Opening Gambit

[Mightypeon]

Some other starting armies have OK odds of a turn 1 conquest (MA Ulm in addition to Ashdod and Abysia), but would not really want to risk that over a single province.

[Zorfwaddle]

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

@JB I usually get at least one province where I can recruit indy scouts pretty quick, then I can switch to just recruiting researchers. Another thing about a lot of scouts is threat detection... the AI tends to may a bee-line right for the human player; I can detect the biggest armies fairly quick with a spread of scouts. I also locate the AI capitals pretty quick, and, if I have a spy recruitment capability, extra forts can generate those spies and mass them to instill unrest in the enemy capitals neighboring provinces. And if you are playing with the magic sites mod, there is one that can produce a flying, sacred assassin-seductress... pretty crazy against invading armies and all sorts of evil stuff :-)

[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.

[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 :-)

[Mightypeon]

Indeed.
Also, concering the AI, put 10 PD into every province as soon as you conquer it. It really makes them more peacefull. The beeline making happenes when an AI scout sees a Human province with less then 10 PD. The AI thinks "Yay free province" and beelines for it.

[rdonj]

With regards to hiring mages early, the contribution of a single mage over the long term is fairly irrelevant as a consideration. What you need to be worried about are your immediate goals. One mage won't make a huge relative difference between you and other nations. What will make a difference is your early fighting strength. If you can hire non-mage commanders that will significantly increase your early fighting strength, then it can still be a valid purchase. On the other hand, you don't want to purchase non-mage commanders if they'll interfere with your ability to research critical early spells. Basically, do the math first.

[triqui]

Originally Posted by rdonj

With regards to hiring mages early, the contribution of a single mage over the long term is fairly irrelevant as a consideration. What you need to be worried about are your immediate goals. One mage won't make a huge relative difference between you and other nations. What will make a difference is your early fighting strength. If you can hire non-mage commanders that will significantly increase your early fighting strength, then it can still be a valid purchase. On the other hand, you don't want to purchase non-mage commanders if they'll interfere with your ability to research critical early spells. Basically, do the math first.

1 mage in the long turn means 80 points of research (which are two level 1 paths, or 1 path from level 1 to level 2) in the first year, or 160 in the second year. If that's relevant or not, that's up to you to decide.

However, I was not advocating against expanding, I was advocating against buying scouts. Early expansion makes up for any research lost, becouse it allows you to get a bigger country, that it's the same that having extra castles, and extra castles mean extra research. There are a lot of situations where you wouldn't buy a researcher in the first turn. For example, with Ermor MA, you are almost bound to use your first mages as commanders, as you need mages to carry undeads. Several nations with heavy bless strategy need to buy a priest in the first turns as well, and some nations expand using SC chasis (like Nieflheim with jarls).

Early expansion is the single most important thing in the first turns, bar none. However, a lot of nations (most of them), need not to wast any castle turns on that. You can expand to your first province with your initial army, then recruit an indy commander there, and go back to get your second army when it's ready in turn 3. In the meanwhile, you should be buying a mage+troops each turn, if you can afford, or just troops, if you can't. That bassically depends on how cheap are your researchers.