Endgame

[sansanjuan]

ahhh... good old MoM.

In SP I play medium or small maps and try to amass and outfit a couple dozen Thug/SCs. Not too much micro-mgt then. Castle seiging is a pain then though. Usually sit a couple on top and let the rest blast on. I usually learn some pretty good SC vs. chaff lessons.

Played Ea-Neif SP last night. Amazing what the big boys can do with breath of winter, reinvig,quickness and frost brands standing shoulder to shoulder. The only time I would lose one was when I forgot to script one and the tag-team would split up at battle start. The back one ,unscripted, casting leeching darkness till he fell on his giant @ss , with the front one being swarmed on four sides instead of three and no stacked chill.

-SSJ

[Renojustin]

The AI cannot remotely compete on Easy research. You have to use Hard research to give them a longer window where there huge chaff armies are effective. Which is why you put them all on at least Mighty and Aggressive.

[MaxWilson]

Hmmm. But the AI doesn't do well with huge chaff armies in the endgame (because it can't handle SCs). On the other hand, it does pretty okay with Thunderstrike/Lightning Orb/Disintegrate/etc. if it gets that far in research. After all, the AI uses pretty much the same battle AI that you do except that AFAIK it doesn't script it. Intuitively I think it's plausible that the AI benefits from easy research (which effectively drops each spell a researchlevel).

As an aside, note that the spell research formula is a Fibonacci-like recurrence relation:

C1 = 40
C2 = 60
CN = C(N-2) + C(N-1)

Dropping research to easy makes C1 = 20, C2 = 40, C3 = 60, etc.

Anyway, I've found that the AI actually does pretty well at research (on Impossible) until I pull ahead economically and start building more mages and skull mentors than he can afford.

-Max

[Chacal]

hmmm MofM ruled the realm of fantasy game until Dominions... ahhh my undead Highmen Paladins.....

Well for my part I like to finish the games until the final victory, maybe because I never play on too large maps with too much opponents, so i play 'human sized' games with never too much micromanagment or boring. And like said before, it's always fun to try funny and totally useless combinaisons of spells, summons etc...

Playing at this scale I usually play with easy reserch as the game never last too long.

[Gandalf Parker]

I also loved MoM. But even in MoM I tended not to finish the game. Once the winner was obvious I tended to move on.

In Dominions I will play abit longer but still rarely to the endgame announcement. I tend to solo play on huge maps (maximum in fact, 1500 provinces) with lots of variations thrown into them. I was one of the pioneers of the mega-game concept, pre-built AI gods, boosted neutral armies, etc. I rarely play a standard game and I like to play until I get a feel for whether or not the variation is interesting. Then Im eager to try something else.