Newbie come lately?

[Gandalf Parker]

One of the great things about this game is that people do not tend to agree on most of it. Everyone has favorite nations. They all play differently so you will want to try them all. The "best" nation will be the one that best matches your playing style. Slow moving heavy armor? fast moving raiders? heavy research? barbarian horde? stealth guerilla warfare? undead armies?

Personally for new players I like to recommend Middle Age Man. Its not the most fun, nor the easiest to win with. But its probably the most "standard" nation. Its bowmen and knights, mage, priests, scouts. Not very hard to figure out what each one basically does so you can concentrate on learning the menus and keypresses.

There is a map on www.Dom3Minions.com called Tower which is good for new players. It allows you to play with many AIs without getting swarmed by them. It also tends to improve the use of some menus (such as F1)

Also a good tip for new players is that the Independents strength in games is the reverse of AI strength. If the game is rough on you, turn the indepts UP. Most people turn them down thinking it makes the game easier but it actually makes the AIs harder.

If you get tired of Solo in vanilla mode then there are maps and mods to boost it.

Oh yeah, and the only almost complete keypress chart is at the player-made wiki.
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Hotkey

[rdonj]

There was another thread about this a while back, and I'm just going to link you so you can get an idea of people's various opinions on the matter. Note that the thread eventually fell to bickering between some of the various parties involved, and it will really not do any good to read past page 2. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=46214

Alternatively the short version - It doesn't really matter what nation you play as, as long as you enjoy the theme of the nation you'll probably enjoy playing. But if there was a nation I would describe as the easiest for a new player to play, it'd probably be EA Niefelheim. They are strong or capable in all categories and one of the more forgiving nations. They can be played bless, scales, rainbow, whatever. The only drawback is their best units are all cap only, and the rest are only average at best.

[Carny]

Wow this is truly great. Thanks everybody!
Some reading up do, some games to try on.

One question regarding the AI. Does it "get better" on higher difficulties or does it just cheat?

and again thank you everybody for the welcome. Its really great not to get the neoclassic OMG LOL NOOB - greeting that some game communities reserve for new players. Looking forward to getting (presumably) hurt in MP now.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Carny

Wow this is truly great. Thanks everybody!
Some reading up do, some games to try on.

One question regarding the AI. Does it "get better" on higher difficulties or does it just cheat?

Not like in other games. It does operate pretty much within the same ability to know things that the human players operate in.

What it does get is extra build points. So it is able to use more expensive pretender chassis, and add more magic, and take more extreme scales. But since if does this fairly randomly the results can either be really good or really bad. One of the things commonly used to boost the AI later is the ability to assign it logically created pretenders with settings that match that nation better.

and again thank you everybody for the welcome. Its really great not to get the neoclassic OMG LOL NOOB - greeting that some game communities reserve for new players. Looking forward to getting (presumably) hurt in MP now.

I think for many communities that comes from the idea of newbies being only fresh meat. When all of the expert players know all of the killer strategies so that newbs are not much better than AIs.

Even though Dom3 has been out for years, the closest thing to absolute strategies can only be gotten from defining all of the game parameters (map size, nations in game, turning off many game features with mods). And with so much variety available for those and everything else in the game there will always be room for even a newbie to do something surprising.