Requesting a Pedantic Dom3 Guide

[shatner]

Here is my understanding of how things are, in very broad terms, supposed to progress in a game of Dom3.

1) Early Game: recruit national troops each turn and start sending out indie-conquering armies as often as you can to plant your flag on a decent number of provinces. You want to get casters and/or an awake rainbow pretender out manually site searching ASAP. You want to recruit good research mages from your capital every turn to quickly reach whatever crucial research target is important for your nation/strategy. To further this, you want to get additional forts built as quickly as possible to allow you to recruit more casters each turn.

2) Middle Game: you start investing in your gem economy by intensive site searching (remote and manual as necessary) as well as forging gem-gens. Your major armies should shift from "commander + dudes" into combined arm forces with mage support. Somewhere along the way you start diversifying or intensifying your casting potential with summoned commanders. Depending on your nation and strategy you might start bolstering or phasing out your recruitable units with summoned units. Raid with thugs.

3) End Game: try and stake your claim to those crucial artifacts and globals. Get whatever game ending engine (tartarans, nationally summonable SCs, army-wide buffs, army-killer spells, etc.) you are employing up and running and then beat your remaining foes into submission.


While those are all well and good as guidelines, I find I have precious little expertise in actually realizing those goals. The point is, I understand the game mechanics and I am pretty familiar with the spells, items and nations. I have combed through the wikis as well as the strategy guides on this and other forums. However, whenever I read nation guides or check out the banter from old MP matches I can infer that people are expanding faster, getting up those early forts sooner, researching in a more focused manner and actually using their mages better than what I find myself doing. What I'd really like is to just watch over a skilled Dom3 player's shoulders while they play but seeing as that isn't really possible, I'd love some specific advice on how to play this darn game better. I have read through dozens of threads and guides but that good advice hasn't really crystallized into solid play on my part. So since the high level advice hasn't worked for me, what I'd like is series of pedantic, low-level, step-by-step recipes for competitive play.


What specific things do you do in the early game to expand, construct those first few forts and advance your early research? What are common early research goals? Around what turn would you consider the early phase over and the middle phase begun?

What constitutes a good combined arms army? Normally I get as far as a handful of bladewind or fireball casters hunkered down behind my wall of grunts and archers. What is the recipe for a good communion and when do you apply it?

Etcetera, etcetera.

Thanks.

[rdonj]

I started writing up a long and drawn out guide but then I realized I needed to ask a question first. Are you playing a CBM version with clams or are you playing vanilla :P

Part of the problem with this is that there's no good generic way to lay out a strategy guide like this, because each nation plays differently. Without specifics though, I can tell you for the early game that if you aren't able to create an expansion army every 2 turns, or 3 at the utmost, then you're doing it wrong because pretty much every nation should be able to do this. Some can make an expansion army every 1 turn, even. You start building forts as soon as you can plausibly afford it. With a nation that can expand faster than it necessarily wants to in multiplayer, it may be feasible to skip a turn of recruitment early on just to get an extra fort up faster. In SP, just keep your expansion armies down to a reasonable size and don't build any more troops than you actually need to take provinces, and once you have 5ish expansion armies out you can really stop worrying about the expansion phase. Then devote your money towards cap only commanders and forts. Depending on the nation, it may be worth sacrificing a cap only mage for a fort, or for a nation that doesn't really do cap only mages you can easily sacrifice one of your best mages to build a fort a turn or two earlier. If you have a powerful cap only sacred and went with a bless strategy you'll need to keep buying those as well, but the mages are more important in most cases.

Middle game: Direct your research towards a spell or spells that will allow you to achieve a long term goal or that will enable you to defeat one of your neighbors. I don't think I can really describe this stage better without more specifics on nation/mods/etc.

Late game: You pretty much have this part down, except of course it's easier said than done.

I'll leave your other questions for others to answer.

[shatner]

I have played a fair amount of both core Dom3 and CBM.

As far as what nation to be very specific about... I don't actually care all that much; just pick whichever one you want to talk about and talk about it. In detail.

I have played at least one game (SP) as just about every nation in just about every era. I am partial to playing in the middle era and (in descending order) Ulm, Tien Chi, Marginon, Pythium, Abysia, but again the specific nation or era isn't important. I think there are some fundamental ideas I'm either not getting or not handling right and I'm thinking that seeing a good run through, in detail, will cause the pieces to snap into place.

However, if a prompt would help, pick MA T'ien Ch'i and run with it.


Thanks.

[llamabeast]

Are you tempted by a friendly multiplayer game? Multiplayer's undoubtedly the way to really learn dom3 - and it's a lot of fun!

[shatner]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Are you tempted by a friendly multiplayer game? Multiplayer's undoubtedly the way to really learn dom3 - and it's a lot of fun!

Sure. Lemme know the details. That said, I'm still open to real nitty-gritty advice from any who care to give it.

[SsSam]

I suspect the crux of your problem is just simply speed.

I tend to faux my games by testing my nation on the MP map we are going to use with the same number of nations. Usually in a true MP game my expansion is about half of what it is against the AI. That's just how much better real players are at expansion.

While I can laze away several turns with broad based research against the AI, against real people I need to focus on specific targets.

Sounds like you have a better handle on the late game than I do, so I'll not give advice there

[sansanjuan]

shatner,
For the turn by turn thought process of a very good player give this thread a read if you have not done so already.
-ssj

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44860

[jimbojones1971]

Originally Posted by sansanjuan

shatner,
For the turn by turn thought process of a very good player give this thread a read if you have not done so already.
-ssj

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44860

That is a very good read, even if it only goes to turn 13. Highly recommended!

[shatner]

Seconded. That was an excellent read. Pity it ended so abruptly though; I was looking forward to seeing Cleveland's plans fail or succeed to informative effect.

[JonBrave]

But it's for a water nation. I won't play a water nation, or fight against a water nation, sorry just not interested in them And tactics are very different from a land one.