Question: Overcoming the barrier to understand Dom 3?

Cheers Yskonyn,
If you found a Dom PPP guide for Caelum with blood, that was most likely from Jacques Vidal (aka Nagot Gick Fel in these forums), I had the pleasure of getting my arse handed to me by his Blood Caelum in one of my first dominions game.

He was a top player so it's an excellent guide, but part of it no longer applies to Dom 3:

1)-IIRC, back in Dom PPP Caelum got 2 unrestricted random picks in its High Seraphs, so you could roll 1B or even 2B mages in every fort for 180 gold. Once the Dominions series evolved, Illwinter concluded that such unrestricted magical diversity in national mages resulted in all the nations playing more or less the same way by the end game, so the nations are nowadays restricted to picking their randoms from 4 or so types of magic, instead of all 8.

Also, back then scouts could be equipped with dousing rods to blood hunt, and at Blood4 you could summon Ice Devils for 30 slaves, and Fathers Illearth at Blood5 for 50 slaves IIRC, so getting into blood with a Fountain of Blood pretender was much easier than it is in Dom3, and much much easier than in Dom3 CBM.

2)-Back in Dom PPP the lesser elemental summoning in Conj3 did not require gems, and elemental mages would literally spam the spell.

Apart form the above, the rest of the guide should mostly apply nowadays.

Look at the strenghts of your nation: long range raiders, efficient patrollers, lightning resistant troops that synergize well with lightning spells, and the same with cold resistant troops & cold spells. Many troops carry magic weapons!

Your fliers have troop density issues, but your temple guards do not:
Do not underestimate your temple guards when it comes to holding the line, their ice armour gets better in cold3 provinces (their stats get much higher that what you see in the recruitment sheet), so name your pretender Prima Donna the Ice Queen and spread the cold love with a high dominion and liberal use of Wolven winter.
Add some winter wolves or undead with cold auras (ghosts, wights...) to your front line for some extra punch.

edit: I type slowly and did not see your last message: it's not Jacques then, but the advice looks similar.