Best - worse magic paths

[FrankTrollman]

Ritual Magic holds a different place in Dominions 3 than it did in Dominions 2. No longer are you racing to replace your national troops with conjured alternatives. Now you are attempting to supplement your armies of national troops with summonings. This means that summonings like Vine Ogres are no longer the holy grail that makes you automatically win - instead you're looking for units that cover holes in your national army.

Because of that, the ideal summonings vary somewhat between nations. Atlantis, for example, is light on ranged attacks and is looking for something that can cover that weakness. Good alterntives include:
[*} Fast Troops. If you can summon something that flies, you can close with the enemy archers before they cut you to ribbons. In the long run, that might as well be Iron Dragons (Earth), but for the majority of your life, the best flyers available are going to come out of Air.
[*] Tough Troops. If the guys in front are tough enough, you don't really care what kind of archery you're shrugging off. Late game that can be Tarrasques (Nature) or Juggernauts (Astral), but most of your time you're going to be doing it with Statues (Earth) or Wights (Death, or Water if you can make Unfrozen).
[*] Archers. Summonables with archery are fw and far between. But it can be done, and is often devastating if done correctly. Most ranged summonables come out of Blood, but Reanimated Archers (Death) are very impressive as well.

--

Which brings us to the rules of gem conservation. Unlike Gold, the amount of gems you get each turn is pretty small compared to the cost of anything you want to make with it. That means that in order to cast the big fun stuff you must save your gems from turn o turn. This also means that anything you cast now essentially cuts into the strength and number of high end spells you will ever be able to cast.

Casting a ritual early in the game is an investment in having whupass on the table now, which will hopefully pay itself off by allowing yu to take more provinces, search for more sites, and eventually have more gems to cast more awesome magics when your research catches up. But not casting a ritual is also an investment - an investment in having more gems in a pile when you can cast better spells with them.

Vine Ogres are better than Vine Men. Not just "per unit of hero time", but per gem and just overall. If you can manage to stay alive and expanding without squandering any gems on Vine Men, you'll have more gems to make Vine Ogres. And the same can be said of Crushers and Iron Dragons, just on a larger scale.

Death has an advantage that it is relatively easy to use Death Gems to advance in Death if you have enough Research. A mage with 2 Death can make a Skull Staff, using which he can make a Mound Fiend. The Mound Fiend with the Skull Staff can make a Skullface, and while wearing those items the Fiend can make a Lich... and that should cover virtually anything you need to do. With enough Research under your belt only the scarcest of side suits won't be enough to make a powerful army of the dead with Death magic. Even the gems generate themselves once you have a Revenant you can spare to cast Dark Knowledge on all your provinces.

On the flip side, you have things like Blood. To get the little girls you need to use it at all you need to turn provinces over to having several blood mages spend their time hunting them down. Then to actually cast the spells or make the bonus items requires more blood than most nations ever get on anyone. To get it going properly requires not only taking a nation which has blood hunters already, but generally requires a pretender with at least 4 blood as well.

For ease of development, I'd rank them:

1. Death
2. Water
3. Earth
4. Nature
5. Fire
6. Air
7. Astral
8. Blood

Oddly enough though, that may put higher priorities for placement on the God for the more difficult developing paths.

For "early game", which for this purpose I am arbitrarily defining as "how well can you supplement your army with Level 3 Research and worse", I would have to rate it:

1. Blood *
2. Nature
3. Death
4. Water
5. Air
6. Fire
7. Earth
8. Astral

*: Although, that can be misleading. While certainly the Blood Summons at Levels 1-3 are amazing, they are also almost unreachable for many nations and require a kick to your economy you may not be able to support if you actually use them in the early game. Still, Fiends of Darkness are so much better than Cave Drakes that it isn't funny.

Note also that national summons can throw that WAY off. And that things develope at different speeds. If you intend to jump to an Enchantment of 5 or 6 quickly an Earth/Air setup or a Water/Death setup is a very strong army supplementation. Seriously, what army wouldn't be made stronger with the inclusion of Gargoyles?

-Frank

[Graeme Dice]

FrankTrollman said:
This means that summonings like Vine Ogres are no longer the holy grail that makes you automatically win - instead you're looking for units that cover holes in your national army.

Vine ogres never made anybody automatically win. They were cost-effective meat shields and nothing else. Anybody who lost to an army of vine ogres would have lost to any competent player, using any powerful strategy. A single bane lord with a blood thorn, charcoal shield, lucky pendant and jade armour would have been enough to kill 50+ vine ogres in a single battle, and a failure to field such a unit to deal with an army of vine ogres is the fault of the losing player, not game balance. Now, thanks to a doubling of their gem cost, they are barely cost-effective. Bizarrely, lamias, which were already the best nature summon, have been made cheaper.

[Endoperez]

Lamia Queens are much harder to get, though, and they summon more Lamias, so that makes Lamias somewhat less cost-effective than they would have been in DomII.

[Truper]

Graeme Dice said:

[Vine ogres never made anybody automatically win. They were cost-effective meat shields and nothing else. Anybody who lost to an army of vine ogres would have lost to any competent player, using any powerful strategy. A single bane lord with a blood thorn, charcoal shield, lucky pendant and jade armour would have been enough to kill 50+ vine ogres in a single battle, and a failure to field such a unit to deal with an army of vine ogres is the fault of the losing player, not game balance. Now, thanks to a doubling of their gem cost, they are barely cost-effective. Bizarrely, lamias, which were already the best nature summon, have been made cheaper.

This "analysis" ignores the fact that vine ogres can be buffed, and do not operate in a magic-support-free vacuum. In Dom2, Vine Ogres were absurdly underpriced. Calculate the number of gems spent on that Bane Lord, and then calculate the number of hitpoints possesed by an army of Vine Ogres on which an equal number of gems was spent.

[Graeme Dice]

Truper said:
This "analysis" ignores the fact that vine ogres can be buffed, and do not operate in a magic-support-free vacuum.

If the person lost a battle because of mage support, then they lost it because of mages, not because of vine ogres. It's also not like there's a useful battlefield wide buff spell other than mist warriors and arrow fend for vine ogres.

In Dom2, Vine Ogres were absurdly underpriced. Calculate the number of gems spent on that Bane Lord, and then calculate the number of hitpoints possesed by an army of Vine Ogres on which an equal number of gems was spent.

Easy. 10 death gems for the bane lord, 20 slaves for the blood thorn (The equivalent of about 5-10 normal gems), 5 pearls for the luck pendant, 5 water and 5 earth for the jade armour, 5 earth and 5 fire for the charcoal shield. That's a grand total of 40-45 gems for the bane lord, or 80-90 vine ogres and 40 mage turns to summon them.

Those vine ogres have two fist attacks and a protection of 5, so they cause themselves 11 damage each turn they attack, and the bane lord causes 34 damage per turn. Over the course of the battle, the bane lord will kill 25 vine ogres by himself. The charcoal shield takes five turns to kill one, but since up to 16 will surround the bane lord, you can expect him to kill up to a maximum of about 160 vine ogres given optimum placing.

I've seen what fireshield does to vine ogres. On a dragon that's currently at F7 the shield killed 50 vine ogres well before the 50 turn limit. I also know from first hand experience that sea trolls, which are better meat shields than vine ogres will die to a similarly equipped ice devil.

Vine ogres were one of the few early research summons that had actual use, despite their expense, throughout the game, which is hardly a bad thing.

[Shovah32]

Mass protection and/or regen make vine ogres alot more survivable and weapons of sharpness (would it work even though they only have fists?) could make them deadly if they hit.

[Graeme Dice]

Shovah32 said:
Mass protection and/or regen make vine ogres alot more survivable and weapons of sharpness (would it work even though they only have fists?) could make them deadly if they hit.

Mass protection only raises their protection to 10 as vine ogres don't wear armour, and makes them 25% susceptible to fire, so that's only a small boost. Mass regeneration is enchantment 8, so you pretty much deserve to have such a powerful spell by the time you research it. Weapons of sharpness is E5 which limits its access to only a few nations. Although to be fair, there are a couple of nations that have access to both N3 and E3 mages. However, I'd rather not spend 23 gold a turn to summon two vine ogres with a Pan.

[Shovah32]

You could always play an earth heavy nation and take nature on your pretender (he could then summon vine kings to summon vine ogres and lead them)