Is this strategy viable?

[das123]

I was playing a game the other day but for a number of reasons couldn't start expanding until fairly late. It was hard work but I slowly fought off the hordes attacking my core provinces and eventually had a good quality army that ultimately wiped out one of the antagonists (before a water nation wiped me out).

Usually I expand and protect as quickly as I can but the side benefit of being attacked so close to home was that when I finally re-took the provinces, the enemy hordes had discovered caches of special sites.

Is this holding back and getting attacked a viable strategy or is it still best to get as many provinces as possible in the early game?

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Only if you've got a specific spell you can leverage with your nation and dedicated research.

[NTJedi]

das123 said:

Is this holding back and getting attacked a viable strategy or is it still best to get as many provinces as possible in the early game?

Even on huge maps... after turn_15 you should seek war with one AI opponent, maybe more depending on how weak the AI neighbors.

[Saxon]

While the enemy has "your" provinces and is searching for special sites, they are getting income from them. I would rather deny them the income and have it myself, even if that means I do not get as many gems later.

All else being equal, the person with the most income (of all types) will win this game. The earlier the income advantage begins, the sooner they can use it against you. I would not want to give that advantage to another.

Of course, things are never equal in this game, but I would still need a very, very good reason to give up the income.

Further, what if the enemy takes "your" provinces and never searches them for gem sites? You take the province back and get nothing special. You still lose the income and get nothing for your risk.

In short, I would focus on improving your early game strategy and tactics rather than risking this strategy.

[Baalz]

In a game like Dominions, the term "all other things being equal" doesn't have a whole lot of meaning - nothing is ever equal when you're going to have such different capabilities than your adversaries. Gold is not always the limiting factor, you can certainly have a viable strategy other than expand as fast as possible. For instance, focusing on research at the expense of some expansion is often a reasonable strategic choice - or site searching, or dominion push. Sacrificing expansion to not overstretch yourself and thus being able to take advantage when your aggressively expanding neighbor is embroiled on two other war fronts is also a sound choice. Restricting your expansion to make your borders more defensible - perhaps staying in the water if aquatic, perhaps stopping at some good choke points - can be a good choice. It can sometimes be effective to mass an army and wait for your neighbor to clean out some tough indies as you then steamroll over his expansion force and proceed to gobble up his lightly defended provinces. Pros and cons, to be sure, but it most certainly can be a viable strategy to expand a bit slower so long as you're gaining something more valuable than the opportunity cost. Expanding *very* slowly though is going to set you at an insurmountable disadvantage against competitive opponents though - the opportunity cost is too high.

[OmikronWarrior]

Also, take into account your scales. Somebody with generally negative scales NEEDS more territory to simply stay competitive. For example, somebody with Turmoil-3 has their gold reduced to 79% of the base, while somebody with Order-3 get 121% of the base. Thats around a 50% difference. More importantly, the negative scales make it really tough for the player to afford mages, units, and buildings.

So, if you're going to try to turtle to build up something, I recommend Order-3, at least 1-growth, and 0-hot/cold. Drain-2 might be OK depending on the specifics of your nation/strategy, but Magic-1 can make research a lot easier.

[Baalz]

Oh, another thing I forgot to mention (which goes hand in hand with scale choices) is province population variation. If you're not site searching much yet, it doesn't really make a big difference to try and root out those lizards/amazons from a 2k population swamp/wasteland province. Even with equal scales there can be quite a divergence between income and province count - it very well might make sense to forego expanding every turn if it means you can instead take out a fat farmland province stuffed with knights every other turn.

[das123]

Thank you all for the comments. It seem generally I should focus on expanding unless I have a good reason. I tend not to mess much with the scales when I set up my pretender.

Also, I usually set the starting indies at 7 or 8 difficulty so most games I play are difficult to expand every turn.

In the game mentioned I was playing as Vanheim against Ermor (EA) and it took me a while to build a strong army. I wasn't worried so much about the loss of income because when I got going my army would only lose about 10% compared to Ermor's.

[Ironhawk]

You can still expand quickly at 7+ indies, you just have plan your armies and your attacks really carefully.