Fixing PD?

[Endoperez]

It works for me. PD has changed, and the recruitable units are still there.

[rabelais]

This a fabulous idea, especially given the ongoing controversy about SC's with life drain.

The complete lack of defense after the early game is an enormous issue for me. Even "good" PD (Jotun Marignon etc) isn't cost effective.

The castling strat is a direct response to the futility of defense.

This would go a long way torward making the game more perilous for the SC weenieness that dominates MP.

Let's Overdo it, and then scale back to balanced? I dont trust the SC-mongers to stay cowed.

PD would need to be scriptable to make this truly formidable though. (Good idea anyway)

Yeah, Panther!

Rabe

[NTJedi]

I've included the list below for the WishList of Dom_3... however the developers might be able to use one or two of these for Dominions_2.

-----------------------------------
Improving Province Defense

One or more of these ideas can be used for improving province defense:

A) Provinces adjacent to the main capital and including the main capital have very powerful defenders for its province defense. These units should have much higher morale, defense, magic resist, and protection.

B) More unique and stronger defenders as provinces defense increases. Province defense(1_thru_10) basic units, Province defense(11_thru_20)average units added with basic units, Province defense(21_thru_30)strong units added with basic and average units, and so on...

C) For province defense beyond 20... adding a commander with a standard(+8) and additional commanders with standards for every additional 10pts of province defense.

D) Some unique powerful unit(depending on the race) added for any location with province defense of 50 or more.

E) Increase resources in a province when the province defense goes beyond 25, yet doesn't work on capital. This would give province defense a second value. Province defense beyond 25 is an investment of over 350 gold.

[The_Tauren13]

or
F) What Panther and I suggested:

One idea suggested to me by my son is to add mages to the mix. Give each nation the obligatory commander at 1 PD. Then, every 5 PD, add the national lesser mage. Each 10 PD, add a national priest instead of the mage. On the even 20s, use the nations greater mage instead. Let them use whatever spells the nation has researched to that point.

This means at 40 PD, you have the 40 (minimum) national troops, 1 commander, 2 greater mages (at 20 and 40), 2 priests (at 10 and 30), and 4 lesser mages (at 5, 15, 25, and 35). This means a player can't just attack any old province with a tiny strike force anymore.

Perhaps you should put all that into the dom III wishlist thread...

[Tuidjy]

I am damn sure I do not want to play a game in which 250 golds worth of province
defence rout 500 golds worth of troops or mages.

It is beyond me why anyone would ask for province defence that is relevant after
turn 20 or so. Without utterly changing the game balance or improving the
tactical AI beyond belief, no amount of unscripted national troops and mages
will be more than a speed bump to well designed turn 40 thug, let alone SC.
In my current game, I teleported, more or less accidentally, my pretender on
top of what I think was one of another player's three main armies, complete
with prophet and life drain/raise dead sauromancer. Five of his two hundred
units escaped. Are you suggesting that one should be able to buy PD that would
have made a difference?

I repeat, my pretender was scripted for dealing with AI resistance, and I am
sure that the army was as well (the original province owner went AI)

I have said it dozens of times before. Play the game you have - tunning it is
one thing, but trying to transform it into a different game is silly. Dominions
is a game of godlike beings, world-altering enchantments and powerful wizards.
If you want to lead legions of infantry, cavalry, and archers, there are plenty
of other games out there. There are even games for those who like a smattering
of magic - I recommend the mods for Shadow of the Horned Rat/Dark Omen. Of
course, I do not know whether anyone outside of Eastern Europe still plays these.

[FrankTrollman]

That would lead to some pretty nasty trips through PD. In Guerilla warfare, provinces are changing hands rapidly. Every time the defender throws down 15 gold, he'd get a mage - mages that are things like Seraphs (throwing one or more lightning bolts before she goes down), Witch Doctors (throwing one or more Fire Darts before going down), and so on and so forth. If every time you attacked a province, people could spend very tiny amounts of money (15 gold) to cause you 1+ casualties of real troops, that would favor the defense a lot.

Already it's a pretty ugly experience trying to get a force into the dominion of someone who has Lure of the Deep or Wrath of God going - I don't think that everyone needs to be able to shoot lazers at interlopers for pocket lint.

What I would like to see is a better return on investment for PD of more than 10. As is, 1 gold gets you a look-see at exactly what just came in and took your province (so you can decide whether to Mind Hunt it or not), and 55 gold gets you a net that catches the occassional spy. Since it doesn't cost any upkeep, that's cheaper than a lone indep commander doing the same thing after 13 turns. And it works more and is more likely to win when it finds one and can't be assasinated and is invisible to enemies on the main map most of the time.

So 1 PD and 10 PD are worth it in the abstract - without actually taking into account whatever military worth they may have (which is usually nothing if you are talking Machaka, but quite substantial if you are talking Atlantis, Ulm, or Caelum). But PDs in excess of that are not. They generally suck, even for groups who in general have very nice PD - I wouldn't buy 17 points of Caelum PD under any circumstances.

So what I'd like to see is a breakpoint or three in the 11-19 range. I could deal with having wizards show up, for example. If Atlantis got a Deep Seer or Sea King at some intermediate point, we'd ever see those intermediate PD levels, which would be good.

-Frank

[PvK]

If you invest in PD, I suggest protecting the investment with some troops you don't consider useless.

PD by themselves may be weak, but a defense force plus a mob of PD can be quite strong. Especially since if the province is not lost, all the PD reappear. PD is magically regenerating fodder, and it's much more useful when combined with at least a few other units.

For example, I had an Ulmish province with 20PD and a few troops get attacked recently by an army of over a hundred men. On the same turn, my provincial commander apprehended the attack (random event - I have luck scales) and added 20 more PD - suddenly I have 20 Arbalests, 20 Infantry of Ulm, a priest, and Ulm commander, and my troops. All of the PD were tough but expendable. It was a Phyrric victory - both sides lost lots of men, especially the enemy. Almost all of my men however, were PD, and so magically reappeared for the next attack. I've crushed several attacks into that province, so my 20 PD has let me take probably over 100 casualties so far, and has inflicted hundreds.

If I didn't have any other troops or mages stacked in the province, though, it's pretty likely they would have routed at some point, and thus have been lost.

PvK

[tinkthank]

Lots of good things said here. Still, like PvK sez, we cant make PD such that it makes recruiting troops obsolete or makes Turtling even more appealing.

rabelais said:
The castling strat is a direct response to the futility of defense.

This would go a long way torward making the game more perilous for the SC weenieness that dominates MP.

Let's Overdo it, and then scale back to balanced? I dont trust the SC-mongers to stay cowed.

True!
Good to see you back here, Rabe! (Where were you?)

[tinkthank]

Actually, some second thoughts upon testing:

To sum it up in an oversimplified way: I dont think PD is too weak; it is false horrors, send horror and ghost riders which are too strong.

Yes, PD is not strong enough to defend against halfway serious threats -- but I think that is intentional. I sort of like it like that, too, since it encourages keeping "patrolling" forces in provinces to mix it up with PD.
This is not to say that most of the suggestions are not good ones here; but beefing PD up too much may also result in players purchasing less and less troops and more and more mages and artillary spells.

So I think that making FH and WrSkies and similar types of speels on the one hand, SH and GR and similar types of spells on the other hand less potent for their price, while making PD more interesting (like Indy-Flavored troops in PD as bonuses in conquered territories) might result in a nicely balanced mix. At least the first part of this suggestion could be done for dom2, the rest for dom3.

[RonD]

"Any good Dominions MP player knows how mostly useless PD happens to be. Even a smallish army can roll through 20 PD quite easily. I mean, one sauromancer spamming undead can frequently kill 20 PD (without archers) all by himself! How much PD can a single High Seraph spamming false horrors plus 1 archer kill? And what about Ghost Riders? I recently had a fight where my 35 Machaka PD lost to one single lesser horror! Bah! That should never happen..."


I agree that PD could stand to be tweaked, but I don't buy this argument at all. I see PD as local-yokel conscripts. These guys *should* be totally freaked out (and destroyed) by any thing named "horror". And by ghost riders. If you want to stop high-end magical attacks, you should have to use reasonably high-end counters.


Now, the fact that ghost riders can wipe out a lot of high-end counters is a different matter. 2 castings of GR is about a 50/50 proposition to beat an equipped, Zen-spell-mod-enhanced ArchAngel *plus* mechanical militia. Without the mech militia the ArchAngel loses every time to 2GRs. But that is a matter for a different thread and has nothing to do with PD.