Dominions 3000 - MP game - 2-3 nations left

[Aezeal]

good choice, ulm has it all

[Dragar]

I just checked out the map for the first time - gonna be a bit crowded eh?

[rdonj]

Depends on how many are playing. If it's the full 7 races, yeah, it'll be crazy crowded. If it's only 4 or 5 of us it won't be nearly as bad. Probably by the time you kill one neighbor you'll start feeling like maybe you have a little elbow room. With current numbers though it should be fine.

[Dragar]

I've just read through that mammoth development thread you guys have built - impressive amount of work. I haven't had any time to play yet unfortunately, so odds are won't get much testing done before the game starts. I'm happy to play it mostly by ear, just don't want to stuff up my pretender too badly.

So, if I went with the droid pretender as a an awake rainbow mage for early research and site searching, with good order and production and whatever negative scales and low dominion I need to make that work, would I go all right? Presumably ulm will as normal benefit a lot from early research in construction and alteration?

[rdonj]

Wow, I'm impressed, that must have taken hours

Order and production are both very good for ulm, and keep in mind that there's a lot less land to build on in this map than normal maps, so you can't make up for lack of resources by fort building. There are also several very resource-expensive units ulm can build from all forts that it can't get otherwise (capital ships and tanks). I haven't really experimented a whole lot with pretenders... what I've done in sp is mostly race towards Enchant 7 for earth blood deep well (bonus is you get arrow fend doing this, and thunder/fire ward which is great against jomon), then research construction up to 8, then win. That would probably not work as well in multiplayer because you probably will not be left alone long enough to research that far. Construction is useful early on for making spaceships, and evocation gets you magma eruption. Alteration is good for buffs, mostly for thugs but there aren't really lots of "good" thug chassis in dom3k, also wind guide is very useful for ulm. The personal artillery marines with wind guide could be quite devastating.

Things to bear in mind:

You have mages with natural picks that can reach n1, E4, F2, S3, and A2, and you'll get EFS crosspath mages, as well as SA crosspath. Your starting income covers earth, astral and fire. It's hard to get all of those paths up to max so it may be beneficial to cover some of that on your god if you go rainbow. You probably also want to take a magic dominions since magic is very important to ulm.

Prot is about half as good as it is normally, since AP damage is everywhere.

Misfortune can be a bit nasty with dom3k, it takes a lot of pd to beat independant attacks.


Anyway, to answer your question more directly, yes that sort of pretender will work for ulm. If you have to go negative, probably your best bets are the temperature and death scale, but ideally you don't want to dip too far because d3k also has low gold income I think because space provinces are small, and you will want lots of mages.

[Dragar]

Cool, thanks for that. It looks tenable then, just a question of the usual trade-off of magic vs scales.. I think given the size of the map there isn't much point looking at end game strategies too carefully at this stage

[rdonj]

You're probably right about that

[Aezeal]

yeah though rthe last 2 might be battling somewhat longer.. if the races are somewhat balanced... I do hope R'lyeh gets to summoning space-eels I think they would eat most other SC for breakfast especially if somewhat equipped. Must admit I've never had one sofar though

Is misfortune that much of a problem? I can't really imagine why PD is so much weaker than in vanilla.. do you get to few units? because most nations have much more prot than vanilla etc.

[Aezeal]

So far 5 nations taken and that won't really crowd the map though..

I do want to tell I'll update the mod one last time before we start (with the last things from dev thread) but pretenders won't be changed (as far as I can see now at least) so just make pretenders already and somewhere in the next week maybe I'll see about getting llama to set it all up. we'll try to start before end of the month

[calmon]

Give me the insects. Your mod looks good!