08-07-2013, 12:51 AM
Hey all, out of a combination of boredom and interest in furthering my writing skills, I've been writing up a Let's Play for my latest obsession. Feel free to critique my writing, express pleasure/disgust, or ask questions.
Post 1: Intro + Nation/Pretender Design
Hello, and welcome to Eschatos' Lets Play of Dominions 3!
At this point you might be feeling curious, what is Dominions 3? To make a long story short, Dominions 3 is an incredibly complex turn based strategy game featuring gods warring with each other for control of all creation. To make a long story long, read the rest of this LP.
Â
Dominions 3 is primarily played as a multiplayer game. While AI exists, it's not exactly intelligent. A typical multiplayer game is filled with desperate alliances, sudden betrayals, and wars I would not hesitate to describe as epic. Let me provide some context for this LP. The good folks of the Rock Paper Shotgun forums have recently arranged a large game of Dominons 3(henceforth referred to as Dom3) with your humble narrator as a player. 18 players will vie for domination. The majority of players, including me, are somewhat new to the game, so expect plenty of mistakes and unusual strategies.Â
We will be playing with two mods enabled. First, Conceptual Balance Mod 1.94, which buffs the weak, nerfs the OP, and generally improves the quality of gameplay. Second, All Ages Mod, which allows the nations of all 3 Ages(~70 Nations Total) to be combined in the same game. I'm personally not a fan of the second, but it should make the game more exciting.Â
This LP is mainly intended for people who haven't played Dominions. I'll try to provide quick explanations of important gameplay concepts so that yall can tell what's going on. Before I finally jump in, let me insert a quick advertisement. Dominions 3 is on Steam Greenlight right now, currently languishing in a sea of mediocre games. If you enjoy this LP, use Steam, and are interested in the game itself, please consider voting for Dom3 on Greenlight.
The first step for any player before starting a game is to pick a nation and god from the pool available. A typical game will take place in one of the three eras(Early, Middle or Late). Most nations exist in different forms throughout the three ages.
As a quick example, I've posted below the descriptions of a particular nation across the three ages.
As you can see, Ermor transitions from a relatively friendly Rome-inspired nation into a twisted hellscape of undead. Other nations go through similar transitions, or are wiped out and replaced by new nations, creating a massive diversity of lore and play styles. You want to play a race of ice giants capable of rushing the other players? Pick Neifelheim and watch as your sacred giant Jarls cleave and freeze their way across the land. Into Lovecraft? Play as R'lyeh, safe underneath the waves from the marauding land dwellers until your Ilithids and their mind-controlled slaves can march from beneath the waves to claim victory. Are you a fan of hit and run tactics? Play as the birdmen of Caelum and let your Eagle Kings blast foes with lightning before flying away.
I chose to play the Middle Age incarnation of Arcoscephale, a fantasy version of Ancient Greece/Macedonia.Â
Arcoscephale drew my eye because of two particular features. It has a strong early game with its elephants, and a strong late game from its wide variety of cheap, powerful mages. As a general rule in Dominions, magic always dominates. The players might begin the game with hordes of swordsmen or archers, but a late game battlefield will be dominated by summoned elementals, demons, and even dead gods returned from exile.
After a player picks their nation, the next step is to design their pretender, a being of godlike power aspiring to control the world. As with the various nations, there is a huge variety of gods to choose from. The list you're about to see only has the selection of gods for one of the many available nations.
You want your god to be a two-headed serpent, or a dragon, or a statue? Any creature can be successful with a proper strategy. When it comes to pretender design strategy, there are four primary options for building a pretender:
Supercombatant: Choose a powerful combat oriented god that can conquer provinces quickly in the early game to provide a massive land and income advantage over other players. Big creatures like a dragon or wyrm fit this role best. A wyrm is particularly nice because it regenerates 10% of its health every round in combat, and exudes an aura of fear that lowers enemy morale.
Blessing: When a pretender takes a high number of skill ranks in one of the eight paths of magic, sacred warriors serving them can be buffed with various abilities. For example, a pretender god with nine or more ranks in fire magic can grant their followers increased accuracy and flaming weapons. Almost any god can make a good bless, since the most important aspect to consider is which magic paths they start with. With the right strategy, any bless can be effective, except air. Air blesses suck.
Bless nations tend to be extremely powerful in the early game, as their massively buffed sacred warriors stomp over anything opposing them. The weakness of a bless nation is that the high magic paths required cost massive amounts of design points, and require tradeoffs in every other field of pretender design.
As a secondary weakness, bless nations are usually one trick ponies, as they'll spend most of the game relying on a single type of sacred unit. If an enemy figures out how to counter your sacred warriors, you're in deep shit.
Scales nations: These emphasize the next aspect of pretender design. The influence of a god can exert positive or negative effects on the land under their dominion. This screen is where the player picks what exact effect their god can spread, and how quickly their dominion can spread.
A high dominion strength is vital for survival. If no one worships your god(aka they have no dominion), you immediately lose the game. Aggressive temple building to spread dominion can be an effective strategy to weaken enemies.Â
The further options are called Scales. Why scales? Because they can tilt in two directions with opposing consequences. A death scale will slowly kill your population, and a life scale will increase population growth. Any scale can be increased to a maximum strength of 3 in either direction, which will either provide a positive effect to lands under your dominion and costs points, or causes a negative effect which grants you extra points to spend on more important aspects.Â
Scales nations get a relatively small boost across all stages of the game. They tend to be more effective in the late game once the interest of their benefits has had a chance to compound. Cheap gods tend to be best for scales, allowing more points to be dumped into powerful dominion effects.
Rainbow pretenders: Pick a rainbow pretender when you want to try most or all magic paths at the same time. Most nations only have inherent access to two or three paths of magic, and a rainbow pretender can allow access to the ones left over. This allows a high level of versatility, but tends not to be especially powerful in any one aspect without a high level of magic gem investment and research. Mage pretenders tend to make the best rainbow mages, since they can most easily expand into new magic paths. The frost father's immunity to cold, freezing aura, and ability to move through mountains without penalty are just icing on the cake.
Concept: Magic gems. Magic gems are the currency of magic. Every item forging, noncombat ritual and many of the more powerful combat spells require gems of the appropriate path as reagents. Each path has a corresponding gem type:
You might notice that the rightmost "gem" looks like a little stick figure. Blood magic is the exception, instead of being powered with magic gems, it runs on human sacrifices. Don't expect to make too many friends when your mages hunt through villages for virgins to sacrifice.
After at least 15 minutes worth of deliberating, I decided on a rainbow pretender with a hint of scales. Rainbow gods are my favorite strategy. Rainbow gods are excellent for searching for magic sites for increased gem income, and I love being able to switch between strategies easily.
Final build:
As you can see from the above pictures, I took one rank in fire and death magic, four in air, three in earth and astral, and two in nature. I won't go into specifics right now, but suffice to say that these paths will allow what I think is the optimal compromise between gear forging, spell casting, and site searching.
Since this is a particularly large game(an average game will hold less than 10 players) I wanted to also plan for the long term, and good scales can be very strong long term. After all, your subjects can't pay taxes if they've died due to a strong death scale, or fled due to misfortune scales.Â
Dominion 8 will allow me to hold off on building temples until I can easily afford it, and protect me from domkills. As I mentioned previously, not having dominion over any provinces results in an instant game over. Some strategies revolve around spreading your god's dominion as quickly as possible to try and wipe out the dominion of your opponents.
Order, productivity, and growth have the net effect of gaining me more money(total +14% boost and growth will cause it to go up more over time). Misfortune naturally complements order. The increase in bad random events is partially mitigated by the decrease in random events caused by order. Luck and turmoil combined can also be highly effective. If you take those scales, expect a penalty to income, but a constant stream of random gold and gems. I took Heat 1 because I needed more points, and there are a number of players in this game with cold loving nations. The income/supply penalty that I see will be much larger if a cold nation(like the frost giants of Neifelheim) manages to invade me and take my land. Finally, Magic 1 will provide a boost to my researchers. Arcoscephale's strength is its mages, and mages are worthless if they don't know spells to cast.
To afford all those bonuses, I had to spend far more points than I was allocated. To make back my deficit I set my pretender to start the game asleep, meaning that she won't wake up until a year has passed(12 turns). If I wanted to truly go all out with bells and whistles I'd have to set my pretender to be imprisoned, which would leave me without a god for three years.Â
Concept: magic sites
These are where you get magic gems from. Every nation will start on base magic sites that complement their national magic paths, but the vast majority of sites lie in provinces that don't start filled with tens of thousands of your worshipers, and thus are hidden from view. To find these magic sites and take advantage of their income, mages must search for them, either by trekking through provinces themselves or by scanning from afar with magic. Increasing gem income as soon as possible is vital to playing effectively, you can NEVER have too many gems.
Magic sites can also provide other benefits in the form of special unit recruitment and scales bonuses.
And some magic sites are just bad.
Tune in next time for a look at the armies of Arcoscephale, and the first turn.
Post 1: Intro + Nation/Pretender Design
Hello, and welcome to Eschatos' Lets Play of Dominions 3!
At this point you might be feeling curious, what is Dominions 3? To make a long story short, Dominions 3 is an incredibly complex turn based strategy game featuring gods warring with each other for control of all creation. To make a long story long, read the rest of this LP.
Â
Dominions 3 is primarily played as a multiplayer game. While AI exists, it's not exactly intelligent. A typical multiplayer game is filled with desperate alliances, sudden betrayals, and wars I would not hesitate to describe as epic. Let me provide some context for this LP. The good folks of the Rock Paper Shotgun forums have recently arranged a large game of Dominons 3(henceforth referred to as Dom3) with your humble narrator as a player. 18 players will vie for domination. The majority of players, including me, are somewhat new to the game, so expect plenty of mistakes and unusual strategies.Â
We will be playing with two mods enabled. First, Conceptual Balance Mod 1.94, which buffs the weak, nerfs the OP, and generally improves the quality of gameplay. Second, All Ages Mod, which allows the nations of all 3 Ages(~70 Nations Total) to be combined in the same game. I'm personally not a fan of the second, but it should make the game more exciting.Â
This LP is mainly intended for people who haven't played Dominions. I'll try to provide quick explanations of important gameplay concepts so that yall can tell what's going on. Before I finally jump in, let me insert a quick advertisement. Dominions 3 is on Steam Greenlight right now, currently languishing in a sea of mediocre games. If you enjoy this LP, use Steam, and are interested in the game itself, please consider voting for Dom3 on Greenlight.
The first step for any player before starting a game is to pick a nation and god from the pool available. A typical game will take place in one of the three eras(Early, Middle or Late). Most nations exist in different forms throughout the three ages.
As a quick example, I've posted below the descriptions of a particular nation across the three ages.
As you can see, Ermor transitions from a relatively friendly Rome-inspired nation into a twisted hellscape of undead. Other nations go through similar transitions, or are wiped out and replaced by new nations, creating a massive diversity of lore and play styles. You want to play a race of ice giants capable of rushing the other players? Pick Neifelheim and watch as your sacred giant Jarls cleave and freeze their way across the land. Into Lovecraft? Play as R'lyeh, safe underneath the waves from the marauding land dwellers until your Ilithids and their mind-controlled slaves can march from beneath the waves to claim victory. Are you a fan of hit and run tactics? Play as the birdmen of Caelum and let your Eagle Kings blast foes with lightning before flying away.
I chose to play the Middle Age incarnation of Arcoscephale, a fantasy version of Ancient Greece/Macedonia.Â
Arcoscephale drew my eye because of two particular features. It has a strong early game with its elephants, and a strong late game from its wide variety of cheap, powerful mages. As a general rule in Dominions, magic always dominates. The players might begin the game with hordes of swordsmen or archers, but a late game battlefield will be dominated by summoned elementals, demons, and even dead gods returned from exile.
After a player picks their nation, the next step is to design their pretender, a being of godlike power aspiring to control the world. As with the various nations, there is a huge variety of gods to choose from. The list you're about to see only has the selection of gods for one of the many available nations.
You want your god to be a two-headed serpent, or a dragon, or a statue? Any creature can be successful with a proper strategy. When it comes to pretender design strategy, there are four primary options for building a pretender:
Supercombatant: Choose a powerful combat oriented god that can conquer provinces quickly in the early game to provide a massive land and income advantage over other players. Big creatures like a dragon or wyrm fit this role best. A wyrm is particularly nice because it regenerates 10% of its health every round in combat, and exudes an aura of fear that lowers enemy morale.
Blessing: When a pretender takes a high number of skill ranks in one of the eight paths of magic, sacred warriors serving them can be buffed with various abilities. For example, a pretender god with nine or more ranks in fire magic can grant their followers increased accuracy and flaming weapons. Almost any god can make a good bless, since the most important aspect to consider is which magic paths they start with. With the right strategy, any bless can be effective, except air. Air blesses suck.
Bless nations tend to be extremely powerful in the early game, as their massively buffed sacred warriors stomp over anything opposing them. The weakness of a bless nation is that the high magic paths required cost massive amounts of design points, and require tradeoffs in every other field of pretender design.
As a secondary weakness, bless nations are usually one trick ponies, as they'll spend most of the game relying on a single type of sacred unit. If an enemy figures out how to counter your sacred warriors, you're in deep shit.
Scales nations: These emphasize the next aspect of pretender design. The influence of a god can exert positive or negative effects on the land under their dominion. This screen is where the player picks what exact effect their god can spread, and how quickly their dominion can spread.
A high dominion strength is vital for survival. If no one worships your god(aka they have no dominion), you immediately lose the game. Aggressive temple building to spread dominion can be an effective strategy to weaken enemies.Â
The further options are called Scales. Why scales? Because they can tilt in two directions with opposing consequences. A death scale will slowly kill your population, and a life scale will increase population growth. Any scale can be increased to a maximum strength of 3 in either direction, which will either provide a positive effect to lands under your dominion and costs points, or causes a negative effect which grants you extra points to spend on more important aspects.Â
Scales nations get a relatively small boost across all stages of the game. They tend to be more effective in the late game once the interest of their benefits has had a chance to compound. Cheap gods tend to be best for scales, allowing more points to be dumped into powerful dominion effects.
Rainbow pretenders: Pick a rainbow pretender when you want to try most or all magic paths at the same time. Most nations only have inherent access to two or three paths of magic, and a rainbow pretender can allow access to the ones left over. This allows a high level of versatility, but tends not to be especially powerful in any one aspect without a high level of magic gem investment and research. Mage pretenders tend to make the best rainbow mages, since they can most easily expand into new magic paths. The frost father's immunity to cold, freezing aura, and ability to move through mountains without penalty are just icing on the cake.
Concept: Magic gems. Magic gems are the currency of magic. Every item forging, noncombat ritual and many of the more powerful combat spells require gems of the appropriate path as reagents. Each path has a corresponding gem type:
You might notice that the rightmost "gem" looks like a little stick figure. Blood magic is the exception, instead of being powered with magic gems, it runs on human sacrifices. Don't expect to make too many friends when your mages hunt through villages for virgins to sacrifice.
After at least 15 minutes worth of deliberating, I decided on a rainbow pretender with a hint of scales. Rainbow gods are my favorite strategy. Rainbow gods are excellent for searching for magic sites for increased gem income, and I love being able to switch between strategies easily.
Final build:
As you can see from the above pictures, I took one rank in fire and death magic, four in air, three in earth and astral, and two in nature. I won't go into specifics right now, but suffice to say that these paths will allow what I think is the optimal compromise between gear forging, spell casting, and site searching.
Since this is a particularly large game(an average game will hold less than 10 players) I wanted to also plan for the long term, and good scales can be very strong long term. After all, your subjects can't pay taxes if they've died due to a strong death scale, or fled due to misfortune scales.Â
Dominion 8 will allow me to hold off on building temples until I can easily afford it, and protect me from domkills. As I mentioned previously, not having dominion over any provinces results in an instant game over. Some strategies revolve around spreading your god's dominion as quickly as possible to try and wipe out the dominion of your opponents.
Order, productivity, and growth have the net effect of gaining me more money(total +14% boost and growth will cause it to go up more over time). Misfortune naturally complements order. The increase in bad random events is partially mitigated by the decrease in random events caused by order. Luck and turmoil combined can also be highly effective. If you take those scales, expect a penalty to income, but a constant stream of random gold and gems. I took Heat 1 because I needed more points, and there are a number of players in this game with cold loving nations. The income/supply penalty that I see will be much larger if a cold nation(like the frost giants of Neifelheim) manages to invade me and take my land. Finally, Magic 1 will provide a boost to my researchers. Arcoscephale's strength is its mages, and mages are worthless if they don't know spells to cast.
To afford all those bonuses, I had to spend far more points than I was allocated. To make back my deficit I set my pretender to start the game asleep, meaning that she won't wake up until a year has passed(12 turns). If I wanted to truly go all out with bells and whistles I'd have to set my pretender to be imprisoned, which would leave me without a god for three years.Â
Concept: magic sites
These are where you get magic gems from. Every nation will start on base magic sites that complement their national magic paths, but the vast majority of sites lie in provinces that don't start filled with tens of thousands of your worshipers, and thus are hidden from view. To find these magic sites and take advantage of their income, mages must search for them, either by trekking through provinces themselves or by scanning from afar with magic. Increasing gem income as soon as possible is vital to playing effectively, you can NEVER have too many gems.
Magic sites can also provide other benefits in the form of special unit recruitment and scales bonuses.
And some magic sites are just bad.
Tune in next time for a look at the armies of Arcoscephale, and the first turn.