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