Dominions 5: Disciples Games - the hidden and obscure

 Hi folks,

Today I was typing out my workflow for running and playing Disciples team games in Dominions.  The documentation of this type of game is weak in the manual and there are some game details and organization tricks I use to make it work better.  The three paragraphs in the manual are just not enough.

Organization

The first step will be to advertise a game.   To make good advertising and find players, I choose the game size with any ideas of themes, map, or mods you'd like to use in the advertisement.  Be detailed and describe skill level, commitment, any particular rules like banning water nations or death dominion.

I have tried a few different game sizes to make for fun games that don't take years to finish.  From my experience I now prefer 12 or 16 players in 4 teams.   I tried 4 teams of 5 and managing the team communication is more difficult.  One of the features of disciples games is sharing your resources.  This means that research, forging, and global spells are easier especially if you take nations that synergize and diversify you team.  The time playing the game is small compared to the time spent talking with your team, sharing stuff, and talking with other teams for diplomacy.  If you regularly play free for all multiplayer games be prepared for a lot more time spent talking.

I've used different methods to find teams.   You can request only complete teams sign up or take individual players and help them find a team.  The team will be playing together for some months most likely so it's good to socialize and meet the players before choosing teams.  I also recommend as the host that you talk to each player and discuss commitment, turning a nation AI, policy on substitutes or stale turns.  Some players may not understand the additional effort required.

To choose nations, any of the normal methods work but I prefer using a draft selection.  Some combinations of nations in a 3 or 4 player team are overwhelmingly powerful.  Draft provides a opportunity for other teams to counter a team plan and I really enjoy the challenge of working with nations that may not quite fit together in an obvious way.  One of my current team games I am Kailasa as the pretender with Ulm and Helheim.  We negotiated a bless amongst the three of us and the bless was a great challenge for my expansion.  But it is becoming a great bless for thugs.

Pretender and Disciples

My prior guide on pretender design is applicable here but there are some unique things with disciples games.  The first is understanding which chassis are available.  The pretender can only use the dominion 3 and 4 gods so the immobiles and the titans.  Disciples can only be the dominion 1 and 2 gods so monsters and rainbows.

The second key thing is god awakening.  Your choice of awake, dormant or imprisoned works as normal for the pretender.  But it's effect on the disciples is not as clear.  The manual says the disciples wake in half the time of the pretender but there is a small random element.  If awake then they are all available turn 1.  Dormant results in disciples arriving around turn 7 but maybe 6 or 8.  I've not seen them arrive later.  Imprisoned I have not used in disciples because having them arrive around turn 18 is very late and I don't consider worth the design points.  I use dormant a lot because it is not very likely that someone's awake monster is going to be rushing you before turn 7.  Of course, your bless choice is important here.  

The third concept is the use of temperature scale.  I almost always choose on nation on the team of the opposite temperature preference from the others.  That was the motivation to choose Kailasa above.  With heat 2 preference we set our pretender to cold 1 scale giving 120 design points and excellent temperature for my team mates. My other recent team game was late age Atlantis, Ulm, and Utgard.  Ulm was pretender taking cold 3.

If you are familiar with popular ideas of pretender archtypes you can see that only a few can be done in disciples.  You have no monsters or rainbows for the pretender which eliminates some bless choices such as the all rainbow minor bless.

For disciple design, I've found a few very effective.  A monster expander with self buffing magic and perhaps some additional diversity is great.  You have 300 points to buy magic since you are not buying scales.  Another handy design is a rainbow with lots of research boost and the paths to forge most anything in the game.   It also can help site search early.  However, keep in mind that your team territory is 3 or 4 times bigger than usual.  Mobility on a disciple is very important.  I have also had excellent success with a ghost king half rainbow expander dormant.  You can forge a couple trinkets for turn 6 and off he goes.

Disciple Game Oddities

There are a number of undocumented features of disciples games that are not apparent.  I'm going to do a list with short explanation.

We are developing a couple rules of thumb on these issues.  If an effect is tied to the dominion of a nation it propogates to the disciples from the pretender.  If it is tied to something like that nations forts it does not.  This is only a rule of thumb.

1. Your commanders and armies can freely move in ally lands.  They can coexist with ally armies but may starve since you are sharing the supplies.  They do not fight together.  If there is a fight with an enemy and two or more allied armies it appears that the largest ally army fights first.  Then the smaller if the enemy survives.
2. You can search each other's provinces.  This is an excellent feature.
3. You can see each other's armies.
4. You do not get battle reports or messages from your ally's scouts.  It's worthwhile to double up on scouts for important locations.  Or perhaps scry.
5. You can claim thrones in your ally's provinces.  You do not have prophets so claiming can be a challenge especially if the pretender is immobile.  Disciples count for claiming.  It makes holy 3 priests quite valuable but there is the option of summoning bishop fish and giving them gear to breathe air.
6. You can cast instant fort spells on an ally province and they get the new fort.  This is an excellent way to lock down a throne.
7. Only the dominion of the pretender takes effect.  So you can use death nations as disciples without dying dominion.  This is a strange result and I've not seen it used effectively.
8. And more oddities just tested, if you take a freespawn nation as pretender such as Lemuria (P), R'lyeh (d), and Man (d) all three nations get Lemuria freespawn and their population dies.
9. A new oddity was just confirmed by me (Dec 12, 2020).  Mictlan with dying dominion (must sacrifice can not preach) does not affect disciples if it is pretender since it is a national link not a dominion effect.
10. I have a report from a reputable source that national benefits such as Arco's scrying and Na'Ba's hidden provinces also work for disciples if they are the pretender.  This is especially interesting as the Mictlan issue does NOT propogate to disciples.  Who knows why?
11. Phlegra's unrest propogates to disciples (appears to be connected to dominion).  Mekone's unrest does not.  (Appears to be connected to forts).

If you know of more please comment and I'll update.

Team Organization

I have found that the most effective way to communicate as a team is to form a group private chat on discord.  You can do that by starting a direct message with one player and inviting the rest from your friend list.  You can also turn that group into a voice or video call on demand.

Those group chats have pinned messages available.  So I pin a few things right away and some as the game goes on.

• A snip of the pretender and each disciple.
  
  
  
• A list of the team members with nation and password.
• A list of all the teams.
• A pin for each diplomatic agreement between teams.
• A pin for each bless you see from opponents.
  
  
  

We have often added an extra team member as a designated sub and invited them to the group chat.  If you are playing direct connect they can download any other team mate's turn and view or play it if needed.

For diplomacy I use a fairly simple method to avoid confusion.  For major agreements one player (the captain or a spokesperson) does the negotiation with the designate of the other team.  For borders or local coordination with an allied team, it is better for the players to talk directly to their neighbours.  Usually you have to work with time zones in large games.

Playing the Game

Due to the possibility to play each other's turns, I find that direct connect is a better option for disciples games.  It is slow and awkward to change emails for a teammate on llamaserver.

There are some important issues related to playing more than one nation on your team.  It can cause a cheat error and I have caused that once.  

The short answer is to avoid the cd key error, let the game manage your turn and orders files (*.trn and *.1h).  Simply log in as the first nation, play the turn, log out.  Repeat for the second nation.  Don't remove or copy any files in the game folder.  Copying the entire folder to an archive directory is safe.

To avoid that issue I use a particular workflow for disciples games.  I also manually manage folders for each turn so that I can review old turns and to allow recording for youtube.  That may not be of interest to you and it's fiddly but only takes a couple minutes a day.  Here is an example of one of my folder structures for a team game that is finished.

The folder LardTunderingJesus is the folder created by the game when you first log on to the server.  That is the primary folder where you play the game.  The other folders I manually created. Note the spaces in the archive folder which holds the older turns.  Dominions can not read spaces in folder names so that reduces clutter in the "Continue Old Game" screen.

Here is the contents of the main folder: 

You can see that it contains one *.trn file but two *.2h files.  When you log onto the server you choose the nation and enter the password.  It downloads the new turn file and deletes any other turn files.  So, in this case I logged on once as machaka, looked at the turn, and closed it.  I then logged on as R'lyeh and it deleted the *.trn file.  If the game sees two or more *.trn files it generates a cheat report and forces a stale.  Don't ever copy turn files back into the primary folder.  Only copy OUT of this folder.

You do not need the map in each folder.  Copy the map to the maps folder.  The game will download it again each time you log on if you delete it so leave it in the primary folder.  The maps are large and your folders will be bulky if you have the map in each subfolder.

You can now open prior turns and it will not affect the current turn.  I run Dominions from the root directory and not from Steam so that I can have multiple instances loaded to compare turns or for doing recording.  It's a handy thing to do but requires manual updated each patch.

There may be more oddities of disciples games so I welcome feedback preferably here.  You can chat with me on Discord or Steam too but it's nice to have the feedback in one place.  Cheers my friends!

Dominions 5: Maer's Monkey Madness (Nation Guide for Bandar Log and Patala)

Maer's Monkey Madness

I originally wrote this guide for Dominions 3 in roughly 2010 after a series of successful games playing these two nations with a focus on going into blood magic to prop up some of the weaknesses of the two nations.  You can view the original on the wayback machine here: Monkey Madness Dominions 3

I've had one successful game in Dominions 5 with Patala where we formed a coalition to defeat an extremely dangerous Lemuria and we agreed to give the win to the strongest member of the coalition.  I have not played any games with Bandar Log since Dominions 5 was released but much of the ideas here still apply.

The major changes to the game particularly with the new way resistances work and the simultaneous battles have major effect on strategy and tactics.  I am going to adjust my recommendations to suit.

Contents

1. General Guidelines

2. Design Goals

3. Pretenders

4. Expansion

5. Building a Blood Economy

1 - General Guidelines

Both Bandar Log and Patala have superb astral power and amazing national summons to leverage that power. However, these cost tremendous numbers of astral pearls and there are never enough for everything you want to do. You must adapt and you must conserve pearls.

In Dominions 3, the item clam of pearls provided one permanent astral pearl per turn each and you could forge as many as you could find water and nature gems. It's my opinion that the high prices for astral summons were based upon this concept and they have not changed significantly since although the clam now only provides a temporary gem in battle. My personal experience is you can get enough pearls for mage summons, forging, battle magic and some global spells. But you can't afford troops from astral spells which is somewhat of a disappointed as the gandharvas are a very nice unit.

One of my motivations for going for serious blood hunting is to improve this situation by providing diversity magi, thugs, troops and forging using blood slaves. It's not my intent to compete as a major blood nation since you have to start small and build slowly.

Both nations have access to all the national summons of Lanka and this combined with astral power makes for a terrific late game: massed combination communion/sabbaths with every path in the game. To use this amazing power you have to plan. There are a few ways to get a blood economy going with monkeys. 

- The first is a pretender designed to start hunting quickly. 

- The second is scout and commander blood hunting. 

- The third is buy slaves from an ally.

My preference is the pretender and trade. It takes a very long time to hunt with scouts and cheap commanders.

Both Bandar Log and Patala have excellent capability to enter the water and fight hard. This is due to the amphibious nature of nagas and it's important to realize that Bandar Log gets cost effective access to the nagas of Patala via conjuration magic and water gems. I will go over nagas in more detail later as they have significant power but are a challenge from some weaknesses.

In terms of gems, the key gems for both of these nations are water, astral and nature. Of course, you can make good use of the other gems but these are your go to resources. And that quickly leads to the desire to get Maelstrom up as a global. One of the fun things is that both nations can do awesome things with water gems and you can usually trade for water gems in multiplayer.

2 - Design Goals

When building a nation and pretender I use a method based on strengths and weaknesses. In general you can either fix your weaknesses or boost your strengths. Both are valid but trying to do a mix of each is generally a fail.

• Weakness

• Strengths

• Leveraging Strengths

• Overcoming Weaknesses

• Elephants

Weakness

Monkey troops are mostly poor. They are expensive for the value and don't have solid general use. There are a few exceptions.

• All your recruitable troops except sacreds have poor magic resistance. You must either avoid situations with magic resistance negate spells or use antimagic liberally.

• Your big bandars are expensive and take resources which you normally won't have.

• Your shields are all bucklers which are minimal.

• You have no native fire magic until conjuration 9 which for a massed archer nation is painful.

• You have no native death magic until conjuration 6 when you can use nature magic to get some death magic or Rudra at conjuration 9 using astral pearls (or national blood summons!).

• Bandars are size 3 and therefore vulnerable to swarm tactics.

• You have weak priests (or expensive magi with holy 1) so bless strats can be a challenge.

• You will always be short on pearls.

• Bandar Log has mediocre sacred troops that are cheap and available in any fort with temple. The tiger riders from the capital are effective while not stellar compared to other sacred cavalry.

• Patala's sacreds have limited utility due to high resource cost or lack of armour as well as cold blooded and encumbrance problems.

• Most of your troops have the "animal" tag. This has some odd game effects. I say odd as it's not very intuitive how it hinders or helps.

• You have elephants. 

Strengths

• Bandar troops have high hitpoints and excellent strength. Add this to heavy weapons and they can crack amour, hold up walls, and crack walls very well.

• Markata can be brilliant in certain situations. For example, markata swarms can expand against heavy cavalry due to extremely high defence and size 1 swarm tactics. They are undisciplined so your options for scripting are limited.

• You have superb sacred magi. Research is excellent. Diversity is particularly good if you use your summons. High level access is easily available for earth, water, astral and nature magic.

• The Nagini magi are seducers. This mostly means they can assassinate since seduction is unrealiable. But it is a useful additional tool.

• You have wonderful astral summons which diversify you into fire, air and death magic although the cost in research and pearls is high.

• You have summonable H3 priests to fix the blessing issue.

• You have access to all the a national summons of Lanka which opens up strong air, death and blood magic. These summons are also excellent thugs and SC's and are not unique so you can summon as many as you can afford.

• You have recruitment of atavi and markata in every forest without infrastructure. They are not good units but if you have spare gold it's something to provide some chaff or script bait. The atavi leaders are stealthy so a backup scout or gem carrier.

• You have elephants. (I know I know. I put this as both a strength and a weakness.)

• Light Bandar Warriors are surprisingly good. Their sticks and stones have good range with 15 strength and hit hard as well. They shoot twice a round in combat. Use strength of giants or rush of strength to give Light Bandars the range of short bows. They also make excellent wall defenders or crushers. 

Leveraging Strengths

• Go for blood massively. Of course, if you've read this far you know it's the point of this entire guide.

• Use point buffing and later larger scale buff spells in battle from your broad choice of magic paths. Here are some quick suggestions: body ethereal, luck, mossbody, iron warriors, strength of giants, protection and others.

• Choose a bless that leverages your amazing blood summons and your recruitable and summoned thugs.

• Use communions to enable casting high level spells or cast more spells in battle.

Overcoming Weaknesses

Some of these ideas are mutually exclusive. I am listing them so you can see there are options when designing a pretender.

• Support your monkey troops with the spell antimagic when meeting things like other astral nations or mind blasting troops in battle.

• Take some death on your pretender to get death magic going early. Revenants are a cheap solution to searching for death gems.

• Use the luck scale. There are excellent heroes for both nations that can help a great deal and it's even better if using the very popular mod: Worthy Heroes    

• Multiple minor blesses can shore up a number of weaknesses and boost thugging with less need for forged equipment.

• Adding magic paths that you do not have either natively or with moderate research and summons can help tremendously in mid to late game. Two paths are especially useful: fire and death. This guide by MelficeBelmont is an excellent resource in how to broaden you diversity: Boosting and Access Guide

• Use an awake monster pretender to improve early expansion. 

Elephants

Be careful with elephants. There are many good discussions of these weird units but my general belief is that they are severely overpriced given how easy they are to counter. I like to use them in year 1 for expansion but beyond that I generally suicide them since the upkeep is horrific. If you want tramplers later, earth and ice elementals are much more cost effective. One excellent trick is to send 5 elephants out with a yogi and cast body ethereal on them. Later on if you still have some around or really enjoy them you can also get them to fly with your astral or blood air magi.

3 - Pretenders

Scales

Heat/Cold:

They prefer heat 2 which gives I consider has two options. The first is go with heat 3 for 40 design points. This will have a light effect on income since temperature scales moves around a bit from summer to winter. Alternately you can go for neutral temperature for 80 design points. I don't recommend cold 1 especially with Patala since your important naga magi are cold blooded. There is also a strategic choice here. If you are expected cold preference nations it is a major disadvantage to allow their cold to seep into your lands. I usually go with heat 3.

Production/Sloth:

This is a difficult choice. Production gives good gold income and the ability to make high resource units quickly on demand is helpful. Historically people recommend full sloth scale for monkey nations but in Dominions 5 I think it's a more granular situation. As you work on your pretender idea this is a scale worth moving up or down to find points. One solution to sloth is to use gold to build more forts to compensate. Patala is more likely to benefit from production due to it's capital only sacreds that need a lot of resources.

Order/Luck:

Here things get interesting. I personally enjoy playing under luck scale. This analysis by Taorec gives a lot of detail: Scales Analysis I quite like using luck 3 for both of these nations particularly for the increase gem income. Depending on your pretender design and need for points, I prefer going getting points by reducing order even as far as turmoil 3 to pay for other important things. The loss of gold and recruitment points is significant but like all choices in pretender design there are costs and benefits.

Growth/Death:

This is a blood design. Growth 3 is wanted for avoiding population loss from hunting and patrolling and for the gold. You could go with Growth 1 but I don't recommend it. You are going to want to patrol like mad and you don't want excessive loss of gold.

Magic/Drain

I am very fond of as much magic scale as you can afford since you have very cheap researchers in yogis so this leverages well. Magic scale also boosts your gem income from events so is an excellent synergy with luck.

Favourite Chassis

As described above, I recommend having blood magic on your pretender to get the blood economy going as fast as possible.  With some luck (and luck scale) you may get the blood 3 hero for either nation but that is not guaranteed and may come late.  So here are a few pretender chassis I like for this build.

To make your blood economy the core unit is the national spell Summon Dakini which requires research to blood magic 6, magic of air 1 and blood 4 and 81 slaves.  This need for air magic is quite critical and there are two solutions.  You can take air and blood on the pretender or plan to empower a Kinnara from the conjuration spell using pearls to summon.  The first is more reliable.

A second option to start a decent blood economy requires using a hidden mechanic.  Summon Asrapa at research of blood 3 provides 11 asrapa.  In the mod inspector you can view that they have hidden blood 1 and holy 1 magic if made into commanders using Gift of Reason or Divine Name.  So if you have more nature gems than slaves this is an interesting option.

I have traditionally chosen to put air magic on the pretender to ensure the earliest possible ability to summon Dakini.  However, an excellent comment below reminded me that empowering the pretender later in air magic you got by luck, trade, or some early Kinnara out searching is fairly reliable.  This is a trade off where you are more dependent on some luck to save a significant amount of design points.

Immobile

Fountain of Blood

It comes with blood 3 and dominion 4 as an immobile.  I like to give it astral 3 or more to teleport and you want to give it a bit of air magic to summon Dakini.  If you don't add astral you will only be able to use it in your capital for blood hunting and that has significant gold cost.  The air spell cloud trapeze does not work on immobiles.  It will gather slaves very quickly.  The cost to add the air magic is moderate at 40 new path cost.

Titan

Devi of Darkness

This titan comes with earth 1 and blood 2 and can be a reasonable expander with two built in weapons, four arms, some armour, fear and the ability to use early earth buffs.  Each additional point of earth magic increases protection and allows some good blesses.  With a new path cost of 60 design points, the option to wait for empowerment is air becomes very valid.

Monster

Man-Eater

This monster is also earth and blood but like all monsters the new path cost is very high.  Like the Devi it's a viable expander and gives you that initial hunting ability.  The population killer is a bit of a nuisance but with at least some growth scale can be managed.  This is a chassis that definitely fits with the empowerment in air option.

Rainbow

Ghost King

With new path cost of 20 the Ghost King is an interesting near rainbow.  Buying you air magic at the start has double benefit in additional buff ability and the possibility of air forging.  I prefer to buy at least Air 3 for forging.  I have successfully used Ghost Kings to expand from about turn 4 and up by forging a trinket shield and weapon with whatever gems you happen to have around.  Later you can add an armour.  I don't recommend trying to expand without any gear since it's natural weapon is very weak.  A quick research rush in alteration solves the protection issue.  Watch out for magic weapons that negate it's ethereal.

Great Enchantress

This is my favourite true rainbow for any astral nation due to the free astral pearl each turn.  Many people prefer the great sage for the research boost and that is a viable alternative but with these nations pearls are very valuable.  I prefer to choose the magic to ensure the ability to forge all the critical magic boosters in the game.   Refer above to the booster guide for details.

Awakening

In order to get a blood economy going in enough time to be relevant to the game, I choose either awake or dormant.  For the Devi, Man-Eater and Ghost King I go awake so that they can help expand.  The other choices are good dormant.  You are probably too busy expanding for the first 12 turns to have time to blood hunt with the pretender.

Bless

With the expanders you can choose any handy incarnate bless.  I am very fond of the fire and shock resistance from earth magic 5 which continues to remain viable throughout the game.  Blood surge also works well since to get any blood bless you need a minimum of 4 points.  I prefer blood surge to blood bond but you can make your own choice.   You will be hard pressed to afford any air bless but that is an option.  Basically you'll have Air, Earth and Blood on any of those.

With the Fountain, it's viable to go with Air 4, Astral 4 and Blood 6 dormant while keeping good scales.  Shock resist and precision are solid for your magi.  With astral, Patala gains some good advantage with Arcane Command if planning to use nagas.  Bandar has little need for it.  As an astral nation, Arcane Finesse is a wise bless to improve penetration.  Blood surge is still about the best for the blood magic and top up with Strong Vitae if you have leftover points.

For the Enchantress, I go dormant and 3 in every path with 5 in astral.  That way you can have all the little blesses cheaply.  That 5 in astral is to easily allow forging Rings of Sorcery and Wizardry which are very useful to have one around for key boosting.

Arcane Finess bless synergizes extremely well with all astral nations and monkeys are excellent astral nations.  As noted in comments, it also helps the naga hypnotize.

4 - Expansion

A incredibly popular topic back in Dominion 3 was how can you win with those crappy markata. Before they were made undisciplined there were some tricks. Overall though, I now only buy markata during expansion in small numbers. A few can soak those lance hits from heavy cavalry and save you losing valuable troops. You also get stuck with one of the crappiest starting armies in the game. Flinging monkey poo is just not enough.

You are monkeys. It's time to apply some intelligence to expansion. You don't need resources early so don't worry about getting all the provinces around the capital. Rush for choke points. Mark off a piece of territory and negotiate. Leave provinces near home for later. Swap provinces with a neighbour if required. Don't worry about the province graph if you have moved outwards and looped back. You can catch up. Besides, you will never be the biggest with this strategy. Accept a moderate 12-15 provinces year one.

A note on markata: I have successfully taken a heavy cavalry province with markata. I usually buy very few and wait to take out heavy cavalry later, but if you have to it works. Use at least 5:1 ratios and you need proper archer decoying. But each markata absorbs a lance hit (pretty funny to see each lance only do 5 hps). After that, the cavalry miss a lot at defence 14 and you get swarming going from size 1. It works. Tested and tried.

Bandar Log Expansion

In the case of Bandar Log, you have viable sacreds. If you took one of the light bless ideas, both tiger riders and white ones work. Tigers are cost effective and with 3 attacks and 2 forms they expand quite well with minimal help. Of course, you need a priest. The prophet works fine for the first expansion army. For that reason, I prophetize the Bandar Commander and not the scout. A 5 hp prophet is a bit too fragile for my taste. But that only gets you one army. Damn. You could burn one capital only commander recruitment on a priest. Or you can hold back and buy some elephants as money arrives. A cheap priest and vanara captain can be recruited together for one turn of commander points and is an effective option for your second army. The bandar commanders are nice but a lot more expensive and the army won't be very big.

So now what do you have? You probably can't move out till turn 3. But don't feel bad. Generally, I take my 5-6 tigers and half the start army. Prophet sits sort of middle and scripts Divine Bless and SMITE SMITE SMITE. The Atavi infantry sits just ahead of him on fire closest. Split your markata archers in half. Put one squad up top right (or left) on fire. Keep the other squad behind your atavi. Set your tigers slightly behind your prophet and below on the opposite side to the markata on attack rear.

In the interim you will need gold for fort 2 and temple 2 and lab 2. I recommend sticking with yogis as your go to mage in year 1. They are enough for solid research and then you get to phase 2 of expansion.

Yogis can open up the use of point buffing for expansion if you rush alteration research. I am not an expert at this technique and welcome comments from anyone who has tried it with Bandar Log or Patala.

Patala Expansion

Your sacreds are terrible. Ignore them. Buy elephants. Simple enough. Some bandar warriors for morale boost helps. And some markata screens. Get your research running solid and you have the identical body ethereal trick to use.

Well okay. The sacreds are not that terrible in Dominions 5 due to a couple very useful features for taking water provinces. They have great poison resistance and there is a lot of poison damage on the independent tribes in the water. They also have the hynotize ranged attack that helps to break up formations. Depending on the map, I buy a few and lead them with a nagaraja or nagarishi to take nearby water provinces. But they are damn poor on land.

Down in the comments below, Kashtronomical has proposed a very interesting build for naga expansion. I have not tried it and will leave his comment to give credit to him for the concept. If you have success please post for more discussion.

5 - Building a Blood Economy

The core for your blood economy, and the reason to bother, is the national summons you inherit from Lanka.  There are no unique summons in this group which means you have unlimited blood hunting potential.  The only other blood makes blood route in the game for any nations without unique summon limits is vampire lords. They require fairly high death and blood paths are are not an easy route.

The Lanka summons go beyond this guide and are best reviewed in a Lanka guide.  But let's go over the key ones for a blood economy.  Whether you use your pretender or scout and commander hunting to get your first slaves these are the key hunters in your magic.

The Asrapas: Summon Asrapas, Blood 3 research, Blood 2 to cast and 11 slaves cost.  This gets you 5 pretty useless troops but that's not the wonder.  Asrapas have a hidden B1 magic when made commanders by gift of reason.  This means that you can get your first set with 91 blood slaves (empower 1 = 50, empower 2 = 30 plus 11 to cast).  This will take a while but is by no means hard.  Now you have real hunters.  It will burn some nature gems but there is no downside.  You have nature in hordes.  And it's very low on the research tree.

The Dakini: Summon Dakini, Blood 6 research, Air 1 Blood 2 to cast, 75 slaves.  With monster paths and super thugging ability, the Dakini is the core of your economy.  Once you have begun to summon Dakini you can roll out in power and style.  In order to make life easy if not using a pretender with blood magic, I tend to empower a Kinnara from Conjuration 6 for summoning Dakini.  Given that both Bandar and Patala have excellent research you should be able to get to Conj 6 while scout hunting, get a Kinnara, and make that your first blood mage while you then prep Blood 3 research and get some thistle maces made.

The Danava:  Summon Davanas (note the spelling error), Blood 8 research, Blood 5 to cast, 75 slaves.  You get 3 troop giants with sacred and horrific base equipment.  Davana are the heavy lifting beasts of the Lanka summons.  But the important part for this discussion is they have secret paths with GoR.  Check out them on the mod inspector or wiki.  You will get various versions with air and blood magic.  A2 are your cloud trapezing brutes.  A1 can become commanders of other Danava.  The blood versions can hunt while defending border provinces or go off fighting with blood vengeance buff.  And if you get some crappy randoms, they actually make pretty good reanimators in border provinces.  I happen to really like the monkey ghouls (pisacha).  They are not mindless, have high str, and give you some solid fort crackers for dirt cheap.

And that is that for now! Feel free to discuss this in the comments here or on the discord server linked on the side bar. Enjoy and fling poo with enthusiam.

Dominions 5: 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 Arch-types

I use these arch-types 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.)  You want to consider good low level buff spells such as earth, air or nature magic.
2. The awake high bless (I separate this one from above.  This is typical a single path high level bless and provides an solid excellent expander.  You can use incarnate blesses with this method. You take a pretty hard hit on scales).
3. The bless chassis (Design is all about the bless you need.  Incarnate blesses added in Dominions 5 make this a more complex option than in previous game versions.)
4. The site searching rainbow. (basically 2 in every path)  This and the next two can take advantage of the bless feature that having all 4 elements or all 4 sorcery allows blesses with only level 3 in the paths.
5. The artifact forging rainbow.  It's similar to the site searching option but needs a few higher magic paths such as air 3 and astral 5 to allow forging.
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 global spells.)
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: Erytheia

I hope you follow my logic as I've worked through the example.  I've reduced it to two possibilities: awake research rainbow or imprisoned great scales.  Partly for fun I am choosing to imprison a rainbow with at least 3 in all magic paths to have a broad bless.  I went this way since Erytheia has a significant research advantage with inspiring on many magi.  As this game is now in the early stages, I'm going to postpone showing my exact pretender.  I will add it later.

Costs and Benefits

This design allows the bless to be available turn 1 since none of the low level blesses are incarnate.  I did a mix of bless that helps the sacred infantry and also magi or thugs.  That is a significant benefit.  Minor blesses are not as powerful in general as major blesses but when stacked can add significantly to the power of sacred troops.

The scales are very good.  Almost maximum.  That's a significant benefit with high gold income and production.  I expect recruitment to be limited by recruitment points.

The biggest cost is low dominion and few sacred troops.  Rainbow magi have expensive dominion candles.

And that sums up my methodology.  You can post any comments or discussion here or on the new discord for guides: Dominions Guides Discord  I am very happy to have constructive criticism.

Dominions 5: 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 super combatants.

You can't predict all the things that your opponents will do.  You can make general predictions.  Is early age 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.

LA Erytheia Example:

The game I am for which I am designing a pretender is all veteran players who needed to convince the administrator that they had the experience to compete effectively.  It also has a number of long term players from Dominions 3 time who have returned.  The possible strategies are broad and hard to pin down.  My opponents and my estimate of their likely strategies are:

• Gath: I expect Gath to use a major bless but may use a dormant pretender to keep good scales.  Gath has giant thugs and fair magic diversity.  I don't have a good grasp of current preferred Gath strategies.
•  Caelum:  Caelum has large amounts of inexpensive flying troops with a good ability for air magic and some earth and death.  The great mobility and the addition of storm immune troops can make castle defence very difficult.  Fast siege is likely backed with air elementals and thunderstorm.
• Xibalba:  Xibalba has good potential to take water provinces.  That could create conflict.  It's a major blood nation with cheap fast flyers that die like flies.  But every forest can make more.  Another case of high mobility and rapid siege.
• Marignon: Fire and blood magic are typical for Marignon.  A bless is likely along with evocation magic and fire elementals.
• Patala: Patala has good potential to get into the water with nagas and naga magi.  On the other hand, the nagas are difficult troops on land with cold blooded and high encumbrance.  I personal tend to scales with Patala and consider it a valid design.
• Ulm: Good blood potential although the hunters are pricey.  The national spell for vampire counts and usually good research suggest a scales build.  They get free wolves as patrol chaff.  Ulm also has good communion/sabbath potential.  The ghoul guardians are popular to deal with enemy sacred units.
• Vaettiheim:  I am not very familiar with the new Vaettiheim nation.  My understanding is that it's similar to Utgard but with stealthy goblins and moose!  Go Moose Go!  I expect a moderate blood economy.
• Mictlan: Mictlan has the excellent jaguar warrior sacreds.  I expect a major bless and a good blood economy.
• C'tis: A nation with mostly cold blooded magi and troops so likely to go for heat scale.  It has excellent death magic with some nature and other.  I have played it and find the sacred units difficult to get in large numbers so tend to play it with scales and use large numbers of the general troops and skeleton summoning in battle.
• Abysia:  Late Age Abysia has moderate blood potential.  Basic assassins are available in every fort.  I expect a scales build with a focus on evocation and a research rush going for lightless lanterns in Construction 6.
• Pangaea:  Good magi and excellent cavalry in the centaurs.  Bless is quite viable but from what I've seen a broad rainbow style bless is very effective.
• Bogarus:  Bogarus has good cavalry for basic expansion and excellent research potential with blood magic on the side.  I would expect a scales build with perhaps a light bless.
• Arcoscephale:  A broad base of magi and classic greek troops with pikes and tower shields.  It also has good astral and communion potential.  I expect another scales build.
• Man:  I recently played a game with man.  Communioned air magi and cheap spies are good.  The crossbows are excellent.  It also has some very interesting national spells that are near impossible to cast with the national magi.  I would play it with a pretender to fill those diversity issues and a light bless.

Looking over the list, I can see a potential for some very aggressive early rushes especially from nations that go with a big bless.  It's my view that a focus on fast research is critical for rush defence.  With the high research potential for Erytheia there are two options: very good scales to buy a lot of magi or an awake research pretender.

Dominions 5: Pretender Design and Analysis Part 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.  Or as some would say a little bit of key research matters.  You are working with armies and your pretender if available soon enough.  You may also be using a few magi.

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 multi-player games a practical expansion is 15 or so provinces per player.  Some folks shoot for 20+ but the reality is that can lead to an early death by a gang up.  In graphs off games it's more viable but with graphs 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.

I am a somewhat careful player who does well in late game.  But I have also been pushing myself to use more aggressive designs in the recent past.  I am not advocating for any particular style in play just mentioning my own preference and habits.

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?

LA Erytheia Example:

My game with Erytheia is now on turn 13 as I write this section.  I fumbled the first five turns quite badly but not clearly grasping the oddities of Erytheia troops on land.  The slow combat move of the heavy infantry and sacred infantry makes scripting a challenge.  However, they do work to expand with minimal bless.  Preparing a test game or two and practicing expansion with different pretender designs is a useful tool for important games.  I usually do that for large turn a day type games but not for blitz games played in a single day.  I cut my testing short this time.

What I found worked was a small number of the sacred Setting Sun with the slow Hoplites to soak crossbows and draw aggression.  Then flanking with squads of the faster Phalangites and Thyreophorite javelins.  

The nation has potential to do key research rush quickly to help defend against an early human opponent so a focus on Alteration magic to level 4 for body ethereal and other low level buff spells for troops is a valid approach as well.  This again supports a light bless and saving pretender points for scales or research potential.

Phase 2: Middle Game

What is the middle game?  In my view it's the period of the game when magic becomes as powerful as troops.   You can now leverage spells and summons to supplement your basic troops.

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 cheaply.  In Dominions 5, I try to limit thugs to a total cost of 15 gems.  This is based on the concept that a thug has a specific purpose.  I define 3 of them: take light to moderate province defence, killing other thugs, or army support.  Each purpose tends to need different equipment or buff spells.  

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.   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.  This guide may help: Magic Sites and Searching

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 purchased 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.  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 (therefore high magic), many of these summons are incredibly efficient.

LA Erytheia Example

With wide magic path access but fairly low maximum paths, the magi of Erytheia will be able to cast a broad selection of defensive and offensive combat spells.  With wide magic paths, but only a lucky random to get some level 3 higher paths, I expect that summoning quality troops will be a challenge.  Forging magic path boosters will also become important for summoning as well as battle magic.  So reviewing again the magic available, I can see some key mid game research.  Alteration to about level 5 provides a lot of value in fire, earth, water and astral buffing spells.  Conjuration of at least 3 provides the magic path boost spells summon earth and phoenix power.  Evocation combined with the path boost spells make a number of options for fire, earth and water at research 4 to 6.

And Erytheia has the option of communions.  For effective communions key research are Conjuration 5 for Light of the Northern Star and Thaumaturgy 4+ for communion spells and astral attack spells.

In a quick review, there are not many great summons although the national spells for Erytheia deserve a close look.  For those not sure, you can easily load the mod inspector, select Erytheia as the nation and click the toggle for nation spells only.  

You can see that a number of these require path level 3 which is rare and suggests forging boosters.  Some also require paths not available on the national magi.  I am leaning towards using the pretender to get these paths.  A rainbow or titan pretender with broad magic and some bless is looking like a great solution. 

For forging boosters, many are available at Construction 4 and most of the rest at construction 6 making those another important goal for research planning in the mid game.

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.

LA Erytheia Example:

With the previous sections on specific troops, magi and research it looks like the best late game strategy is lethal squads of battle magic supporting troops and summons.  With good access to communions and broad magic paths, Erytheia can cast almost all of the large battlefield wide spells and use powerful high level evocations and thaumaturgy to destroy armies.

As part of the late game plan, I intend to summon a number of diversity magi such as naiads, kokythiads and perhaps lamia queens to broaden the magic available.  Most of those require a lot of gems and high level conjuration research.  I expect gem income to be excellent compared to many other nations since you have a broad selection of magic at level 2 or higher.  I was questioned about this statement since site frequency is lower in late age on default settings although I have seen that many administrators set the magic site higher at game start.  But any magic site settings affect nations fairly equally and broader magic leads to more gem income.

With that huge variety in random magic it's hard to predict if global spells will be easily available.  They tend to need path level 5 or more and a lot of gems so that will require either the pretender or summoned magi and boosters from forging.  No globals stick out as obvious right now in the early planning.

I am leaning more heavily to a diversity pretender.

Dominions 5: Pretender Design and Analysis Part 1

As you will see if you look at my history, I wrote this guide for Dominions 4 many years ago.  Here is my update for Dominions 5.  Enjoy!

Here's the story.  You joined a game and you got a nation.  NOW WHAT?  Maybe you got a nation in a draft and haven't a gory clue about it.  Of course you can go chat up people on forums or discord and ask for help.  Or you can do your own work.

Step 1: Review what your nation has.

This part has held up as viable since Dominions 3.  10+ years.

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

Due to interface improvements you can also do most of this by "create pretender god" and using the live tooltips.  But I still prefer a test game.  It has a few more options to dig into detail.

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?
12. What is my capital gem production?

Example: Late Age Erytheia

This is my task tonight.  I have never played the nation. In the next part I used numbered list but I did not keep each question to the same number.  If that bothers your latent obsessive compulsive.... I propose you edit it to taste.  It's like cooking.  Use a LITTLE heat, but save the rest for toppings.

1. The sacred are average in price and function and not capital restricted.  The biggest issue is terrible combat move of 5 and very high encumbrance on land.  But almost all Erytheia units have a second water shape.  A comparison may help.  The Soldiers of the Setting Sun are 30 gold and 36 resources each.  For that you get excellent protection, 3 attacks per square (size 2), a magic weapon, 13 hit points, but on land the very challenging 5 move. A reasonable comparison is the Jaguar Warrior with second form for 26 gold and 4 resources.  Just on resources it is much easier to create large numbers on demand without many design points spent on production.  They are also fast and have effective 30 hit points with the second shape.  And in the second shape they get 6 attacks per square.  This does not recommend a large bless to me.  Some minor blesses could be quite helpful.
2. None of the sacred magi look like good options for thugs so another reason to avoid spending large design points on a bless.
3. The troop sacred units are not capital only and you have some capital only sacred magi and some not but those are restricted to coastal forts.
4. The princes and princesses are odd units with insanity and from research some complicated events that can occur.  There is no easy answer but it's pretty clear you want them.  Deep analysis of the royalty isn't something that can be done from a quick review.  I am just going to play the game and figure it out.
5.  Alternatively, the daduchos look very excellent and deserving of a light mage bless.  The research points per gold is very high with an average of 10gold/RP (typical random magic).  That compares very favourably with 9.2 gold/RP for Tungaliks which I had handy to compare.  Then you get a good chance of level 2 in numerous paths and a slight chance of level 3 magic.  They are also sacred so upkeep costs are manageable.  I understand they are available in any coastal fort.  Your land forts will be limited to mystics which are a good mage but not sacred and not as broad in magic.
6. Erytheia has a selection of water only units and magi.  The key thing to note is the only source of nature magic on the pearl magi as a 25% random.  To use that nature on land will require forging or summoning from the conjuration school.  Nature is not critical to the nation but the ability to summon Naiads would help diversify significantly.  And for that you simply need water 3 nature 1 which can be done easily with booster items.
7. The available magic paths are very broad but not very tall.  This nation has a lot of random magic on its magi.  Fire, Water and Astral are the strongest. There is a good chance of Earth and Air at level 2.  And a small chance of Nature.  Death magic is completely missing.
8. The research is very good.  You have two magi with inspiring research: mystics and daduchos.
9. The royalty are 4 commander points so you won't be buying them fast.
10. The capital makes 2 fire gems, one water gem and one pearl.

Troops Review

Now you need to look carefully at the statistics of your national units.  The main thing for pretender design in this section is planning your scales, most importantly production.  If your main troops are low gold and high production things like turmoil and production become viable.  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. Or crossbows (armour piercing).
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)

Late Age Erytheia Example: 

The units for Erytheia are an interesting mix.  There are 3 general types: amphibious units from coastal forts that have two shapes (merpeople legs in water), regular land units from coast and inland forts, and aquatic only units from sea forts.  This makes it a bit tricky to do my favourite review by starting a game since you'd have to expand inland and to water to see all the options.  So it is easier to do the review from the pretender design screen and the nation overview.

All of the heavy infantry of Erytheia have formation fighter.  This increases the number per square and therefore the number of attacks per square.  It tends to make melee troops significantly more effective.  And the melee troops of Erytheia are high resource cost so that suggests production scale.

A couple quick things are apparent.  The combat move on land of the amphibious coastal units is slow.  This is a concern for melee troops since it will take a long time being shot by late age crossbows to get into engagement.  The heavy pikemen and sacreds are combat move 5.  That's very slow.  For ranged troops they have some decent light infantry with javelins.  I find it useful to buy light infantry or light armoured ranged to use up spare resources after buying heavy infantry.   I adjust that as I expand and gain more resources.  It is also easier to buy low resource troops when you simply need numbers for siege or patrol.  They have a odd weak crossbow that works in the water.  The crossbows do not compare favourably with independent crossbows in having one less damage and a range of 25 compared to 40.  You are better off on land simply buying independent crossbows which are common.  But in the water any ranged units are helpful.

The aquatic troops are more or less common tritons and do the job fine but can not leave the water.  

Gold costs are average with some high resource units.  This suggests going with good scales and using mixed formations for expansion.  It is late age and depending on the map and opponents getting in the water quickly will be a big help.

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: Erytheia has good fire magic but no death magic.  The ability for forge skulls of fire for +1 fire magic is very helpful.
8. What cross path summons, forgings, and battle magic fit my nation?  Example: Erytheia has a number of excellent national summons using things like F3S1, F3N2, E3A1.  But getting that third level in the paths is not easy with the randoms on the magi.  This suggests broad magic access on the pretender.  Generic mage summons like Naiads are probably important.
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?  
11. Are any of my magi tough enough to be thugs too?  Self buffing thugs are extremely powerful since they need very little equipment.  
12. Do I have movement problems?  Some magi are very slow on the map.
13. Do I have age problems?  Abysia is by far the worst case here.  A method to manage it may be required. Example: many people recommend Unaging bless for Erytheia.  It's inexpensive and may be very helpful.

Late Age Erytheia Example:  

I discussed some of this in the first section.  This nation has some of the most variable random magic in the game with, for example, the Princes and Princesses have 8 @ 25% randoms.  I'm not going to do the probabilities here but that does give the potential to get level 3 magic in a number of paths.  However, it will take either luck or buying very many.  The daduchos have 3 @ 50% randoms in air, water, and earth so you will have quite a lot of air 2, water 2, and earth 2 magi.  Those all have good battle magic utility and forging option.  However, the small chance of level 3 does suggest two things: a rainbow pretender for forging and summoning, and summoning diversity magi particularly Naiads or Kokythiads.  The details of how to boost magic to high levels is available on other guides Dominions 4 Boosting and Access Guide.

Erytheia does not have an obvious primary path.  It has easy level 1 access in fire, air, water, earth and astral.  And good access to level 2 in air, water, earth, and astral from random magic.  Level 3 access is possible but quite rare (2 @ 25% random) on Princes and Princesses.  And there is a reliable but uncommon chance to get level 1 nature combined with water magic.  Otoh, there are a great many cross path options for particularly forging items.  There is no death magic available.  That is not a major issue but can be very easily fixed with the pretender.  And as noted above, a few crosspath items could help greatly.

For priests, Erytheia has the Nomarch at level 2 for 75 gold.  It is a decent leader so could be an option to lead sacreds if you planned that direction.  It has some extra traits that may have niche use but not worth any effort at the pretender design stage.  The Princes and Princesses are holy 2 and once you recruit the first of each you get a king and queen from event that get holy 3.  That opens up some options for throne claiming.

Part 2 to follow soon.