Your most magic-less game

[MKDELTA]

Mine must be my current EA Ulm game. Glory of the Gods, some VP stuff, Indies 9, very difficult magic research. I simply...have...no usable mages. Or that much usable spells. E1 mages with some feeble random on top aren't very useful. Especialy without magma bolts. I have couple of Antlered Shamans backing my raiding groups armiees/with Panic. Apart from that, pretty much nothing. One or two of the groups had a shaman tossing that first berserk spell on some units. Even site searching has given exceptionaly dry results.

[Sombre]

The problem with a hard research game designed to cut down on magic is that bless troops take over, along with a handful of effective SC pretenders (like PoD).

A game with very hard research, pretenders restricted max of 4 in a magic path and certain pretenders banned might be good fun.

I do sometimes turn on hard research for SP games though, where I don't use uber blesses or SCs.

[DigitalSin]

I have to say, I almost never play with low magic teams, and I find the magic one of the most fun parts of the game. I don't think I've ever really had a magicless or low-magic game..

[DrPraetorious]

My suggestion would be:
* Very difficult research.
* 125% resources and supplies, 100% gold.
* All pretenders must be *dormant*, neither awake nor imprisoned.

Everyone would still go for a strong bless or a supercombatant, it is true, but that's okay if everyone knows that up front.

[ano]

Doesn't it almost *kill* certain nations and certain strategies with no chance to defend themselves from double-blessed van (who takes the imprisoned pretender anyway) at least with PoD. I find Sombre's suggestion much more viable.

[MKDELTA]

Except that AI can't do double blessed Vans, and I don't play Vanheim because I find the theme boring. I wanted this to be a thread about experiences with low-magic games, not another minmaxing thread.

[Endoperez]

As far as hard-research games go, would it help if starting dominion was limited to, say, max of 5? Hard to keep SCs inside own dominion, no awe, and for most nations recruitment of sacred unit was just cut in half. Some nations (Niefel) aren't going to be hurt that much because they can't recruit that many sacreds any way, but at least Niefel has harder time spreading the cold around.

[DrPraetorious]

I don't think that any of this helps hard-research games. I think it helps games in which you're trying to play dominions without using pretenders, blesses or magic.

A dormant SC can stop a blessed rush on a decent sized map. He shows up on turn 12 and he can appear with equipment.

At very-hard research, const 2 costs, what, 260 RP? That's easily achievable by turn 12 by Pythium (for example.)

The difference here is that you can't take a prince of death and have him leap on your opponent's face on turn 3 .

[HotNifeThruButr]

I played a few games against the AI where I jacked up the difficulty of magic in every way imaginable.

Frankly, it wasn't very fun. The thing is, most nations have an extremely limited roster of troops, out of which 3/4 are probably useless anyways and there is really only one or two ways to set up your army to really make it effective.

And there's really no way to improve your troops aside from getting more of them... which is kind of lame.

[Edratman]

Dominions on the difficult magic option is CIV without buildings.