Alexander's Ever-Expanding Tome of Knowledge, pt 2

[Meglobob]

Gold, you never have enough, especially in dominions, so here is a nice way to get more of it.

Research watcher spell, cast 2 of those in your capital and any other high population province with a lab. Get 1 of your cheapo mages to patrol with them. Now slam taxes upto 200% and leave them there. You now have double your income permanently, with 0 unrest and a mounting stockpile of corpses. Watchers have +50 patrol bonus and are tough defenders who discharge lightning and never retreat, so a decent defense to support your PD.

Also to get the most out of this, turn those corpses into free troops, research carrion reanimation, and when you reach 100 corpses get 100 souless undead for 10D gems, cool...

[HoneyBadger]

Ok, since my previous posts were-atleast to some-potentially not terribly worthwhile, here's an easy and useful strategy for Kailasa Early Era. Note: this draws upon an earlier strategy posted in the original Tome and just specializes it for Kailasa.

Create a Pretender with Air 10 and Death 8 (Destroyer of Worlds is a good candidate, but you might want to go with something cheaper. He's worth it though, because you're going to want a strong capacity to fight hand-to-hand. If you feel you can get away with it, give him Fire 4 and it'll really help your melee forces, while at the same time allowing easy access to Flaming Arrows for maximum messiness.)

Yes, it's very expensive, (especially if you go with Fire 4 on top of it), but there's no real reason not to make your Pretender imprisoned. The Bless effect payoff of this is to make your sacred Yavanna troops completely immune to missles, while at the same time your own sacred Yavanna archers are dealing out +300% affliction arrows.

The enemies' archers can only hurt the enemy, and your own archers again can only hurt the enemy, effectively nullifying as much as a third of all Independent forces, and forcing human-run nations to cross a battlefield under fire and fight your melee forces either hand-to-hand or with spells, but not air spells, since your sacred Awe troops and summons are now 75% resistant to lightning-a fact your Air 10 Pretender should be able to exploit.

[HoneyBadger]

By the way, one nice thing about Wishing for a Pretender Type is, once you've Gift of Reasoned it, you CAN Prophetize a wished-for Pretender!

[HoneyBadger]

Fear and Awe on a really powerful Pretender (like a Carrion Dragon for instance) can be great, especially if you're using your Pretender to capture independent provinces. But, one thing you need to be aware of and avoid when "soloing" such Pretenders is that Fear and Awe have very little effect on undead
(they're back from the dead, you don't impress them).

A good strategy when "soloing" a powerful Pretender is to create a backup "holy slayer" squad made up of maybe 15 regular troops (your starting army should be fine for this in most cases) and atleast 5 commander units with atleast 1 level of holy magic each. Set each commander to cast Banishment x5 and then "cast spells" in the back of your forces, and put your regular soldiers in the front, set to "hold and attack". Not many undead will survive the Banishment party, and the ones that do can be cut down safely by your troops.

Use this type of squad to take out the undead provinces your Pretender has to avoid.

They can then be used to increase your Dominion around the edges of your national borders, which will make your Pretender stronger and protect your Dominion.

[Meglobob]

In SP you can gain a advantage over the AI by buying all the mercenaries and never letting any AI nation have any.

Simply bid 1gp over asking price and they will be yours, everytime. When it comes to renewing there contract you after bid full price again +1gp, to 100% guarentee you keep them.

The AI it seems only ever bids the exact amount...

When you get a mercenary commander with a magic item, consider sending that mercenary to his death in the last month of his hire. Simply place him up front on his own and give attack closet orders. Have your own commanders in the rear with empty slots, with a little luck you will pick up the magic item off your former employees rotting corpse...

[Gandalf Parker]

Interesting tactic altho it might be hard to duplicate on purpose.
For Pangaea:
In a solo game of mine there is an "eater of the dead" walking around randomly and just munching up provinces. At first I thought that it would be a major problem for me but it turned out to be a bonus. I followed it around with Pans while leaving them invisible. He devastated anyone elses armies that got in the area. But I was able to take any province with the few maenads that the pans tossed. Id crank up the taxes and maybe try to recruit some things. I was able to follow it closely since my pans werent susceptable to it, and take the empty provinces faster than other nations using scouts and attack orders.

[Foodstamp]

Meglobob said:
In SP you can gain a advantage over the AI by buying all the mercenaries and never letting any AI nation have any.

Simply bid 1gp over asking price and they will be yours, everytime. When it comes to renewing there contract you after bid full price again +1gp, to 100% guarentee you keep them.

The AI it seems only ever bids the exact amount...

When you get a mercenary commander with a magic item, consider sending that mercenary to his death in the last month of his hire. Simply place him up front on his own and give attack closet orders. Have your own commanders in the rear with empty slots, with a little luck you will pick up the magic item off your former employees rotting corpse...

The bit about bidding 1 gold over the asking price does not always work. It seems to work 99.9% of the time, but in an EA game I just played as Kailasa, I bid on the amazon archers with the pegasus commander 1 gold over the asking price and was outbid. Other than that one incident, which happened a few hours ago, I have never had the AI outbid me on mercs if I go 1 gold over.

[Meglobob]

Foodstamp said:

The bit about bidding 1 gold over the asking price does not always work. It seems to work 99.9% of the time, but in an EA game I just played as Kailasa, I bid on the amazon archers with the pegasus commander 1 gold over the asking price and was outbid. Other than that one incident, which happened a few hours ago, I have never had the AI outbid me on mercs if I go 1 gold over.

Foodstamp, I have done this 100's, perhaps 1,000's of times now in Dom 3. It's never let me down yet. Perhaps due to excessive Dom 3 playing , you were tired and bid under by mistake?

[Foodstamp]

I am pretty sure I bid on them right. The game I was playing was a test bed for an upcoming MP game and I had just read your post so I decided to test it as well.

The nation that outbid me was a modded in nation from Master of Magic and the mercenaries were the archers in white. It's possible I did not bid on them properly, everyone can misclick, but I am pretty certain i bid 1 gold over because I usually check the merc screen before I end turn.

[HoneyBadger]

I just thought I'd give this one a bump since it's potentially pretty useful, especially to new players