Terrible Player.

[Squirrelloid]

Oni, like Undead, can get diseased. Its a 'free' affliction insofar as it doesn't actually do anything to them.

[Trumanator]

Well, even if it does nothing, they shouldn't have been starving at all since they're NNE.

[Squirrelloid]

Its true. They can get afflictions via taking damage though - i've seen diseased demons/UD generated that way.

I always laugh when a GK pretender gets 'diseased' as an affliction.

Iry:
One of your problems seems to be this idea that the goal is to amass an overwhelming army and then crush everything with that one army. This is primarily a strategy game, not (really) a tactics game (although tactics is important, at the level you're playing at you can mostly ignore it).

The strategy 'have one large army' is a losing strategy. One army seriously constrains your choices. You can make one attack per turn. You can be in one place at a time.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu: the best deployment approaches the formless, for if it is formless, even the wise cannot make plans against it.

So, field multiple smaller armies. Attack multiple provinces of an opponent when in a war. Avoid his large army if necessary until you can assemble enough forces to deal with it (try to predict where he's going and meet him there). Use remote spells to whittle away his numbers, or, more likely and usefully, his commanders. All the while take away his provinces, jack the taxes if you don't think you can defend them, and thus destroy his economy.

[ComTrav]

I've started playing this game some again after being away for a while, and in messing around some I've had to re-learn some things.

It sounds like you're taking too long to get your magic going. It seems like you have a plan to build up your empire, and then get into magic, but really you start researching magic almost right away. IMO part of the reason the AI is an easy opponent is because it rarely researches magic, and once you get Evocation 4-6 and a solid number of combat mages it's pretty easy to blow up a much larger army. (Everyone's mentioned EA Abysia,

I could've misread your description, though, but it sounds like you're following a plan of 'establish territory, then do magic', or 'get a feel for combat, then do magic', but IMO the magic system really is the heart of the game. When you feel like you have a handle on the game to play without getting stomped and want to mess around with magic, my EA Tien Chi game taught me a LOT about the magic system, and the use of different items/summons to do diversification. (Along with this: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Dominio...ing_and_Autumn).

I haven't played that many multiplayer games, but you can test out a lot of tricks against the AI. (You don't learn many counters against the ai, though, because it has basically one fighting style...I really wish I could get the AI to obligingly set up a large spell communion...)

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Oni, like Undead, can get diseased. Its a 'free' affliction insofar as it doesn't actually do anything to them.

Unless somebody hits them with Decay, and then they'll take 5 points of damage per round just like any other Diseased unit. IIRC.

-Max

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

Unless somebody hits them with Decay, and then they'll take 5 points of damage per round just like any other Diseased unit. IIRC.

-Max

Decay doesnt deal 5 damage/round, it adds 5 to age per round. Dai Oni don't care.

Also, Diseased doesn't do 5 dam/round, its 1 dam/game turn, and don't heal between turns. Neither of which effects Dai Oni.

[Trumanator]

I think hes saying that if disease does 1 dmg per turn, and decay does 5 turns worth of aging it equates to 5 damage. While I don't think it actually does that, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it did, what with all the other randomness that Dom likes.

[Tollund]

Five years is 60 turns, so it should really cause 60 points of damage per turn to a diseased unit.

[Foodstamp]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

Unless somebody hits them with Decay, and then they'll take 5 points of damage per round just like any other Diseased unit. IIRC.

-Max

It's kinda confusing because of the "5" that appears above the victims head, but that is not damage, it is an anomaly in space-time.

[Sombre]

That's pretty cool if decay causes diseased units to take 5 per round.

But yes it really should be 60.