Request for strategy: Late game tips

[Micah]

Max, with the amount of time you spend posting on the boards I'm sure you have enough time to fit in at least one MP game. =)

Just don't do what I did and sign up for a lot when the turns take 2 minutes, since then it WILL be a large commitment down the road.

[Manuk]

Boron's map

I posted the question in an other thread but this seems to be the right place. Anyway, i found this thread in the mod's section. It could aid new players to familiarize with late-game-stuff. I will try this at home. Let's see if I can learn something.

What I was looking for is a mod for make all spells lvl 0 and i don't know how to do it.

[MaxWilson]

Touche. In my defense I'll note that it's easier to check a forum on the run than it is to install Dominions and my latest saved game. But yes, time spent posting could probably be used more productively on my thesis. [He said, while writing a long post.]

It occurs to me that there are a lot of nice things you could do with allied nations. If you've ever played Axis and Allies, you know that the best way to lose as the Allies is neglect coordination and play nations as separate-but-equal (e.g. Britain trying to guard her African income from the Germans, when the Americans can actually do it more cheaply. Britain should be trying to help Russia by dropping troops in Karelia or bombing Berlin).

For instance, what if you combined Mictlan with Marverni? Mictlan can take terrible, suicidal scales (since they don't need Prod anyway and gold is fungible) and a massive bless and do the early expansion (ideally with an awake pretender), while Marverni takes good scales including magic and an imprisoned pretender. Together they can get a Blood Stone factory up relatively easily; Marverni can spread its nice dominion (with its cheap temples) over Mictlan's lands to at least cancel out the terrible scales, and funnel extra money from its good scales into Mictlan's early expansion. Marverni takes weakly-defended provinces with Marverni's dominion from Mictlan so they can both benefit from Marverni's better scales (since they're pooling gold anyway and positive scales only benefit the scale owner), while Mictlan holds on to any areas that are militarily contested. Mictlan's dominion needs to be strong enough to not get dominion-killed, but since Marverni and Mictlan have blood-sacrifice it should be possible to control exactly where Marverni's dominion lives.

In order to make it genuinely Axis and Allies-ish, however, you'd need an "Allied" option which lets you have troops in an allies' territory and participate in defense. Ideally as part of one large army with the PD but if necessary in a separate battle. And you'd want allies to be able to move through your territory at full mapmove. I don't see it happening with Dominions, but there's still a lot you could do with alliances in the game as it is.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Manuk said:
What I was looking for is a mod for make all spells lvl 0 and i don't know how to do it.

I've attached a mod which does this. [Edit: attachments don't work right now. Download it instead from ]http://students.cs.byu.edu/~mdw45/easyspell.dm] One caveat: this doesn't adjust the difficulty of constructing magic items. That's because unique items *must* be left at level 8 to be unique, and also because I (cough) was too lazy to look up all the item numbers. It would be

#selectitem [name or number, without brackets]
#constlevel 0
#end

I'm not sure if magic items are numbered sequentially, in which case you could do what I did and write a for-loop to set them all to zero.

-Max

P.S. Thanks for asking. I should have written this long ago to use with the battle-map, but I never got around to looking up the mod commands.

[Gandalf Parker]

attachements dont work still

[MaxWilson]

That's odd. I'll attach it as a .zip file instead, on this message. If that fails you can always regenerate it with my Python script (replace underscores with spaces):

f = file('c:\program files\dominions3\mods\easyspell.dm','w')
print >>f,'#modname "All spells pre-researched"'
for x in range(798):
____print >>f,'#selectspell',x
____print >>f,'#researchlevel 0'
____print >>f,'#end'
f.close()

-Max

[Gandalf Parker]

It doesnt help. The attachment function is broken.
If you really want to make something available you need to upload it to a web directory and provide a link.

I was going to do that for you but the python script didnt run for me.

[MaxWilson]

The forum doesn't display spaces, so I've replaced all spaces with underscores. (Sorry, I figured anyone who knew Python would see where the spaces were meant to go.) However, I've also followed Gandalf's suggestion and put it on my school account web site.

http://students.cs.byu.edu/~mdw45/easyspell.dm

-Max