Alexander's Ever-Expanding Tome of Knowledge, pt 2

[HoneyBadger]

Fear and Awe on a really powerful Pretender (like a Carrion Dragon for instance) can be great, especially if you're using your Pretender to capture independent provinces. But, one thing you need to be aware of and avoid when "soloing" such Pretenders is that Fear and Awe have very little effect on undead
(they're back from the dead, you don't impress them).

A good strategy when "soloing" a powerful Pretender is to create a backup "holy slayer" squad made up of maybe 15 regular troops (your starting army should be fine for this in most cases) and atleast 5 commander units with atleast 1 level of holy magic each. Set each commander to cast Banishment x5 and then "cast spells" in the back of your forces, and put your regular soldiers in the front, set to "hold and attack". Not many undead will survive the Banishment party, and the ones that do can be cut down safely by your troops.

Use this type of squad to take out the undead provinces your Pretender has to avoid.

They can then be used to increase your Dominion around the edges of your national borders, which will make your Pretender stronger and protect your Dominion.

[Meglobob]

In SP you can gain a advantage over the AI by buying all the mercenaries and never letting any AI nation have any.

Simply bid 1gp over asking price and they will be yours, everytime. When it comes to renewing there contract you after bid full price again +1gp, to 100% guarentee you keep them.

The AI it seems only ever bids the exact amount...

When you get a mercenary commander with a magic item, consider sending that mercenary to his death in the last month of his hire. Simply place him up front on his own and give attack closet orders. Have your own commanders in the rear with empty slots, with a little luck you will pick up the magic item off your former employees rotting corpse...

[Gandalf Parker]

Interesting tactic altho it might be hard to duplicate on purpose.
For Pangaea:
In a solo game of mine there is an "eater of the dead" walking around randomly and just munching up provinces. At first I thought that it would be a major problem for me but it turned out to be a bonus. I followed it around with Pans while leaving them invisible. He devastated anyone elses armies that got in the area. But I was able to take any province with the few maenads that the pans tossed. Id crank up the taxes and maybe try to recruit some things. I was able to follow it closely since my pans werent susceptable to it, and take the empty provinces faster than other nations using scouts and attack orders.

[Foodstamp]

Meglobob said:
In SP you can gain a advantage over the AI by buying all the mercenaries and never letting any AI nation have any.

Simply bid 1gp over asking price and they will be yours, everytime. When it comes to renewing there contract you after bid full price again +1gp, to 100% guarentee you keep them.

The AI it seems only ever bids the exact amount...

When you get a mercenary commander with a magic item, consider sending that mercenary to his death in the last month of his hire. Simply place him up front on his own and give attack closet orders. Have your own commanders in the rear with empty slots, with a little luck you will pick up the magic item off your former employees rotting corpse...

The bit about bidding 1 gold over the asking price does not always work. It seems to work 99.9% of the time, but in an EA game I just played as Kailasa, I bid on the amazon archers with the pegasus commander 1 gold over the asking price and was outbid. Other than that one incident, which happened a few hours ago, I have never had the AI outbid me on mercs if I go 1 gold over.

[Meglobob]

Foodstamp said:

The bit about bidding 1 gold over the asking price does not always work. It seems to work 99.9% of the time, but in an EA game I just played as Kailasa, I bid on the amazon archers with the pegasus commander 1 gold over the asking price and was outbid. Other than that one incident, which happened a few hours ago, I have never had the AI outbid me on mercs if I go 1 gold over.

Foodstamp, I have done this 100's, perhaps 1,000's of times now in Dom 3. It's never let me down yet. Perhaps due to excessive Dom 3 playing , you were tired and bid under by mistake?

[Foodstamp]

I am pretty sure I bid on them right. The game I was playing was a test bed for an upcoming MP game and I had just read your post so I decided to test it as well.

The nation that outbid me was a modded in nation from Master of Magic and the mercenaries were the archers in white. It's possible I did not bid on them properly, everyone can misclick, but I am pretty certain i bid 1 gold over because I usually check the merc screen before I end turn.

[HoneyBadger]

I just thought I'd give this one a bump since it's potentially pretty useful, especially to new players

[Horst F. JENS]

not so cool like the Kraken, but maybe useful for new players (got this from dom2 thread):

If you get Elephants or other big units, your main fear is that those beasts rout and trample over your own troops.
Avoid that by placing an nature mage in the square over (north of) the Elephant and let him cast Beserk.
Set the Elephant on "Hold and Attack". Note that the Elephant will attack as soon as become berserked. If possible, have an Astral mage in the same square as the Nature mage cast Body Etheral and/or Luck.
Cast any buff spell that has short range and Area of Effect of 1 square.

You can replace each Elephant with 2 cavalry units.
Place mages in the combat squares north and south of each Elephants, casting buffs.
Enjoy the sight of unbreakable, etheral (75% chance to avoid hit) Elephants trampling over your enemys.

[Foodstamp]

Meglobob said:

Foodstamp, I have done this 100's, perhaps 1,000's of times now in Dom 3. It's never let me down yet. Perhaps due to excessive Dom 3 playing , you were tired and bid under by mistake?

This just happened to me again. EA game playing as Agartha. I bid 1 gold over the demanded price and I am absolutely positive I did it correctly. Ermor outbid me and got the mercenaries. The independents were Asparides (spelling?).

I was thinking, maybe this has to do with other nations getting special deals on certain mercenaries that fit their theme?

[Ewierl]

Meglobob said:Simply bid 1gp over asking price and they will be yours, everytime. When it comes to renewing there contract you after bid full price again +1gp, to 100% guarentee you keep them.

The AI it seems only ever bids the exact amount...

I'm with those who have definitely seen the AI make higher bids on mercenary forces. It doesn't happen too often, but neither is it all that rare. I find that I can keep my mercs 95%+ of the time if I put my bid above the minimum by about 50 gold.