My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatment

[void]

you can go with a forged pocket ship, yay it's in the forge magic item, or you may just took a long travel on land. so far there's no "seperated island" w/o a path on land to get on.

[curtadams]

The most valuable trick is that the AI responds to what your strength was in the *previous* turn. So if you move from province A to province B you will often catch a defeatable force moving into B. The Dom2 AI was ridiculously easy to fool - it's better now but still often beatable. I do find that AI is prone to gang up on you and that's hard to deal with. I just barely won a game when 3 AIs jumped me. A high independent setting and lots of mountains help.

Another trick is that the AI is incredibly defensive about its home province. If you can get an army on it, all units in adjacent provinces will attack you every turn. That pretty much locks down an AI; you'll still have to deal with armies already in your territory but you usually won't see more. Of course the army must be very strong and if you can't keep an adjacent province any retreaters die.

As mentioned above, PD helps a lot. A large army seems to discourage the AI from attacking you but it's not perfect.

[Cainehill]

Actually the AI is pretty stupid right now, and _doesn't_ seem to respond to strength the previous turn. One of my MP games, Pythium's player went AI real early - I've kept the same army, with the same 31 PD, in the same province, and chewed up 3 attacks from Pythium's best troops. Things like 70 troops attacked, 56 dead, 0 friendly casualties (because the PD kept things from getting near my elite, armored, demonic, longbow samuraiwomen).

This happened three times in a row in one province (I'm staying there partly because I have a temple built), while a second province also slaughtered 2 attacks, lost to the third because I moved my demon archers out to cut off an army / province.

[CaptainGimpy]

Tried playing another game but I got boxed in by these Jotun guys who absolutely destroyed me in every battle. Even my swordsman apes didn't hold a candle to them when they outnumbered the giants two to one. It seems like archery does more damage to my guys then the enemy. At least they're not running through the kingdom unhindered, but they still killed me with little to no effort. But looking at the score chart they were about 2x the size of everyone else in the game in terms of provinces and armies.

[Hadrian_II]

Jotuns can kill even strong heavy armoured troops with one blow. So if you want to fight them you should use lots of troops. You dont need hevy armoured troops as the gigants do lots of damage and kill you anyway but defence helps. Mage support is nice too, as even gigants get trouble with ethereal lucky units.

[Endoperez]

You might want to mix the Bandar Swordsmen with smaller apes. If you had 3-4 markata for each Bandar Swordsman, and they mixed evenly, each square would have 2 Markata and 1 Bandar Swordsman (instad of 2 Bandar Swordsmen). When a giant strikes at a square, he'd have 2/3 chance of hitting a markata instead of a Bandar, and the Markata would have a better chance of surviving the hit due to his defence of 14.

In this case, numbers are more important than skill, and Bucklers won't help as much as usually since the giants' incredible strength often allows them to deal damage even when their attack is parried, so you might want to try Bandar warriors with Cudgels.

Also, remember to use your mages. After some Thaumaturgy research, Gurus can cast Mind Burn (which helps but isn't very good against giants) and then Paralyze. Each Paralyze that gets through the magic resistance of a Jotun effectively kills the giant, as long as your units aren't defeated before they manage to kill the paralyzed one.

[Gandalf Parker]

If you have the monkeys you might consider slipping a large monkey army thru the stronger indept provinces, then start expanding on the other side. Allow a province like Knights or Amazons to defend you

[Tuna-Fish]

One thing the learn about dominions is that there is absolutely nothing that is good against everything. Scout a lot, and when you see a large enemy army closing attack it with one chep commander or something, and look closely what kind of troops he has.

Giants? They kill everything they hit in one turn, so either get them more targets (smaller, cheaper units) or targets that are harder to hit. (more def, etherealness, luck, whatever)

Do they have low prot? (archers shine against low protection non-shielded units.)

Small armoured units? (trample, giantgs)

Undead horde? (I banish thee...)

And so on and so on...

[curtadams]

Cainehill said:

Actually the AI is pretty stupid right now, and _doesn't_ seem to respond to strength the previous turn. One of my MP games, Pythium's player went AI real early - I've kept the same army, with the same 31 PD, in the same province, and chewed up 3 attacks from Pythium's best troops. Things like 70 troops attacked, 56 dead, 0 friendly casualties (because the PD kept things from getting near my elite, armored, demonic, longbow samuraiwomen).

It *does* respond to your strength but often seems to misjudge what it needs. Larger forces get larger attacks; if they're big enough they don't get attacked at all. However, the AI seems to consider force count and not force quality and so it does very poorly against thing like, well, elite, armored, demonic, longbow samuraiwomen nicely shielded by PD.

[Mind Elemental]

... All right, I have to ask. Which unit is the demonic samurai woman with a longbow?