Carrion Woods ideas please

[Cainehill]

Used to play CW a lot, and here's what I posted about it once: my scales (I tried others in about 15 MP games as CW) tend to be Turmoil-3, Sloth-3, Heat/Cold-3, Growth-1, Magic-3. Luck varies but I never take misfortune, because CW's national heroes are too good. I don't go past Growth-1 because the higher growth increases how fast the population dies, without having significant enough an effect on the rise of Carrion critter freespawns - better to take magic or a higher base dominion, imo.

To build up an army capable of expansion without the pretender, I often prophetize the starting centaur commander - this helps spread dominion from the get-go, and also lets him summon 3 Carrion critters each turn. (The alternative is to prophetize a Panic Apostate to reduce upkeep on it, but then you don't raise Carrion because you need the research more.)

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Those scales give you a LOT of points for your pretender, so I tend to take a real combat monster - carrion dragon for example loaded up with magic. In addition to going for combat spells, I also really like to have fire-3 and earth-3 : those gems get alchemized for gold, which helps a lot to afford mages, temples, etc, since your population & tax base dies off pretty quick.

Your research isn't going to be great, so I recommend either focusing on nature right away (Mass Protect + Mother Oak) or Conjuration (spectres & lamias for research). When you finally start going up Construction, don't forget the skull research items.

HTH.

[Gandalf Parker]

If you take the Carrion Dragon as a pretender then you might want to make sure that you have the magics necessary to cast the carrion spells. It can help give you a boost in the game.

[shovah]

mother oak is great, it lets you mass produce unholy priests. I would rush up conjuration and possibly go into const if your making thugs or something and once you get tartarians go for thaum.

[Saxon]

New problem. Last night my Carrion Dragon retreated from a battle that he would have won naked, in his sleep, with his claws tired. It was in friendly dominion and one carrion critter had spawned. Mitlan attacked, killed the critter and the CD retreated. Thing was, there was nowhere to run and he was killed…

Any way around this sort of problem? I suppose some PD would have helped, but Carrion Woods is low on cash and I was expecting to lose the province. I only took it to destroy the temple, as I am counting on a lot of dominion in this game.

[archaeolept]

only solution is to send in sufficient troops (at the rear, on hold and attack, or fire if archers) that they are not all killed before he wins the battle. Unhappily, the retreat rules mandate that commanders retreat if their troops do; or that commanders retreat if there are no other troops and one of the commanders dies.

also, guarantee yourself a retreat path

[Gandalf Parker]

Did you have minor troops attached to him? Maybe bodyguards? Were they scripted or did they rush in to the attack?

The basic AI pretty much has to have a "if I have bodyguards, and they die, then Im in trouble and should retreat" type of thinking.

[Cainehill]

Sounds like Saxon did what is normally the smart thing to do with a single SC in a province: he didn't recruit, didn't buy any PD, so there usually wouldn't have been anything to rout and cause the SC to retreat.

But, at the beginning of the turn, before movement, a carrion beast was auto-generated by his friendly dominion. That single carrion beast was killed, causing his pretender to retreat.

It's one of the frustrating things about Dominions, and sadly I don't expect it to change in Dom3, since troops causing retreat is nominally part of the balancing of SCs.

Hmm - maybe if retreating couldn't be caused by the death of mindless units? A militia event could still cause you to retreat / get you killed, but carrion / undead freespawns, etc, could not.

[shovah]

or just take 1 or 2 centaur archers way at the back set to fire.