Dominions 3

[RationalGoblin]

Anyone else have this game? I just got it, after having the demo for a full year, and I love it.

I'd be up to playing a game with fellow Dominions newbies.

So, is there ANYONE who likes this game as much as I do?

[Poison_Fish]

There are a couple of us lurking who play the crap out of it. Including some who shall not be mentioned because the gods of banning declared it so.

What nations have you been enjoying?

[RationalGoblin]

There are a couple of us lurking who play the crap out of it. Including some who shall not be mentioned because the gods of banning declared it so.

What nations have you been enjoying?

Ulm was my favorite, back when I had the demo of Dominions 2 as well, and it hasn't proven me wrong yet in the full version of Dominions 3.

Early Age Abysia seems fantastic, I've smashed many independents beneath their flames.

Early Age Pangea is interesting, I enjoy throwing mainads at every independent province.

Any age of R'lyeh is interesting, but hard to use.

I do like the flavor of Late Age Atlantis, I mean Inuit fishmen? Sign me up! :smallwink:

I thought I'd like Mictlan, but they're too fragile, in my opinion.

Middle and Late Age Man are fun to use.

I like Helheim better then Vanheim, it's a shame Helheim only lasts for one Age.

In any era, Agartha can't hit the broad side of a barn, but I like them. They seem to be good underdogs.

Back in Dominions 2, C'tis was another favorite, and it seems this will continue.

Middle Age Caelum is fun to use, with all the Air spells they can research.

Annd... that's about it, for my favorites in Dominions 3. I do have the update that adds about 5 new nations, but I haven't used them enough to comment on them.

[RationalGoblin]

Sorry about the double-post, but I figured I can use this thread for questions.

For example, how do I start a game in my local area network? For that matter, how do I create a server? What are the numbers it wants me to input?

[Poison_Fish]

The numbers you want to input is the IP of the host server that others will connect to. However, this site may be of some use to you. http://www.dom3minions.com/

[Jahkaivah]

Crap! Why didn't anyone tell me they made a sequel to Dominoes?! Two sequals none the less!

[Poison_Fish]

There have been threads every so often on the forums. Just not a lot of us seem to play it unfortunately.

[Sir Dar]

After downloading and playing the demo . I have this to say.Why didn't i find out about this game sooner?

Forging magic items,rising armys ,watching battles, rising armys of undead all good fun.Good ai.

This game is going on my to buy list, which justs keep geting longer and longer.

[RationalGoblin]

After downloading and playing the demo . I have this to say.Why didn't i find out about this game sooner?

Forging magic items,rising armys ,watching battles, rising armys of undead all good fun.Good ai.

This game is going on my to buy list, which justs keep geting longer and longer.

Yeah, one of my favorite things about Dominions is the sheer number of things you can do. You have almost unlimited options. The vast majority might not be the best options, but you can still do most of them. Forging powerful magic items that do utterly absurd things, building an army that streamrolls your opponent, and casting incredibly powerful spells, I love it all. You can do almost anything imaginable.

The other favorite thing about Dominions for me is yeah, the AI. It's one of the best I've ever seen. And the only cost is making the graphics a bit dinky. Now what if more games went AI over graphics?

Anyway, Jahkaivah, I highly recommend downloading both the Dominions 3 and Dominons 2 demos, to get a feel for them, before you think about getting the full version of 2 or 3.

And thanks, Poison_Fish, I figured it was probably the IP address, but I wasn't sure.

[Gamerlord]

I have played the demo nonstop, must buy it ASAP.

[Drascin]

I have always wanted to try this game, it sounds pretty appealing. Though, I hear the AI is pretty tough, and the depths of my ineptitude when it comes to strategy games are boundless, so I'm fearing I wouldn't try much part of it... :smallsigh:

[Gamerlord]

I have always wanted to try this game, it sounds pretty appealing. Though, I hear the AI is pretty tough, and the depths of my ineptitude when it comes to strategy games are boundless, so I'm fearing I wouldn't try much part of it... :smallsigh:

Play hotseat against yourself, I do it all the time.

[Copper8642]

I read this thread a few days ago, wiki'd the game, and went and got it.

This is epic.

I've been playing around with most of the nations and not getting very far, just to try everything out (only in the Middle Age so far, though). I'm not particularly good at it, and I can't choose nation to stick with (Ermor and Marignon are currently my favorites, though I'm mildly interested in sides with more forging and/or blood magic. R'lyeh is also cool... hell with it, they're all rather cool).

So yeah. Pretty awesome.

[Kalbron]

Dominions 3 will definitely hand you a tub of lube while grinning in your early playthroughs, but I found that by my 6-7th game I would tend to fare better against the AI. The weakest AI that is.

[Deliverance]

Early Age Abysia seems fantastic, I've smashed many independents beneath their flames.

EA Abysia is extremely fun to play but also very limited. With blood hunters being capital only recruits and with all commanders close to old age, they have a number of serious problems to contend with if you play other humans (above and beyond that any human will ruin your day by casting Rain when fighting major battles with you, crippling your offensive battle magic). The few things they do, they do very well.



Any age of R'lyeh is interesting, but hard to use.

MA R'lyeh is fairly straightforward to learn to play adequately since they can be played as a normal amphibious race, who just happen to be mindblasters and braineaters, and followers of the astral star gods.



I thought I'd like Mictlan, but they're too fragile, in my opinion.

You are doing something dreadfully wrong - most likely playing them as you would another nation.

The key to playing EA or LA Mictlan is to screw your scales with one monster of a bless and a high dominion on some imprisoned pretender and then recruit Jaguar warriors all over the place.

Since they shift to Jaguar form when wounded severely, they effectively need to be killed twice in a single battle and no single attack can kill them. Even then, they are fragile, but assuming you have chosen a high starting dominion (obligatory!), you can mass them easily as they are incredibly cheap and recruitable everywhere. You'll still take dreadful casualties against some types of enemies, but just keep on recruiting more each turn, swamping your enemies with cheap sacred warriors who punch far, far, about their weight class.

Of recruitable troops, they provide the strongest offensive punch in the game for their gold cost bar none - nobody else has troops that get even close - so long as you have given them a proper blessing. F9W9 is a good place to start, and for players that don't blink in the face of the abyss and the potential for bad luck, even a triple F9W9S9 blessing isn't out of the question.

The real goal of Jaguar warriors is to slaughter your starting opposition while getting to the point where you can ramp up your blood economy and start summoning sacred 0-upkeep beast bats - that get no less than three attacks per combat turn. Sure, beast bats have weaknesses too, but they are flying sacreds dealing way more damage than the Jaguar warriors did. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that the AI, regardless of difficulty level, can do to fight an EA or LA Mictlan using this most basic strategy.

Fragile, yes. Every single one of Mictlans recruitable troops or national summons is individually fragile, but when using larger groups they turn deadly - which is why it is imperative to build castle #2 incredibly fast with Mictlan to double your sacred production per turn. Castle #3 probably follows a few turns later having belonged to an opponent that you defeated before he managed to raise anything resembling an defense.

You can find good beginner guides to Mictlan and many other nations in the Strategy Index (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=38122) on the official forum.



Back in Dominions 2, C'tis was another favorite, and it seems this will continue.

Probably - the mostly peaceful Lizards of C'tis with their awesome command of death magic are very fun to play in all ages. :smallsmile:



Annd... that's about it, for my favorites in Dominions 3. I do have the update that adds about 5 new nations, but I haven't used them enough to comment on them.
Hopefully you have the latest patch that adds many bugfixes.

Of the new nations, two in particular may interest you given your comment on Mictlan's fragileness: Hinnom (EA) and its Ashdod (MA) variant gives you two superpowered nations of giants that can focus on blood magic should they want to and, in EA, summon extremely powerful super combatants; The physical prowess of their recruitable troops and point defense beats most other EA and MA nations as well. I'm not saying they are unbeatable, for they are not, but there is a reason that they are probably the nations most frequently banned from being played in MP games and it is that they are almost unbelievably strong in anybody's hands.

Lanka, Land of Demons, is another nation that you might like if you find Mictlan too fragile. It is probably #2 blood nation after Mictlan but instead of focusing on plentiful cheap sacred troops it focuses on more expensive tougher troops and very tough sacred commanders, both for recruiting and blood magic summoning. It also has normal dominion spread and cannot blood sacrifice like Mictlan can which has both upsides and downsides. Generally speaking, you cannot afford to spend as many of your design points on a monstrous blessing as you can with Mictlan because you need more gold survive and prosper in the time before you switch to an economy run mostly on blood.


Yeah. I love Dominions 3 too.:smallbiggrin:




I have always wanted to try this game, it sounds pretty appealing. Though, I hear the AI is pretty tough, and the depths of my ineptitude when it comes to strategy games are boundless, so I'm fearing I wouldn't try much part of it...

The AI is atrociously bad in Dominions 3. One can still have a fun time playing it by choosing the highest difficulty level where it cheats the most on extra income and gets most bonus points to pretender creation, but it has the strategic abilities of a concussed duckling and no idea at all about what makes good scales/magic/chassis choices during pretender creation.

As many beginners don't have an idea either, they can fool themselves into believing that the AI is doing well when it steamrolls their awfully managed dominion, but this illusion evaporates quickly as the player learns how to set up a good pretender and gets a few test games under his belt.

As the AI additionally has no idea of how to create magic items according to anything resembling a plan, you will never see the AI kit out a thug or super combatant like human players do against the AI and each other all the time.

You'll occasionally find an AI player handing out a few minor magic items that, because they are alotted without rhyme or reason, do not signficantly affect its ability to wage war - a stark contrast to the human player who thinks along the lines of "I'll summon a Bane Lord once I reach the proper level of Conjuration, which is my current research focus, and then I'll kit him out with a Frost Brand, Vine Shield, Horror Helmet, Elemental Armor, Boots of Speed, amulet of luck and ring of regeneration - so I had better have the right mages to forge these items, oh, and don't forget to make Dwarven Hammers with the Earth Gems first - make that E2 mage forge a pair of Earth Boots to make him E3, forge a hammer, equip him with the hammer, and have him forge more hammers to get all the cost reduction possible when making the items for the Bane Lord"... and so on and so forth. Instead, should the AI actually choose to summon a Bane Lord, more or less by accident, you are likely to find it only equipped with its default equipment or, perhaps, a Flesh Eater axe - a useless thug who will die easily to your forces and have accomplished nothing except wasting valueable gems.


Finally, it does not adapt its use of mages to counter the abilities it has seen you using, but throws them along more or less at random with its larger armies. As a result of this you can get away with leaving yourself vulnerable to any sort of magic that isn't the main focus of a nation's mages in the certain knowledge that the AI will only target your vulnerabilities by accident where a human player would start recruiting or equipping mages to target your vulnerabilities.

As a result, one can really only lose to the AI while learning the game or when stacking the odds hugely against oneself and getting unlucky in the early game. It is sad in some ways, but the very nice developers are amateurs writing games in their spare time and, along with interface design, AI is one of the areas in which they are very bad, and because they are amateurs making games for their own fun we get all the great options in the game that any sane professional game developer would veto on the grounds of balance and his desire to make a game for the broad strategy playing audience, so it is an interesting trade-off. :smallsmile:


I wish you good luck learning Dominions 3; my evaluation of the AI as written above may seem harsh but I doubt you will find many, if any, veteran Dominions 3 players who fundamentally disagree with me*. The AI doesn't roll over and die, it just doesn't stand a chance. At least it has learned to build fortresses now and, as of a recent patch, doesn't build mostly militia/light infantry armies - a huge improvement over the AI performance in Dominions 2.



* Except Gandalf_Parker, who often goes to extreme lengths in order to explain the fun of his humongous SP games

[RationalGoblin]

Thanks for the tips, Deliverance.

But I'm wondering; is there enough Dominons 3 playing GiTPers for a PBEM game of Dominons? I want to join (if not start) a newbie game of Dominons, where we're all learning how to play.

[Smight]

:smallfrown: guess not :smallfrown:

[Eldan]

Well, it does sound like an awesome game. If I ever see it in a shop somewhere, I'll probably buy it.

[Shovah]

Well, it does sound like an awesome game. If I ever see it in a shop somewhere, I'll probably buy it.

Seems unlikely, but if you get the chance you should most certainly get it.



I.. have been craving it lately, quite a bit. Was heavily into it from back during 2, carrying on into 3, and then.. needed to reinstall but lost the manual to do so.
Cash-flow has been an issue, so no chance of buying again either :smallfrown:

I reckon I'll be shelling out for a second copy soon - it's definitely worth it. Although I have far too many favourites to mention, special props go to Late R'lyeh just for being so superbly messed up.



A Dominions 3 thread without Endo showing up? This is madness!


Anyway, have fun everyone. I may see you in a game soon :smallamused:

[Gamerlord]

Ordered the game a few days ago should come unto my door saturday or monday.

[RationalGoblin]

Ordered the game a few days ago should come unto my door saturday or monday.

Excellent, I hope you'll enjoy it.