Which Nations Are Best for Turtling?

[K]

Originally Posted by Illuminated One

Well, somehow along AoE's lines (if I understand him correctly) - turtling to invest in defense is not what you want to do.
You want to invest as much as you can into thing's with a return (research, gold, gems). Once you get that return you use it to overrun underdeveloped enemies.
Defense, i.E. military forces, has no return only an upkeep, so you have to avoid it as much as you can, if you are following that strategy.

The problem is that dominions mechanics are so unsuited to this.
Gold is proportional to the provinces you have, since there is no need to somehow establish order (compare Cyrus the Great's strategy to Alexander the Great's - Alexander would have won in Dom but his empire held how long, until he was sick?)/develop it (forts pay off in 40 turns, a new province pays of in 1 turn).
What's more gold is most important early on, so you're only going for RoI.

Gems - well, clams and co. which are admitedly flawed.

Investing into research = Investing in defense since all the mages around are also your combat mages. This also a reason that a nation that's effectively dead can kill it's conqueror. I have killed almost the entire army of a player that was taking my provinces simply by charging in my researchers, which was enough to end that war it seems, but make a comeback from 3 provinces, no way.

I've always seen any real turtling strategy as a simple build-up of resources that either have no cost to maintain or pay themselves off. On one end of the spectrum are the much maligned gem-gen items that pay themselves off and at the other end you can acquire SCs and thugs that have no cost to maintain.

I mean, if a guy has the income to make one SC a turn, a turtler can wait ten turns instead of five because that doubles the numbers of SCs he can bring to war when he finally decides to do it.

Another example would be: keeping ten mages with an average research of six at home for ten turns equals 600 research points and that far exceeds what another player might have gained by simply sending those ten to acquire provinces in a war in terms of short-term turn advantage.

In the worse case, an opponent will drain gems, gold, and mage-time to such a degree that no amount of provinces or sites gained will offset the cost of the war before the game ends. Only wars that pay themselves off are worth it, so to continue our example with ten mages sent to war, we can see that they must take enough resources to buy more mages that can eventually close that 600 research point gap and lost turn advantage before the game ends or important enemy benchmarks are reached (globals going up, SCs built, etc.).

One of Dominions basic problems is that there is a large incentive to not fight wars until you have some tactic worked out that can bring a bloodless war. The problem with that is that by then your opponent usually has some way of making your war NOT bloodless, thus leading to even more turtling. Like a samurai or gunslinger staring duel, the win goes to the one who can strike without the opponent getting a strike in.

That being said, Bless rushers also make fine turtlers since they can often grab an empire large enough in the early game that no one wants to attack them for fear of unacceptable losses.