Yet another new person with a question...

[Jrandom]

Originally Posted by MunkieSuthorn

Hi all,

I bought Elemental a couple of weeks ago and I have to admit that the best thing that has come out of that game so far was the recommendation to check out Dom3.

Ahhh, I know exactly how you feel. Thank you PC Gamer UK, who I believe is the one who mentioned that Elemental didn't push the genre forward like Dom3 did. Dom3 is exactly what I was looking for and had been missing for over 4 years! And it was developed by 2 guys. Amazing.

[rdonj]

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

It's Niefelheim.

You don't think Niefelheim would tend to promote a strong bless strategy to an inexperienced new player?

No. Not that strong bless strategies aren't one of the strongest ways to play for nations that excel at them. And most who excel at them are quite strong. Clearly, even if you took some issue with the author of the guide, someone DID write up a guide for non-bless niefelheim. And that person is a highly respected writer of guides for many nations, whose works are excellent for acquainting oneself with different ways of looking at nations (even if they aren't always very newbie friendly).

However...

Tien Ch'i, you can literally do anything with, including destroy your scales and Pretender, for the ultimate Bless. I've had something like 4A,4F,9W,4A,4N,1B on a Father of Winter before, and destroyed the AI.

I don't really get how this wouldn't give the player that very impression?

[HoneyBadger]

I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: that Niefelheim does not give you a huge amount of options to play successfully: It's got units that are there mostly for effect, unless you really know how to get the most out of them, and that making bad choices about Niefelheim can easily cost you a successful game, even against the AI.

EA Tien Ch'i, on the other hand, is a much more forgiving Nation, and much more flexible, choice-wise.
You can go with an "all or nothing" approach to a Bless strategy, or absolutely anything in-between, and still do well, without knowing that Nation very well.

Someone learning on Tien Ch'i is much less often going to be frustrated, at any point in the game, by not being able to play "how they want to play", and still win.

I feel that's important to the learning process.

And I don't have any issues with Baalz, if that's who you're referring to. He's got a far deeper understanding of the game, and is a much better player, than I ever will be, and his strategy guides are the gold standard. He's done a great deal to help people learn the finer points of Dom3, including myself, and has been a real asset to everyone. I admit I was a bit tiffed at his choice of wording at one point, in one of his strategy guides, but that certainly has cost me more than him, and the contents of the guide in question were themselves without fault.

Also, if the guides aren't "friendly" for new players, then why are you referencing them, as something new players should be familiar with, in this conversation?

[13lackGu4rd]

HoneyBadger, you're missing the point. with EA TC you can't just create troops and go after the AI, as TC's troops are pretty much on par with many other nations that the AI may be using. so in order to tip the scales in your favor you need to efficiently use magic, both inside the battlefield and rituals. with Niefelheim your options are a lot more limited, so it's harder to make a mistake, and those options pretty much guarantee you bring the AI into submission even if you just bum rush it.

[Squirrelloid]

Also, remember new players will tend to instantly be drawn to the biggest baddest things on the roster. Call it the rule of cool, or the shiny toy factor, or whatever. So the chance that they'll try something other than Niefl Giants or Skinshifters first is actually pretty low.

[HoneyBadger]

I'm not talking about what shiny thing attracts them. I'm talking about what's best for educating a new player.

And no, you don't need to do anything fancy, because I've tested it out myself.

The AI can't keep up with a human player throwing TC numbers at them. It isn't that "smart", and the troops TC has, while they may seem similar, are nonetheless superior enough to win against the AI's poor to nonexistant strategies.


You're both looking at Niefelheim from the viewpoint of experience. There's a ton of mistakes that can easily and repeatedly be made with Niefelheim, that aren't obvious right out of the box.

Those cool looking guys with the plate armour? I thought they were great, when I first started playing. Yeah, they suck. The skinshifters? Well, how's your income? You don't have any? And they aren't even sacred? Why are the other guys archers putting all those holes in them? How about Niefels? You went with a triple 10 bless??? (alt: Oh, you didn't do any bless at all?) How about those guys that throw boulders? Why are the other guys' archers putting all those holes in them?! How come my hags keep dying? Old age what the hell? What's blood magic? Wait, what are blood slaves? Demons hell yeah! How do I get those? I can't, because my population is dead??? Wtf they all froze to death? Ok, so maybe I can make some undead...who are those little grey guys? Where did those yellow lines come from? oh crap, my undead guys just blew up. Those were priests??? Ok, so I'll build my own priests to zap them back. Wait, that only works on undead? Why are the other guys' archers putting all those holes in my priests? Well, everybody else has a damn shield, why not the giant priests? I guess I should have stuck with the (sucky) dudes in platemail. Ok, so I guess I'll build a giant king guy... Yeah, I could only afford one, but he's got a 10/10/10 bless! I'll just go attack these little wolf tribe dudes, they look easy....WTF?!?!? IHATEDOM3!!!

[sector24]

You could probably do it that way, but it's certainly not how I approached my first game of Dom3. Here was my first experience:

Day 1: Received game in the mail. Started up a new game with EA Agartha, max opponents, large map. Messed around for a bit, didn't really know what I was doing. Crushed the independents with large armies of trampling troglodytes, but got massacred by EA Helheim.

Day 2: Brought the game manual to work. Read the entire thing on the sly between meetings. Did a little forum searching. Went home, fired up EA Niefelheim. Took a N10 bless. Built 1 Jarl, 5 Niefel Giants. Destroyed all independents, felt like a big man.

Day 3: Continued my EA Niefelheim game, small armies from AI nations moved around my army and stole all my provinces. Eventually caught them, then HULK SMASH! Built ridiculous amounts of Jarl/Niefel Giant armies, basically one group for every province on my border. Slowly crawled across the map until I felt confident enough to start over with another nation.

That was it in a nutshell, the only spell I ever cast was bless, I didn't forge much of any equipment or try the other units. My main battle was with the game mechanics and the interface, not so much the other nations. Niefelheim (and some other nations) let you do that. I don't think you could win as EA T'ien C'hi using military might alone, you would have to figure out enough battle magic to beat the AI once they start using Mass Protection, Shadow Blast, etc. Elephants would crush you, causing you to post about how overpowered they are.

I think TC would be ok in a small game, but it's my experience that players typically put in the max # of opponents and the largest map possible for that "epic" feeling and in those situations TC would crumble when 3+ AIs all attack you at the same time.

[Squirrelloid]

Ok, playing nieflheim with a build that is pretty stupid (Son of Niefl with dom 2, lots of points in magic i never used, O3C3). I then proceeded to hire nothing but niefl jarls and niefl giants (at 2/trn), never did any research, never scripted anything but attack closest (ie, never blessed my sacreds), and never repositioned units on the battlefield.

My opponents were 5 random hard AIs. I've got 2 crushed and just waiting for walls to break as of late fall year 2 (fomoria and marveni).

Now, to actually kill Oceania i'm going to need to do some forging for Rings of Water Breathing, but this is seriously on auto-pilot with no problems whatsoever. And I'm sure even a brand new player would put more effort into their turns than i have. (I also made some mistakes early that resulted in my pretender getting killed simply because this strategy is beyond stupid, and lost some combats to not bringing enough Niefl Giants. Still crushing AIs, and they're harder AIs than a new player is going to select).

[Fantomen]

My first game was actually with EA Agartha. I played with pretty low difficulty, toned the indies down to make expansion easier. And god I cursed over how incredibly hard the game was. I refused to give up and eventually little by little I managed to fortify and start turning the wave. It took forever but I won in the end.

I kept asking myself "If these underworld giant badasses are so hard to win with, how is it even possible to play a human nation?"

[13lackGu4rd]

HoneyBadger, I don't know about you but I registered on these forums 2 weeks before even deciding to buy dom3. it took 2 more weeks for it to actually arrive in my mail box. spent that month reading stuff on the forums, almost immediately ran into Baalz and his great library of knowledge so I've done some serious amount of reading(as in most of his guides) while I didn't understand most of what he said there, as I didn't even own the game, I did already get a picture of what the different nations are, magic, armies, etc. don't remember my first single player game but I know that I did mess around a lot with EA Atlantis. for obvious reasons it didn't do me much good, so I moved on to land nations, read Baalz's guides on them once more, than started to actually understand what he was talking about. than I got some expansion rhythm going and quickly enough got into my first MP game, as a sub, don't even remember what nation it was. the first game I played from start to finish(well, finish is when I died) was a vanilla game with EA C'tis.

your main problem is that you're assuming people jump right into the deep water, before knowing anything at all. sure, some people do, but I'm seeing more and more newbies on IRC and here on the forums who ask questions, obviously read stuff around here, and acquire more knowledge in this game before even attempting their first single player game! and even the people that do jump right in with no preacquired knowledge are usually not as dumb as you're trying to make of them. so if you take Niefelheim with no idea at all on what you're doing, the first unit you will most likely recruit is a niefel giant(more if you can afford it) than send them out against indie, probably in larger numbers than you actually need and without a bless for them unless you got something from your random pretender generation. but even than you probably won't bring priests to bless them. and guess what? you'll still roll indies as well as most AI nations...