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there is a generals thread in 4chan:
http://boards.4chan.org/vg/res/54757391
at the moment I wish they add:
an hotkey to put all gems in lab, similar to the put all slaves in lab, useful with the gem generator pretenders.
one shortcut to select the prophet, select pretender is actually enabled.
one way to know the invocations likewise the recruitment mode, where you can see the units right-clicking on them. playing with lemuria the first time requires to be reading the manual to know what invocation is a mage.
and if anyone is interested and can read in Spanish, I recommend this AAR:
http://www.puntadelanza.net/Foro/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=360082#p360082
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That's not even a steal, it's a full-blown heist  .
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I just got this game yesterday and played a short game. Pretty enjoyable even though I had no idea what was going on most of the time.
I got a few noobie questions. I'm probably missing something here but how come archers seemed so useless? I played Caelum, and their description said they have good archers, but it seems that every battle, the archers fire off maybe 2 rounds before the enemy closes in on my melee line but those 2 rounds seem to do no damage? I think i saw them do a little damage once the enemy was closer and had engaged with my melee troops but I thought the point was to weaken their numbers before they reached me.
Also, maybe this is just for Caelum but it seems that mages can do a decent amount of work in battle casting spells, but the melee commander guys seems to be only for leading troops (giving unit slots)? Because I wanted them to be in the fight with the troops, but they're hardly any tankier than a armored infantry, and they just die if they get into the fight. Am I missing something here, or do I just need to set those guys to "Stay behind troops" all the time?
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I mostly use nations that use little or no ranged weapons whatsoever (Atlantis,Mictlan, some Agartha and Arcoscephale) so i'm unsure, but i think there are many scripting tricks you can abuse, like scripting to scoot and shoot (it's not immediately clear how to do that, you'll have to experiment a bit). There should also be some battle-magic spells somewhere that drammatically improve your archers effectiveness (precision is everything with ranged units). If i'm not wrong Caelum has the best archers of the early age or close to that tho (perhaps the chinese-like faction have better ranged units?) you're playing EA, right?
As for the commanders, it depends on your nation, some have really strong and big unique commanders (giants, basalt kings, stuff) which are pretty decent on their own, but the real trick of a commander lies in its inventory, and if you plan to use one in the frontline you must absolutely equip them with good magical armor and other equipment (forged by your mages*, researched in the Construction research level), and either an AoE weapon (frost brand/fire brand are the basic ones) or the boots that give trample ability if they're much taller than humans; also try not to get them too swarmed, for even terrible infantry can eventually fatigue them and make them pass out or score almost impossible criticals against armors they cannot hope to penetrate (there are astronomical dice rolls in the game that might mean that a peasant can kill a dragon with a pitchfork)
Some nations early/mid game strategies revolve specifically around kitting some big commanders with strong weapons and sending them alonish against decent armies and winning easily (this is called "thugging" for the early game and making an SC (SuperCombatant) for the middle game)
A properly kitted frost giant SC is really a one man army,and my Atlantian thugs easily reach the 80+ independent kills alone.
Talking about Caelum, if i'm not wrong they're basically squishier humans with hollow bones and wings, i think their strenght lies more with their air magic than anything else, but i'm sure if you kit a decent Caelum commander with Black Steel Full Plate, a good helmet and the already mentioned AoE small weapon he can be a very good scripted flanker, especially with a body guard scripted to follow him (human-sized commanders are very susceptible to swarming).
Hopefully he wont pass out from the heavy armor fatigue too fast (if he does, try equipping some lighter armor),
as a general rule, i think Caelum ranks among the squishiest nations, they pay dearly their incredible strategical move speed...
Mind you, i'm still pretty noobish after 30 hours of dom4 and many more of dom3, and i never really played Caelum, so take these with a grain of salt, and keep searching and experimenting, it's half the fun of the game ^^
*the best are usually Earth ones, but you'll quickly learn the elemental levels needed to forge basic equipment, every forging requires gems and quite a lot of your early ones
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thanks for the tips, I just realized that Caelum was listed by the OP as a nation noobies shouldn't start with lol.
I guess I'll try another more standard nation for now.
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this game looks sweet, il take a look
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Caelum is not a thug nation, unless you are MA and have enough of a D gem income and enogh forts up to sacrfice D random High Seraphs to start producing Wight Mages (in which case, they become pretty scary thugs-very lite SCs, with Death, Air, and Water magic defensive buffs, even if they're pretty squishy), which can then be kitted out.
In general, Tien Chi is the EA Archer nation. Archers are ranked based on 4 different criteria.
1) Precision as mentioned, but this is actually fairly minor. While it's useful if you need to snipe someone, for an archer army, weight of fire does nullify it to a degree it as long as it doesn't fking suck, they can hit something against a large army. The other categories are
2) the bow type. Longbows>Composite Bows>Short Bows, because the former do more damage, have longer range, while crossbows are a separate category for armored troops (and sacrifice rate of fire in exchange). There are other bows like some giant nations have or some pygmies, and poison, but here Caelum falls short because they have short bows as opposed to the composite bows of TC (and MA TC has x-bows too).
3) How easy they are to mass. Giant archers suck despite having good bows, as do Jomon/samurai archers. The latter may have longbows, but the cost a fkton and they have so much resource cost that they can't be massed in the necessary weight of numbers. Compare that to MA/LA Man's longbows: fairly cheap gold cost for a longbow compared to non-human longbows (like Bandar/Patala I believe) and, more importantly, they don't cost an arm and a leg in resources to mass up. Compare LA Man vs Jomon: 11 resources vs 25 resources (and I believe MA Man has cheaper longbows). 12 gold vs 11 gold, but who the fk cares, with troops this cheap, resources are the limiters to quickly gathering up longbow armies.
4) Magic support. There are 2 major magic paths that archer nations should be concerned with having: Air and Fire. Fire gives you the ability to cast Flaming Arrows, which makes regular bows MUCH scarier and is a major force multiplier to regular bows. The other, and generally weaker battlefield buff, is Wind Guide, which is a +precision boost. Caelum has only 1 of those (Air) without a pretender, whereas for EA TC, they have easy access to both (only F2 is necessary: Phoenix Power->extra fire gem in battle to empower->flaming arrows).
Caelum is generally not newbie friendly because their troops generally suck because basically an all-flying army (except for those all-important Mammoths) requires SOME tradeoff to having awesome mobility. So they pay with Size 3 (only 2 per square instead of 3), pretty bad equipment, and bad base stats in general minus precision. EA and MA Caelum are still "playable", whereas most people agree that LA Caelum probably needs help. The main issue is that EA and MA Caelum have fairly mammoth dependent, weak early-games (and trampler counters are fairly widespread in the early magic levels), and they need to fully utilize their magic to properly be a force. Flying Storm-wielding LIGHTNINGBOLTS (well, actually thunderstrikes), Seeking Arrows to kill key commanders, Frozen Heart and Lightning to kill Giants and thugs, etc, raiding the enemy nation's backlines (which has been pretty heavily nerfed). I've been using a flying Archer army recently in one of my MP games with a pretender to provide the flaming arrows, but it does clash with my need to cast Storm to supplement the arrow fire with thunderstrikes (Storm scatters missiles and cause a % of them not to land, as well as reduces precision).
There's a flying patch coming up soon that should buff Caelum however, even then I'd recommend something like MA Ulm to get a handle on basic troop management and how to leverage basic battlemagics (their magic is weak, but still extremely effective fire support for Ulm's armies, and heck, those troops are enough to beat the AI on pretty much any difficulty when properly scripted and formationed), EA TC to start to delve into the diversity of the magic system (every possible path minus blood), and probably Eriu or Niefel (how to create, kit, and script thugs and SCs; mass airdropping Sidhe Lords on every enemy province in a massive blitz is part of the fun of Eriu).
And finally, if you want commanders that fight with the troops, play a giant nation or a thug nation like Eriu or Vanheim, whose commanders are superhuman enough to do so. There's generally a reason why you don't want your human commanders fighting with the rest of their troops as in RL, because that's kind of a bad idea if they randomly die. 
@ PassiveAce: I recently heard someone describe it as Civ+Total War on a Risk-like map, with DnD magic and stats/dice rolls. If that interests you and you aren't phased by the pixel graphics, go for it. Its sort of the Dwarf Fortress of Fantasy TBS, I think.
Also, read the manual to see if you like it.
http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/manual_dom4.pdf
Go to page 111, on the current version. They recently included an excellent piece discussing a nation in whole, even if it isn't exhaustive by any means.
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Hi OP, feel free to add me to the list of TL players of dominions, even tho i'm playing really rarely lately and as i said i'm still somewhere in the learning curve, btw thanks for being clear on the archer stuff i didn't know ^^
it'd be nice to try to set up a TL game in the future btw, i don't really wanna play against the AI and it's quite hard to find games...
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Look to the Desura forums: there are plenty of MP games being hosted there, and they fill up quickly.
I'm also going to have to go through this thread and update it. The op hasn't been updated in quite some time lol.
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/o1QZUpV.jpg)
a good read
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Nice!
I would love to read a writeup of a game of dominions, maybe il make my own.
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Hi guys, so I'm playing my very first multiplayer game, and I'm just getting destroyed be the worst luck. (well the bad luck is partly facilitated by a throne spreading world misfortune, so I shouldn't really complain)
I had a small expansion force moving out taking indy provinces, and suddenly I got an event, something on the lines of "a group of passing adventurers decided to stop the unfair rule of a province". And with that I lost a province which cuts off pretty much the only route connecting this expansion force and my capital/main area.
Now the main problem is that holy shit this party of adventurers are strong. Its 5 guys, consisting of 3 trolls (raider, mage, archer), a warrior mage, and a dark knight riding a gryphon looking thing. I'm playing EA Pangaea and my expansion force consists of around 50 troops of mainly satyr warriors lead by a Pan, and I think this little force has no way of taking that province back. The dark knight has 27 def 26 prot with fear+15, and the trolls have decent def and prot with 70+ hp. Can anyone give me an idea of how I can kill these guys? I would probably need to bring an army from the other side as well to attack at the same time with my expansion force.
My Pan is only E1 so I can't cast the increase strength spell ( I have alt 1, conj 1). the best I can do is cast entangling vines on all of them then try to kill them with troops, but I feel like just that dark knight guy alone would destroy me, with 27 def it takes a miracle for my troops to hit him ( gota hope for a surround I guess), and even if I hit him, 26 prot would be very hard to get through as well ( though he only has 15hp). Plus every turn he stays alive, I run the risk of my guys succumbing to his fear. But even if I kill him the trolls will be tough to deal with, they even have regen along with their 70+ hp. One of the mages is also summoning magical wolfs I think.
I almost want to send all my dryads in to try to seduce these so called heroes, but I think that would probably fail horribly lol.
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Trying to work around Bogus and his merry men is the best option early game, I'm afraid. Unlucky :/.
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oh dam, I didn't know Bogus was well known to ruin people's day lol. I thought these guys were randomly generated or something. Well, I'm pretty screwed, because his party is at a province with a bridge, so unless the rivers freeze over, 3 of my provinces including a farm would be useless...
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bogus man, bogus.
i have not seen bogus on dom4 but i rememeber he was vulnerable to fire
if you achieve your seduction attempts, you will be in a very good position with this thug.
taxes are collected in forts, not just in the capital.
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You found the dev's dnd party! Just make rocks fall :p
Jk
In Dom3 Bogus and party were gifts in the late game as one or two were scripted with the otherwise unusable fire commander command. Which meant you could mass copy orders for cheap bows on scouts.
I don't know if this is still possible in Dom4, but the order copy command hasn't changed radically so i'd guess it's still possible.
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That's considered an exploit though and will be frowned upon, if it's still in the game
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EPT
