Newbie Questions (That aren't in other threads)

[hanez]

Ok, I searched the Forum, but I found a lot of expert level threads, not a lot of newbie level threads (only a couple).

So here goes, I'm sure I will have more.

1. Forts - How far a way from the nearest fort is good? Should I only build a fort if I like the race? Or should I place more value on its income, does its geographical location have anything to do with building one? Or should important locations just get a high defense?


2. Gems - I am finding these really annoying to manage. Is it me or do you get the gems you dont need? Do you often make your mage turn around from a good streak just to get more gems? And the gems you find are site specific right? So you cant transfer between forts ect?

3. Magic - I am finding it hard to see my mages actually cast usefull spells, I put them in the back and they go crazy with fireflies, over and over. Is there a good path I should take so that I can see the power or point of magic?

4. Making a prophet? How early should I do this? Should I just make my strongest unit a prophet?

5. Blood Hunt - Is this the only way to cast blood spells? Are they worth it?

6. Dominion - I look at a town I am controlling. And it says "This town is under another pretender gods dominion" OH NO! Then I look at the effects and it says Growth +2 Productivity +2. How is this hurting me?

7. All these side things (magic site searching, blood hunts, dominion, researching, forging) How do your armies do all this? Should I just be making commanders to go solo to do this stuff? (Like different commanders whose purpose it not to lead people but just to go around site searching ect) Is this a good use of resources?

8. Magic of nation vs that of the pretender gods - If I select a nation that has magic of Earth and Nature, is it a bad idea to put all my pretender gods path into fire? Should they be the same?

Thanks for the answers!

[UninspiredName]

1: I usually build a fort either A: To defend choke points or get recruits or B: If there are five or more fortless allied provinces between this and the last one. And you do build different forts depending on the location. On plains you'll build Fortified Cities, which are ridiculously expensive but have a good admin value and defense. In forests, you'll build Forest Ramparts which are the opposite. There's one for just about every type of terrain.

2: For getting gems you don't need, I'll assume you're talking about random events. Those aren't your real gem income, but you can see your gems coming in per turn under magic/laboratory, then Magic Resource Treasury. As for tranferring them, once they're in a laboratory (As magic sites automatically put them) you can take them out of any laboratory you have anywhere.

3: You'll find most combat spells in the Evocation school, and can further maximize your damage output by scripting the mages to cast what you need. At level three you get a particularly noteworthy spell called Blade Wind, that requires a level 3 Earth mage. It will decimate any lightly armored troops. But yes, without researching new ones, you're stuck with mostly useless spells.

4: Depends on your strategy, really. If you have a really high dominion, a supercombatant can benefit from it. It's also the main way to get access to the Holy 4 and Holy 5 spells. Usually, though, I find it's best to put it on someone who you really want to be able to build Temples/preach (For the latter, possibly in enemy provinces). Usually I prophetize my starting commander before he starts taking down independents.

5: Blood Slaves are like the Gems of any other school. Blood Magic can be worth it, or it can not. Many times depending on your nation's access to Blood Magic and national Blood spells. As a whole, for a nation with no recruitable Blood mages, you'd be better off with Conjuration.

6: Dominion is a tricky thing. It may seem like a benefit, and it is in some ways, but any of your troops fighting there take a hit on Morale. That's minor compared to its other risk, however. If you have no Dominion of your own (White candles), you lose the game. Just like that. Temples spread your dominion, as do priests under the Preach command. Depending on your pretender's Dominion Strength, this will be either easier or harder to do, and it can get bad enough that once, with half the world under my control and temples in every province, I got dominion killed because my pretender had Dominion Strength 1.

7:The only of these commands that are reliant on having an army with you is Patrol and Pillage, and for most of the others you'd technically want mages, not commanders. You're right, though, that going alone is usually better unless you're worried about getting attacked.

8: That depends. Many people (including me) actually find it profitable to give their pretender magic that their nation doesn't have, to round out the spell they have access to. Still, if you plan on casting spells your recruitable mages have difficulty accessing, it's many times a good idea to build a Pretender around casting them. Remember, though, all it takes is one magic item, costing ten magic gems to get a Water 2 mage to cast a Water 3 spell.

[Ironhawk]

1. In dominions, the primary use of forts is to recruit more national units (and some good indys). Additionally, they should be placed so that they protect labs, temples, and interesting magic sites from capture.

2. Gems can be withdrawn instantly from any lab you control. Send the gems to your mages - not the other way around - by means of "mules". Mules are cheap, fast commanders who can relay gems, items, and reinforcements to and from the front lines.

3. If your mages are casting Fireflies then you have fire magic. Research up Falling Fires and use a 3F mage to cast it (or a 2F mage with Phoenix Power). You will see how much damage magic can do then.

4. If you have a recruitable H3 priest, many people like to prophetize one so you can get access to the H4 spells. Other than that, units with no holy are popular because they turn into instant H3 priests. If your nation has very strong national commanders they are sometimes prophetized so they can be turned into Thugs.

5. You must blood hunt to get blood slaves (basically, blood gems). Blood slaves are used to cast the spells from the blood school which are quite powerful. Particularly the powerful summons in that school.

6. You gain no value from beneficial enemy dominion. However, negative enemy dominion will effect your provinces. Also, enemy dominion causes some minor unrest.

7. Yes, you should be specializing in this manner. Recruit cheap, efficient mages for researching. Send one or two mages with good path coverage out site searching (or casting site search spells). Blood hunting is a very specific activity and you probably shouldnt delve into it too soon as a new player. Its not really complicated but you already have enough to think about.

8. Pretender creation has SO many subtleties that it is difficult to answer your question. I will just say this: generally speaking, you should not heavily invest in the same paths of magic that your national mages have unless you have a specific, heavy-duty, spell that you need your pretender to cast from those paths.

[Taqwus]

Fort placement is a bit of an art, as there are multiple possible roles and they have substantial cost in both money and time.

From a military perspective, they offer more rapid troop recruitment of local troops if neighboring provinces have high resources. They also provide the ability to recruit national troops. Both of these are especially useful if you have slow armies and this is near an active theater. Also useful for many armies, they project supply to nearby provinces... another reason for them to be near a front, so you can maintain armies.

Also useful, they may be used for defending chokepoints where you would be able to threaten an invader's lines of retreat and supply... or where your own lines would be threatened if these were held by an enemy. They're also useful for protecting temples (400 gold each!) or critical magic sites. An unprotected temple is a tempting target for raiders, including the assorted remote summons.

A fortress can also buy you a turn of protection for weak forces (a mass of sages researching because you have a Library and didn't bother redistributing them more evenly, say) that may help if you have strong mobile forces (flyers, army movement spells) or magical counterattack (remote summons for stomping raiders).

If you're the Ashen Empire (Late Ermor), fortresses will also affect what autospawns you get.

[Sheap]

Forts have three main uses:
1) A province with a fort gets double the resource production, and some of the resources from neighboring provinces (based on their administration value). So you can build a lot more there. You can also build any of your national troops in a fort*, otherwise you can only build the troops native to that province. National troops are usually, but not always, better than the native troops. However, building a fort doesn't prevent you from building the native troops, so, you aren't losing anything.
* Priests and sacred units also require a temple, and mages require a lab, to build.
2) A province with a fort has increased supplies, depending on the fort's Supply Storage value. Provinces near the fort also get increased supplies, but the effect decreases the farther from the fort they are.
3) Forts provide protection, it always takes at least one turn for your opponent to break down the gate, and often longer. During this time, they can't engage the troops you have in the fort in combat (this is especially valuable for priests preaching, mages forging or researching, etc). Some nasty random events (barbarian attacks, etc) are also mitigated by forts, as these raiders won't storm your castle; this can save the units you have in the province. Attackers also can't capture your lab or burn down your temple until they have captured your fort.

As far as where to put them, this is up to you, but generally, valuable provinces (with good magic sites, victory points, map chokepoints, enemy borders, high income, high resources, or whatever you need) are the right place for them.

Gems: The best way to get more gems is to send mages out searching for sites. Most magic sites produce gems. Some do other things instead. Each site has a difficulty (up to 4) and a path (air, fire, death, whatever). A mage whose skill in the path is equal to or greater than the site's difficulty will always find the site, otherwise they won't; there's no randomness. Sometimes you also get gems from random events.

Magic: You can script the spells your mages will cast by going to "army setup" and clicking by the mage where it says "<select orders>". But, to get good spells, you need to research. To set a mage to researching, he must be in a lab; "research" will be one of his available orders (click the bottom of his icon where it says "defend" or "move" or whatever). Press F5 to see your overall research status, and try right clicking on the names of the spell schools (evocation, conjuration, etc) in that screen. Some paths, like fire and earth, get lots of good battle spells. Other paths, like nature and blood, have lousy battle spells (but good rituals). Researching is slow and requires valuable mages, but you won't gain access to any worthwhile magic if you don't do it. Most of the good spells start to appear around level 4 or 5 in whatever magic school you are researching.

Prophet: It depends on your nation and strategy. For some nations, a stealthy prophet is useful, as he can sneak into enemy territory and spread your dominion there. For others, with powerful units, you can make your strongest unit your prophet and use him in battle, picking up significant combat bonuses in friendly dominion. Others want to make a level-3 priest their prophet, elevating him to level-4 and allowing him to cast the most powerful holy spells. It's just based on what you want your prophet to be able to do.

Blood Hunt: If you don't have blood mages in your nation, blood magic is rarely worth the effort. But yes, blood hunting is almost the only way to get blood slaves to cast your blood spells. Commanders that are not blood mages are terrible at blood hunting, and blood hunting is also difficult in provinces with unrest. Aside from blood hunting, the Fountain of Blood pretender gets a few blood slaves per turn, and occasionally you will get them from a random event. In multiplayer you might convince another player to send you some. But pretty much, blood hunting is it. Some nations (like Mictlan) have extremely good blood hunters, and others (like Pangaea) have some blood hunters, but they are very expensive for what you get.

Dominion: You normally suffer the penalties of enemy dominion, without gaining any of the benefits. You also lose morale, and of course sometimes the enemy dominion is just plain bad (like if your nation prefers heat but the enemy dominion is cold, or they are Ulm and have drain, or they are Ermor and have death, or whatever). Also, nations that get free spawning units (late Ermor, early & late Rlyeh, early Pangaea), don't get them in hostile dominion.

Armies vs. commanders: Armies have no impact on some things, and you should use lone commanders for this. In Dominions, "commander" doesn't mean "person leading troops" but rather "person you can give orders to." Scouts, mages, and priests rarely lead troops but all are commanders. Blood hunting, forging, site searching, casting rituals, spreading dominion, are all unaffected by armies. The only thing armies are good for is fighting and patrolling.

Pretender magic: There are three things you can do with magic on your pretender.
1) Blesses. If you have sacred troops, taking lots of magic on your pretender will allow you to bless them in combat with a priest, which gives them increased abilities for the rest of the battle. (better attack, better defense, regeneration, faster movement, whatever). Some nations, such as early Niefelheim, Helheim, and Vanheim, are extremely good at this because their sacred units are good. You get one bless effect at level 4 magic in a path, which improves with higher magic levels, and another, different effect at level 9 magic. The magic screen in pretender design tells you what your bless currently is.
2) Doing magic your nation can't normally do. Middle era Ulm, for instance, has only Fire and Earth magic on their normal mages. But they can benefit a lot from death and nature magic. So, in this case, you might take nature and death on your pretender to fill this gap. A special case of this is the "rainbow mage" - a pretender god with a very low path cost, such as an Arch Mage, who takes 3 or 4 levels in every path or almost every path. Such pretenders are exceptionally good at forging items and searching for magic sites. On the down side, this can be a lot of expensive magic, and these pretenders normally have other problems (like low starting dominion, and extreme physical weakness).
3) Doing magic your nation can normally do, but doing it better. If you look at the high research levels, you'll see lots of spells that require extremely strong magic. Many of these spells are beyond the ability of any national mage, and the only practical way to cast them is by using your pretender.

[quantum_mechani]

Everyone seems to have glossed over the usual biggest advantage of more forts- greatly increased number of mages can be built per turn. Indies can alow more mages sometimes without forts, but unless they are from a site they are usually only good for magic diversity, not battle or research.

[Dedas]

On forts.

If you build them in very close by (neighbouring provinces). They will take recources from eachother (still) based on the admin value. Thus admin 50 will take 45 percent of the recources of a adjacent admin 5 fort. This can be bad if there are some unique units in that 5 admin fort, or if it is a strategically good place to recruit.
In a another scenario you have an admin 50 fortress that has a neighbouring fortress (1 tile away) with admin 50. They will share at least one province. This province - as all provinces - can only give 100% resources, and it will thus be drained, splitting (admin 50) its resources up between the two fortresses.
Do you want it to be drained of resources? Well, it is up to you.

Dedas said:
On forts.

If you build them in very close by (neighbouring provinces). They will take recources from eachother (still) based on the admin value. Thus admin 50 will take 45 percent of the recources of a adjacent admin 5 fort. This can be bad if there are some unique units in that 5 admin fort, or if it is a strategically good place to recruit.
In a another scenario you have an admin 50 fortress that has a neighbouring fortress (1 tile away) with admin 50. They will share at least one province. This province - as all provinces - can only give 100% resources, and it will thus be drained, splitting (admin 50) its resources up between the two fortresses.
Do you want it to be drained of resources? Well, it is up to you.

Actually no, at least they're not supposed to. Forts draw resources from provinces around them, but not from provinces with other forts. Of course this still means placing them closely isn't too good. Ideally, each province has enough forts neighbouring it so all resources are used up, i.e. two 30 admin and one 40 admin fort. Practically, forts are useful for provinces with a lot of mountain/forest neighbours, at least if you need it to buy high resource units.

[Ozymandias]

For most all of the questions you asked the answer tends to be, "What nation are you playing?" One of the attractions of Dominions is that the various nations don't play the same. You have already gotten some good general tips, here are a few more.

1. Castles let you spend lots of gold with a good return. When you have many provinces and are generating more gold then you can spend on quality units, then you need another castle. All the advice the previous posters gave you to help in selecting castles is good. Oh try and select provinces that won't be conquered by enemy nations before the castle is finished, that is a painful waste of money.

2. Gems you can't use can still be useful for empowerment, so that you can start using them. Alternatively, you can alchemize them into a more usable resource. Empowerment and alchemy are both pretty pricey, an approach that is sometimes more fruitful is to use them diplomatically. Trade your surplus to a nation that can use them. You can get forged items, military support, and diplomatic concessions with the right sort of gem trades. Diplomacy is a very real element in multiplayer games of Dominions.

3. Check your spell ranges, mages that are never in range of the enemy won't get many kills. Spells that buff your troops are even less flashy than fireflies, but can make a huge difference in battles. Look in the spell index at the back of the manual for interesting effects your national mages can research for.

4. An early prophet helps to spread your dominion. At the very least he will be good for Divine Bless and Smite, also Prophets don't cost any upkeep. A later Prophet is likely to be on a better unit, and hence more useful. Most nations (with early and late era Mictlan being exceptions) want to appoint a Prophet quite early in the game, frequently the first or second turn.

5. Blood magic is very strong. It tends to be more useful for summons than for battlefield effects or rituals, but it does have some spells that are true gems in those categories as well. Optimal bloodhunters should be cheap and have blood 2. Construction 4 gets your blood mages the ability to forge Sanguine Dowsing Rods, which increase the blood skill of a blood mage by one, for the purposes of blood hunting only. You want to hunt provinces that are as close to 5 thousand population as possible, and keep them free from unrest. A good strategy is a 5k province at zero tax with three or four hunters with an effective blood skill of two. A province like that will reliably generate over a dozen slaves a round, several will power a mighty blood economy. One of the greatest appeals of blood magic is that it isn't dependant on the luck of the draw for sites.

6. Controlling a province under an enemy dominion is often bad. The best case scenario is no benefit, possibilities go down hill from there. Order and Misfortune are scales that are frequently combined, since Order reduces the frequency of events. Enemies experience only the bad luck with none of the mitigating reduction in frequency or extra income. Arcoscephale automatically scrys provinces under their dominion. There are several global enchantments that only work or have much stronger effects under the dominion of the casting nation. Finally you will be eliminated from the game if you allow your dominion to get weak enough.

7. You derive no benefit from armies for most commander tasks, but it is worth remembering that a handful of troops on guard commander make your valuable leaders much more survivable, particularly against assassination attempts.

8. This question is very dependant on your nation. Every nation derives great benefit to their forging economy with access to dwarven hammers, if your nation has no native earth 2 mages, you will need to get all of your hammers via trade with nations who do, or you will need to build them with your pretender. If your pretender isn't titan sized or ethereal, you might want to put 4 levels of earth magic on it just to protect your god from lethal castings of Wind Ride. For many nations your selection of magic will be based on the blessing you will receive, water is particularly powerful in this regard. Also, if you are playing early era R'lyeh, make sure your pretender has at least one level of both air and water magic.