Oh boy alot of questions

[Jam3]

Ok I just recieved my full Version the other day. I have read through the walkthrough and the manual, played a few times, and still have tons of questions!

1) One of my main questions is about animate dead. I have mainly been playing C'Tis.

The manual does a good job exaplining that ghouls come from your population points in a province and souless come from the number of corpses. What about Longdead and Tomb wyrms? What exactly is that taking from to build?

2) The whole "no diplomacy" thing is kinda taking me for a loop. Mainly once I meet up with another dominion at the start of the game it seems to go like this, grab all the land you can and establish a border. As long as you don't move into the same territory as your opponent you can usually establish a line and not get into an early conflict.

Basically i like searching my provinces for sites, getting a little research and maybe making a few magic items before fighting another major power.

Does this seem to basically jive with how people see "peace" with other dominions?

3) The whole simultaneous movement thing is throwing me a little. It basically seems that the defender can NEVER get the advantage since a) you dont' know where an enemy army is moving AND b) enemy armies seem to almost never sit still. This is probably the worst part of the entire design system

if

x is my opponent
0 is me

0
0x0
0

if the 4 provinces 0 is in all move into x's province and he moves into anyone of 0's, he completly bypasses them all, this just doesn't make sense. Maybe if spies/scouts etcs gave you a report that told you the armies intentions like "40 units, they plan to occupy this province" or "50 units they are marching on X province".

Does anyone understand this better so you can actually stop a rampaging army? If not then its really just about playing a luck game in trying to determine which province the army is moving into next.

4) Magic - just a quick one but I assume that the individual magic school levels of commanders is just as important to research for as your pretenders schools?

[Wauthan]

1. Nothing. They are sort of summoned. Come to think of it... I'm not sure any of the animated dead spells will fail to function if there are no corpses. You just get less zombie for the voodoo.

2. There's no peace in this game. Just preparations for war. Since there's no "allied victory" condition the only reason for diplomacy is to strengthen the enemy of your enemy. I tend to make a beeline towards my closest opponent with scouts and then strike at his capital as soon as I get enough troops.

3. It works the other way as well. The attacker don't know where the defender will be. It can be a pain at times to get attacked by swift but strong armies. But since they are continually advancing you can just recruit a small force that walks in behind them and reclaims the provinces.

Defend your important sites with strong armies while breaking his supplyline and you'll beat any rushing invader.

Blitzkrieg manouvers don't work that well in Dominions since it's hard to get a good "infrastructure" up fast. At most I managed to pull three waves of attack before having to pause and rebuild my forces.

4. I'm not sure I understand your question. Schools just represent the kind of magic you want to be good at. Depending on what magic your faction is good at this will vary a lot. The pretender is actually less of a concern, if you're not running nines and want to rush to a highend enchantment. It's the commanders that will be out in the thick of it so the spells they use are the most important.

[ January 20, 2004, 19:55: Message edited by: Wauthan ]

[Sindai]

Originally posted by Jam3:
3) The whole simultaneous movement thing is throwing me a little. It basically seems that the defender can NEVER get the advantage since a) you dont' know where an enemy army is moving AND b) enemy armies seem to almost never sit still. This is probably the worst part of the entire design system

It's actually reasonably easy to herd the AI around, since they can be counted on to only attack provinces they think they have a reasonably good chance of actually taking. If you have the cash, you just need to crank up the defense in all of the adjacent provinces except one, then have your armies move into that one province in order to ambush the AI. The AI also values its capital a lot. So much so that it will launch attacks even if hopelessly outnumbered by the besieging army. This is a very handy way of forcing the AI into a fight on your terms.

This also makes building up multiple large armies and lines of heavily defended provinces important, as well as milking chokepoints (if you have them) for all they're worth.

[Jam3]

in number 4 what i meant was that the individual commander types you can recruit have specific schoolt abilities. Like a Shaman has Nature 1. I just meant that when your reseraching its important to keep in mind that you have a shaman in play and that you want to research for him (as well as your other commanders) as well as your pretender.

Or am I just totally off on this?

Number 3 is still a little frustrating I mean two armies don't just pass in the night. If X is moving into 0's province and 0 is moving into X's province on the same turn then there should be some chance that they meet and fight. Also scouts, spies, etc should be able to give you some idea of the movement of the enemy force, some how, some way within the turn/movement model of the game.

[Taqwus]

While I haven't explicitly tested it in Dom II, at least in Dom I two armies looking to exchange provinces had a chance to meet in one of them, with a greater chance for larger armies.

[aldin]

As far as magic schools go, what you research, especially early on, should primarily be stuff for your national mages. Those big (5+ sphere) requirement spells are all quite high in the research tree and don't become useful until mid/late game when you're generating enough research to blow through the lower levels of any school anyway.

~Aldin

[DimmurWyrd]

Originally posted by Jam3:
in number 4 what i meant was that the individual commander types you can recruit have specific schoolt abilities. Like a Shaman has Nature 1. I just meant that when your reseraching its important to keep in mind that you have a shaman in play and that you want to research for him (as well as your other commanders) as well as your pretender.

Or am I just totally off on this?

Number 3 is still a little frustrating I mean two armies don't just pass in the night. If X is moving into 0's province and 0 is moving into X's province on the same turn then there should be some chance that they meet and fight. Also scouts, spies, etc should be able to give you some idea of the movement of the enemy force, some how, some way within the turn/movement model of the game.

well the problem is one of not being able to code with tachyons or something yet because the results of a move order occur the same round they are given so that for a scout to tell you a turn before the game would have to know what a person will do NEXT turn tell you THIS turn then you can counter it would be fun but not realistic... I guess they could make movement take 2 turns but that would drastically slow the game down for PBEM play.

[Taqwus]

There are ways interception could be implemented with the current movement system. Suppose you have a spy in a province currently occupied by enemy forces, and you have an army ready to intercept. If the spy had a 'Track army' command, whereupon it would *attempt* to track the largest portion of forces that move, and you could give the friendly army an 'intercept' command that with some probability would be able to intercept (base it on, say, overall strategic move of the interceptors versus the interceptees, the experience of the spy, stealthiness of troops, the number of parts into which the interceptees split)...
It'd affect balance, as not all nations get spies or very mobile troops, and figuring out a sane formula would not be easy.

[aldin]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
There are ways interception could be implemented with the current movement system. Suppose you have a spy in a province currently occupied by enemy forces, and you have an army ready to intercept. If the spy had a 'Track army' command, whereupon it would *attempt* to track the largest portion of forces that move, and you could give the friendly army an 'intercept' command that with some probability would be able to intercept (base it on, say, overall strategic move of the interceptors versus the interceptees, the experience of the spy, stealthiness of troops, the number of parts into which the interceptees split)...
It'd affect balance, as not all nations get spies or very mobile troops, and figuring out a sane formula would not be easy.

Not to start the "realism" debate again, but there is no way this is a reasonable function. Even with modern information technology it is tremendously difficult to "intercept" a small force with another small force. There ARE interception chances built into the game based on speed (I think) and force size (I'm sure), so part of this is addressed anyway.

Play the guessing game. It's not very tough against the AI. You eventually find you can guess where AI armies are going 90% of the time (richness and defense level being the big triggers). Against humans, they have to play the same game you do.

~Aldin

[HJ]

For 2. and 3., try cranking up the indie strength to 8 or so. This will slow you down, and create a different game, but it will also create a buffer between you and the AIs so you have more time to get the things you want. Many times I just want to try out some things high on the requirement lists, such as high level spells and items, but the current game setup just doesn't allow for that, unless you hamper the advance altogether, since there is no way you can secure your borders and make peace. The high indie strength will also positively affect the porousness of borders that you're talking about in 3., creating indie armies strong enough to fend off smaller raiding armies and hence giving you the opportunity to make chokepoints and normalize situation. Otherwise, playing with indies at 3 or so is just too chaotic if you want a slow-paced relaxing SP game, as everything is simply too open and forces you to bog yourself into conflicts on all sides usually.