Why am I not able to win the Orania Map ?

[JimKnopf]

Hi,

I am a frustrated Dominion Newbie. The reason for my frustration is that I am not able to win the Orania map when not playing Ermor (Each AI in Easy mode)
I experimented with Dom 1 some years ago and finally I bought Dom 2.
Winning with Ashen Empire Ermor was Easy;
1.) Create a pretender with a strong Dominion that kills the population.
2.) Grab some provinces and ensure your Dominion spreads.
3.) Bury the competion beneath your undead hordes.
Very easy.

But playing Arcoscephale I always lose. Made about 15 unsuccessful attempts.
Before I played civ 1-3, Moo 1-3, Mom, AoW1, AoW2, AoW2 SM, Heroes 3. Winning on Standard difficulty was never a challenge.

My problem with Dom 2 is the lack of diplomacy. Just an example: I have peace with everybody. But I notice that Ermor is spreading everywhere on the map and conquers everything.
I gather my troops and attack Ermor. About four turns later one of the AI idiots stabs me in the back.

The game is marketed as a Single-Player-also game. So I think I should be able to win on easy with each nation in Single-Player-mode.

What is your opinion ?

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

First suggestion: Leave Ermor out of the opponent pool. The other AIs can't handle 'em.
Or, if you insist: Make a Broken Empire Ermor (non-pop-killing style), play a few turns of them alongside the nation you actually intend to play out, then hand-off to AI.

[JimKnopf]

Etaoin Shrdlu said:
First suggestion: Leave Ermor out of the opponent pool. The other AIs can't handle 'em.
Or, if you insist: Make a Broken Empire Ermor (non-pop-killing style), play a few turns of them alongside the nation you actually intend to play out, then hand-off to AI.

Thanks for your answer, but I don´t think I should have to cheat to win on easy level. BTW: Ermor was just an example. Another problem for me is that the AI apparently never makes peace after declaring war once.

[Gandalf Parker]

Orania is a map large enough that the independents setting can be a big factor. Set it to 6 or 7. At the default setting of 3 the AIs will roll over you too fast. At the higher setting you should be able to make more sensible choices of who to attack and who to skip that the AI's wont make.

[Saber Cherry]

AIs will not attack you unless you attack them, or they declare war. Normally, they will not declare war unless you look weak. You can prevent yourself from looking weak by keeping your province defense on border provinces at 10+ (the higher the better, I think) and probably putting some units there too. I'm sure there are other factors as well, but I forget them.

The difference between Dominions and the other games you mentioned (I've played all of them, except AoW2:SM) is the the other games don't have magic, or don't require magic to win. You can win an easy game of Dominions (1-on-1 versus an AI) using troop strength, but to win a game versus multiple AIs or any multiplayer game, you will have to focus on a magical strategy (or, sometimes, a heavy bless strategy, but I'll ignore that for now). This means spending a substantial amount of money on research mages, possibly doing a lot of site-searching, forging some magical-path-boosting items like Thistle Mace, Earth Boots, or Skull Staff, and aiming your research toward specific spells. For example, if you did site-searching and found a magic site that lets you recruit Fire-3 mages, you would want to research Phoenix Power and Falling Fires, and buy one of those mages every turn until you can incinerate enemy armies before they get close enough to land a blow. But if you were Man (which has good archers) and found that site, maybe you would just spend money on archers, and cast flaming arrows (needing only one mage for the whole army), then annihilate the enemy.

If you ever play in multiplayer and field an immense army of Hoplites against an enemy (say, Vanheim) army a quarter of your size, you might be shocked to lose. Watching the replay, you might notice that 10% of your army routed or died from scary False Horrors, which are free battle summons; your entire peltast support wing was killed by Blade Wind; and the remaining 70% died in combat with inferior soldiers, because they had Fog Warriors (+mistform: nonmagical attacks usually do 1 damage), Weapons of Sharpness (+armor piercing), and Legions of Steel (+3 protection) while your troops were unbuffed.

Alternately, you would literally be shocked to lose to a lone Vanherse wielding a Staff of Storms, who casts Shimmering Fields for ~10 damage (armor negating) over area ~50 (which would be 150 hoplites, if they were packed).

In other words... play around with the spells. Flying Stones and Fireflies are not representative of their big brothers, Gifts from Heaven and Firestorm.

[Saxon]

Diplomacy doesn’t play much of a role in wars of religion, so don’t expect it here. Once you say the other guy is not a god, he is never going to forgive you.

Saber Cherry is right (as a note, SC probably knows more about DOMII than anyone outside the developers) the magic is key. Only one theme on one nation does not use magic, everyone else does and it is what makes them unique. The differences between nations are vast, it is not like Civ where you get some mild bonuses and one special unit.

The other thing I would mention is how long do you spend on a turn? If I try to play this game quickly, I get my butt handed to me and I am pretty good at all the games you mention. You have to take your time with this and look at everything. In terms of cards, this is Bridge and MOO is Go Fish. Really. Take your time, use the F1 screen, look at your taxes and unrest every turn. Plan ahead for spells, units and magic items. Learn your nation and how they work. If you are playing Arco, look at Astral magic very closely before you start, all of the spells. Learn the crystal matrix and understand fatigue. Power up your mages and cook the enemy with mind burns.

And have fun! I will be honest, not everyone enjoys this game, it is deep and you have to pay a lot of attention. I play MOO when I don’t want to work to hard and Dom when I want a challenge. If you want to win on easy with each nation in SP, you will have to learn more than in other games.

[DominionsFan]

Yeah Saber is absolutely right. Also, keep in mind..only use national troops in the early game, since they are kinda weak from mid game [I plan to make a Dominions 3 total conversion mod after the game is released -> you will be able to summon strong national troops in that, -> level 2/3/4 based -> better equipment and stats after each new level.]. Focus on spells/summons/crafting magic items/equipping comanders and SCs.

[JimKnopf]

Thank you all for your support.

Maybe some of you are interested in my efforts and pretender setup. The only non-Ermor nation I played until now was Arcoscephale because it was the nation I played in the Demo and I liked the high level of their priestesses.

I tried differnt ways to win.
First I tried the simple way. Building standard troops and building local defence until 10 and later 25. But that was not enough. I simply had not enough troops to attack a nation and keep the others from attacking me. In these games I lost quite early.
In later games I tried to be more peaceful. Trying to build a compact empire and abstaining from the conquest of provinces if the ratio of gained territory to additional borders seemed unfavouvorable to me. Instead I planned to increase my research and scan all provinces with Acashic record for magic sites to be able to build powerful armies of summoned creatures. But that didn´t work well either. Because the AI nations continued their wars and one or more of them usually grew big and powerful. And my empire was on their menu before I was ready.

Now to my curent setup.

I played as Welli the Oracle. Pretender God of (surprise,surprise) Arcoscephale.
Reasons for Oracle: cheap, high dominion, Astral magic lvl 3 (no need to reruit an Astrologer instead of a Mystic to cast Acashic Record. Ok this not really a big advantage.)

Magic: No changes

Dominion Theme: Restless worshippers.
Domion str.: 8 (I want my dominion stromg because it has so many benefits for me)
Turmoil: 1
Productivity/sloth: 0
Heat/Cold: 0
Growth: 3 (More people = more money = more troops, temples etc. Besides I like the thought of an empire of life as counterpart to Ermor)
Fortune: 3 (It would be a catastrophe for me if a strategic border province would revolt and another nation would conquer it before I could get it back. And the good events are really nice.)
Magic: 3 (I want fast research to get powerful summons and spells, and I want my spells to do much damage; besides priests are more effectiv against the undead units of a certai empire.)
Castle: Fortress (fits best to my other choices, because no points remaining)

Any stupid choices in your opinion ?

In the game setup screen I changed some settings to increase my chances of winning:
world richness: rich (the benefit for nations with high growth should be larger than for such with low growth or even death)
special site frequency 75: (I expected to be able to cast AR quite fast so this should be to my advantage)

As you can see I tried to be clever (Normally I would call this cheating).

Nevertheless. It looks bad again for me. It started promising. The neighboring provinces to my starting province were not too well defened. I made good progress. The first AI I met was Ermor in the west. Not too good. But I was lucky insofar that this happened the very turn I conquered the province I intended to make to my western border. So I installed enough defense to and went north to secure my northwestern border. Mercenaries liberated in the meantime remaining independent provinves with weak defences. While securing my northwestern and northern borders i encountered Abysia, C´tis and Ermor again, this time coming from the north. Additionally I could not resist to conquer two underwater provinces because they could potentially shield six other border provinces. Three of these I already had conquered Two others had strong independent defenders that decided to spare at the moment. The last province was independent but only reachable by sea at this time.
The neighbours of my Water provinces were R´yleh, Atlantis and again Ermor.
The trouble began when suddenly Jotunheim conquered a province neighboring to my home province in the east. This province had been well defended and so I had decided to wait with an attack until the easy prey would all be mine. Maybe that was a mistake. But on the other hand I now had almost 20 provinces in the west and north with very few border provinces.
Since in the meantime my business in the north was finished I moved my troops in attack position to attack the Jotun province. The war went well.
To protect my western and northen borders I increased local defence there each turn when necessary i.e. wenn it seemed to me the enemy forces in the adjactent provinces might have a chance to conquer one province of mine. To the south were my water provinces. These I filled with Shamlers and Ichtyds.
Suddenly C´tis declared war on me and started to build up forces near my northwestern border. Additionally I had reached the core territories of Jotunheim in the east and resistance got harder, So moving troops at a large scale to the west was no option. The Problem with the Jotun core territories was, that these were many little provinces with many interconnections, which made it hard for me to hunt his armies down. I tried to counter this with the building of local defences in each newly conquered province, and attacking lightly defended provinces with mercenaries. But even relatively small armies ofJotunheim were able to defeat local defenfes of 25 ord annihilate mercenary bands.
Besides that the strength of local defences in the nortwest had become up to 80 and 90 to counter the amassing of C´tis troops. So raising their strenghth had become very expensive. And finally they were able to capture one of my provinces. Strangely it took them mysteriouly long to break the gate of my fortress in this area. So I was able to move the Jotun legion just in time to the west to requonquer my territory before C´tis could make use of the breach in my defense belt of provinces with large local defence.
Unfortunately Jotunheim used this chance to recover and reconquered most of its core territories.
To make everything worse Atlantis had declared war on me, too. The first battle was a victory for me but on the long run i lost my sea provinces because I had not the money to replace the trops fast enough. And last but not least Ermor kept moving large stacks of troops along my borders ignoring the fact that are lots of AI provinces worse defended than mine.
That was the moment I decided to stop playing and instead start this thread.


Now my questions to you did I make some real stupid mistakes ?

[JimKnopf]

Gandalf Parker said:
Orania is a map large enough that the independents setting can be a big factor. Set it to 6 or 7. At the default setting of 3 the AIs will roll over you too fast. At the higher setting you should be able to make more sensible choices of who to attack and who to skip that the AI's wont make.

Until now I did not increase the strenghth of indies because of a comment on http://www.illwinter.com/dom2/maps.html
But I will try.

Thx for the advice.

--Quote---
Orania Nasty Edition
Peter Ebbesen has made a version of the Orania War scenario. In his own words:
As I really like the general Orania War setup, and especially the map, but despair because the AI nearly always loses to me in the magical site race, I have decided to write a new scenario based solidly on the old one but with each nation given certain initial advantages in the forms of sites or extra leaders, sometimes in line with their default theme, sometimes giving a unique boost for the hell of it. Independents have also been set to 9. In general, it seems that the AI performs better vs. humans at higher independent settings - possibly because rapid expansion as a human the first dozen turns is a bit harder.
Download: oraniane_1_0.zip.

[JimKnopf]

Saber Cherry said:


In other words... play around with the spells. Flying Stones and Fireflies are not representative of their big brothers, Gifts from Heaven and Firestorm.

Thank you Saber Cherry this was a very interesting and enlightenzng read. I already read before that magic plays the key role but until now I always focuessed on summons or big spells line Enchanted forest.

Thank you very much.