Request for strategy: Late game tips

[jutetrea]

I consider a NAP completely different than an alliance. IMO while in an alliance its a NAP, a defensive treaty, and an "i'll back you up in anything you do...even if its really really dumb" all rolled into one.

A NAP is just a small measure of security, and 3 months warning is nothing really. If you're fighting on one front its tough to do anything about another front in 3 months.
6 months notice is best imo, if you can't respond in 6 turns you've got big problems.

[atul]

Yeah, well, the NAP thing was just an example from the "real" life. I think my main point was, if someone came to me really early with a proposition that let's be allies for the rest of the game, I'd be really wary. Maybe after few joint wars where both of us has had the change to prove that it's more than just talking the talk, but from the get go, no.

With some people it's easy to plan campaigns, share the spoils of victory and feel fair, with other it feels that each turn is battle of wills whether either gets a little more edge. I know which kind of people I want to ally with, my problem being, I don't know what kind of people most of the other players are. Yet.

[jutetrea]

Good point, unfortunately sometimes the best allies aren't initial neighbors as well. Both good and bad when you're ally is a few nations away.


Do folks ever let the strength of the nation play a role in who your allies are, or is it all personality/playing style?

[Baalz]

Yeah, I don't know about an alliance until the very end, I'm more inclined to ally until our alliance is almost certainly going to win (in my opinion), declare moral victory, then with plenty of warning start fighting my former ally for the win (hopefully with the help of some of the less powerful nations...keep then in and having fun). Not so much a cut throat attitude, just seems like actually going through the motions of conquering every territory with no real challenge, THEN starting the real end game would be more tedium than fun for everybody. I'd much rather lose a close game than win a shutout...

[Gandalf Parker]

Strength of nation definetly matters to me. I find it more satisfying, and often safer, to ally with people low on the scoreboard. Not completely on their way out but one who might be more grateful and sharing than someone already high up.

[MaxWilson]

jutetrea said:
Good point, unfortunately sometimes the best allies aren't initial neighbors as well. Both good and bad when you're ally is a few nations away.

Yeah, depending upon whether you need military support this may or not matter. I know my SP games are heavily affected by my need to ensure self-sufficiency; if I took two nations at once and played them as allies (hmmm, interesting thought) I could put e.g. Astral magic for Dispel and boosters on one and Fire/Water for Rune Smasher and map killers on the other. I'm not sure that I'm schizophrenic enough to play both nations well so I may or may not do this IRL, but having a reliable ally at pretender design time would affect how I spend points. (Yeah, yeah, I should try MP. It's too much of a time commitment.)

It's too bad you can't trade spells a la Master of Orion techs.

-Max

[Micah]

Max, with the amount of time you spend posting on the boards I'm sure you have enough time to fit in at least one MP game. =)

Just don't do what I did and sign up for a lot when the turns take 2 minutes, since then it WILL be a large commitment down the road.

[Manuk]

Boron's map

I posted the question in an other thread but this seems to be the right place. Anyway, i found this thread in the mod's section. It could aid new players to familiarize with late-game-stuff. I will try this at home. Let's see if I can learn something.

What I was looking for is a mod for make all spells lvl 0 and i don't know how to do it.

[MaxWilson]

Manuk said:
What I was looking for is a mod for make all spells lvl 0 and i don't know how to do it.

I've attached a mod which does this. [Edit: attachments don't work right now. Download it instead from ]http://students.cs.byu.edu/~mdw45/easyspell.dm] One caveat: this doesn't adjust the difficulty of constructing magic items. That's because unique items *must* be left at level 8 to be unique, and also because I (cough) was too lazy to look up all the item numbers. It would be

#selectitem [name or number, without brackets]
#constlevel 0
#end

I'm not sure if magic items are numbered sequentially, in which case you could do what I did and write a for-loop to set them all to zero.

-Max

P.S. Thanks for asking. I should have written this long ago to use with the battle-map, but I never got around to looking up the mod commands.

[MaxWilson]

Touche. In my defense I'll note that it's easier to check a forum on the run than it is to install Dominions and my latest saved game. But yes, time spent posting could probably be used more productively on my thesis. [He said, while writing a long post.]

It occurs to me that there are a lot of nice things you could do with allied nations. If you've ever played Axis and Allies, you know that the best way to lose as the Allies is neglect coordination and play nations as separate-but-equal (e.g. Britain trying to guard her African income from the Germans, when the Americans can actually do it more cheaply. Britain should be trying to help Russia by dropping troops in Karelia or bombing Berlin).

For instance, what if you combined Mictlan with Marverni? Mictlan can take terrible, suicidal scales (since they don't need Prod anyway and gold is fungible) and a massive bless and do the early expansion (ideally with an awake pretender), while Marverni takes good scales including magic and an imprisoned pretender. Together they can get a Blood Stone factory up relatively easily; Marverni can spread its nice dominion (with its cheap temples) over Mictlan's lands to at least cancel out the terrible scales, and funnel extra money from its good scales into Mictlan's early expansion. Marverni takes weakly-defended provinces with Marverni's dominion from Mictlan so they can both benefit from Marverni's better scales (since they're pooling gold anyway and positive scales only benefit the scale owner), while Mictlan holds on to any areas that are militarily contested. Mictlan's dominion needs to be strong enough to not get dominion-killed, but since Marverni and Mictlan have blood-sacrifice it should be possible to control exactly where Marverni's dominion lives.

In order to make it genuinely Axis and Allies-ish, however, you'd need an "Allied" option which lets you have troops in an allies' territory and participate in defense. Ideally as part of one large army with the PD but if necessary in a separate battle. And you'd want allies to be able to move through your territory at full mapmove. I don't see it happening with Dominions, but there's still a lot you could do with alliances in the game as it is.

-Max