Newbie questions

[Ballbarian]

The AI does not focus much on underwater provinces when playing as an underwater nation.

This does not appear to be a problem in Dom3. In my current game Oceania & Atlantis started in seperate large bodies of water. They held every water province and were starting to clash with my forces on land before I was finally able to enter the sea with summons & shamblers.

[hoo]

Question about movement and Combat.

Let's say I have armies in Provinces A & B and my opponent has armies in province C And D. Province B does NOT border province D! I attack Province C from both A&B. My opponent attacks province A from C&D. How does it resolve? To my 2 armies meet his 1 army in province C? Or do the armies in the provinces being attacked stop and defend so it's 1 army vs 1 army? Think of a province setup like a "Z" and how it's resolved.


Finally, let's say there's only 2 provinces(this is simpler) and We attack each other at the same time...Is there a defender or do you meet on neutral ground?

thanks bundles.

[calmon]

This is explained in detail in the manual. Page 64+ (MOVEMENT). The Dom3 Manual is quite cool!

1. All Movement in friendly provinces happens
2. Movement in enemy territory followed in a random manner. So the answer of your questions should be clear

[hoo]

I read the manual turn order pages and understand movement in friendly provinces happens first. Random manner doesn't exactly answer my question. I know that entering an enemy provinces stops your movement. but my question remains.

If the enemy moves first into a province, are you then blocked from moving out of a province? If the movement is random will your forces possibly attack piecemeal if they're coming from 2 differnet provinceS?

[calmon]

Thats explained on page 68.

"...
For example if 2 armies attack each other one of the 3 things can happen:

- there is a battle in the enemy province
- there is a battle in your province
- the armies miss one another and exchange place
which event occurs depends on the size of the armies and the terrain involved"

So eventually your army is 'pinned' in your province.

[PhilD]

Like calmon says: either your army will be prevented from moving, and combat will occur in your province between your army and the enemy army, or both armies will move (possibly resulting in position exchange), or your army will move first and the enemy army won't (resulting in battle in opponent's province).

Thus, sometimes you try to coordinate attack from more than one province, and only part of your army get there, which may result in battle loss (hey, where's my left flank?). And, sometimes an army was supposed to vacate a province while another followed, and both end up in the same province, resulting in starvation.

[Patriot]

I'm a newbie and I have a question.

Since Gandalf Parker, the good man, put up a multiplayer blitz server, I can't wait to play a person, but I wanted to know generally how other people play.

I got the general feeling that a majority of people, at least those that post on the forums here create small but elite + blessed armies to massacre their opponents without taking any losses, while adding invincible combatants in the mix.

Is it possible to put up a fight by conscripting masses of trashy troops, keep morale up the best you can, and overwhelm an opponent? I was wondering if there is a good human wave strategy. I tried playing Late Ermor but the AI killed me. I don't like the undead that much.

Or should I try to go for spells like Leprosy and Black Death? I know how annoying those kind of spells are when the computer does it to me.

[Zen]

It all depends on what you want and can afford.

The best nation to probably try the "Standard Army" would more than likely be MA Ulm. Play with Order3/Production3 and a Pretender with at least some nature (N3 is a good markerpoint) and probably death (D3) or Astral. Recruit a good mix of units, xbows, heavy infantry, use your Cav (HCav) only for situations that require it, since they are gold heavy.

Make +Supply items for nature, in order to keep your armies in shape.

Recruit indpendents that help diversify your armies: nature mages, death mage, amazonian sacred units (Pegasi, Lizard riders), independant mages.

Make big armies with "Thugs" in order to develop how to equip and identify units that make good thugs. Along with that a few battlemages for support, equipping them with Earthboots to use Bladewind, Battlefield support spells. Ulm is a good nation for this with death and astral because their forgeable items can be equipped on both constructs and undead to make use of their low encumberance values.

Your endgame thugs should probably comprise of Iron Dragons and Golems.

Look for promising provinces for high resource centers in order to churn out the masses of units. Watch out for stagnation with upkeep due to not expanding or waring enough.

These are ways you can play the "Army" game of Dominions.