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| Good battlefield spells include Rigor Mortis, Rain of Stones, Astral Tempest, Fire Storm, and Poison Vapours.
Raiding Not all battles are for conquering and holding territory; it can be worth it, especially for highly mobile or stealthy forces, to target individual provinces for some particular value and do damage before the province is retaken. Damage can take the form of, e.g. capturing a province, cranking the tax rate up to 200, optionally hanging around for a turn to pillage or blood-hunt (thus pushing up the unrest even more), and then leaving it with 1 PD, fully expecting the enemy to take it back. (And if not, oh well. You keep getting taxes.) This works particularly against enemy fortresses if you don't have time to take the walls down and thus can't build PD or expect to keep the province long-term. No Survivors Routed troops will flee into neighboring friendly provinces. Make sure that no such provinces exist for your enemy! Use the "magic" movement phase (together with stealth armies) which comes before the "normal" movement phase to conquer all the enemy provinces around the main "battlefield" province. If the enemy army in this main "battlefield" province is routed and has no province to flee into, all enemy units are lost and your foes will hopefully think twice before attacking you again. Check the army size graphic after such an battle. Take a screenshot from it and send it to your human opponents as a warning. [It actually doesn't seem to be necessary to use the "magic" phase. If an invading army A is cutting into B's lands, and A moves from newly-conquered land L to attack B's land M while B simultaneously attacks L with airborne forces or reinforcements from elsewhere--if B captures L successfully then when A loses at M, A has nowhere to retreat to and so routed units die. The lesson here is that having well-defended forward bases helps invading armies recover from unpleasant surprises, even if you don't need the provinces for income. In particular, it keeps mages alive, since commanders almost always survive a rout.] Paratroopers Some rituals like Fairy Trod allow you to move an army in the magic phase into any enemy province. Other spells like Cloud Trapeze allow an single Commander to teleport himself into an enemy province. Other (cheaper) spells like Imprint Souls or Call of the Wild summon a small armies into any enemy province. Such magic 'Paratroopers' armies attack together with stealth armies already hiding in the target province and having the order "attack province". Force your enemy to patrol his lands and invest his gold into province defense. Keep in mind that battles initated by magic come before normal troop movement. Super Combatants & Thugs Particularly formidable commanders, such as Niefel Jarls and a number of pretender types, can become extremely dangerous on the battlefield with appropriate magical gear, orders and perhaps a few spells. Some such commanders can conquer enemy provinces alone and are called Thug or Super Combatants (SC). 7.11 Items Basic items These are the default armor and weapons of units in the game. Their properties are analogous to those of forged items; for example, a suit of chain mail is similar to the forged Weightless Chain Mail except it causes more fatigue when worn. Basic items may not be traded, though they are removed when a commander is given a forged item for that slot. If you later remove the forged item, the original Basic Item reappears at the commander's slot. Note that some Basic Items are actually better than some of the (lesser) forged Items. Make sure to check the commander's stats before and after equipping him with an forged item. Forged items In the mysterious and magical world of Dominions hundred of different magic items exist. Mages with sufficient skill can produce marvellous items of the forge if they have researched the recipes or blueprints for these items with the Construction school of magic. These items can then be equipped by all Commander units be it mages, warriors, Pretender Gods or void summons as long as they have appropriate item slots. More information about forging can be found here. More information about items of air can be found here. Weapons Ranging from sticks and stones to swords and the eldricth Mind Blasts, Dominions 3 is filled with different kinds of weapons. Many of them are mundane while some are powerful magic attacks or magic items forged by mages. Melee weapon statistics * Weapon damage: This is the damage from weapon without added strength unless "No Strength" is stated * Attack: The attack bonus or malus of the weapon. The higher attack the more often the unit hits the enemy * Defense: Defense bonus or malus from the weapon. The more defense the more often your unit can dodge attacks * Length: The length of the weapon used to determine repeling and if the unit gets poisoned by some spiny units * One-handed or two-handed: Whether the weapon is wielded with one or two hands. * Special statistic: This contains the special statistics of the weapon such as Magical or Armor Piercing Other melee weapons This section contains a number of weapons that don't fit into the category of normal weapons: * Natural weapons: These include attacks like Bite, Claw, Talons, Tentacle and Hoof often found on animals or monsters. These attacks often have 0 length meaning that a monster attacking with a Bite would get poisoned from Atlantian Coral Armor. They often have little damage, relying on the creature's strength. * Sleep Vines: Found on Mandagoras and Manikins, the sleep vines do little damage but they also cause fatigue on their target and are potentially devastating. * Drain Life: Some units such as Illithids and Vampires attack by draining life from their targets at close range. This attack does damage on the target and transfers at max 5 HP per hit to the attacker. * Paralyze: Paralyze is found on some units, notably Disposed Spirits and void summons, this touch attack paralyzes the target if it fails to resist the attack. Additional paralyzis counts as damage so units with only Paralyze as attack can kill units. * Drain Strength: This is another attack found on void summons and unded. This attack damages the strength of the target for duration of the battle and eventually starts doing damage. * Touch of Leprosy: This is a rare attack found on some Foul Spawn. This attack causes Disease upon a successful strike. Ranged Weapons Statistics * Weapon damage: This is the damage from weapon without added strength unless "No Strength" is stated * Precision: The precision of the ranged attack. The higher precision the closer to intended target the shot lands * Range: How many grid-squares the object can fly. Press g on the battle view to see the grid. * Ammo: Number of ammunition in the weapon. If the weapon runs out of ammo in battle it cannot be used during that battle or other battle in same turn. Weapon ammo is replenished during turn processing. * One-handed or two-handed: Whether the weapon is wielded with one or two hands. * Special statistic: This contains the special statistics of the weapon such as Magical or Armor Pierrcing * Swords * Axes
* Daggers * Hammers, Maces and Mauls * Flails
* Morning Stars * Spears & Pikes * Halberds & Glaives * Staffs & Rods Armor Armor, ranging from leather cuirases to magic armor, contribute to the Protection value of the unit. The more protection the unit has the more harder it must be hit before it takes damage. Heavy armor encumbers and reduces the defence of the unit, and spellcasting causes a greater amount of fatigue when wearing armor. Armor is less effective on units with high natural protection. The Protection bonus from armor counts only half against Armor Piercing attacks and not at all against Armor Negating attacks. Commanders wear magic armor on the Body slot. * Body Armor * Shields * Helmets * Boots
Rings Rings are magic items forged by mages which go to the Accessory slots of the commander. There are great many different types of rings which effects range from increased Attack the increased magic powers. Talismans and necklaces Forged by mages, the various Talismans and Necklaces go to the Accessory slot of a commander. There is a vast number of different talismans and necklaces ranging from the Disease causing but Fire Gem generating Fever Fetish to the Crystal Coin that empowers Astral magic skill. Other accessories Dominions 3 has a huge number of magic items that go to the Accessory slot of a commander. They range from Magic Carpets to Barrels of Air and wall-shaking horns. 8. Dominions III Strategy Guides 8.1 Communion Guide Author, Baalz. URL: http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=577320&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=7&fpart=1 Alright, seems like every couple months a new thread with questions about communions pops up so I figured I'd write a guide about communions, answer the common questions and go over the basics of how to use them effectively. Communions are potentially very powerful, potentially very dangerous, and definitely kinda confusing. The basics. Communions (and their interchangeable, less well known blood brother Sabbaths) are a way for mages to work together to become greater than the sum of their parts. The slaves both boost the magic power of the masters and soak up the fatigue of the spells cast resulting in masters who can cast big spells much longer than otherwise possible. Because of the fact that they keep soaking up fatigue after exhaustion - all the way up to 200 fatigue at which point they start taking damage and quickly die, it is often the case that a mismanaged communion causes catastrophic loss of mages even when you win. Many the player has sworn off communions after watching a dozen mages perish as Armageddon is opened up on the terrified and fleeing PD. In Dominions, bad luck can always render any carefully laid plans asunder, but understanding how to use communions will result in them being much more useful and much less dangerous (to you, hopefully they¿re quite dangerous to your opponent). First it¿s important to understand the basic mechanics of the communion. Slaves boost the power of both slaves and masters inside the communion by 1 per power of 2. This means +1 at 2 slaves, +2 at 4, +3 at 8, etc. The masters are boosted in all paths which they already have, while the slaves are boosted in all paths whether they have them or not. The slave power is important for calculating the fatigue they receive for spells cast by the master. The specific mechanics of how fatigue is parsed out is not entirely clear, but roughly slaves will receive fatigue as if they cast the spell themselves (which is why the power level is important), divided by how many slaves there are. Encumbrance is not added to this calculation and significant extra fatigue is accrued if the slaves could not cast the spell themselves after the communion boost another reason the slave power is important. The communion bonus does not show up on the character sheet, but it is effected by buffs. This means that so long as there are at least two slaves, all slaves will benefit from such spells as phoenix power for the purpose of soaking up fatigue. Putting together a successful communion is a lot like baking. You've got several different basic components which need to be properly balanced, and a few optional extras which can be used to add an interesting twist if you want. Just like baking, you can't stray too far away from the correct ratios or the bread won't rise resulting in best case reduced effectiveness of the communion, worst case a bunch of dead slaves. The basic components of course, are the masters and slaves, and choosing the correct ones to use is not as easy as it first seems. First, you've got to decide what type of thing you're baking, is it bread, or cookies, or a cake? There are several different types of communions, here are a couple recipes. Once you become familiar with them you will be able to tweak them without unbalancing the important factors and come up with your own recipes. Classic communion This communion is intended to rain down mid-line evocation spells in a never ending barrage. Masters should have an elemental path and you'll want to script something like falling fires, falling frost, magma eruption, thunderstrike, acid rain, blade wind or gifts from heaven. Slaves will either need one level in the same path or one of the masters will need to cast power of the spheres (or phoenix power, etc if all your masters are the same path). The really important thing to keep in mind with this communion is critical mass. You need to have *at least* 8 slaves, 10 is much safer to have a buffer against those stray arrows. Outside of that, as you add masters make sure you have more slaves than masters. 14 slaves, 12 masters is fine*, but if you're short on mages you'll want 10 slaves and 5 masters. The * is because you'll need to add a few extra slaves if you're spamming particularly fatiguing spells like Thunderstrike. Your masters will have +3 to all paths, which really helps those spells which scale with mage power. Your slaves will be at least level 4 after the boost, which means they should be taking only 1-3 fatigue or so per spell that is cast as the spells you're casting all have requirements of 3 or under and fatigue in the 30-50 range this is important in order to keep your slaves from accumulating fatal fatigue. No worries as these are the spells the AI will choose once your scripting expires, and you should be able to go 15 or so turns before slaves start dying, making this quite a rare occurrence (not much stands up to 10 turns of such a barrage, you¿ll generally have won or lost by then). Reverse communion 2 or 3 masters then as many cheap slaves as you can muster. Your masters will cast power of the spheres then whatever other booster is appropriate (phoenix power, etc). For air spells you can use the third master to cast storm so that air power is an option. Now, all your slaves have been boosted 2 levels, so they can cast fun things like falling fire, thunderstrike, etc. Even lowly S1 mages are now capable of Soul Slaying. The fun thing about this one is it¿s a great way to use all those cheap researchers you¿ve got with no other preparation. Leading a fight with three rounds of 10X Falling Fires makes quite a difference considering how cheap the mages are. Note, this communion takes advantage of one of the quirks of the communion, the fact that slaves can cast spells so long as they act sequentially before all masters in the turn sequence. Commanders resolve their orders in the same order that they¿re listed in the strategic screen. If for whatever reason you¿re not comfortable trying to get this order right you can have the masters retreat after casting the buffs the buffs remain in effect. Note, the communion bonus does not affect slaves casting by themselves, only the buffs the masters cast help. Apparently the slaves are acting by themselves outside the communion. Linebacker communion 3 or 4 masters with varying paths and at least 10 slaves. This communion takes advantage of the fact that self buffs which affect a master also affect all slaves. The masters will cast as many self buffs as possible before the slaves wade forward into melee. This tactic works best with slaves that have more hitpoints and a good attack (like starspawn or vampire counts), but even just passing out frostbrands to your average poindexter before he is buffed with invulnerability, mistform, regeneration, quickness, luck, fire shield, astral shield and breath of winter¿well, there are worse uses for a slew of S1 mages. Note, for this to work it¿s important that you have a sufficient number of slaves, otherwise the slaves will rack up too much fatigue during the buff cycle and be worthless for combat. [Wraithlord comment: Great idea by JimMorrison Give the buffing masters a cheap bow and script them to fire when they finish buffing. This way they won't rush to melee and get killed. Consider that Piercer is a crossbow, so 2 rounds. Vision's Foe is an arbalest and fires every 3 rounds.
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Superman communion The numbers on this one vary depending on what you¿re trying to accomplish, but the idea is to have a whole bunch of slaves and only one or two masters casting those really devastating spells. The classic example of this is Master Enslave communions, though there are other good choices for more modest uses like flaming arrows, fog warriors, darkness, etc. The important factors are that there are enough slaves and that the handful of spells which are cast are devastating enough to make the opportunity cost worthwhile of all these mages doing nothing else. Alright, there¿s some basic recipes for your book, obviously you can start mix and matching them as you become more comfortable. Now for the optional twists previously mentioned. The blood spell Sabbath Master is equivalent (and mutually interchangeable you can join a communion by casting Sabbath Master) but functionally there are two big differences. The first is that Sabbath Master costs 100 fatigue, so casting it with a B1 mage will result in a pass out once you account for encumbrance. What makes up for this in a big way though is that nice little blood spell reinvigoration. If a master casts reinvigoration not only does it remove all his fatigue, it removes all the fatigue of all the slaves. For this reason strategic use of a single blood mage can as much as double the effectiveness of your communion. Crystal/slave matrixes. These magic items allow non astral/blood mages to join a communion (note: they must still be mages of some type). The potential uses of this in combination with the linebacker or reverse communions should be obvious. One note of caution however, because of the fact that slaves rack up fatigue really fast if they don¿t have the paths for the spell the master is casting it¿s very important to have enough slaves to compensate for this if masters are casting spells which the slaves don¿t have paths in. Keep in mind penetration goes up with the mage¿s power and sometimes extra penetration can be worthwhile even if you¿re not enabling extra spells. Have that S9 pretender lead all those S1 researchers you have in a communion before spamming enslave mind. It beats whatever the heck S1 mages would otherwise be casting. Phoenix pyre can add an amusing twist to the linebacker communion as it can set off a devastating chain reaction. Expect this to be a fairly kamikaze move. Some magic items cause their effect by autocasting a spell at the very beginning of combat such as a charcoal shield or crystal shield. These spells, if they're self buffs will effect slaves who are part of the communion so long as the item is worn by a master who is in the communion. Since the timing on this is such that the buff is cast before anyone can cast master/slave communion, this generally only effects people wearing crystal/slave matrixes (though pythium's communicants are an exception, and there may be others). Hellpower is an interesting spell in combination with Sabbath, but rather difficult to use effectively. A master casting hellpower will result in every slave being effected by all the effects of hellpower, including being horror marked and having a chance of calling a horror. Obviously you seldom want a bunch of people calling horrors immediately after all your mages have been horror marked. This can be useful in two situation though. The first is if you are fighting a SC (or really anybody) who has already been seriously horror marked (if you're particularly baalzy, you might try to horror mark them the same fight before casting hell power) - horrors will attack the most horror marked units first. The second situation is a kamikaze linebacker move where you uber buff the slaves then don't care if they die. This is pretty wasteful though unless your slaves are tough enough to survive a couple AN hits from horrors. I have used this tactic successfully with LA Ulm's vampire counts (2b 2d), resulting in a dozen uber buffed, life draining, flying thugs...who happened to be immortal so no worries if they died. The nice thing about hell power is it not only increases magic power, it increases attack, defense, strength (hitpoints, I don't remember) so it's particularly useful in this case. Note, your slaves are going to rack up horror marks when you do this even if you win the fight, so use it sparingly even with immortals. 8.2 The art of placement http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=523202&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=all&vc=1 When fighting against another player, your chief concerns in placing magi are: * You want to be able to hit the enemy with your zap spells (or your own units with buffs, whichever). * You want your enemy's zap spells and archery not to hit your magi. This is somewhat similar to the dillemma faced when placing regular units, who gain bonuses for outnumbering enemies, but are very vulnerable to spells like Falling Fires when deployed in tight formation. AFAICT, the following considerations are applied when the AI targets a damaging evocation. I'm prepared to be told that I'm wrong: * Potential damage dealt. Thus, a caster shooting blade wind will prefer low Prot targets, someone casting falling foo will avoid targets resistant or immune to the elemental damage, and so forth. * Number of anticipated hits. Thus, a low precision caster will tend towards closer/more tightly packed foes while a high precision caster will take other factors into consideration - and AoE attacks will tend to avoid small skirmishers and hit tightly packed enemy ranks (if they expect to hit at all.) * Quality. I've only really noticed this with a few single target spells, but hitting a better-quality target does seem to enter into the calculus. It might just be a function of damage dealt - don't know enough to say. Finallly, if everything else is a wash, the AI seems to prefer targets in the *middle* of the enemy ranks. These are often the targets of choice for archers set on "fire" with no specified target, as well - making this often a good choice. This means that leaving your magi in the default position is the worst thing you could possibly do! In addition to spreading your magi out - which is also a good idea in case enemies break through to melee or anything else untoward happens - place some actual skirmishers (low prot, no elemental resistances) in front of *each* individual mage, so that they'll be targeted instead, if it comes to that. Spreading out is a must, since that way, even if you mess up and place a mage in harms way, at least you won't lose all of them at once. Another point, which follows from your advice but was not explicitly stated is: Do not ever put two mages in the same square. Especially if one of those mages is an astral mage. One thing that I like to do when placing mages is give each mage two bodygaurds (assuming the mage is size 2). They will stay near him in the same square and drop the probability of an arrow striking him to 1/3. If you have a big nasty guy you may bring elephant bodyguards assigned to a closer-to-enemy commander. Elephants will be targeted by single unit attack spells that often choose biggest enemy (and closer I assume). Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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