Happiness in Darkness -An Argatha Ktonian Dead AAR

[Boron]

This will be my first (and maybe not my last ) Dominions 3 AAR. I will try to make this AAR quite detailed and informative so that it is (hopefully) interesting to read for both new players and old veterans. All screenshots used that are bigger than 50kb will be attached as thumbnails so that people with a slow internet connection can also enjoy the AAR hopefully because my AARs are always very screenshot-heavy.

If you are a fan of swedish gothic music the title might sound familiar to you. And you are correct, apart from fitting well for Argatha Ktonian Dead it is also the title of a song from Gothminister. I recommend listening to them while playing Argatha Ktonian Dead. Many of their lyrics imho catch exactly the mood of late age Argatha. They are now a quite desperate kingdom. The real Argatheans, the Pale Ones, which form Early Age Argatha have long been wiped out and now the caves of the Pale Ones are ruled by a human necromancer cult.
For further reading pleasure the detailed descriptions for all 3 Argatha Ages:
Early Age Argatha Pale Ones:

Middle Age Argatha Golem Cult:

Late Age Argatha Ktonian Dead:


So the first important decision has been made, i picked an age and my nation.
Now as second even more important decision i have to build a god for my nation to worship.
To help the decision process let's first check what Argatha's national troops and commanders have to offer.
Troops:
Crossbowmen:




Their steel crossbow is an Argathean invention and superior to the crossbows the other human empires use because he inflicts 1 more weapon damage.
Melee Infantry:





Sapper (Siege unit, +7 siege bonus)


Cave Knight (the cave dragon continues fighting till the end of the battle if the Knight gets killed )


Blindfighter (bless troop, recruitable everywhere )


Commanders:






Magepriests:




Interesting changes/new features compared to Dominions 2:
-The old age trait
As you might have noticed the Ktonian Necromancer has a strange philosophical looking head symbol. This means that when we recruit him he is considered to have old age already.
All units and commanders in Dominions 3 have a lifespan .
If they are considered to be of old age you will see the old age symbol. From then on they start to get stat reductions and every new year (every 12 turns) there is a chance to get afflictions from old age. The older the unit already is the higher is the chance that it gets the diseased affliction.
Growth Scale has has a strong impact (unfortunately i do not know the details yet, the manual is not finished yet) on old age. With high growth scale your units of old age are less likely to get afflictions whereas death scale increases the chance. Nature mages get a bonus whereas firemages suffer more from old age. There are also rituals to increase your lifespan.
Most humanoids are considered to be of old age when they are older than 50, mighty summons and some nations (R'leh especially) have a very long lifespan and are considered to be of old age at the age of 1000 or even 2500 years.
I like the introduction of the old age system very much, it makes all your commanders and units more unique and adds much variety because most really good mages are of old age.
-The new randoms system

These are the possible magic paths for our Necromancer.
All randoms are now this style and are normally 2-5 different paths. Also they all have a percentage probability.
This means that our Necromancer will get 1 random that is either fire, earth, astral or death magic and then has an additional 10% chance to get another random which can also be either fire,earth,astral or death.
This makes getting magically flexible much tougher in dominions 3. So each nation has to work much harder to get an expert in every of the 8 possible paths and has the result that all nations feel more unique than in dominions 2.
-Changed holy system
Now priest levels range from lvl 1-4.

Requirements for the priest spells got also reduced 1 level per spell and word of power is a new spell.
There are now more priests with lvl 3, so Smite is a more common spell .

Now that we took a closer look at all national units and commanders of our nation we can start designing our god.
Argatha has many very promising looking units and commanders.
The necromancer is a very powerful battlemage (more about that in later chapters when he goes to real combat ), the crossbow troops are very useful and the blindfighter looks decent enough to try a bless strat because he has already very promising base stats.
I need lots of money though to use many necromancers and if i want to recruit blindfighters i need also productivity because they need many resources.
With all that in mind it turns out that there is one god that seems optimal for my planned strategy.
You can btw save your gods now, so you do not need to make a new god every time again but you can instead simply load your old successful builds if you want to use them again.

I select an already known god from dominions 2. Sorry about that, but unfortunately my most disliked god is optimal for my strat and thus i have to pick a great mother as god.
For other strats there would be some other very interesting gods though:

Two of them are Argatha-only, no other nation has them.
The Olm

and the Oracle
.
Notice that the Oracle is immortal . That makes it very interesting to attempt a SC (SC=Supercombattant, meaning a commander who can solely kill a whole enemy army) strategy.

(Warning: Not for the faint hearted, view the screenshot at your own risk )

We pick though the Great Mother because we want to try a 1,5 bless strat(boronian neologism, meaning a major (lvl9) bless combined with one minor (lvl4-8) bless ).


We pick an earth 9 nature 4 1,5 bless, this should increase the combat value of our blind fighters quite a bit and help your necromancers to cast more spells. Note that you now immediately see the bless effects, so you do not need to look in the manual what the effects of your bless are.
Dominions 3 has many such nice small improvements and is thus more accessible than Dominions 2 where you were forced to read the manual. Dominions 3 you should be able to play without reading the manual at all, playing the tutorial should be enough. Nontheless it is recommended of course to read the manual nontheless, but you could start playing Dominions 3 without reading the manual as a new player .

As scales we pick very economical scales:


If you are an old dominions 2 veteran you probably begin to wonder how this is possible. If you look at our bless, god and scales you will notice that in Dominions 2 this design should cost -92 points.
The design becomes possible though through the new feature to chose your desired awakening.

We pick imprisoned, this gives us 250 extra points. In Dominions 2 you had 500 base points for god design, in Dominions 3 you only have 350 base points for god design but can get up to 250 extra points by deciding to use a non-awake god.
Imprisoned means that our god will not be available from the start of the game on, but escape out of his prison within 3 years +/- half a year as random factor. So around turn 30-42 our great mother will manage to escape her prison and from then on we can use her too.
If we would have taken dormant our god would have awakened within a year +/- a few months random factor, so around turn 12.
Awake finally is self explanatory.

Now we have done all adjustments. Fort selection is gone. Each nation now has a couple of forts they can build, they are terrain dependent. So in mountain terrain all nations will have a different fort type than in farmland etc..
Imho this feature is a good idea too, it removes the old watch tower castle spamming problem which many people disliked in Dominions 2.

This is also a good opportunity to end the first chapter and just in time because my weekly Eu2 MP game starts in 20 minutes . After the MP game i will probably write the second chapter about the first couple of turns for our wannabe Goth-Necro-Argatha .