Some beginner gameplay and strategies questions

[Zywack]

First, a question: Does having enough temples boost your dominion strength, or does it only increase your amount of holy points? The reason I ask is because I took over a player's place who disapeared in a multiplayer game: I figured it'd be good experience for me no matter what happens and I'd be helping out the other people by enabling them to continue without turning over the country to AI. The country I took over is in a DISASTROUS state: For example, 3 provinces at turn 13 with a tiny army: I assume that the most of the army has been lost to independents, and what's left is sneaking 3 province away for reasons I can't even begin to understand. I realize I've got absolutely no shot at winning the game with a position like that but I'm implementing a desperation plan that just might enable me to grow up substancially with an acceptable army before the forced peace wears off (Thank you very much to the other players in the game). I can't win, but if the current turn extremely risky battle is won, the rest of the plan should work and I should at least be able to bloody the nose of whoever comes for my territory. If I can do that much, I'll be happy with my game, it'll be good experience and at least the closer players won't get gem income for free so everyone wins.

The thing that terrifies me the most though (amongst all the other horrible things I have to cope with of course) is that the pretender I inherited has a dominion strength of 2... Two. So while it's highly unlikely I'd ever get to enough income, province or even time to have it be possible, if the impossible somehow happen, would it be possible to increase my dominion strength through a large amount of temples?


For the whole thug/sc discussion, thank you very much everyone! It's extremely enlightening and I'll be trying out those ideas: At the state the current game is in, I can afford to try out many of those suggestions, especially since I now have a province that can produce Enchantress which gives me Fire Access (Hidden in Sand is a good idea but I found the site before I could build a lab in a swamp).

I had a Sleeper already on hand so I geared him up with a cross between rdonj and Amhazair suggestions (plus reinvigoration boots): I unfortunately only had the occassion to fight two small battles with him so far (battles I'd have won with few losses even if he weren't there) but at least he got out of them in top shape so it's looking good. It gives me a good base to work with: Now that I have something that works, I can start tweaking the commanders and items in reasonable fashion as situation warrants. I'll be sure to try out the Ancestor Smiths and the Bane Lord ideas too although I'd be a bit scared of the Bane Lord with all the banishes flying around.

I hadn't tried Cleansing Water since Banish seemed to be equal in damage and area but without a fatigue cost (and 100% of my mages have holy 1 in the first place), but I hadn't noticed the "No resist" clause on Cleansing Water...

Regarding Earthquake, doesn't that spell hit the entire battlefield including my own troops? Although, none of my troops or commander would die from a single earthquake and since I'm the one with all the arrows and banishes, it just might be worth the tradeoff...

I haven't tried communions yet, but it's definitively something I should practice with very soon.

Regarding Ermor, yes I agree that fighting them is extremely annoying... I did hit them as soon as I could, but due to our relative position, they had over 30 provinces by the time we were neighboors. Taking a province from them adds no economic benefit whatsoever (and it often simply increase your front size) unless it has gem production, you need +supply items and whenever I saw them taking a province from another player I had to rush to take it back before it killed off all the population. In a multiplayer game, I admit I'd most likely be inclined to fight them with everything I have early on even though it'd likely mean my own death at the hands of other players...

Oh! Question: How do you make your mages buff your Thug? Like with Quickness for example: The area it affects is simply tiny. How do I 'guarantee' or at least improve my chance that my mage cast Quickness (or other buff) on my thug instead of some random PD or a group of heavy cavalry?

[bbz]

I think people suggested Earthquake because half of the skeletons have 4 hp so or up to 8hp. Also the way to use it is with a single caster defending a province that an enemy is about to attack. Use some pd to distract the enemy then all you need is 1 or 2 E4 casters with 5 earth gems each, cast summon earthpower to get them to E5 then set them to: cast earthquake, retreat.(giving them the two extra gem would make them cast earthquake like an E6 mage and reduce the 300 fatigue from the spell enough so that they can retreat(and not be unconcious because of it) ,also you need high defence to avoid being hit by earthquake that is if your mages dont have enough hit points to survive it)

Answer to the second question, they do it randomly in an area around them also they tend to target less armoured targets I think(that is for legions of steel buff, not sure about the others but it has some tricks i think)
What I usually do is set the thug at the bottom and the rear of the map(or top) and place the mage behind the thug so that thier squares form a rectangle. Also I dont place anything near them so that the mage doesnt make a mistake. Another way to ensure that your thug has quickness is have the mage cast it 2-3 times before battle(at least improves the chances of affecting the thug)

About the first question I'm pretty sure it increases your dominion aswell. So if have dominion 8 and 10 temples you can get up to 10 candles in a friendly province.

[llamabeast]

To address your Oceania question, I think you would find them much more fun in CBM (Conceptual Balance Mod, latest version 1.92). Clams are effectively removed, so turtling becomes much less attractive. Land-water interactions have become easier, and lots more spells work underwater. I think MA Oceania has also been made somewhat stronger, although I can't remember exact details.

[Zywack]

That sounds promising... I'll give it a look, thanks!

Quick question: How do you assign the 5 bodyguards to your mage to protect them from assassins and horrors? Is it simply by setting 5 troops to "guard commander" and hope for the best, or is there an actual "set bodyguard" command for that purpose?

[parone]

'guard commander' units will fight in an assasination attempt. that is the correct command

[Legendary League]

The only way to guarantee it is to have the mage and thug be the only two units on the field, and for them to share the same AoE (I believe). Another way to guarantee it is to communion slave the thug and have the masters cast self-buffs like personal luck, which will affect the thug that way (be careful of building up too much fatigue on them though). Other than that, I'm not sure how the AI scripts spell cast locations.

[Shangrila00]

Regarding Dominion, more temples increase your max dominion and holy points. However, your dom spread doesn't increase so far as anyone knows. So at dom 2, only 1 in 5 temple checks will produce a candle. Needless to say, that's pretty bad. Anyone that seriously makes an effort to domkill you will do it very easily even without blood sac simply with stone idols and preaching unless you are a nation with strong priests or better yet inquisitor priests. And even with strong priests, and tons of recruitment turns given to recruiting priests, you are unlikely to see your scales in much of your empire. That might not be such a terrible thing if you have absolutely awful scales.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by bbz

I think people suggested Earthquake because half of the skeletons have 4 hp so or up to 8hp. Also the way to use it is with a single caster defending a province that an enemy is about to attack. Use some pd to distract the enemy then all you need is 1 or 2 E4 casters with 5 earth gems each, cast summon earthpower to get them to E5 then set them to: cast earthquake, retreat.(giving them the two extra gem would make them cast earthquake like an E6 mage and reduce the 300 fatigue from the spell enough so that they can retreat(and not be unconcious because of it) ,also you need high defence to avoid being hit by earthquake that is if your mages dont have enough hit points to survive it)

Yeah, there's basically two ways to use Earthquakes. The first is as described above, casting and retreating. (If you do it with human-hp mages don't use two in the same province though. The first caster will rack up massive fatigue from the casting, meaning he's very likely to suffer a critical hit and die from the second Earthquake. The Ideal caster would be a Troll King, they have 4E with boots, and enough hp to shrug of a couple of Earthquakes.)

The second way, if you really want to stick it to a big enemy army is to first cast army-buffs to make sure your own guys can weather the quakes. (Assuming you have the research of course.) The single best protection would be Fog Warriors. (Alt7) Since Earthquake counts as nonmagical damage, it will only do one point of damage to those affected, while being extremely unlikely to dispel the mistform. Another option would be Army of Gold/Lead or Mass Protection if you have medium armour accross the board already, both of which will mean only critical hits or very lucky rolls will do any damage at all.

Of course, if you're at the point where you can reliably cast Fog Warriors or Army of Gold/Lead in battle your problems with the AI should be pretty much over.

You can get a similar effect by bringing along a (probably smaller) army of tougher stuff. (Usually summonded. The trolls you get along with the Troll King in Troll King's court would qualify for example.)

Originally Posted by bbz

Answer to the second question, they do it randomly in an area around them also they tend to target less armoured targets I think(that is for legions of steel buff, not sure about the others but it has some tricks i think)
What I usually do is set the thug at the bottom and the rear of the map(or top) and place the mage behind the thug so that thier squares form a rectangle. Also I dont place anything near them so that the mage doesnt make a mistake. Another way to ensure that your thug has quickness is have the mage cast it 2-3 times before battle(at least improves the chances of affecting the thug)

Yeah, there's no way to be completely certain besides making sure the thug is the only unit in range. This is easy for spells with range 1 or touch, but various other spells have greater ranges.

Other than that there's some tricks that can help nudge the spell AI along: Single target spells are more likely to be cast on the single unit with the highest hit points. (Which in many cases will be your thug, but keep away other high hp units like elephants, vine ogres, fall bears, the various golems, etc...) AoE spells on the other hands tend to target big troop squads, so you might want to park your thug in the middle of the biggest group of regular dudes around) Spells without perfect accuracy will also tend to target units that are close to others. And a last important consideration is the stat to be boosted: spells that boost protection tend to go to units that have low protection to begin with. I'm less sure if the same reasoning goes for other stats though. (Does quikness prioritise units with low action points? Iron Will to those with low MR? I wouldn't be surprised based on the "logic" of the spellcasting system, but never actually noticed such a corelation myself.)

Originally Posted by Zywack

I had a Sleeper already on hand so I geared him up with a cross between rdonj and Amhazair suggestions (plus reinvigoration boots)[...]

Yeah, good call on the boots. The biggest diference between the two chassis is that, not being undead, the sleeper doesn't have 0 encumberance. If you want to send him out against big AI hordes solo he has to be fatigue neutral, or he'll die. (He also has significantly less hp, meaning he also regains less from regen. The better att/def/prec/move of the sleeper mean very, very little in a chaff-killing role unfortunately, so for this purpose he's strictly inferior. Which doesn't mean it can't work.)

[Shardphoenix]

Originally Posted by Zywack

I had a Sleeper already on hand so I geared him up with a cross between rdonj and Amhazair suggestions (plus reinvigoration boots)

Sleepers have 15 precision, and that`s really much. Give him Eye of Aiming, Bow of war - and watch the slaughter! It`s like bladewind spam, but without earth mage involved, and much more accurate.

[Zywack]

I'll probably have the chance to try out a Sleeper with bow of war this weekend: Looking foward to it!

For the thug, I had some underwater fighting to do so I geared up a Sea Troll King. It worked. My god did it work. A huge thank you for all the recommendations everyone

I didn't have the chance to try out Earthquake yet (2 Earth is the best late age T'ien Ch'i gets so it takes some effort to cast a 4 earth spell in battle) but I'll be sure to do so before the game is over for learning sake.


I have a new question and for once it's super straightfoward:

What happens if your capital is under siege and you have an Immortal unit that die? Do they:

a) Die and never respawn
b) Respawn and immediately attack the enemy that is sieging the castle
C) Respawn inside the castle with the other defenders