Dom I Strategies which WON'T work in Dom II

[ywl]

Originally posted by apoger:
>1) Super-Combatants. Except for Ice Devils, I think that most super-combatants are fine.

Said like a person that never had a Sphinx dropped on their capital on turn 7. The abuse can get a lot worse than the loss of a 100 HI.

That's the problem of a Sphinx, not Super-Combatants in gerneral.

I've seen it in action. I'm not impressed. A minimally configured Sphinx is good for disabling one castle of one enemy in a small map. It's good for a small, cutthroat game. But otherwise, I don't really find it very useful.

Actually, I don't really think a Sphinx with only Astral can even qualify as a Super-Combatant... It's good for routing your enemies but Astral alone kills *too* slowly. It'd be different if it also had Fire or Death but that'd be quite an expensive pretender. The Super-Combatants I've used, tested or seen can easily demolish - in the sense of wiping out of their existence - 100+ HI in around 10 combat rounds. An astral sphinx falls far behind.

And also, the pretender is the center-piece of any nation design and should be powerful. The Great Mother, Nataraja or Moloch isn't bad at combat neither.

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>3) Magic Duel. It's fine in its current form. Or Astral would be too powerful . The only nations severly hurt by MD is Marignon.

C'tis and Jotunheim also often field mages that have astral-1. Even the astral-2 mages are dangerously behind the astral-3 nations. The tricks that can be done to pump astral are available to everyone. The astral-3 nations are always ahead of the curve on this, and as such it makes life hard on the lesser astral nations.

It's something you must always consider when playing with astral magic.

Marignon was singled out because their lesser Astral mages are expensive. C'tis and Jotun's low level astral mages look quite expendible to me.

I agree that Mind Duel should be a factor to consider while using Astral. But Astral also have advantages that everybody need to look at when they prepare the game strategy.

I'm also curious, has anybody managed to slaughtered a large number of enemy mages with MD after the bug-fix? It's theoretically possible. But to pull it out, it seems to be quite an achievement in scripting and guessing your enemy's move to me.

>4) Ritual Summon... what does it mean?

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>5) Battlefield Summon. Not sure - I haven't seen enough.

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>6) Battlefield spells. Does it means "Wrathful Sky" and others?

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To me, all these magical twists of tactical combat are what make Dominions fun . The battlefield can't be dominated just by the largest army. And magical creatures, demon lords, mages that single-handedly demolish an army are all stuffs we read in fantasy novels anyway .

>8) Army BLasting Spells... I don't have enough

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Once MW and FFTS start getting thrown about, conventional armies with mages become much less important. You must start to rely on super combatants and larger summoned creatures. I'm not a big fan of this kind of endgame. I much prefer it when things resolve before this much magic becomes available.

As I said, I don't have enough experience. But it could be just because the end-stage is a different game.

Or we can always have an game setting option for limiting the spell level. Everybody can then tailor the game to his flavour.

>9) Province BLasting spells. An useful and fun

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>10) Assassination. I haven't seen anybody using them with effect more than mere annoyance.

I was talking more about assassination spells than assassin characters.

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Most commander assasination spells are slightly on the cheap side. But since they can be easily defeated by a large number of cheap priests or scouts, so the cost might be reasonable. I don't know.

Yes. I understand that most of the whammies are advice to newer players rather than problems of the game.

[Gandalf Parker]

Just as a guideline for these discussions IMHO

Having administrated MUDs for decades Ive gotten to play alot with concepts such as balance. People who program or admin such games tend toward either fixing by addition (boosting the low stuff which players refer to as "upgrades") or fixing by subtraction (taking things away from something that is too high-end, which players refer to as "nerfing"). In my experience the best MUDs (and probably any other game) are where you have both types at work.

As far as Dominions goes... my preference is that I dont want anything to disappear which might be a tactic. Even if the programmers dont see how it could possibly be used tactically, Id like to see it go in so that WE can try to figure out how to use it.

Along the same line, I dont want to see anything become an automatic default, or an unarguable "best strategy". I think that anything which seems useless should be examined extensively and if a hidden use cant be found then dont remove it, upgrade it (this was one of my favorite things to work on in Dom 1). Also, anything which seemed over-powerful to the point of seeming to be an automatic choice should also not be removed, just nerfed in some way (others in the newsgroup were hot in this area).

[apoger]

>I'm also curious, has anybody managed to slaughtered a large number of enemy mages with MD after the bug-fix? It's theoretically possible. But to pull it out, it seems to be quite an achievement in scripting and guessing your enemy's move to me.

Duel happens all the time in Dom I.
In recent past - As C'tis I lost about 25 shaman in one battle to Duel (was doing an aggressive communion/relief engine). In another my Marignon got slapped silly by a Pythium player when he gated in a stronger astral mage and popped my communion master "grand master" who was casting the critical spells. One game earlier I teleported/trapezed in a group of astral mages to blow away a concentrated Jotunhiem Seithkona "nether dart" stack.

The short answer: Yes, it happens.

[Aristoteles]

Lifelong protection must be nerfed, OR

as we all know, the disabling spell ability in the mod tools is a must have. If we will be able to disable spells, these discussions will be pointless. We can disable the unbalanced/disliked spells by our own, and we wont have to whine, that 'plz fix this, fix that'. IW is already flooded with work.