Pretenders useless?

[krpeters]

Sometimes I wonder if I'm playing the same game as all of you... or maybe I'm just playing it wrong? Anyway, in my SP games I've found that my most effective strategy against 5 difficult AI's is pretty much to ignore my pretender, ignore magic, take Order-3 Production-3 Dom-9, and crank out hordes of stomping troops to fight with -- typically of the "heavy cavalry" variety.

It seems to me that in the early game magic is very underpowered... and I usually lose interest in a game around turn 50 because on the smaller boards that I like to play by then I've already eaten up 50% of the world.

Is a troop-heavy magic-ignoring strategy more agreeable to a small game than a large game? Or is this just an artifact of my playing computer opponents who usually have a huge numerical superiority that I need to meet with large troop concentrations?

[thejeff]

Largely true for the early game.

But early game can end well before turn 50. Of course, you have to devote enough resources to hiring mages to research to get the more powerful magics that will change the balance.

Even in the relatively early game, the large scale troop buffing spells can make a big difference depending on your nation. Flame arrows is an obvious example.
Once you've got a decent gem income, again requiring mages, summoned troops can replace those stomping hordes.

The obvious early game exception is the heavy bless strategy. For some nations a handful of blessed troops can slaughter those hordes with minimal losses.

[Taqwus]

For instance... if you don't go with a scalemonster build, you might use a bless build, combat pretender, or rainbow mage... or maybe a caster. They're useful for different purposes.

A bless pretender is designed primarily to take particular paths of magic to enhance sacred units. As such, the pretender himself might be dormant or even possibly imprisoned if taking a particularly monstrously expensive bless. This tends to get used with either powerful sacred units (helhirdings, Niefel giants come to mind) or ones that can be cranked out in decent numbers and moved reasonably quickly (flagellants, valkyries). There are nations for which this is likely grossly suboptimal; LA Man on a large map comes to mind, considering that rangers and wardens are capital-only, fairly resource-intensive, and strat-move 1. There are nations where bless strategies make an awful lot of sense; Niefelheim or Helheim on a small map, for instance.

A combat pretender is designed to facilitate rapid expansion by slaughtering enemies quickly. As such, they may take some paths of magic specifically for some boosting spells (earth magic for protection, nature for regeneration, astral for luck and etherealness -- but beware taking -low- astral). They may take a 9- or 10- dominion for the Awe effect; if the pretender already starts with Awe or Fear, the combined effect will be quite nasty against living melee troops. Recuperation, regeneration, item slots, lots of hit points and att/def, and damage shields (Gorgon's petrification, for instance) help here. Rapid expansion can really help, so if your national troops are weak (say, you're a summons-heavy nation) then a combat pretender is one obvious way to help -- mercenaries are another, but you might have to bid fairly high...

A well-designed combat pretender can be pretty vicious, although less so than in Dominions 2 with larger armies and some nastier anti-supercombatant effects.


A rainbow mage is designed with a number of low-level paths and typically gets tasked with bootstrapping the search for magic sites. Once there's enough research and income to permit searching via remote-search spells, they can still do some searching, are fairly versatile item forgers, and the amount of magic makes them decent researchers.


It's also possible to design a pretender for a specific difficult spell; this is more of a late large game thing. If you're the Ashen Empire and you really, really intend to be destroying the global economy with Utterdark, taking a high-Death pretender will make it easier. If you're playing a blood-heavy nation and plan to be pushing for Astral Corruption, you'll want somebody with both high Astral and high Blood, and this is easiest to do if you have a pretender designed for it.


In a small and short game, less research will be done and you'll find bless strategies and order/death/misfortune scales more rewarding; production may or may not be important depending on your nation. You won't necessarily need *numbers* though if your blessing strongly improves already powerful units. Try Helheim Helhirdings with F9W9 blessing, for instance, mixed with Dis/Valkyrie flying squads.

[Micah]

If you're playing SP then you're most certainly not playing the same game as all of us =)

It also depends what nation you're playing as. Troop-stomping is a pretty good strategy for Ulm, since the AI isn't going to be taking advantage of the appropriate counters (rust mist, iron bane, destruction, mind burn, lighting, magma eruption, etc.)

Magic is most often used as a counter-strategy for what your opponent is doing, so that your troops can win the battles. If you're facing hordes of enemy crossbows casting arrow fend and/or storm will render them near-useless. If you're facing down 100 barded elephants you're going to be happy to have 25 astral mages casting soul slay on them, or someone to cast flaming arrows on your legions of archers that would normally fail to pierce the protection value on the elephants, since even most heavy cav won't be able to do enough damage to the elephants before they get squashed.

The AI doesn't employ strategy, they don't mass specific troop types very effectively, and their mages rarely do anything of note, hence your own use of magic will generally be used more for artillery than it will be for saving your bacon against something your troops can't hack it against. I agree that some of the lower-level magic is pretty worthless, I'm on turn 15 of one game where I started an early war and I've done virtually no research, and it hasn't impacted me, but I'm getting ready to hit the books hard, because I'll lose out bigtime in the mid-game if I don't get competitive in the magic race very soon.

[Gandalf Parker]

You find that this is a good tactic using all nations and versus all nations?

There is also the possibility that you are just a very effective player using that strategy. In that case, certain nations (Ulm, Pythium, Marignon, maybe Jotunheim, Man) might be particularly good for you in certain ages. Matching your best mode of play with the best nation for doing that is the #1 suggestion for doing well in this game.

[KissBlade]

I dunno. All I've been playing lately is Starcraft ... What is this "Pretender" you speak of? =O




On topic, most tactics that work on AI, you will find does not work against humans very well. Namely in that AI has almost no idea how to battle script.

[Ironhawk]

krpeters said:
Sometimes I wonder if I'm playing the same game as all of you...

Hehehe, to some extent you are yes. As for a troop-heavy strategy being more effective than magic: No that is definitely not the case. For the early game, perhaps, but as it progresses, magic quickly dominates any number of troops. The reason you havent found this out is because the AI is not smart enough to force you to play new strategies. All it does is make lots of troops. So if you make lots of better troops, and use some better tactics, you can beat it on that level. But if you were to play a human, for example, your heavy cavalry squads would be getting totally destroyed by Lightning Bolts, Soul Slays, or Gifts from Heaven, etc.

My suggestion to you, to really get a feel for the power of magic is to do this: Play EA Caelum or some other nation with mega air power. Research Storm (or forge a Staff of Storms - preferrable) and Wrathful Skies. Then Cloud Trapezee a mage onto an enemy army and cast those spells... and just watch an entire army be blasted to nothing by a single mage.

[curtadams]

For SP I have to agree with the OP. With practically any nation I can grab enough territory using a pretty much national army approach that by the time magic becomes relevent I've effectively won or at least played to the point of boredom, barring LA Ermor opposition or such. At least against the mostly normal troop armies the AI fields, 10+ archers or heavy infantry is far more useful than any mage who can't do a battlefield enchanment or large AOE spell, and cost about the same. To that you have to add lab and research costs. Likewise for the effort of making a strong SC I can just take scales to get bigger armies - even the best early SC is about as useful as one decent army, and often less. Against humans I can see how it's different, since humans have a better grasp of making units quasi-invulnerable to normal units and mages can be handy then.

[thejeff]

Is Wrathful Skies as effective as it was in Dom2?

I don't usually play Air nations, but the only time I tried it in Dom3, it only damaged a handful of units a round and they quickly reached and slaughtered my mage.

I'll have to play with it again.

[HoneyBadger]

Kiss Blade, a Pretender is kind of like the Queen of Blades in StarCraft 2, or the Xel'Naga, except you actually get to see what your Pretender looks like, unless you're playing a Judeo-Christian-Islamic Nation