Opening Gambit

[triqui]

Originally Posted by Zorfwaddle

All, thank you for the constructive criticism :-) I do see what you are saying about "all eggs in one basket"

Fact is, unless your mage has two heads and the ability to act twice in a round, it's completelly useless for them to be able to cast Fireball (or whatever other spell he is able to) and Smite at the same time. He will use one, or the other, not both in the same round, so it's much better to have the commander be the prophet and cast the smites while your mage do it's stuff

@JB I usually get at least one province where I can recruit indy scouts pretty quick, then I can switch to just recruiting researchers. [...]

If you don't recruit an scout in turn 2, you don't really lose that much, becouse as you say, you ussually are able to recruit indy scouts pretty quick from outside your castles. However, if you don't recruit a mage in turn 2, and that mage can research, say, 7 per turn, you'll be losing 84 research at the end of first year, 160+ at the end of second year, and 240+ at the end of third year. That's a pernament disventage: those are 1, 2 or 3 levels in magic that you wont have, and you won't be able to recover if you miss the chance to buy that mage in turn 1.
If you happen to buy 2,3,4 or more mages in the first turns, then the mistake compounds and you lose even more research. That research lost outweight, by FAR any extra adventage you might get from having a scout one or two turns earlier.

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by triqui

If you don't recruit an scout in turn 2, you don't really lose that much, becouse as you say, you ussually are able to recruit indy scouts pretty quick from outside your castles. However, if you don't recruit a mage in turn 2, and that mage can research, say, 7 per turn, you'll be losing 84 research at the end of first year, 160+ at the end of second year, and 240+ at the end of third year. That's a pernament disventage: those are 1, 2 or 3 levels in magic that you wont have, and you won't be able to recover if you miss the chance to buy that mage in turn 1.
If you happen to buy 2,3,4 or more mages in the first turns, then the mistake compounds and you lose even more research. That research lost outweight, by FAR any extra adventage you might get from having a scout one or two turns earlier.

I'm with you on this one!

@Zorfwaddle (what a name! )
The way you described it, you talked about "alternating" your mage/scout builds, from the outset. That's up to you and your playing style, from a beginner's pov I was just saying I find it a waste of effort to produce many, early scouts against SP AI.

[Zorfwaddle]

Triqui, I did not think of it that way... thank you for the insight.

I do not think I lose more than 1-2 mage-worth-of-research before I stumble into a scout province. I do plant a lab if feasible for the provinces w/ a magic site that generates something useful like a sage or mages I cannot generate, for a bootstrap into a path I don't have.

That is the great thing about Dominions... so many ways to do stuff :-)

[triqui]

Originally Posted by Zorfwaddle

Triqui, I did not think of it that way... thank you for the insight.

I do not think I lose more than 1-2 mage-worth-of-research before I stumble into a scout province. I do plant a lab if feasible for the provinces w/ a magic site that generates something useful like a sage or mages I cannot generate, for a bootstrap into a path I don't have.

That is the great thing about Dominions... so many ways to do stuff :-)

That's not relevant, you still lose the 80 research per year per mage you didn't buy.

Quick math:

Lets suppose you don't buy a mage in turns 2, 3 and 4, where you could, to buy 3 scouts. Let's suppose you conquer a province with mages one of those turns, and you go and buy a lab in turn 5 to buy druids. Let's assume your mages have research 7. Druids and the like have research 5

So your research for the first 12 turns is:
0+0+0+0+7+(7+7+5)+ (7+7+7+5+5) + (7*4+5*3) + (7*5
5*4 ) + (7*6+5*5)+ (7*7+5*6) + (7*8+5*7) = 384 research

Let's suppose you now buy mages in those first turns, and then you buy the same lab and buy the same druids (there's nothing forbidding you to do so)
0+7+7*2+7*3+7*4+(7*5+5)+(7*6+5*2)+(7*7+5*3)+(7*8+5 *4)+(7*9+5*5)+(7*10+5*6)+(7*11+5*7)= 600 research.

The fault in your reasoning is that you think you are just losing 1 research turn. You arent. You are missing 1 researcher, which means you lose 1 research turn per turn after the turn you missed the researcher. That compounds through time, so a 7 point researcher you missed in turn 2, by the end of year 3, you would had lost 34*7=238 research, that mage alone. If you miss mages in the, say, first 5 turns, you will be 7*34+7*33+7*32+7*31= 910 research in turn 36.

That does not mean you should buy researchers every single turn of your life due to this opportunity cost you miss if you don't. But you should miss the buy only when what you are doing produces a benefit that is greater than the oportunity cost you miss. Buying a needed commander, maybe buying a H3 priest to prophetize into H4, buying extra troops first couple of turns to get 2 expansion parties, or going to site search with a mage are worth the research cost. Buying a scout, is not.

[JonBrave]

@Zorfwaddle
What triqui says above makes sense to me.

Not meaning to get at you all , just interested, but the bit I don't really get is what you do with these extra scouts early anyway?? You're gonna have 3 scouts in 5 or 6 turns, plus your starter, or thereabouts. You'll have one army or so. A single scout can more or less look around near to you for you, can't it? I can only see you going to scout provinces miles away. And you mostly need to conquer your immediate neighbours in the early days (IMHO), you mostly end up attacking them anyway.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by JonBrave;789443
Not meaning to get at you all :), just interested, but the bit I don't really get is what you [I

do[/i] with these extra scouts early anyway??

Beats me. From a practical perspective, in SP, it doesn't really matter as the AI is utterly incapable of keeping up with any half-way decent player, so somebody who wants to start finding all opponents early in the game isn't really hurting himself all that much as the opposition doesn't take advantage of his suboptimal playing.

In MP, it is very common to recruit a flood of independent scouts once you find an independent site or, if you fail to find such a site, to recruit a flood of independent scouts out of secondary fortresses once you cannot afford to recruit all mages everywhere every turn, since from the middle game onwards, detailed scouting is often essential to survival, but the capital should never, ever, recruit a scout during anything resembling normal gameplay in MP as there is (practically) always a better affordable capital-only commander mage or priest that should be recruited instead.

[triqui]

Originally Posted by Peter Ebbesen

Beats me. From a practical perspective, in SP, it doesn't really matter as the AI is utterly incapable of keeping up with any half-way decent player, so somebody who wants to start finding all opponents early in the game isn't really hurting himself all that much as the opposition doesn't take advantage of his suboptimal playing.

In MP, it is very common to recruit a flood of independent scouts once you find an independent site or, if you fail to find such a site, to recruit a flood of independent scouts out of secondary fortresses once you cannot afford to recruit all mages everywhere every turn, since from the middle game onwards, detailed scouting is often essential to survival, but the capital should never, ever, recruit a scout during anything resembling normal gameplay in MP as there is (practically) always a better affordable capital-only commander mage or priest that should be recruited instead.

you can beat the AI with no research at all (I have done). So sure, it is not needed to buy a mage in turn 2. However, it is (very) suboptimal, and I think we should make the new players to understand why. Then they can play as they want, as this is a game, and the goal is to have fun :-)

@zorfwaddle sure, in MP is even more important to have scouts. In my game with Marignon I have like 20 :-)

[Zorfwaddle]

Originally Posted by JonBrave

@Zorfwaddle (what a name! )

Yeah thats a story from 1996. When I got back to the States, I got a real email account and tried everything with my real name... got frustrated, hit a bunch of keys, thought a little bit and added some vowels :-)