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

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by markmayhugh

2. From what I read, Longbowmen are supposed to be amazing archers. But I have two squads of 40 archers that maybe damage 2-3 enemy per turn, and not very heavy damage at that. It seems that ranged units are not very effective, even against unarmored barbarians. Are my expectations too high?

As vfb said, it does help if you use other (shielded) units to block them long enough for the archers to hit them at point-blank range. Even so, unless you're hitting low-Prot + unshielded targets like barbarians, archers are less for killing things than softening them up and routing them. 80 longbowmen are likely to damage 50 heavy infantry moreso than kill 20 of them, and the routing algorithm pays a lot of attention to who is at partial HP.

Wind Guide and Fire Arrows improve longbowmen significantly. Overall, though, I think your expectations are too high because longbowmen are not so much "amazing" archers as the best archers available. (Well, crossbowmen are better in some cases.) They still have to hit a square with an enemy, and win the dodge check, and do more damage than he has Prot, in order to do even 1 point of HP damage. Generally that's less damage per longbowman than you would get out of a foot soldier with a mace or something--although longbowmen also scale better.

-Max

[markmayhugh]

Thanks for pointing out that the dom3_db documents item slots in AllUnits. I had looked in Pretender Summary, which did not have the info.

Suddenly, some pretenders are looking more interesting, like the Crone with 4 misc slots. Before seeing this, I was not sure why anyone would ever pick the Crone. Anyway, the slots are important to know to plan appropriately. I ended up having to use Empowerment to boost Earth in my current game because my plan was based on using boots to boost Earth on an Arch Druid with no feet slot.

As for archers, I noticed in several battles that they were not having that much of an effect on the battle compared to melee units. When I attacked an independent with 20 barbs and a commander, I paid close attention because I wanted to see the effect of weak armor. My 80 archers only damaged 5 units before they got into melee range, which I thought was pretty poor performance. Once in melee range, they were decimated so quickly I could not tell if the damage was from archery or my melee troops.

Other battles against larger forces (usually armored), even at close range the archers seem far less of a factor than my melee troops. Just my initial observations as a newbie.

[MaxWilson]

Partly, it's about scale. Arrows scatter, even if your precision is pretty good, and so 80 barbarians would have taken more damage than 20 barbarians did. (As an experiment, try adding various amounts of Barbarians, or Longbowmen, to your battle replays w/ Shift+'U'.) Still, it's not surprising that melee troops did more damage.

On the other hand, melee troops take fatigue from encumbrance, as well as HP damage from enemy melee units. As fatigue goes up, effective attack and defense skill go down and you also become more vulnerable to missile fire. Sometimes PD + archers can be much stronger than just PD by itself.

-Max

[rdonj]

One benefit to the crone pretender is that she's very cheap. She's also the only mobile 0 point pretender chassis. This makes her a choice for an imprisoned bless pretender, an economy awake rainbow pretender for site searching, something like that.

I've never really been that fond of archers in dominions, personally. You do tend to get much better results using infantry, but archers are useful in large battles for the reasons maxwilson stated, and they are useful on low armor units. I do tend to find them absolutely useless on heavily armored, shielded troops though (heavy infantry). You can try using crossbowmen, but I dislike them even more than archers. The reason being, I tend to use a lot of heavy infantry myself, and I usually end up taking as much damage from my crossbows as the enemy does. All that said, what this means is I usually only use archers if my enemy is fielding lots of low armor units and I'm using lots of heavily armored units, and I try to shoot whatever looks easiest to damage. Casting wind guide can help a lot with archer effectiveness, if you want to get the most out of them.

[MaxWilson]

As an example of archers: in one game that I'm playing right now, as Ashdod, I happen to be fighting EA Agartha, EA Ermor, and EA Marverni simultaneously. My heavy troops (Ahimans) are all tied up in expansion parties, but my best location for a second castle also happens to be right on Agartha's border. Agartha's troops are pretty weak, but they can cast some nasty Earth Elementals and such, so I don't want to rely exclusively on cranking up the PD. Since Agartha's troops are shieldless and mine aren't, it's was a pretty simple matter to produce a moderate handful of (2 res) slingers and set them to help the PD. So far that's kept Agartha out of some provinces that they might otherwise have taken.

On the other hand, against Ermor's tower shields missile troops are totally useless.

-Max

P.S. Archers, especially low-precision "archers" like slingers, are sometimes quite good at "accidentally" killing off enemy mages. It's not something you can count on but it can be a nice surprise.

[markmayhugh]

OK, I need to run some longer battles where encumbrance/fatigue is an issue to see how the archer situation improves. Problem is, once I get in melee range, the battles rarely last very many rounds.

Is there a way in a single player vs AI game to save a checkpoint that I can go back to? (I realize this would be gross cheating with other real players involved.)

I want to try out a lot of things as quickly as possible, and this would be much easier if I could try something, then go back to an earlier position to try something else.

[MaxWilson]

You can just copy the saved game files. Although honestly Shift+U and/or Shift+K (kill the unit the mouse cursor is over) is often the fastest way to test a strategy vs. multiple different opponents.

-Max

[Edi]

You can copy the the savegame folder in between turns to a backup folder, then go back and rerun the turn by retrieving the files from there and rehosting.

[Endoperez]

If it hasn't been mentioned yet, archers alone may suck, but archers cmoplementing infantry or infantry guarding archers work much better against most enemies.

MA Ulm, as an example, can choose between high-prot and even-higher-prot units with and without shields. They don't want to use their national archers (with crossbows or arbalests, which are even heavier than normal crossbows), but if they can get some indy shortbows to complement their infantry, you'll quickly see a vast improvement in their performance. The high-prot infantry can mostly ignore the archers, and anything that they tie up will be constantly peppered by the arrows.


Barbarians can be absolutely devastating. They deal so much damage so quickly that they can often cause severe losses to early conquering forces even when you win, and if the barbarians cause a rout their quick speed means that they will often kill many of the retreating force as well. Archers work well against barbarians if you can keep them occupied for a few turns. A small squad of any lght infantry or militia will slow the barbarians for a turn or two, and your normal archer-bodyguard squad of shielded medium-to-heavy infantries will hopefully not take too much damage before the archers cause enough damage to rout/kill the barbarians.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by markmayhugh

Is there a way in a single player vs AI game to save a checkpoint that I can go back to? (I realize this would be gross cheating with other real players involved.)

There are a number of options.
If you are Windows then I have created a simple desktop icon that you can click to make backup copies of all your games at once.

And I have a BattleSim map where you can edit the ascii file to place units in provinces next to each other, set their formations and scripts, then have them attack. To reset them back just start a new game with the same BattleSim map. To try different units just edit the .map file to change the starter units then start a new game with that map.

Both can be found here...
http://www.dom3minions.com/utilities.htm

There are other backup and restore schemes done with more features and various programming languages. Such as this one in Python.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com//showthread.php?t=31522