Requesting a Pedantic Dom3 Guide

[shatner]

Here is my understanding of how things are, in very broad terms, supposed to progress in a game of Dom3.

1) Early Game: recruit national troops each turn and start sending out indie-conquering armies as often as you can to plant your flag on a decent number of provinces. You want to get casters and/or an awake rainbow pretender out manually site searching ASAP. You want to recruit good research mages from your capital every turn to quickly reach whatever crucial research target is important for your nation/strategy. To further this, you want to get additional forts built as quickly as possible to allow you to recruit more casters each turn.

2) Middle Game: you start investing in your gem economy by intensive site searching (remote and manual as necessary) as well as forging gem-gens. Your major armies should shift from "commander + dudes" into combined arm forces with mage support. Somewhere along the way you start diversifying or intensifying your casting potential with summoned commanders. Depending on your nation and strategy you might start bolstering or phasing out your recruitable units with summoned units. Raid with thugs.

3) End Game: try and stake your claim to those crucial artifacts and globals. Get whatever game ending engine (tartarans, nationally summonable SCs, army-wide buffs, army-killer spells, etc.) you are employing up and running and then beat your remaining foes into submission.


While those are all well and good as guidelines, I find I have precious little expertise in actually realizing those goals. The point is, I understand the game mechanics and I am pretty familiar with the spells, items and nations. I have combed through the wikis as well as the strategy guides on this and other forums. However, whenever I read nation guides or check out the banter from old MP matches I can infer that people are expanding faster, getting up those early forts sooner, researching in a more focused manner and actually using their mages better than what I find myself doing. What I'd really like is to just watch over a skilled Dom3 player's shoulders while they play but seeing as that isn't really possible, I'd love some specific advice on how to play this darn game better. I have read through dozens of threads and guides but that good advice hasn't really crystallized into solid play on my part. So since the high level advice hasn't worked for me, what I'd like is series of pedantic, low-level, step-by-step recipes for competitive play.


What specific things do you do in the early game to expand, construct those first few forts and advance your early research? What are common early research goals? Around what turn would you consider the early phase over and the middle phase begun?

What constitutes a good combined arms army? Normally I get as far as a handful of bladewind or fireball casters hunkered down behind my wall of grunts and archers. What is the recipe for a good communion and when do you apply it?

Etcetera, etcetera.

Thanks.