First Post: Introduction and Request For Help Getting Up To Speed

[markmayhugh]

Hi, I'm, Mark Mayhugh. I just discovered Dominion 3 a couple of weeks ago, and am trying to get it figured out a bit. I am a big fan of PBEM games and turn-based strategy games in general. My first serious PBEM game was Fantasy War about 15 years ago, which reminds me a lot of Dominion 3, with simultaneous turns, although far less complex. Unfortunately, they went out of business a couple of years after starting. (Not to be confused with the current Fantasy Wars, which does not have simultaneous turns, and is still published.) I am very active in Alpha Centauri multiplayer games, which in my opinion is still the best Civ-sytle game, far better than the much newer Civ 4: BTS. If you have not tried Alpha Centauri, you should check it out. And my other current favorite is HOMM 5, a superb turn based game.

I am hoping to get some help getting up to speed. I have gathered some resources from the strategy link, including dom3_db and dom3 forging reference project, which are great pieces of work; my thanks to the authors. I would greatly appreciate pointers to good other information.

I am not looking for strategy help at this point; I am looking strictly for information. If there is some strategy mixed in with the information, that is fine, but I would really rather figure some strategies out for myself. What I don't want to do is waste a lot of time experimenting because I can't find any information about something. I don't want to figure out information for myself if I can avoid it; I would rather spend that time working on strategy.

In addition to useful links to information, I have some specific questions I hope someone can help with:

1. dom3_db_320_status.xls gives me a dialog "file error: data may have been lost" when I hope it with Excel 2003. Do other people get this error? dom3_db_320.ods opens fine with open office, so I can just use that, so it is not a big deal.

2. Does Master Alchemist pretender actually confer any kind of alchemy bonus? Do alchemy bonuses make gem to gem conversion more efficient, or only gem to gold?

3. Does alchemy (or can anything else) reduce the cost for empowerment?

4. Is there any way to actually use the Jaguar pretender? It does not seem to be available for any nation or age.

5. Has anyone done a Magic Path Boosting spreadsheet containing the information on pages 283-284 of the manual? It is only a couple of pages, but I would rather not type it in myself if I don't have to. I want to sort it out in some various ways, which requires a spreadsheet.

I have lots more questions, but this post is getting rather long, so I will save them for later. Thanks in advance for any help!