Dominion Spread

[Micah]

Hellboy,

The manual is wrong. It may be a bug, it may be a change, but temple spread is unaffected by dominion increases from having extra temples.

There is no scale for increasing your gem income, or it would obviously be a more important factor than growth. Gold isn't that important late game, but building temples, castles, labs, and mages is always useful. Troops are also still used for the purpose of beating down gates, so being able to buy more troops speeds sieges along, meaning you get the gem income of a province that much more quickly.

What would you say is a more significant long-term consideration than the gold boost from growth? Some possibilities would be the luck scale, E/N blesses, or a pretender that covers the holes of your national paths. Luck is a maybe, but most of the good events give gold, or an insignificant amount of gems. The blesses are nation-specific depending on what's sacred, so tht's a tricky one. I'd support saying that a pretender that covers holes in your magic paths might be the most important consideration for late-game, although depending on what indies you find it might not be a concern.

Mostly though, as I said, it's going to come down to how large your resource pool is, which is based on early and mid game success. A 5-gem income advantage (that's about 2 provinces on a high-magic map) on turn 10 adds up to 200 gems on turn 50...if you haven't found any indies by then you can easily burn some of those on empowering if need be and still come out ahead.

And no, the best expander on turn 20 isn't always going to win, but they have the best POTENTIAL to win, all else being equal.

[Edi]

Hellboy said:

Wow, that sucks! And it still hasn't made it onto Edi's short list! Edi, what's it gonna take for this one to make it on the list?

I've seen it now that it was reposted in the Bug Discussion Thread. I hadn't looked at this thread after the initial 3 posts in it. Contrary to what some here may believe, I am NOT all-seeing, all-knowing or infallible, nor do I spend all of my time forum-crawling in search of bugs that have not been reported yet. There are other things in my life besides Dominions 3 and even within the context of Dom3, other things than just the bug shortlist as even a cursory glance at my sig and the mapmaking/modding forum will reveal.

I think you didn't mean it, but that post came across as just short of an accusation of intentionally leaving this issue out of the shortlist and more widely neglecting the task of bug reporting. Not exactly very cheering, I assure you.

[TirAsleen]

Well i play mp, sp everything with strenght9 indies and from what i can tell is, a high dominion to start with makes your game much easier.
Lowest dominion i would ever take is 6 and this really can hurt. You can build temples, but for most nations 1 of them cost 400 gold. Can be destroyed through unlucky raze events or the enemy quite easily. If you build fort everywhere a temple is its going to be very expensive. If turteling is your style this one is for you.
I prefere offensive armies and a lot of magic in each game, some cheap national troops to beat up the indies quite easily and support the magic of my god, usually the god has lots of hp too, like mother of lions, or simlar, abyssia has very nice lion titans for example.

At least 1 maxed out magic path to cast globals with heavy gem investment, mother oak and gift of health up can win games or any other nice global spells, releated to your nation and highest gem income.

SC and rainbowmages are rather a waste of time, except you can manage to make a SC with a high magic path and awake/dormant. SC you rather need to beat some indies but will die quickly against more diverse armies leaded by other players pushing their domain, and you waste a lot of resources in them too, that you better spend on magic paths or scales, i am more positive that diverse armies in high numbers win this games than just SC's.

Rainbowmages are not needed, you can recruit national and independent mages to do your site searching move them in several groups to cover a big area quickly.
Pretender is always to slow for that anyways and more useful casting the big rituals, big battle spells or do some research and stay away from beeing feebleminded, cursed, marked or killed.

[Eressil3]

I'm currently in four MP games and 3 of them are in small maps. Having a small dominion in a small map is rather scary. Especially when you got 2 or 3 neighboors. So in most of mp games, I think a good dominion is expensive but necessary. And later on, the negative effects of your dominion (turmoil, sloth, death, etc.) can really be a thorn in your opponents's foot.

[Gandalf Parker]

Edi said:
I've seen it now that it was reposted in the Bug Discussion Thread. I hadn't looked at this thread after the initial 3 posts in it. Contrary to what some here may believe, I am NOT all-seeing, all-knowing or infallible, nor do I spend all of my time forum-crawling in search of bugs that have not been reported yet. There are other things in my life besides Dominions 3 and even within the context of Dom3, other things than just the bug shortlist as even a cursory glance at my sig and the mapmaking/modding forum will reveal.

I think you didn't mean it, but that post came across as just short of an accusation of intentionally leaving this issue out of the shortlist and more widely neglecting the task of bug reporting. Not exactly very cheering, I assure you.

(sarcasm on)
WHAT? I am so shocked to hear that you dont pursue this with the same ferver and put up with the same level of crap that you would a full job with overtime pay just like all of the moderators before you that hung on thru ... (looking around for missing moderators)... never mind.
(/sarcasm)

(when the cold syrup wears off I will probably delete my snide remark)
Gandalf Parker

[Edi]

Never mind the sarcasm, Gandalf, it gave me a much needed laugh.

My own sense of humor is decidedly bent in a similar direction, so your post does not offend me in the least. So I hardly think it should offend anyone else either.

[Hellboy]

Edi said:
I think you didn't mean it, but that post came across as just short of an accusation of intentionally leaving this issue out of the shortlist and more widely neglecting the task of bug reporting. Not exactly very cheering, I assure you.

You are correct, both in that the tone of my post was unduly negative/insulting, and also in that I did not mean it to be so. My apologies, Edi.

I take advantage extensively of all your free labor on the DB project, the Bug Shortlist, as well as other endeavours going back for years now. The last thing I want to do is to offend you, when you have added as much as you have to the fun I have playing Dominions.

Again, mea culpa, and thanks for all the work you do.

[Edi]

It's all good then. I know how it is, I've suffered from the occasional bout of foot-in-mouth as well.

Thanks for the positive feedback.