Some Questions -- making up my mind, advice needed

[Endoperez]

Nerfix said:
4) The Agarthan amphibians might be a bug. Did you check out Agarthan's attack and defence values? Agartha is powerful but it has it's flaws, some of them can be fatal ones. Endo told me that the general concensus amongst the betas was that Agartha is weak.

I doubt I said anything generally to you, but I think I have mentioned that the general concensus amongst the blitzers, or those regular to the #dominion irc channel, is that Agartha, especially as far as national units go, is weak. That includes some of the betas. I'm doing my best in arguing against them, but haven't been successful yet. I'm not that good a player, though.

My latest try with EA Agartha was with Alteration-based research. Adding some protection with various Earth spells should work, Earth Meld should work against high-def enemies, Oracles of the Dead can cast Blight... Lots of interesting things in there.

Agartha also has access to Earth 4 mages, even the occassional Earth 5 mage. The same IRC crowd says that Blade Wind is one of the strongest damage spells in the Early Age, especially with Earth 4 or more mages... Earth Power makes Agarthan capital-only mages even more powerful, and happens to be at Conjuration 3, where Agartha gets two nice national summon spells. At Conjuration 5, Agartha can summon life-draining ethereal creatures that could be described as Agarthan Wraiths. At higher Evocation, Agartha gets Magma Eruption. There's also their ability to scry with their starting site.

[onomastikon]

Wow, that was fast, thanks for those replies.

Especially @endoperez: Thanks for that preaching info. My question is, however, related to the MAXIMUM candle count by which a priest can still preach. In dom2, standard vanilla priests were level 2. IIRC they could
have a chance to raise the dominion by 1 via preaching if the current domionion in their province was 1 or lower, 2 if there was a temple present.
Now, they are level one, and everybody else is lower respectively. Does that mean that they can only effectively preach when the dominion is 0 (1 if temple present)? THat is the nature of my question, since it would greatly affect those priests' roles who do not have mage or fighting ability.
(In the demo, I got conflicting messages: Once, I noticed that my priest of level 3 (I think it was my prophet) was able to raise the dominion of the province, although there were 4 candles in it. Well I dont know if he did raise it, but I did NOT get the messsage "unable to raise dominion by preaching" when I hit "P".

Do temples, labs, and forts all cost the same amount of gold and build time in all the different ages?

Are you saying that gem cost for forging and path requirements are now decoupled? (So that path-1 could be 5 gems or could be 10? I think I saw a Lucky Coin shield cost 10 gems, but maybe I was mistaken.) That would be very nice IMO. But maybe I misunderstood your post.

And when I hit "view battle", the screen *does* zoom in from map to battlefield in a blend-in kind of way, but it goes black for some time before that. (So if 10 battles happened per turn that I can view, I sometimes decided not to view quite a few out of impatience)

Anyhow, thanks for the replies. If I understand you all correctly, however, then the main point (AI) still seems to be quite shaky. Good to know! thanks

[Endoperez]

onomastikon said:
Wow, that was fast, thanks for those replies.

Especially @endoperez: Thanks for that preaching info. My question is, however, related to the MAXIMUM candle count by which a priest can still preach. In dom2, standard vanilla priests were level 2. IIRC they could
have a chance to raise the dominion by 1 via preaching if the current domionion in their province was 1 or lower, 2 if there was a temple present.
Now, they are level one, and everybody else is lower respectively. Does that mean that they can only effectively preach when the dominion is 0 (1 if temple present)? THat is the nature of my question, since it would greatly affect those priests' roles who do not have mage or fighting ability.
(In the demo, I got conflicting messages: Once, I noticed that my priest of level 3 (I think it was my prophet) was able to raise the dominion of the province, although there were 4 candles in it. Well I dont know if he did raise it, but I did NOT get the messsage "unable to raise dominion by preaching" when I hit "P".

Do temples, labs, and forts all cost the same amount of gold and build time in all the different ages?

Are you saying that gem cost for forging and path requirements are now decoupled? (So that path-1 could be 5 gems or could be 10? I think I saw a Lucky Coin shield cost 10 gems, but maybe I was mistaken.) That would be very nice IMO. But maybe I misunderstood your post.

And when I hit "view battle", the screen *does* zoom in from map to battlefield in a blend-in kind of way, but it goes black for some time before that. (So if 10 battles happened per turn that I can view, I sometimes decided not to view quite a few out of impatience)

Anyhow, thanks for the replies. If I understand you all correctly, however, then the main point (AI) still seems to be quite shaky. Good to know! thanks

Again from the manual:

Furhermore, preaching in a province can only raise dominion as high as twice the level of the priest doing the preaching.

Path requirements and item costs are still linked. If Lucky Coin costs 10 gems, it requires Astral 2. Many items have been changed slightly. Especially path boosters can be harder to come by. Winged Helmet and Bag of Winds are both Air 4 now, or 25 gems. Manual lists all items, their path requirements, and has its own list for path boosting items.

The black screen is a bug, then. Feel free to report your OS, graphic card and details of the bug in the bug thread.

If you want to test the AI, try playing a small random map against one AI. I played Kailasa against EA Ulm. I conquered their capital, they had built another castle, they took their capital back, and eventually I forgot to rebid on a mercenary and they got it, and I wasn't comfortable with the changed balance of forces and quit the game. This was while testing the demo. I suggest that you test the demo's AI few more times. It is easiest to test out on a small map, with perhaps just 20 provinces or so, but random maps that small are fast to create.

[thejeff]

Agartha gets nice Earth Mages for Blade Wind, but the mages have horrible precision, so it's not as impressive as it should be.

Buildings do cost the same across ages.

I do get the black screen for a few seconds before the fade in begins as well.

[Nerfix]

Endoperez said:I doubt I said anything generally to you, but I think I have mentioned that the general concensus amongst the blitzers, or those regular to the #dominion irc channel, is that Agartha, especially as far as national units go, is weak. That includes some of the betas. I'm doing my best in arguing against them, but haven't been successful yet. I'm not that good a player, though.

My latest try with EA Agartha was with Alteration-based research. Adding some protection with various Earth spells should work, Earth Meld should work against high-def enemies, Oracles of the Dead can cast Blight... Lots of interesting things in there.

Agartha also has access to Earth 4 mages, even the occassional Earth 5 mage. The same IRC crowd says that Blade Wind is one of the strongest damage spells in the Early Age, especially with Earth 4 or more mages... Earth Power makes Agarthan capital-only mages even more powerful, and happens to be at Conjuration 3, where Agartha gets two nice national summon spells. At Conjuration 5, Agartha can summon life-draining ethereal creatures that could be described as Agarthan Wraiths. At higher Evocation, Agartha gets Magma Eruption. There's also their ability to scry with their starting site.

Oh, sorry, I must have misunderstood.

For the record, I don't think Agartha is especially weak, it's just that getting their research started feels like...well, I have one crude and colourful term to describe how it feels.

One noteworthy thing is that you can use the Oracles as combat "mages" from the moment you recruit them...they can kill a number of thing with Smite and rack exp in the progress.