In short, you weren't attacking with an army the caliber of the armies that were marching around on your border. It wasn't science fiction enough, it wasn't diverse enough, and it wasn't nearly large enough for the amount of troops it was looking at.

Finally,

the Hannyas which burn and fatigue our own troops!

I actually think that Yomi is all about the Hannyas. The heat aura is an advantage if you turn to magical troops or segregate them from the rest of the army. As mages, they don't have to stand in the middle of a blob of troops, they can be way in the back, or over on the side. Equipped with a Skull Staff they can mad spam skeletons and equipped with a Flaming Skull or Helmet they can Flaming Arrows the army or rain Falling Fires on the enemy. At 40% the cost of the Dai Oni and producable from any Castle, my initial analysis is that they are the soul of the Yomi army (but I don't really know for sure because I didn't even open up the Yomi position to look at what it does until you invaded me).

I understand WHY my armies were easily beaten, just not HOW it could have been avoided.

Part of it is jusging where and when the major battles are going to take place. When you first started screaming across the border, you could probably take any province with 100 guys and some sharpened sticks, so really you could just do that. Once you believe that a major battle is going to take place, your choices are to either:

• Avoid the battle altogether and simply continue to take territory with small armies while ceding provinces to large enemy forces.
  or
• Consolidate all of your forces into the province you believe a major battle is going to take place.

Indeed, since you controlled the planes section between the two major battle fields, it was entirely within your means to have moved some or all of one army group into the other province - forcing my forces to fight the entire force. The divide and raid plan relies entirely on the fact that that is an available strategy. Since one team could combine arms, the defender (that's still me by the way) has to alot for that fact and cannot afford to split forces to fight small battles.

Movement occurs after the magic phase, so spells like Mind Hunt and Murdering Winter apply only to the troops that aren't moving into that province.

-Frank

[Saarud]

Warnings... loooong post

Finally I Agartha are dead. Maverni and Atlantis quite effiecently cut me down and eliminated all my dominion. My 25 or something priests had no chance to preach to the people about me as both Maverni and Atlantis outnumbered my priests. My last action as I knew this would be my last turn were to breake the siege and try to do as much damage as possible to Maverni. I was owned on the battlefield as Maverni used much better tactic than me but atleast I took some 118 or something with me to my grave.

I started the game in Aklavik Pass very near the northwestern corner. I thought that was good but quickly I had to realize that it was very crowdy up there. I ran into Maverni and Yomi south of me early and I immediatly started to negotiate with Maverni about an alliance against Yomi. At first I thought the negotiation was going good but after a few months the messenger from Maverni was not going to Agartha anymore.

Meanwhile I was attacking hard eastwards and I reached Sauromatias capital at the time when he was stalling so I tried to seize the moment and attacked the capital... well I was trashed by the PD and a new player took control of Sauromatia. He pushed me back immediatly... meanwhile I had started negotiations with Yomi as I realized that Maverni was planning to attack me. Yomi and I agreed to a NAP but he warned me about attacking Maverni as he told me they were allied and he would have to take his side if I was the aggressor.

Also Yomi is a good negotiator he asked for 2 provinces that bordered his capital (I took them because of Yomis big mistake of sending a Dai-Oni to his death while the troops were hiding away) as I still had no friend I had no choice but to agree. I realized that my war with Sauromatia would be hard for me to fight because of the long supply route and that Maverni was gathering forces on the border, so Sauromatia and I agreed to a border and now I could concentrate on my southern would be enemy Maverni.

I still couldn't make the initial attack due to the pact between Yomi and Maverni so I started gathering troops. Since my territory was small, only 5 provinces I got way to small income. I had to push the taxes up to 200% while patrolling. This I did in all my provinces and actually had the highest income of all for a couple of turns (I killed approx 9000 of my starting 30000 population in my capitol over the years as they tried to rebel against my high taxes).

Maverni made the first move and attacked and totally trashed my army in the first battle. He used loads of Eponi Knights on the flanks where I had 0, zero, zip, nada troops he slaughtered my army quite good. Quickly I sent more troops to the front. Atlantis showed up and become a new bordering nation. I quickly new that he was allied to Maverni as he refused to help me against them. Now I had two 1 province fronts, 1 against each of them.

Many battles was fought and at one time I really thought that I had a chance of pushing them back far. In the end... I lost... but that you already know.

So did I learn anything? Sure did I learned more in this game than every SP game I have played in Dominions 3 and Dominions 2 DEMO.

I want to thank FAJ (Yomi) and llamabeast (Sauromatia) for being good neighbours I also would like to thank Sheap (R'lyeh) for all the friendly messeges but most of all I want to thank my nemesis Xox (Maverni) and Darrel (Atlantis) for making this game fun. There actually was a moment I though I could advance on you... but you quickly killed that dream.

Bye all

[FAJ]

Thanks Frank for the analysis. It is my hopes to give you one good (or at least better informed ) fight before I am dead.

By the way, is it possible to kill Oni with murdering winter? At most its one attack on them, and they all have a double life if they die.

[Shovah32]

Abysia has joined the 'we hate tien chi' group and will be attacking as soon as our NAP is over.

[Sheap]

Saarud: You sort of got a raw deal with the sub (which was me at the time) taking over right before you were ready to attack the Sauromatian capital. On the other hand, if you are attacking a staling player, you need to move fast - they might return, someone might sub for them, and it's not like they're going to defend themselves.

Edit: I have no idea how Ulm consistently gets their turns done, like, 30 seconds before the timer expires