Casting first in defence + endgame spells

[IndyPendant]

Heh. I was the attacker in question, and I'm still rather annoyed about the whole thing. (Not at Twan, note. At this particular mechanic.) I basically wasted untold hours of complicated end-game turns, because evicting Twan was so incredibly, unbelievably unlikely that I might as well have gone AI shortly after he took the island. Even destroying the rest of his territories would have taken so long that by the time I was done he would have had his nigh-impenetrable defenses up on the central island...

It all came down to the defender casting first.

To answer some of the points brought up: spells cannot get past domes. Assassins and disease-spreaders cannot get past patrollers. Multiple attackers do not work against a castle. There was essentially no reasonable method, at all, of evicting him. Period.

[VedalkenBear]

Mm. I'm curious about several points, the primary of which is why the defender should have an advantage in battles. From a military perpective, the defender is generally seen to have a tactical advantage but an operational disadvantage. My concern is to how well this RL 'norm' translates into Dominions. If it is indeed true that the operational-level advantage normally held by the attacker is the case with Dominions, then retaining the defender tactical advantage sounds reasonable.

However, if the operational-level advantage is not realized, then I think that the defender's advantage should be mitigated. Note that I do not refer here to a specific situation (like the above points to). I refer to more general issues with the game.

One way to 'fix' this would be to implement an initiative system. Each 'unit' (commander or block of soldiers) gets a move. How hard would this be to implement?

[Renojustin]

Domes are not working as intended, because they're not supposed to make an impenetrable wall of magic defense. They're not supposed to stack.