4/ Counters:
Fight fire with fire. The best tools to use against this strat are the same as your opponent with some tweaks.
Critical mass: be humble. In most of my games, players either underrated the threat or had too much faith (ahem) in their preaching capabilities. If you’re not a bloodsaccing nation, you don’t stand a chance in the long run to counter you opponent with mere preachers. All you can achieve is to delay him. Still, you should thrive to do as it may be enough if you’re good at the two other tools.
Go for the sources: that is the most important part. Your opponent’s superiority lies in having the means to reach the critical mass.
First and foremost in your priority list should be raiding his bloodhunting sites to stop or lessen his bloodsaccing until he no longer has the critical mass necessary to domkill you.
If you achieve that goal, it should already be enough which is why I emphasized earlier that the would-be domkiller must first secure his bloodhunting facilities before going to war.
2d on the list should be the search and extermination of all those stealthy preachers : domes + patrols to find them despite the unrest rituals spammed on your head, mindhunt to kill those sneaky faithkillers wherever they hide.
Diplomacy: Domwars are short wars. If you want to achieve these goals before being domkilled, don’t try it alone is my best advice. You should stop listening to anyone obviously going for a dompush, that he’s no threat and blabla. Gang and kill him at once!
There’s a parallel with LA Ermor: if you let him pull out his strat unhindered, there’s a threshold beyond which all your efforts to stop him avail to nothing. Don’t let him reach that treeshold.
5/Nations:
Not every nation is well suited to make an efficient dompush, and even less a domkill.
It should be possible to domkill a weak opponent without these tools but if you have less than dom 9 and at least blood sacrifice, don’t even think of it as a reliable strategy.
Without blood sacrifice you won’t get it on any large scale anyway unless you’re far superior in size than your opponent and if you are, you should just kill him the old way.
Here’s a list of the blood sacrificing nations:
EA Marverni
EA Sauromatia
EA Mictlan
EA Abysia
EA Pangaea
EA Vanheim
EA Helheim
EA Hinnom
MA Abysia
MA Vanheim
LA Marignon
LA Mictlan
LA Abysia
LA Midgard
LA Gath
Of all these, the best suited to pull out a strong dompush is imho EA Pangaea: it’s got everything from PoD to blood sacrificers to cheap temples to stealthy preachers (flying turn1 stealthy prophet!) to easy access to jade knives and rains of toads. Alternatively, MA Abysia and Vanheim being the only two sacrificers of the era stand at a clear advantage.
6/ Examples of MP games:
InversionsRedux (starring Frozenlama, Lingchih, Militarist, Kianduatha, GraemeDice/Diceman, Sensori, Baalz and me) run recently on The Other Forum.
http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/...p?showtopic=24
I kind of screwed the game with a huge dompush as it was initially set up to test the EDS but it still remains as an example of this strat.
I played EA Pangaea with an awake dom10 D5 PoD.
We had an early war in year 1 with militarist/kailasa where I combined a pretender jumping around to snuff the candles and stealthy prophet/dryads under his capital. War over in 4 turns.
Later, GraemDice/Yomi felt threatened by my dominion and declared war which made me go for a strong dompush. I had a NAP with nearly everybody on the map at that time but the graphs made me an obvious threat and soon FrozenLama/Lanka came after me while I was holding Sensori/Niefelheim at bay with heavy diplo. At that point I also casted Gift of Nature and Gift of Nature’s Bounty which made me appearing even more threatening.
I tried to do 2 things at the same time: domkilling FL asap while trying to convince everybody I’d stop my dompush once I had. I even was genuine at start though retrospectively I stood a much better chance at winning with dompush. To give peace a chance I stopped all blood sacrifices on the Niefelheim/Oceania border and even funded some temples for Niefelheim. Anyway, I didn’t have the leisure to ponder which way to go as on the same turn I finished Lanka, Oceania and Abysia aggressed me. I then let my dompush run wild and the game was over 5 turns after, one nation falling to my dominion per turn on the last 3 turns.
Corydalis (starring Fantomen, Firewalker, Dark Kitty, ZZcat, Ghoul31, Folket, mscfish, Pyg, Tollund, Starshine Monarch, Herode and me), a few months ago 3.23 (graphs of the dead off unfortunately)
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44477
I also had an early war with Pythium which was over in 3 turns with my god+prophet attacking his capital by surprise and then my god flying to the few candles he had before he could retaliate. Then after dispatching Rlyeh and Jomon, I had a long dominion war with Gath/Pyg which was followed by the whole world turning on me.
There are 2 differences with InversionsRedux: firstly I had planned to play a domkill strategy as my main strat from the start and secondly I stupidly stopped it altogether by persuading myself it didn’t stand a chance in the late game. After eliminating more than half the players with my dompush I relied on my meagre military development when I got ganged by the remaining 3 (zzcat/Herode/Ghoul31) and sadly surrendered to zzcat by early year 5 who was a clear winner. With retrospect, I would have been hard pressed fending them off but with more experience in the dompush department I know now I stood a much better chance with it.
I hope some of you now realize how dominion war really is another nice way to enrich an already incredibly deep game. As everything not well understood it may seem overpowered to some until you understand the counters. I’d like nothing more than watching this whole aspect of the game being used more often, and people suffering from it adequately countering it for even more entertaining games.
If you found any interest in this (looong) guide, please send your thanks and good vibes to Sensori, Lingchih, GraemeDice, FrozenLama and all the players of InversionsRedux because:
- If it were not for them and our little drama, I don’t think I’d have roused myself to write this.
- It will help balancing my karma
If not, well…don’t bother
