New Player questions

[Dragar]

Armies certainly decline in importance over time, and become used mainly as shields for your important mages, thugs and SCs. It isn't just that they are less able to hurt SCs, they become very susceptible to large area spells, in particular battlefield enchantments like master enslave, undead mastery, fire storm, earthquake, etc.

Not that there is no place for armies later in the game, especially combined with powerful buffs like weapons of sharpness, fog warriors, mass flight, etc. They certainly remain useful for sieging and defending castles, and for patrolling. They just won't be your main offensive weapon.

The trade-off between recruiting and using for other purposes is part of the skill of the game, and there are no set rules, it is all situational. One conflict I have problems with is research mages - being competitive in research is critical, but at the same time the more mages you have sitting at home poring over books and the fewer you have on the battlefield. A key advantage the defender has in Dom3 is ability to keep his mages researching most of the time, while an attacker must commit them to the field for an aggressive campaign, which also makes them more exposed to remote attacks and assassinations.

In terms of having a focused undead army utilise spells that don't hurt them - unless you are ermor keep is as an option but don't rely on it. Someone expecting that can plan for it and hit you with very effective anti-undead spells. If you've been relying on large undead armies with foul vapours and rigor mortis to take out the enemy, it won't take too much to build a few poison resistant or even undead thugs (such as bane lords), or to set up a communion casting powerful anti-undead spells like Solar Brilliance or Wither Bones. Or they'll wait until you are well into enemy territory and cast Purgatory and wait for all of your chaff to burn.

Make sure if you have one or two armies operating on that premise that you also have something else capable of handling the counters. Flexibility and surprise are key in MP.

[RegnorVex]

Geez, the depth of this game. Like a good game of chess, there are basic operating principles governing the openings but then you're quickly into unpredictable tactics that put a higher value on situational awareness and knowledge of general principles. But like chess, I can see that there's also a lot of community knowledge about how to respond to well known lines.

I've been playing vanilla. Do people still play that or is CBM pretty standard? After reading the 300 page manual, I'm concerned that everything I know is wrong (to paraphrase Firesign Theatre).

[capnq]

Originally Posted by RegnorVex

After reading the 300 page manual, I'm concerned that everything I know is wrong (to paraphrase Firesign Theatre).

There are things in the manual that are wrong, often because they were changed in patches. There are entire nations not mentioned in the manual that were added in patches, as well. These forums are the most comprehensive Dom3 resource that I know of; you can dredge up a lot of info with the Search function, when you have a specific question.

[RegnorVex]

Yes, I've noticed that. I've been pouring through the forums a lot lately and have learned much from that experience. A lot of the replies in this thread have been very helpful (looks at Dragar). At the end of the day, however, nothing has been more instructive than actually playing.