Help! It's not fun!!

[Saxon]

Another opinion for you. I played only SP for a few years (Dom I, II and III) before stepping into MP. Single player can be a lot of fun, a huge amount of fun, but it is very different than MP. I would argue that MP is more fun, but it has drawbacks. So don�t feel you must play MP. Also, unless you don�t mind getting your butt handed to you on a platter, don�t enter MP until you have a solid understanding of the game. Others will disagree, but I don�t find sink or swim the best learning technique when you don�t know the basics.

Another thought. Despite your preference for large maps, your learning curve will peak faster in some smaller maps. If you are determined to enjoy (which many of us clearly encourage) run a series of two or three fast small maps with different nations. Devote 45 minutes to each. Play and try out new things. Then, when you move on to one of the big maps, you will have a stronger conceptual grasp of what is possible and will get more out of your game. Some folks might blanch at the idea of putting in two hours of �training� but if you really are into big maps, two hours of gaming is nothing to you. The big maps will consume hours�

Finally, I second the advice to boost magic sites to 70 and choose fast research.

[parcelt]

Another option to get into the game and start enjoying it (SP), is to take a nation that is suited for SCs. I remember finding the game somewhat dry in the very beginning, until I tried Shinuyama which has recruitable SCs. Then try out forging different items. Then have a blast just taking out Bandar Log's armies of 10000 monkeys with just a handful of your SCs. They'll quickly become experienced heroes and add some role playing to the game.

Another good suggestion made above is to try Abyssia and play around with fire magic. That's when I got into magic.

Once you get to know the game a bit more, the starting turns won't be boring anymore either. You will have your long-term strategies set out, and every turn counts (in MP more so) in order to maximize your goals. I now actually feel that the starting turns are some of the most exciting, especially in MP.

[QXel]

Hello Clownhammer, and welcome aboard.

Almost everything has been said.

I can garantee you that this game IS fun! I almost exclusively play at it since now 2 years, and exclusively in SP, and I had, have a LOT of fun!

All advices are good: try small games with victory points to handle basic game mechanisms.
Then, try some nations which you think fit you gamestyle.
Read A LOT on this forum! Especially the strategy index, and try that is explained.
Try every spells that inspire you and see what happen.
Whatch the battles, and you will learn a lot. Adjust your army placement and your commanders scripts and look at the results.
If you want to really go deep, you have to learn handling magic, and for that play some games in EA with magic site frequency set at the max to experiment a lot.

For nations, EA Abysia is one of my starting ones, along with EA T'ien Ch'i and EA Vanheim a bit, but I don't recommend the last for beginners. Arcocephale is also a good choice.
MA Machaka is versatile in magic, but a bit tricky to handle at first.

I would not advice trying SC or thugs in the beginning, because I think that it requires some game comprehension and some magic items experiment first, but it's your choice, and as parcelt said, it may fit you. Try it.

Well, that's a lot to try!
But as JimMorrison said, the real treasury is the content of the game, and I must admit that, after two years of playing, I only discovered probably less than 10 or 15 % at most.
So, you have many long years before you

I can say anything about MP, but I must correct you: it is NOT all about MP with Dom3! Believe me!

See you around on the forum.

[NTJedi]

QXel said:
I can say anything about MP, but I must correct you: it is NOT all about MP with Dom3! Believe me!

I agree, there are many methods for providing a challenging SP game. As time passes the SP gamer can even provide one AI opponent with 20+ SuperCombatants at the start of a game, which works fine on large maps.

Large maps should also use victory points otherwise it can take months to finish a game.

QXel said:
it is NOT all about MP with Dom3! Believe me!

The patches seem to lean towards being all about MP. From what I've seen the computer AI opponents haven't been improved in any patches despite having multiple problems. Some of these are probably difficult to fix yet I'm sure others are not so complex.

1) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents sending pretenders into the arena death match. Pretender tag should make it easy to stop this unit from participating. It's so sad to see 10+ AI pretenders getting killed because the AI doesn't know better.

2) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents starving its own troops. This causes the AI opponents to lose battles, even important battles. This would probably be more difficult to fix, yet at least the human player can set supplies to 300 as a semi-workaround.

3) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents blindly drop items on mages/commanders. This causes AI opponents to severly hurt its own mages as it places full steel plate on a low hitpoint caster. It's rarely able to use important magic item boosters as well. This is another task which would probably be difficult to fix.

4) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents lack knowledge of which globals it should NOT be casting. Globals such as Utterdark and Perpetual Storm will do more damage to the AI opponents 99% of the time. If given a high astral and blood pretender I worry whether it may even cast Astral Corruption which would totally devaste any AI opponent. It should be very easy to prevent AI opponents from casting specific spells since it's already done for spells such as Wish.

5) AVERAGE FIX DIFFICULTY: AI opponents choose wrong scales causing even an Impossible AI setting to choke and wither away. The higher difficult settings should include wiser scale/pretender builds. Poor scales and dominion has been known to cause AI opponents to die very very early... such as Mictlan. Some nations already have programmed scales such as Abysia for its heat so the difficulty is probably average.



The last patch I recall which improved the computer opponents was the Burden of Time fix during Dominions_2.

[llamabeast]

I don't think this is really the place for a complaint about lack of changes in the AI NT Jedi. Clownhammer is unlikely to be worried about these things for quite a long time.

[Gandalf Parker]

As much as I love solo play thats not at all what I see. Im not sure what MP things you feel are in the patches. It doesnt take much scrolling thru the fix-list to see a number of AI spell-casting improvments.

Most of the patches lately seem to be mod commands (Johan) and new nations/units (Kristoffer)

[NTJedi]

Gandalf Parker said:
It doesnt take much scrolling thru the fix-list to see a number of AI spell-casting improvments.

These are battlefield spell-casting improvements not AI opponent improvements.

Gandalf Parker said:
Most of the patches lately seem to be mod commands (Johan) and new nations/units (Kristoffer)

This doesn't help AI opponents, but it's appreciated.

llamabeast said:
I don't think this is really the place for a complaint about lack of changes in the AI NT Jedi. Clownhammer is unlikely to be worried about these things for quite a long time.

I was responding to QXel and leaned into a different important issue, thus created a new thread.

[Tifone]

JimMorrison said:

[...]And there is so much cool and interesting content, it's nearly impossible to become deeply familiar with all of it (very few succeed in that quest, most dehydrate first).

Not with a good Water bless

Hey Clownhammer, welcome here.
I'm a quite new player just like you, so I can't be of much help. I am like you, I love to play SP in large maps, I have yet to try a MP game 4 newbs but soon I'll try.
The more expert guys here gave you excellent advices IMHO.

If I can bring my experience, as you asked nations-pretenders combos, the first game being very funny to me was:

Large Random Map, 3 Human Player, 3 Normal AIs, Early Age
Very Fast Research, Indies at 6, 2 initial provinces, Sites at 55

My 3 nations were

- Abysia with an Asleep Moloch: The expert ones are right, Abysia is funny, the national troops are quite good at the beginning for their good armors and heat auras and not many indies are a problem for them. For the time the Moloch awakened, I had forged some items for him and sent him fighting with my main army, while the powerful fire mages were wreaking havoc on my enemies and my (immune ) armies in form of falling fires, fire pillars, firebolts, fireclouds, fire-everything.

-A Marverni with an Awaken Wyrm with no magic, Dominion 10 and decent scales. A strange choice probably, but it was funny to have a good awaken SC helping my early expansion and I didn't have to worry a lot about (regen, no magic points to lose if it died). Not having blesses, I didn't have to focus too much on sacred units and made huge armies with a mix of every unit avaible. It was funny, yet not terribly effective on the long game

-Agartha with an Imprisoned rainbow Master Lich. The blesses helped the not terrible sacreds of Agartha while hordes of troglodytes and the nice national summons were flanking and squishing the enemies, with mages casting one of the most exciting spells of the game: Blade Wind. Let me say - plain fun

The enemy AIs were IIRC Ermor Arcoscephale and Tien Chi (I avoided water nations as I suspected it would have been difficult for a beginner getting to attack them).

Ok, now prolly the gurus will skin me alive as surely those weren't perfect, minmaxed, totally effective builds - but I had a lot of fun with them, they were fine to play with and gave me a nice idea of how the things work in Dominions 3; playing 3 nations at a time allowed me to gang against the AI if I was in trouble, then to backstab myself and see how my favourite armies worked one against another.

Surely every experience in game as in life are different for different people, but I hope I gave you at least some ideas on how you can have fun with this huge game


P.S. If someone is asking, Agartha won as soon as I put my hand on Tartarians [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Envy.gif[/img] - even if I didn't know yet that with Gift of Health or The Chalice they would have been far better [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]

[MaxWilson]

NTJedi said:

The last patch I recall which improved the computer opponents was the Burden of Time fix during Dominions_2.

Improvements don't all come in patches. The AI has been vastly improved since Dom2.

-Max

[NTJedi]

My point was none of the DOM_3 patches include improvements for AI opponents.