Jomon advice wanted

[Pablomatic]

Hey Micah. Don't be frustrated. I didn't dismiss your strategies. Ok the Celestial General is crap. Fine. I really appreciate your advice, and I'll try it out.

[Pablomatic]

Just seems like every nation should take a Ghost King, or a Cyclops, no matter what. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but reading through the strategy guides, those seem to be the most common, with perhaps a vampire queen thrown in.

Guess I need to start powergaming if I want to try MP, or I won't last long.

[Micah]

sorry if I was grumping at you.

You're pretty much right on the pretender choice though...there's a choice between GK, clops, PoD and Wyrm for early SCs (with a few nation specific choices such as the risen oracle, gorgon, and colossal fetish as well.)

The fear/awe combo is just too damn good to pass up, and the celestial general doesn't have fear (he isn't as bad as I thought though, since he IS armored at least, but his encumberance value is a problem for extended fights, which will happen due to the lack of fear...Actually, if you give him enough death magic to have a fear value he might be a viable option, though it'd be somewhat inefficient. Play with it if you'd like, it might provide a decent compromise for theme.) If you haven't tried it go ahead and give it a shot, you'll be amazed at how well they go together against indy chaff.

If you don't have an awake SC you need to have an imprisoned bless chassis (and good units to use it with, Jomon's don't qualify), which is also confined to a handful of different choices.

[MaxWilson]

Micah said:
If you don't have an awake SC you need to have an imprisoned bless chassis (and good units to use it with, Jomon's don't qualify), which is also confined to a handful of different choices.

Is that really true? Bless is just a way of boosting certain unit stats so you get more killing power for a given pound of gold. If you have good, solid national troops, they can expand quite well even if they're not sacred. Functionally-speaking, a dual F9W9 bless in the early game is just a way of killing indies faster and more efficiently. You can get the same effect on expansion in some cases by having a 50% larger army from good scales. This is especially true if your army has access to good missile weapons, which scale better than footmen in heavy plate. (LA Agartha is lots of fun with a good bless but in practice armies of crossbowmen with some light infantry guards expand better than uber-blessed Blindfighters.)

Consider how valuable mercs are for expansion, and then consider that most mercs are pretty average as national troops go--and they're almost never used with a bless.

-Max

[Micah]

Max,

The problem is that production 3 will give you about 40 more resources in your cap. Taking a mountain province with an awake pretender will give you about 40 extra resources in your cap. And then the next province will add another 40, and so on. You also get more gold that way.

Sure, eventually your prod scale will spread out and give you more resources in the long-term, but by then you can have a second fort up. In the meantime you're forced to either attack with marginal forces that will take more casualties than you'd like in order to get resources, or wait longer to let your forces overpower the indies with little or no damage taken, losing expansion speed.

Going for a bless or an awake SC are almost always going to be the best options. Is there some exception? Of course. Perhaps "need to" was a bit strong, but the optimal strategy is generally going to be one of the two.

[MaxWilson]

Micah said:
Max,

The problem is that production 3 will give you about 40 more resources in your cap. Taking a mountain province with an awake pretender will give you about 40 extra resources in your cap. And then the next province will add another 40, and so on. You also get more gold that way.

Sure, eventually your prod scale will spread out and give you more resources in the long-term, but by then you can have a second fort up. In the meantime you're forced to either attack with marginal forces that will take more casualties than you'd like in order to get resources, or wait longer to let your forces overpower the indies with little or no damage taken, losing expansion speed.

Going for a bless or an awake SC are almost always going to be the best options. Is there some exception? Of course. Perhaps "need to" was a bit strong, but the optimal strategy is generally going to be one of the two.

Ah. Is it true that a Prod scale doesn't affect the resources you get from neighbors until your dominion spreads to those neighbors? Makes sense, and I hadn't thought of that. That does tend to make Sloth more attractive, because it won't hurt you for a while, and the beginning is when your home fort is most important.

-Max

[Pablomatic]

Thanks again to everyone who responded. I appreciate the advice, and it has helped me understand things better.

Of course Shrouds of the Battle Saint are perfect for mages. I balk at putting them on combatants, because they negate the units' inherent armor, but for mages they're perfect, and a good reason to go with an earth bless for nations that don't have holy mages.

I'm still going to keep trying to find a way to make the Celestial General viable. It's painful to spend all those points to get Dominion 10 for awe, so I'll work on something else.

JimMorrison wrote:
"I am kind of new-ish, so I don't see quite the necessity of such strict adherence to a small list of pretender choices. Obviously, some of the pretenders are just shabby or in no way cost effective, but it all comes down to strategy, and if you think yours through well enough, just about any pretender should be capable. Just don't get too pissed off when someone's cyclops shows up at your capital on turn 5."

This is how I *want* the game to be. The reason I don't play simpler but flashier games is that I want deep, subtle, and varied strategy choices, rather than rushes with one powerful unit. I want there to be a use for most or all units and spells in the game--otherwise why have them? Whether Dominions 3 is this type of game is debatable though I guess.

I've read some posts that claim MP boils down to a "rush for Tartarians." With everybody going for more or less the same spells and everybody having a Cyclops pretender or something similar, I'm not sure I'll enjoy MP as much as I had hoped. I'll try it out and see. I'd like to be the one who surprises my opponents with an effective ORIGINAL strategy. Is that a losing cause?

Also, nobody said anything about the two Jomon sacred samurais not working together, as implied in the unit description. I've never had a problem (that I discovered anyway) so I'll keep doing that.