Pretender Design 101 - for Beginners Thread - Dominions 3: The Awakening

Note: This guide was originally posted in the Gaming Den, in preparation for a beginner's game (no mods) that included C'Tis, Eiru, Abysia, Oceana, Ermor, and Vanheim. I was playing Vanheim.

Pretender Design 101 - Before You Start, Some Basics

Dominions is a complex game. That is a gross understatement. This is a game so crazily complex that the supposedly simple act of designing your starting Pretender can be the difference between victory or a very short and exciting game.

But before I go into detail about Pretender design, let me try to lay down how most Dominion games actually play like. It's a bit of a generalization, but most Dom games can be divided into three phases: The early, middle, and late game (not to be confused with Early, Middle, and Late eras!)

Why are we starting here? Because most newbies have very little idea how the whole game is going to run. This is a game that will probably last for 50 turns, and it will suck to have made design choices on Turn 1 only to realize that those choices gimped you on Turn 30.

So to kick things off...

Early Game - The Basics

The early game covers about the first year (10 or so turns) of the game. During this phase, virtually all nations are focused on expanding - mostly by beating up on independent powers using non-magical armies (your national troops), a giant serpent (or some other "Super Combatant" Pretender), blessed troops, or a combination of all the above. The idea is that people want to grab as much land as possible - preferrably more than their "fair share".

(Sidebar: What's a fair share? Generally, just count up the total number of provinces and divide by the number of players)

Depending on the nation, you're also going to want to setup some infrastructure in the form of castles, labs, and temples - with the intent of leveraging these investments for the midgame. Others will want to dabble in a few levels of research (level 1 and 2 is usually cheap), to give yourself a few more defensive/offensive options or to develop your infrastructure further (mainly by site-searching spells).

In most cases though, at the minimum you'd want to have a couple more forts by the end of the first year, with fort-crazy nations (i.e. LA Man) getting 5 or even 6.

For some powerful early-game powers, expansion may include going to war against another player, with the objective of wiping them out by taking their capital before they could setup any backup infrastructure. In a game with few players and a small map, this can often win the game outright with no need for a mid or late game.

More often, you'll just see two powers fighting over some rich and disputed lands, with the winner going into the midgame with a bigger nation.

Either way, expect these early encounters to boil down to numbers (Province Defense is quite useful), troop quality (especially troops with a powerful bless or monstrous troops like Elephants), and army-scripting ability. If you expect to do a lot of early game fighting, read up on a troop scripting guide to maximize your troop-fighting ability.

Battle mages and magic will generally _not_ play a decisive role in these battles (but they can tip the balance and people should learn which early spells to beeline for - e.g. spells that can immobilize a giant serpent) and most fights will not even include them. Victory or defeat will also often be decisive - if you defeat an opponent's army, chances are he won't have a second one ready to stop you; which means you can march on his capital and win the war outright.

Midgame Basics

Once the indies have been gobbled up (along with a few players) and national boundaries defined, the game enters the midgame.

Nations that survive up to this point are generally much tougher to kill. They'll now have multiple forts up so that they more easily replace troop losses, and these alternate recruitment sites also means that losing one's capital is no longer necessarily a knock out blow.

Moreover, a lot of the gimmicks from the early game start losing their power. A giant serpent is great if you only have one army to beat and one fort to siege, but not if you're facing three of each (particularly if your SC has suffered wounds). Sacred troops will find themselves increasingly outnumbered as virtually all can only be recruited from the capital. Even stuff like Elephants are threatened with uselessness once the appropriate spells to counter them are researched.

In fact, it is magic power that will come to define the midgame - which is supported by the holy trinity of three elements - Research, Gems, and Mages Spell research is what often defines the middle game. You want to be researching spells during this period at the fastest rate possible, in order to get better tech that can counter whatever your opponent is using.

Is your opponent relying on Elephants? Get various Fear spells online and laugh as they rout and trample their own troops instead of yours. Annoyed by how your Elephants were made useless by Fear? Research some spells that grant them the ability to fly, and laugh as you air-drop them right on top of the enemy troops before they can cast their Fear spells. (Make sure your mages can cast these spells though!)

Put simply, the middle game is a game of attrition. For every enemy soldier you kill, they will probably kill one of yours. To beat the enemy, you need to have a lot more soldiers, or better tech so that your kill ratio improves. Spell Research and proper use of mages is how you improve your kill ratio.

The best spells in the game needs an additional resource to work however - and this resource are the magic gems. You need and want gems to be able to cast your best spells, so you should be site-searching like crazy during the midgame (if you hadn't been in the early game) to increase your gem output.

Not to mention that you need to spend gems to get some better mages (through items or summons), to cast even bigger spells than your national magic paths would indicate!

Finally, you've got the final member of the trinity, which are the mages themselves. Mages are a precious asset because they don't just cast your battle-winning spells; they also do your research. In fact, the midgame can often be about balancing how many guys to keep on research, and how many guys to send out to fight.

Moreover, don't be fooled by their numbers. They are an asset that grows at a specific rate, and if you fall behind it's hard to "catch up". Never forget that you can only recruit one mage for every fort/lab, and that your opponents are working under the same limitations. If you lose mages faster than your opponent does, you'll have slower research (since mages ALSO do your research) and will sometimes have no one to cast the cool stuff you spent so much effort researching!

Mages are not created equal however; and some nations will be blessed with better mages than others. Knowing what your mages are good for is yet another dimension of the game you should look at.

Finally, the latter part of the midgame is when you start seeing ritual spells and globals come into play heavily. So don't just expect battles between field armies. Expect to face all kinds of warfare - like guerillas raiding your provinces via Cloud Trapeze or Teleport, Seeking Arrows raining down on your research centers, mass assassination attempts on your Pretender, and other nasty things that just made your life a lot more complicated.

Lategame Basics

Finally, we get to the end game. Eventually, people will complete researching everything; or at least everything that's important for them. Along the way, some pretty major wars will be won and lost. A few nations may sneak by and get away with turtling. The survivors have the end game to sort everything out.

In general though, an obvious winner will emerge by this point - which is usually the person who has the biggest intact empire; particularly if they get all their research done ahead of everyone else.

Very rarely will the other powers - even working together - have the power to contest such a frontrunner. This makes the midgame even more critical, as you want to be the guy who makes it to the endgame before everyone else and be the "threat to world peace".

However, there are some games when there is no single "threat to world peace". Maybe the #1 and #2 powers are close enough to make a final war interesting. Maybe #2 and #3 have allied to match the power of #1.

In this case, it will also boil down to who has (or still has) the power to deploy the most apocalyptic tools in the Dominion Arsenal. It's not just about getting to Conjuration 9. You generally need to be a nation that packs one of the holy trinity of the endgame: Which is Astral, Blood, and Death. I'm not saying you can't win if you focus on other types of magic; but in general these three will be most important for the following reasons:
1) Astral gives you access to some very powerful rituals, the most powerful of which is probably Wish. This lets you get ANY unit or Artifact in the game, and nearly doubles your gem output. Along the way, it will also provide you with very powerful magic boosters (Ring of Wizardry) that will make it easier to cast spells in other paths.
2) Blood has rituals that can shut down all other players (preventing them from casting any non-Blood spell at all), and cast massively powerful summons. Plus, they have a battlefield spell which can instantly kill an enemy unit (by sending it to hell) - no matter how powerful.
3) Death has arguably the most cost-effective SC summons (Tartarians), and has a lot of spells that could end the world if you want to (i.e. Burden of Time - which causes all units to age rapidly).

Now, it can be argued that you'll have so many resources in the end game that you could empower a shitty mage to S9, but doing so still costs a lot of resources and time that you could be using to nuke your opponents instead. This is why people sometimes design Pretenders with S9 even if they don't really plan to use the bless - they're aiming to get a leg up when the end game comes along and it's time to fuel the nuclear missiles.

[Sidebar: Also, do note that while I say Astral, Blood, and Death have the most late-game power, it doesn't mean that all the other stuff becomes useless. Everything gets pretty powerful spells in the end - such as very impressive army-wide buffs like Army of Gold. And they also have strong summons like Elemental Royalty. But it's Astral, Death, and Blood that has the most "finishers"]

Evaluating Vanheim

So... let's take Vanheim as an example. Before even thinking of Pretender design, let's take a look at this nation's power in the early, mid, and late game.

Early Game Vanheim

Like I mentioned, early game is generally about fights between mortal armies, so let's take a look at Vanheim's national troops. They've got no archers, but their baseline infantry (HUskarls) are decent with a shield, a javelin, and decent melee ability. They are at least a match against most indie enemies.

But they've got more than that - in particular, they have Skinshifters and Einheres. Both are pretty powerful units, with the former being a regenerating greatswordsman who turns into a werewolf, while the latter is a dual-wielding berserker. They'll have some issues with archers and they cost a lot, but these bad boys can gobble up most indies easily. This upgrades Vanheim's early game to "good", and arguably to "great"; if you can afford these units.

Finally, they've got viable offensive sacred units in the form of Vans and Valkyries. Taking a good bless for these guys is not necessarily improving Van's early game though - since you'll only have one recruiting center early and you'll have to choose between Vans and Skinshifters. Still, the option is at least there.

So, overall, even without any tinkering Vanheim is gonna have a good early game, because:
- Vanheim has decent baseline troops
- Vanheim has access to elite troops that will make expansion very easy, if you have the gold to buy them
- Vanheim also has access to good Sacred troops if it really needs it

Midgame Vanheim

Again, the holy trinity of the midgame are research, gems, and mages.

I. Research
The first thing you need to look at for the midgame is a nation's research efficiency. How cheap are the nation's mages (in terms of recruitment and upkeep costs) for purposes of research?

On the top end, you've got nations like TC which has access to Ministers of Magic. These guys produce a base research of 5 for only 70 gold! That's already crazily efficient, but realize that these guys are even better because they can be built by plonking down just a fort. Almost everyone else has to put up a lab (costing another 500) to start recruiting mages.

By contrast, Vanheim is almost on the other end of the scale. All of its research mages need a fort, a lab, AND a temple (another 400 gold) before it can start recruiting mages. On top of that, our cheapest mage (Vanherse) costs 160 gold for 4 research. This is seriously more than twice the cost of TC's researchers for less output, with the only "consolation" being the halved upkeep cost because a Vanherse is sacred.

Our only really "efficient" researcher are dwarves, but they're capital-only and can't match the output of the real research powerhouses.So unless Vanheim has a lot of gold or augments research in other ways (i.e. research items - namely the Owl Quill, Skull Mentor, and Lantern), they are NOT gonna be a research powerhouse.

II. Gem Income No, you do NOT look at your starting magic sites to figure out your potential to get a huge gem income.
Instead, you need to look at the maximum power of your mages per path. To get more gems, you generally need to find more magic sites. To find these sites, you need mages with enough paths to search for them.

In most cases, you want to have at least 2 ranks in every path, as this reveals most sites when manual site-searhing, and also allows you to cast remote searching spells like Auspex (Note: Remote site searching is generally considered to be suboptimal nowadays however, and should be used sparingly). The exceptions are Death and Blood - you only need 1 Death to use its remote searching spell, and Blood doesn't rely on sites (albeit being able to natively recruit Blood 2 mages is still generally better)

Given this, Vanheim will have access to the following sites: -Air - Vanjarls get Air 2 natively.
-Earth - Dwarven Smiths get Earth 3
-Death - Vanadrott and Dwarven Smiths have a 1/4 chance to get Death 1
-Blood - Vanjarls get Blood 1

Additionally, Vanheim may be able to "break" into the following paths with some luck or empowering:
-Fire - You have a 1/4 chance of getting Fire on a Dwarven Smith. Search and empower to Fire 2 and you're good. Dwarven Smiths also have a small chance of getting Fire 2, or Fire/Death which lets you forge a Firebooster to get you to Fire 2.
-Nature - While having zero Nature mages, there are very many Nature commanders (Shamans) available from neutrals which have Nature 1. It can then be empowered to Nature 2 once you've gotten some gems.

Only Water and Astral are more or less hopeless for Vanheim "natively" until much later on, when they get high-end Blood summons or they get lucky and find a nice site/province that makes Water (i.e. Jade Amazons) or Astral mages (i.e. Crystal Tower).

III. Mage Power

Now let's look at how poweful Vanheim's mages are. Generally, we'd like guys to have around 4 ranks in a path; as this usually lets them cast a lot of the more powerful spells.

Dwarven Smiths and Vanadrotts are both excellent casters. Dwarven Smiths come with Earth 3 at the minimum, with the potential to hit Earth 4. He can cast mass-kill spells like Earthquake almost out of the box.

Vanadrotts comes with Air 3, Blood 1, and a Random. They will make great air casters who can do lightning spam or battlefield buffs. Plus, Blood opens up the possibility of communions/sabbaths, which can make them even more powerful. To top it all off, he's also sacred so he can benefit from some blessings (particularly Earth for reinvigoration, which reduces fatigue and let him cast more spells!). If only he didn't cost almost as much as a bloody Temple, he'd be perfect.

But those guys are capital-only, which will limit their numbers. A lot of the heavy lifting will have to be done by Vanheim's recruit-anywhere mages.

Fortunately, their best recruit-anywhere mage is the Vanjarls which have Air 2 and Blood 1. They can do basic lightning spam, and can get into a Sabbat for better blasting or simply use gems/boosters. They can also be blessed. Decent mages overall, except for the eye-popping cost.

Vanherses are just... bad with very little utility. But with money, I guess we can just ignore these Air 1 mages and buy Vanjarls instead.

IV. The Big Picture

So, overall, looking at our midgame power we can say that: - Vanheim's research is expensive and needs some help
- Vanheim will have good access to Air, Earth, Death, and Blood gems. It has potential to break into Fire and Nature too. It's hopeless for Water and Astral without help
- If one can afford them, Vanheim has a great lineup of capital-only casters, and a decent/good recruit-anywhere caster. Starting to notice a pattern here with Vanheim's desperate need for gold?

Endgame Vanheim

Finally, we get to the endgame. So far, the picture has been rosy for Vanheim except for the pattern of needing a lot of gold. We've got a good early game and midgame without even taking our Pretender into consideration. How about the end game then?

In a word? It sucks.

Again, the holy trinity of the endgame is Astral, Blood, and Death. Vanheim has no Astral. Vanheim gets Death 1 and Blood 1 at best.

Fortunately, even with Blood 1 you can get things rolling. Bloodhunting can generate huge amounts of slaves so long as you do so diligently and you have a lot of territory. Just keep empowering until they hit the necessary levels.

The bad news is that you generally want a recruit-anywhere Blood 2 mages (instead of a recruit-anywhere Blood 1 mage). You need a minimum of Blood 3 to be guaranteed of a getting slaves from a province every turn, and you can only get that cheaply if you have a native Blood 2 caster + the Sanguine Dousing Rod item. At best, Van will be a middling Blood nation in the end.

Death 1 isn't so easy to break out either. You're gonna need some boosters, which means empowering more Death magic and making some Death boosters, or getting stuff like rings of wizardry which improves all schools.

Sadly, the second option is only available if you have Astral. Which Vanheim doesn't have.

Unless the Pretender shores up this bit, Vanheim's endgame is gonna SUCK.

=====

Now that we've figured out the strengths and weaknesses of Vanheim, we can start formulating a long-term game plan.

People have different views on what is an ideal game plan. Some would advocate having a super-strong early game and midgame, and annihilate everyone before they finish research. If people make it to the End game, they accept that they're finished and just try to hold out as long as possible. The result of this thinking are strategies like Niefel Jarl rushes in EA - which rely on super-strong sacred troops that can dominate in the early and mid game, but fades into oblivion by the end game.

Personally, I prefer a "cover all your bases" strategy. I like having a decent hand in the early, middle, and late game. So rather than try to make Vanheim uber powerful in one era, I'll go for "patching" the nation so it's decent at all time periods.

To do that, we need to...
1) Augment our lategame power, probably by adding in some Astral power (which gives us boosters that help us gain access to high-level Death and Blood in the bargain!).
2) Get lots of gold to afford our troops and mages
3) Did I mention the gold?
4) Improve our research

These are the priorities. But we also have other concerns, like...

1) Can we find a way to get into water so we can also use any tasty water gems in our kingdom?
2) Can we speed up breaking into Fire and Nature without having to empower?

So with these requirements guiding us, let's make our Pretender.

A giant serpent we don't need. We've got a solid early game so long as we have the money. So let's pick a Pretender that specializes more in magic; particularly Astral. And you simply can't go wrong by picking the Great Enchantress - she starts with Earth & Astral, and makes Astral gems too. While she only makes one a turn, consider that a Dom3 game may last 50 turns; so you'll get 50 Astral gems just by having her!

Plus, it's cheap for her to get into other magic paths, which could make breaking into Water, Fire, and Nature more easy.

Finally, for more points, we can also start her off asleep. We don't really need her in the early game, because again we've got a decent early game as long as we've got the gold. So at this point, we have..

Great Enchantress
- Earth Magic 1
- Astral Magic 1
- Dominion 1
- Asleep (Pops out on turn 12, just in time for midgame)
- 445 more design points

Now, let's fix our priorities. We need Astral. Our Pretender starts at Astral 1. That will not get us anywhere. We need at least around Astral 4 to forge the boosters; albeit Astral 5 is ideal to be able to cast Wish. But for now, let's go with Astral 4, accept we may have to empower her once, and fill up the rest of our checklist. (How do I know we need Astral 5? Wish requires Astral 9. The Enchantress will have 4 slots that take Astral boosters - two misc, the head, and the body. So at most she will get Astral 8, and that's assuming I can forge everything I need)

Now that we've covered our Astral problem, we still have 397 points left to spend. So let's go fix our money problem.

As I've stressed repeatedly, Vanheim needs gold. And nothing improves gold better than Order Scales. I don't care if people say it's unthematic for the Vikings to be orderly. Unless I'm aiming to have a very short and exciting game, gold is a necessity. So I'm putting 3 points in Order for 120 points, leaving me with 277.

Next, we want to improve our research, and there are few choices as efficient as Magic 1. This gives all of our mages another point of research. Even better, since Vanheim prefers Cold climates, we essentially get it for "free" by taking Cold 1 too.

While we're here in the scales screen, we may as well fix another thing that people often forget about - which is your Dominion level.
Always - and I mean always - remember to put points in your Dominion. Without it, you can suddenly disappear off the map via Domkill (if nobody worships you, you DIE). For the Middle Era, I'd say have at least 6 or 7 in Dominion as you don't have to deal with enemies with annoying dominion effects like LA Ermor (which kills your population). For Vanheim, I'm comfortable with 6 - as Vanheim has an alternate way of spreading Dominion anyway (sacrificing Blood Slaves on temples) So with Dominion 6, our Pretender now looks like this:

Great Enchantress
- Earth Magic 1
- Astral Magic 4
- Dominion 6
- Asleep (Pops out on turn 12, just in time for midgame)
- Order 3
- Cold 1
- Magic 1
- 172 more design points

That gives us plenty of extra points to help shore up our deficiencies in Water, Fire, and Nature, and other neato stuff

So, spending the points, I ended up with this final design:

Great Enchantress
- Fire 1
- Water 1
- Earth 4
- Astral 4
- Death 1
- Nature 4
- Blood 1
- Dominion 6
- Asleep (Pops out on turn 12, just in time for midgame)
- Order 3
- Cold 1
- Magic 1
- 2 unused design points

First of all, I shored up our Nature with Nature 4. This breaks us into Nature, as the Pretender can forge a Thistle Mace (a Nature Booster) and give it to one of the many indie Nature 1 mages to site-search. Plus, it gives our sacred troops a regeneration bless; and allows our Pretender to cast most of the best Nature spells (along with calling some powerful nature mages).

Then, I decided to give our Pretender Earth 4. People may wonder why I did this when it's not a priority (we already have Earth 4 via Dwarven Smiths), but Earth 4 gives us another bless - reinvigoration. This is a HUGELY powerful bless for sacred mages (and ALL of Vanheim's mages are sacred!) which lets them recover fatigue to cast more spells. Combined with the Astral 4 bless (+1 Magic Resist) and the aforementioned Regen bless, Vanheim's mages will be in very good shape in battle.

Also, Dwarven Smiths do NOT get Astral/Earth as a combination, and there are a few nice spells that require it - such as Golem Construction.

I then took a smattering of other schools - Fire 1, Death 1, Water 1, and Blood 1. While they're not powerful enough to do remote site-searching (except for Death, which we already have), it's generally a bad idea in the first place to do remote site searching with a Pretender with this many paths. I mean, really - you've got at least 3 good paths, and you're only searching for 1 site via remote site searching?

Instead, my intent is to do some early manual site-searching with this Pretender; so that when she visits a province she will search for Fire, Water, Earth, Astral, Death, Nature, AND Blood sites all at once! Pair her up with a Vanjarl, and he'll search Air and Holy sites too - the only ones missing out of the mix. While some of the best sites will still be beyond our reach (having only 1 rank in a path reveals only the weakest sites), it can jump start our midgame gem income so we can empower our other mages earlier so they can do remote site-searching.

Better yet, with boosters, our Pretender will be a Forger/Ritual caster almost without peer, as she has access to virtually all spells and combos. Vampires? Naiads? Ice Devils? All within reach.

So there you have it - a step by step guide on how to make a Pretender for Vanheim. Now, this guide went FAR longer than I originally intended, but as I said - this is a complex game. You're gonna have to put this much throught on "little" things like Pretender design!

[Addendum:

While I didn't win this game, I did okay and essentially finished 3rd. Despite an early mishap in my expansion I managed to rush and beat Abysia, after which the game entered a long stalemate period.

At the end of it, I launched an attack against Ermor in coordination with another nation (Eiru) which went very well. However, doing that (and waiting too long) allowed Ermor to build up a huge Astral gem reserve, which he used to drop half a dozen Apocalypses on us.

That basically ruined me and Eiru, along with C'Tis which was the world's second largest power. With the three possible contenders ruined, Oceana - who had complete control of the oceans and was pretty much leading the whole game - was declared the winner after they cast Arcane Nexus (and C'Tis gave up).

All in all, it was a good learning experience that made me realize these things:

1) Vanheim's early game was indeed very strong, and pretty much went off as planned. The sacred Vans and Valkyries weren't really needed; only skinshifters (albeit I faced no archer-heavy armies).
2) Because of my blessings, I had a much more powerful midgame than I had initially intended. My Vanjarls were very good thugs that could solo entire PDs. In fact, Ermor lost the majority of their provinces on the first turn of the war after I dropped Vanjarls on them.
3) My Astral end game plan largely failed, because Ermor, C'Tis, and Oceana were all better at it due to Pretender design (for Ermor) and because both C'Tis and Oceana could create items that generate Astral Pearls (clams) "natively".

However, I was not completely ganked in the end game because after crushing Abysia in the early game, I had no other rival blood powers in the game. This allowed me to get a couple of the high-end blood summons before Ermor blew us all up.

If I had a chance, here's what I would have done differently:
1) I should have taken the other nations into account when designing my Pretender. In retrospect, with both Oceana and C'Tis being much better at Astral (they can produce astral gem-generators AND have Astral mages) I really should have accepted that I wasn't going to be an Astral power at all, and the Astral on my pretender was only a supplementary feature - e.g. for forging Rings of Sorcery to help with other magic.

Meanwhile, I should have had a much stronger focus on Blood. Sure, I didn't have the best blood-gatherers, but I only had one rival (Abysia) who had blood hunters.

In this setup I had a much stronger chance of getting the top-end Blood summons, not to mention all sort of demonic troops to support my armies. upping the Blood magic of my Pretender would have helped me more, by giving me someone who can summon a lot of different demons.

Also, having so much blood income also allowed me to forge a ton of Bloodstones, which generate Earth gems. That only further justified my decision to put E4 on my Pretender, as she was able to cast a lot of big Earth spells - such as Mechanical Men which would have been useful in a war against Oceana.

2) My midgame was actually my strongest element, and I should have recognized this earlier instead of allowing a stalemate to persist. I had basically conquered most of Ermor on the first turn of our war by just dropping a properly scripted Vanjarl on each of them (with minimal gear - just a shield of Gold!).

If I had these guys out warring earlier I could have beaten Ermor before they became an Astral powerhouse, and positioned myself for a much stronger late game. This could have let me be a real end game power, despite the mistake of not putting extra Blood magic on my pretender.

===

In short, the old adage applies to Dom3: No plan survives contact with the enemy. But on the flip side, I probably wouldn't have gotten this far on my second "proper" MP game ever without a plan guiding me .

Edited by: Zinegata

You might want to mention that this guide is for the vanilla game, so there's some things that don't necessarily apply to CBM games(like astral blood or death being the only really viable endgame paths, or gemgens).

For noobs like me it seems fine. Long-term strategy is the hardest part of Dominions game for me.

I haven't read it. But I'm SURE mine is better

Thanks Zinegata. More guides is always better.

Question about your thugs.
How did you script them?

Aorta-> Yes, it vanilla. But I assume most beginners will start with vanilla.

GK JL->

It depends on the thug, but in the case of Vanheim it's the standard "Air" thug setup.:

Get a Vanjarl with Air 2 magic.
Give him a Golden Shield with Awe (very good crowd control as it negates a lot of attacks).

In battle, his script is as follows:

1) Cast Mistform - most important buff, as it reduced most damage to just 1 point.
2) Cast Blessing - this self-blesses the Vanjarl, giving him 2 points of reinvigoration and some regeneration (often enough to heal any hits taken)
3) Cast Mirror Image - it's very cheap for an Air 2 caster and gives an extra layer of protection
4) Cast Resist Lightning - gives 100% defense against lightning magic
5) Shockwave, cast spells.

With Awe (greatly reduced the number of melee attackers so long as they make a morale check) your Vanjarl should only be taking a few attacks per turn, some of which will be also negated by his natural defense. Those first couple of hits will be negated by Mirror Images, and then the ones that finally get through will be reduced to 1 damage by Mistform (which is regenerated away anyway).

Total fatigue from all those buffs should only be around 20ish, leaving you with plenty of fatigue to cast 10-fatigue shockwaves.

Shockwave is basically a very good and cheap crowd control spell, and with a few castings it's often enough to chase off most PDs.

The only time the thug can really be killed is if the enemy has a specific counter (of which there are many, but Ermor didn't have any online on Day One), or the thug gets overly fatigued and the PD lucks out and scores a critical hit.

That generally only happens against stronger PDs with enough bodies to throw past the shockwave spam, so for stronger PDs, send two thugs together and put them in the same space. They'll double shockwave output while halving the attacks they each take.

A lot of nations can actually use this setup fairly successfully (Eiru comes to mind), and can be spiced up with other spells. The first and easiest that comes to mind for instance is Air Shield against archer-heavy armies; but there's a ton of other stuff you can add to the recipe depending on the situation.

Edited by: Zinegata

I've moved this thread to The Codex, because it is a useful guide and belongs here.

Zinegata wrote: Aorta-> Yes, it vanilla. But I assume most beginners will start with vanilla.

That's not very realistic here. Most newbie games here are CBM.

It would definitely be helpful to the readers of this forum to be specific that it's based on the the unmodded game. The general ideas are still fine.

I just play Dominions 4. Could I still follow this guide?

I_Am_King_Midas wrote: I just play Dominions 4. Could I still follow this guide?

The big question is the national evaluations portion; which to a large extent is still in flux. That's why I'm only writing "Primers" and not "How-to-Guides", meant to show people what cool stuff is available per nation as opposed to a unified strategy on how to win as a particular nation.

Also, the length of the early and mid game has change a lot.