Newbie questions

[PhilD]

Like calmon says: either your army will be prevented from moving, and combat will occur in your province between your army and the enemy army, or both armies will move (possibly resulting in position exchange), or your army will move first and the enemy army won't (resulting in battle in opponent's province).

Thus, sometimes you try to coordinate attack from more than one province, and only part of your army get there, which may result in battle loss (hey, where's my left flank?). And, sometimes an army was supposed to vacate a province while another followed, and both end up in the same province, resulting in starvation.

[Patriot]

I'm a newbie and I have a question.

Since Gandalf Parker, the good man, put up a multiplayer blitz server, I can't wait to play a person, but I wanted to know generally how other people play.

I got the general feeling that a majority of people, at least those that post on the forums here create small but elite + blessed armies to massacre their opponents without taking any losses, while adding invincible combatants in the mix.

Is it possible to put up a fight by conscripting masses of trashy troops, keep morale up the best you can, and overwhelm an opponent? I was wondering if there is a good human wave strategy. I tried playing Late Ermor but the AI killed me. I don't like the undead that much.

Or should I try to go for spells like Leprosy and Black Death? I know how annoying those kind of spells are when the computer does it to me.

[Zen]

It all depends on what you want and can afford.

The best nation to probably try the "Standard Army" would more than likely be MA Ulm. Play with Order3/Production3 and a Pretender with at least some nature (N3 is a good markerpoint) and probably death (D3) or Astral. Recruit a good mix of units, xbows, heavy infantry, use your Cav (HCav) only for situations that require it, since they are gold heavy.

Make +Supply items for nature, in order to keep your armies in shape.

Recruit indpendents that help diversify your armies: nature mages, death mage, amazonian sacred units (Pegasi, Lizard riders), independant mages.

Make big armies with "Thugs" in order to develop how to equip and identify units that make good thugs. Along with that a few battlemages for support, equipping them with Earthboots to use Bladewind, Battlefield support spells. Ulm is a good nation for this with death and astral because their forgeable items can be equipped on both constructs and undead to make use of their low encumberance values.

Your endgame thugs should probably comprise of Iron Dragons and Golems.

Look for promising provinces for high resource centers in order to churn out the masses of units. Watch out for stagnation with upkeep due to not expanding or waring enough.

These are ways you can play the "Army" game of Dominions.

[KissBlade]

Zen pretty much beat me to it. Though to answer your question about whether or not it is enough to simply overwhelm your opponent with trashy troops, the answer is no. Trashy troops are meant for either raiding pd or standing in front of your mages.

[Endoperez]

Blitz games are over very quickly. If you might come to blows with an enemy on turn 5, and will before turn 10, you have to be ready for all kinds of surprises. Like E9, Dominion 9 Cyclops with prot 29 and Awe. You won't research Plague or Leprosy in that time. If a blitz goes for long, you might get them eventually, but that'd mean that you specialized in one path only, and you had better hope it covered all your nation's needs.

To deal with monsters of this kind, you need spells that cause considerable damage. Loss of hitpoints isn't usually enough to stop these super-combatants (SCs), so you should use spells that kill, disable or paralyze the target instead of just causing damage, unless the damage is extremely high. Spells with high precision and range (like Astral spells in Thaumaturgy) are better than spells with poor precision.

You must probably mass one spell a lot before it works.

Against some sacred elites, spells that cause direct damage might be more useful. Many sacred units have very good hp and/or very good magic resistance, though, so you would probably need more mages than you have.



Massing normal units probably won't work. They'll rout, for one thing. Watch out for troops with better morale (e.g. MA Ulm's Pikemen have morale 11 instead of 10, and Guardians have great morale). Massing undead might work, but your enemy will probably field priests then. Massing Vine Men might work, but they're a bit too weak for that. Vine Ogres are better but harder to mass in large enough numbers.

Plan for second castle quickly. If your enemy depends on troops he can only get from his capital, you have an easier time running over him with numbers. Try to build the second castle so that, if needed, you can build independent units your nation usually can't field in large enough numbers to matter. MA Ulm might want to have some arhchers, perhaps even Longbowmen if you manage to find a Farmlands province neighbouring enough resource-heavy provinces for a fort to be worth it there.

[Gandalf Parker]

Unfortunately, small maps with no special victory conditions create a situation where some strategies can be said to be the "usual winning strategy". PLEASE do not consider that to be the total definition of what is good or bad in Dominions 3. Its a very small part of it, though it might be all of how some people play and view the game. Generally, I would say that the way to kick tail in this game is to discover the nation that best lets you play the way you tend to play. Forcing yourself into a particular strategy wont work better than someone who is comfortable in a specialised nation.

OK enough rant. On the blitz maps Im setting the games up right now on, you might want to concentrate on simple army tactics with powerful national troops. The game isnt likely to allow much use of flight, stealth, specialised allies, or focus on research. MAYBE the strong defense and buildup (dam bursting) strategy depending on who you are playing against.