Dominions 4: Pretender Design and Analysis Step 4

The Wrap Up

Now you have gone over in great detail the nation you plan to use.  To put it all together, put on that thinking cap, and make a wicked cool pretender.  Or at least a useful one.

The Pretender Archtypes

I use these archtypes to guide my pretender design.  You can clearly hybridize but you may weaken the functionality.

1. The awake expander (Design to fight from turn 1 or 2. A variation is to need one or two forged trinkets and roll out turn 3 or 4.)
2. The awake high bless (I separate this one from above.  I have used it to great effect with dragons for Water 9, Fire 9 or Nature 9 bless and an excellent expander.  You take a pretty hard hit on scales).
3. The bless chassis (Design is all about the bless you need and it is commonly imprisoned for the best scales.)
4. The site searching rainbow (basically 2 in every path)
5. The artifact forging rainbow (The Magic Booster guide explains this one quite well)
6. The research rainbow (This is normally the great sage and awake.)
7. The key spell pretender (Design for something like early Burden of Time or other game changing globals.)
8. The all scales pretender. (Take the cheapest chassis available, splash on a bit of cheap magic, and buy the best scales.)
9. The diversity pretender.  (I tend to consider this one very close to the all scales.  The plan is to fill missing magic paths from your nation and is best used with a plan to summon more magi of those paths.)

The Pretender Plan: Bandar Log

From early in this discussion, I have moved towards a plan to go with a major bless.  I felt that given the very high gold and resource settings of 200% gold, 200% resources, and 75% magic I could afford to trash my scales for an amazing major bless.  Tiger Riders have one major weakness.  Their shields are only bucklers making them vulnerable to massed archers.  There are a few ways to mitigate the problem such as using archer screens in front.  However, there are also some bless solutions.  Tigers move only moderately fast for cavalry at 15 action points.  So they can take some time to close with archers.  Regeneration from Nature 9 bless can help a lot.  Air shield is an option but precision boost from major air bless does nothing for the tigers and isn't terribly helpful for astral magi since most astral spells are precision 100.  This leaves Astral 9 as an option to manage attrition from archers.  Astral 9 is not the strongest bless but an astral 9 pretender opens up amazing options in late game.

Let's look at pretender chassis for N9 or S9 bless.  Also, if I go with a dual 9 bless, earth is the best second option for all my units.  Bandar has a choice of a lot of chassis with astral and a cross path.  But very early in my look at chassis I got very excited by the Nataraja.  It's always fun in late game to have a 4 armed pretender and well it's just plain cool.  I know that I am sort of failing to apply the analysis fully, but sometimes I get fired up by a cool chassis.  And can I possibly make a triple 9 bless fly?  F9E9S9 is just such a monster of a bless I went for it.  I had to trash my scales pretty badly.

Here is my design.  It follows the plan I listed but I went a little over the top.

Imprisoned Nataraja 100 points base.
Dominion 7
Turmoil 3
Sloth 3
Cold 1
Death 2
Luck 3
Drain 3

Fire 9
Earth 9
Astral 9

The Sacrifices

1. My scales are awful.  If the game goes on a long time, I'll be very hard pressed to remain competitive.  However, one compensation is I can summon sacred troops and with 75% gems I should have a lot of gems.
2. I am betting a lot of good luck.  And that means I need to push my dominion as hard as possible but that's tough with crappy priests and a gold shortage for temples.
3. My research will be poor.  I'll have to focus research very carefully.

The Power

My sacreds are truly beasts.  And as it played, I scared the willies out of most of my opponents who wisely chose not to test them.  However, I did not have a great game.  It wasn't about my design.  My diplomacy failed.  I allied with Ashdod early and it made good sense at the time but Ashdod disintegrated under attack from two opponents and the geography was such that I could do nothing to help.  Unlike Kailasa and Patala, Bandar Log has a very difficult time entering the water and that would have been my only realistic way to help my ally.  It was still a very fun game and with the unique chassis of the Nataraja and 3 very good blesses that work together I would try triple 9 Bandar Log again.

Dominions 4: Pretender Design and Analysis Step 3

Step 3: Analyzing your opponents

You have chosen or been given your nation.  You've clearly looked over your options and have a pretender concept in mind and some tactics for the different activities.  What about those wankers who are ALSO in the game?  What a pain in the ass.  If single player was at least a competent challenge I could avoid the agony of getting beat by other players.  And let's face, even the best player loses about 5/6 games or 9/10 depending on their preferred game size.

What are we looking for?  Let's go over some obvious major issues.

• Nasty dominions.
• Dangerous sacreds.
• Powerhouse blood.
• Blood sacrifice.
• Stealthy thugs.
• Recruitable SC's

You can't predict all the things that your opponents will do.  You can make general predictions.  Is EA Niefelhiem in the game?  They will probably base their strategy on Jarls and a monster bless.  What do you do?  I don't have all the answers and it's a tough thing to measure.  But you will have a rough time if you do not consider your opponents fundamental goals.

Let's break it down.  You have say 9 opponents.  Look at their nations.  What will they likely do?  Try to have a plan for the most obvious actions.  Sure it's hopeless to plan for everything but the key is to keep in mind the obvious actions.  This section of my guide is in some ways the weakest but in others the most critical.  I can't hold your hand through every situation you might encounter but the point is to keep things in your plan.  Look over who you have to face.  What might they do and most importantly what things they might do that are most dangerous to you.

Bandar Log Example:

My opponents and their most likely strategies are:

• Vanheim - Vanheim is very likely to use stealthy thugs with a bless.  Air drop by cloud trapeze and sudden raiding is the biggest expected threat.  The best counter is to be strong enough to be too threatening to attack.  And small squads of sacreds with a mage or two can be placed in the path of potential attacks to stop thugs
• Abysia - Hard hitting fire immune troops backed by fire evocations is the most likely.  Minor blood hunting with summons like devils is also a serious potential.  Water magic can be used to get fire resistance which supports summoning a few Yakshini.  The spell Rain is a powerful counter.
• Mictlan - Major bless with eagle warriors is the most likely plan.  Early game my plan is to have bigger and tougher sacreds.  For mid game, hopefully I can put up storms to stop the eagles from flying in to my melee troops or back line.
• Man - Man has great potential for a scales diversity design backed by solid magi and hordes of dangerous archers.  A plan to keep sacreds alive against archers is important.
• Ulm - MA Ulm is quite a different nation in Dominions 4.  I would expect a focus on quality troops, the very dangerous evocations Iron Darts and Iron Blizzard and lots of forging.
• T'ien Ch'i - Another case of major archer armies and tough troops.  I would be out shot if I tried to go archer versus archer.
• Ashdod - Big nasty sacreds with a big bless.  This is an opponent unlikely to be a concern.  Attacking an astral nation with giant sacreds can be extremely painful.

I believe all of these can be handled with the right major bless and tigers with white ones.  I don't anticipate problems with very dangerous things like dying dominion or early globals like Burden of Time.  Therefore, my core plan of elite squads with great bless is solid.

Dominions 4: Pretender Design and Analysis Step 2

Step 2: Develop a Grand Strategy

We've gone over what we can recruit and what we have for magic paths.  The next questions come to what to do?  I look at the grand strategy decision from a broad perspective and I break it up into three game phases.  In general, you can be good at two phases but rarely good at all three.  How you manage that is key to winning.

Phase 1: Early game

What is the early game?  The period when research doesn't much matter.  This is key.  You are working with armies and you pretender if available soon enough.

Early game is expansion and early rushing.  Let's go over expansion first.  Most nations can do extremely well expanding with an awake pretender.  But that always costs late game power.  Can you expand without one?  In real MP games a practical expansion is 15 or so provinces per player.  Some folks shoot for 20+ but the reality is that usually leads to an early death by a gang up.  In graphs off games it's more viable but in the normal graphs on games a huge nation is SUCH a target.  I prefer to expand moderately and keep in the average size.  I play for the win, not to be big fast.  I need a caveat here.  There is a great variation amongst Dominions communities in the ability to develop alliances to deal with a fast expanding opponent.  This is a clear case where you need to grasp the culture of the community and the likelihood of being attacked by multiple opponents for being too threatening.

Early expansion is very easy with heavy bless or an awake SC pretender.  Without those you need some scripting skill.  Practice fighting with the minimum troops required and you'll do just fine. Do you have powerful expansion troops?

Bandar Log Example:

Bandar Log has a few viable options for expansion.  The first is simply use troops.  The two main methods that are popular are elephants or archers.  Short bow archers are weaker in Middle Age due to higher levels of armour.  However, you can expand fine versus a number of independents with archers.  Barbarians are very weak versus archers for example and are a real danger to even high bless melee sacreds.

The second clear option is using sacreds.  This is the method I plan to use for this game and I'll cover it in greater detail later.

The third clear option for Bandar Log is using an awake pretender.  I have used this very well for the other ages of monkey nations but it's not the focus of this example.  The simplest and most popular choice is a dragon and all three can be used effectively.

Phase 2: Middle Game

What is the middle game?  In my view it's period of the game when research begins to matter.

I consider mid game to begin when expansion is complete and diplomacy and maneuver starts up in a big way.  It tends to be dominated by armies and/or thugs with some mage support but research needs are very critical so magi are quite busy.  Do you have some solid middle game options?  Things to look for are recruitable or summonable thugs you can gear cheap.  In Dominions 3, I tried to limit thugs to a total cost of 15 gems.  My classic was a regular bane with a brand and cheap shield.  Dominions 4 made some radical changes to the combat mechanics with limb loss and decapitation and repel.  These things have made it quite a bit harder to build viable thugs so I've found I spend a lot more gems on thugs now.  Also, the variability of province defence can make thugs a challenge.  You can easily walk into a horde of barbarians unexpectedly and lose a valuable thug.

It's also when you MUST site search in earnest.  Due to the distribution of sites, manual search with magi with duel or triple paths is by far the most efficient.  The new range limitations, higher gem cost, and higher research levels of site searching spells in Dominions 4 makes them harder to use.  Analysis has shown that about 90% of all sites are level 1 or 2.  This means that the most efficient searchers are multiple path magi at level 2.  And some additional paths at level 1 never hurt.  I use site searching spells to fill gaps in manual coverage or for paths you get later by a lucky independent mage or a summon.

So the needs of gems, armies, thugs and research will heavily impact your pretender design.  Can you leverage your national power and still not leave any glaring gaps in your options?  Will you have a way to eat a neighbour?  It's the time of the game to look at weaker neighbours and plan to be in the winning group.  Games usually narrow down to the 3-4 real competitors for the win by now.

Many nations can start to convert from recruitable armies to summoned armies.  This is a time to look carefully at the cost/benefit of summons.  There are some VERY efficient summons which hold up well late game and there are a lot of inefficient summons.  However, some of the inefficient summons have niche use such as shoring up a defence in the early game during a rush.  In Dominions 4, many summon spells were changed.  It's beyond the scope of this guide to go into detail on the efficiency of summons but take note of the many summon spells that scale with magic level.  If you take a high bless pretender, many of these summons are incredibly efficient.

Bandar Log Example

Bandar Log can make thugs with summoned national magi like Yaksha and Kinnara.  But that will require a pretty heavy research commitment of conjuration 6 and a lot of gems.  It will also require quite a lot of research into construction.  While both of these are viable, I am going to battle magic support of armies of sacreds.  This will require a different research plan.

I am going to target the following research for roughly turn 25.  Conjuration 4 for Light of the Northern Star with summoned Yaksha and Yakshinin, Alteration 4 for body ethereal and other basic buffs, Thaumaturgy 4 for astral combat spells and for communions,  and construction 4 for basic gear and boosters.  Then I will push up to construction 6 for the critical boosters like Starshine Skullcap and Moonvine Bracelet.

Armies of sacreds backed by small mage corps will manage most threats I anticipate.  I'm looking now at a heavy bless so my pretender should arrive around turn 36 to further boost power.

Phase 3: Late Game

What is late game?  This is the period of the game when research dominates.

Unless you are playing on very small maps with few players you will need a late game plan.  Here are some classic late game plans.

1) Be massive huge and walk over everyone.  This is the basis behind most major bless builds since they begin to stall out as late game approaches.  If you aren't already the biggest and baddest economy you will find the high magic late game counters very painful.  Huge swarms of tripled blessed jags are completely useless versus teleport master enslave.

2) Dominate the world with crazy piles of freespawn.  The classics are EA and MA Pan, MA Asphodel, MA Scleria, LA Lemuria, EA R'lyeh and LA R'lyeh.  But this method also requires serious magic buffing since freespawn chaff dies like flies without huge buffs.  Your plan will require a hard push for the big army buffs: Will of the Fates, Army of Gold/Lead, Massed X, etc etc.

3) Roll out lethal squads of battle magi.  Blood and astral come to mind as the tops for this option. Elemental magic is tougher to use due to large area effect resistance spells.  I strongly recommend this plan includes a huge push for very broad diversity.  It is also my favourite late game plan.  I also like to add squads of elite troops and elite summons as both heavy meat in front of magi and for tactic specific methods such as storm flyers landing in the rear.

4) Thugs and SC's.  I'm going to list this as a grand plan but personally it's deeply flawed.  These should be included in any plan and need support.  There is no such thing as an invulnerable SC.  Too often I see folks going this route and forgetting to back up those 200 gem SC's.  Along comes a custom counter and poof.  All those gems are gone.

5) Put up game winning globals.  The obvious culprits are Utterdark, Burden of Time, Arcane Nexus or Astral Corruption.  However, these are suicide if you don't have the resources to hold off the inevitable attacks from everyone.  On the other hand, if you don't plan to put these up pretty early, you will have a slim hope of doing so.

6) Put up lynch pin globals.  TheDemon reminded me of this.  It's not by itself a game winning strategy but it's very important.  All of the gem generating globals fit here as well and very valuable globals like Gift of Health.  These are not globals that force your opponents to team up to kill you and you can get great value.  The important thing to consider is how you will cast them.  Can you use national magi?  Do you need some construction and boosters?  Is this a job for your pretender?  Even an odd spell like The Looming Hell can play here.  It's a weak global but very cheap and a great deterrent to limit raiding.

6) A massive blood economy and sacrifice slaves for the dominion kill.  This is only viable for a few nations but it's very effective when done right.  I won't go into great detail on this option.

Bandar Log Example:

I am planning for a big bless.  This pretty much moves me towards option 1 but I also will get diversity going and solid battle magic so my late game is not ruined by too much focus on sacreds.  Bandar Log has excellent options to get into a broad choice of magic with WESN on national magi, air on mid game summons, and even fire and death in late game.  You can also hope for some luck with independents to get death or fire going early.  And it's time to discuss a bit of pretender design.  To pay for the big bless I plan to take Turmoil and Luck which should have a solid chance of getting heroes and lucky events with extra magi.  You can never be sure luck will provide what you want but it's still fun.

I don't plan to try for globals except perhaps for water globals.  I expect to use my astral and nature gems on summoned magi and my earth gems for forging.  This won't leave a lot of gems or time to fight over global spells.  The main water global I would like is Maelstrom but it requires water 6 and that can't be done without some real luck.  Yakshini from the spell are base water 3 and you can make 2 boosters with construction 6.  To get to water 6 requires either real luck with the summons for an extra water random, a pretender with high water, or construction 8 for artifacts to boost water

Dominions 4: Pretender Design and Analysis Step 1

Here's the story.  You joined a game and you got a nation.  I wrote this guide for Dominions 3 and much of it is still applicable.  I'm revising it with what I now know about Dominions 4.

Step 1: Review what your nation has.

Start up a test game with the correct mods required by your game.  Just take a default pretender and look over your troops.

General Review

You want to ask these questions.

1. What kind of sacred units do I get?
2. Are they capital only?
3. What kind of sacred commanders and magi do I get?
4. Are they capital only?
5. Do I have any other capital only units?
6. Do they have special abilities?
7. Do I have capital only commanders or magi?
8. What are my common magic paths? Is this capital dependent?
9. What magic randoms will I get and how can they synergize?
10. What sort of researchers do I get? Sacred?  Low cost?  Recruit anywhere?
11. Do I have slow to recruit elite commanders and are they important to me?

Bandar Log Example:

A very interesting game was setup on Dom4mods, Intense, with extremely high gold and resource settings.  I decided to play Bandar Log which has always been one of my favourite nations.  Bandar Log gets the very excellent capital only Tiger Riders and recruit everywhere and inexpensive White Ones for troops.  It also has cheap sacred researchers and more astral magic than you can usually use.  I tend to use a very limited amount of the regular troops.  Three stand out as high utility.  The Atavi Archer is very cost effective at 9 gold and 3 resources for fighting soft targets with it's short bow.  The Markata has some surprising utility.  It's size one so can swarm larger units and it has defence 14.  They are very ineffective against archers but can block most any melee troops including cavalry.  I am also fond of the Light Bandar Warrior with sticks and stones.  It doesn't look like much but can launch two volleys per round at range 15 and 12 damage each.  If you cast Strength of Giants on them you boost it to range 18 and 15 damage.  That's enough to crack some moderate armour.

You have the key Rishi mage (Astral 3, Nature 2, with good randoms) with capital only and slow to recruit.  However, a few of these can go a long way.  They are your main communion masters and can teleport.  For your regular recruitment, Yogis are fine researchers, communion slaves and buffers with Body Ethereal, Cheat Fate, and Luck.  Gurus can cast a number of good battle spells, summon your nationals, and do some forging.

Troops Review

Now you need to look carefully at the statistics of your national units.  Things to watch for include:

1. Do my units get good att, def, or str stats?
2. Do I have precision bonus?
3. Do I have cost effective archers? (10 gold or less and low resource)
4. Do I get high power ranged attacks?  (long or composite bows.  Strong javelins.  High strength sticks and stones.)
5. Do I have high protection units (15+) and what defence do they have?
6. Do I have units with extra high enc?  (eg. Atlantis)
7. Do I have other bonuses? (recuperation, stealth, tower shields, fast move)

Bandar Log Example: 

Reviewing the monkey troops there are some glaring weaknesses.  All the monkey troops except the sacreds have low magic resistance.  But you do have fairly easy access to the spell Antimagic which can resolve some of that issue.  The Bandar troops are also size 3 which is more of a disadvantage than advantage.

The core of my idea for this game is using the two sacreds.  Tiger Riders (capital only) at 70 gold 17 resources are some of the best sacred cavalry in the game.  They have excellent combat statistics, 3 hard hitting attacks, and if the rider dies the tiger keeps fighting.  That increases their toughness in combat by a very significant amount.  It's another 21 hit points to finally kill the tiger.  White Ones are a bit expensive and have only a single, although strong, attack.  They are not the core of the idea but if you have a bless, they are more cost effective than Bandars.

Elephants are an option but one I don't usually use with Bandar Log.  Tiger Riders with a good bless are more effective for significantly less cost.  However, if you need them, send some Yogis along to cast body ethereal and you increase the durability greatly.

Mage Review

The magi you can buy largely determine your mid and end game potential.  Troops are still important but the core of your ability to project power will be summons, forging, and battle magic.  Globals are important as well and to cast them will need planning such as forging boosters or high path on an elite mage or pretender.

Here are some questions to ask about your magi:

1. What is my primary magic?  Most nations have one best path.
2. What is my secondary magic path?
3. Do those two paths synergize?  For example take fire and earth for magma magic.
4. What kind of tertiary paths do I have?
5. In the tertiary paths am I stuck with level 1's or do I have a good shot at level 2's.  I define a good shot as a 50% random of 4 options.  10% randoms with more than one path are near junk.
6. What boosters can I forge with my national magi?
7. What boosters will I really need to project power?  Example: Bandar Log really wants to summon it's national astral magi but the higher ones will require some boosting.  The Starshine Skullcap is easy but needs construction 6.  The Crystal Coin is your second astral booster but needs astral and earth.  1 in 4 Rishi get earth one but getting to earth two is a challenge.  Happily, you get Summon Yaksha to fix your limitation with earth magic although it's expensive at 25 nature gems but one or two will solve many forging problems.  Rishi have foot slot so a Yaksha can make some dwarven hammers and earth boots so a Rishi can forge the coin.
8. What cross path summons, forgings, and battle magic fit my nation?  Example: Unlike Kailasa or Patala, Bandar Log doesn't have a good opportunity to cast Gifts from Heaven, one of the most dangerous evocations for smashing giants, thugs and super combatants.
9. Am I missing any critical magic paths that I will be crippled without.  The most common one here is a lack of astral.
10. What about my priests?  Do I have recruitable holy 3 priests?  Or can I get holy 2 with crystal shields?  Example: Bandar Log has weak priests but does have options to communion it's national summons to cast divine blessing.
11. Are any of my magi tough enough to be thugs too?  Self buffing thugs are extremely powerful since they need very little equipment.  Example: None of the Bandar Log recruitable magi are viable thugs.  However a number of it's summons can work well.
12. So I have movement problems?  Watch out for map move 1 magi.  You'll have trouble getting them to battle if you need them.  Example: The Rishi is map move 1 and this is a challenge.  Summoning an air mage and making flying boots may be critical to keep Rishi with an army.
13. Do I have age problems?  Abysia is by far the worst case here.  A method to manage it may be required.

Bandar Log Example:  

We start with the Rishi.  You will get a decent number of Rishi in S3N3, W1S3N2, E1S3N2, and S4N2.  This gives good manual searching coverage for 4 paths which you can later supplement with a summoned Yaksha (E3) and Yakshini (W3).  Rishi can forge both basic nature boosters: Thistle Mace and Moonvine Bracelet.  This opens up the use of Nature Magic globals like Mother Oak and Gift of Health.  As discussed above, summoning a Yaksha resolves forging the Crystal Coin and Earth Boots and Dwarven Hammers.  A Yakshini can forge the Robe of the Sea providing solid water magic for forging and battle support.

 It's important to plan for Conjuration 6 and get one or two Kinnara to get air magic going.  In the very long term you can break into fire and death magic with Rudra at Conjuration 9 but that is not likely to occur in  most games.  If you really want fire or death magic for your plan it's best to use your pretender.  However, in my game I went with the basics and planned to hit hard early.

Gurus and Yogis are pretty self explanatory.  Gurus can research, summon nationals, and forge.  They can also join a communion as masters or slaves.  I generally recruit 1 or 2 gurus per fort.  Map Move 1 is a difficult limitation so they mostly sit at home.  I like having some in each fort to allow emergency summon of the national troop summons: Apsara and Gandharva.  I mostly prefer to use my astral pearls for the mage summons like Kinnara and Sidha but there are times you just need bodies.

Yogis are my core mage purchase.  They are very cheap sacred researchers (for the upkeep saving) and have map move 2 with forest survival which works well with most of your troops and other commanders.  They are fine communion slaves, can cast magic duel cheaply, and can be used alone for simple buffs.  With a Rishi casting Light of the Northern Star they all become Astral 2 and can blast thaumaturgy spells and the very fine Stellar Cascades at enemy troops.