questions (and is there a FAQ anywhere?)

[Edi]

1) In addition to the ones listed, other units that are also capable of healing are early era Ermor priests and the Mother of Serpents pretender that is available to some nations. T'ien Ch'i has a national hero with that can heal troops.

2) No advantage. If you've done a lv 4 search, it's just as good as 5+ search. I agree that the radar spells should set the search level to 4 instead of 9.

3) Yes, it is, but any radar spell like Haruspex, Arcane Probing etc will always find ALL sites of that type in the province no matter what. However, if you've done a lv 1, 2 or 3 search with a mage, then there is always a chance that there is a higher level site that has not been discovered yet. Sites that you can see immediately upon conquering a province (such as Mine of Superior Iron) are lv 0.

4) No, you don't. The only way to get them is that on a specific map a certain province has been set as a special start location for your nation, your nation has fewer than 4 startsites and some site has been assigned to that province in the map file. In other words, doesn't happen.

Edi

[thejeff]

4) It's also possible for a random event to create a site in a capital, but as far as I know those are all visible.

[merlinme]

Thank you all very much, very helpful. I do think some of these things (e.g. being able to waste time searching your home province, being able to waste time doing a level 9 search when you've done a level 4 search) are a bit... quirky, but I guess it comes with the territory when you're playing a game which is such an obvious labour of love. As I say, I'm certainly finding it absorbing. I'm playing as a random nation in a single player game and I got Arcoscephale, so I noticed that my priestesses had a heal ability, I wondered how common it was. It's actually quite handy, as I've got lots of sacred troops who get regeneration after blessing. They've been taking a lot of punishment but surviving with good experience, so a turn or two healing them seems like time well spent.

[thejeff]

Well, you're able to do a level 9 search after you've done a level 9 search as well. Or doing a level 1 search, for that matter.

There's just no mechanism to prevent searching.

I hope that the autocast searching gets rewritten and makes this easier to handle.

[merlinme]

To answer my own question, there is a specific FAQ at the website that calmon posted:

http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/faq.html

There's lots of other cool stuff there as well, (thanks calmon), but that's specifically the FAQ.

It's for Dominions2 though, I don't know if the information is out of date.

Incidentally having reviewed the section on the chances of getting magic sites, I think I was extremely unlucky to have cast Haruspex on about ten provinces (including 6 mountains and a forest) in a middle era game, and got two bleedin' Farms of Plenty (i.e. no gems). Although I guess a lot of the Nature sites must be in a forest. How does that work? If the random roll gives a Nature site, and then another roll determines a site which should be in a forest, do you get no Nature site? Or does it only pick among the ones which could appear in that terrain? Or is there some other complexity I'm missing (has it changed from Dominions2)?

[Manuk]

to prevent your campaigns from stalling you could leave your wounded behind. If i'm not mistaken you have to click on a unit inside a group and then press 'w'. This selects all wounded inside that group.

Personally I don't care that much about them, maybe because I'm not always Acrocephale , but still then. It's easy to do and there mus not be that many wounded anyways.

[thejeff]

If I understand correctly, it doesn't first pick a Path and then determine which site, but just picks from the sites possible in that terrain (weighted for rarity).

Forests are more likely to have Nature sites because there are more Nature sites on the list of sites permitted in forest.

[merlinme]

Well, like I said, I have half a dozen badly afflicted sacred troops, so it's probably worth waiting a turn or two, and I could probably benefit from doing a troop build up anyway and letting my dominion spread a bit.

That's one thing I have found interesting about the lack of a built in save and reload feature . I rarely actually reload other strategy computer games, but I always save every turn (just in case it crashes, as much as anything else). But not having that facility does tend to make me much more cautious. If you know that if it goes terribly wrong you can try again, you tend to be much more aggressive.

I kind of like the way it forces you to think about your strategy a bit more. And also I tend to crush the computer in the long run, not being able to take back stupid mistakes should make it much more challenging. I think I'll take some backup saves though, I'm still very much learning the game, and I want to try out different things if it all goes horribly wrong (rather than spend 12 hours setting it all up again).

[merlinme]

Thejeff: ah ok. I was misreading the FAQ. I thought it said that a 50% chance meant 50% for a site in each Path, whereas in fact when it was talking about multiple rolls, it meant for each of the four possible province slots (four apparently being the maximum). Which would explain why I was having trouble finding Nature sites in mountain provinces.

Would be handy to know which sites can appear in which terrain. Has anyone ever created such a list?

[Twan]

There may be some interesting answers in the beginning of a FAQ I've made some times ago (but I couldn't find the courage to continue).