Primer: Nation Evaluation Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

I've already done a couple of nation guides (to date, I've done three - LA Ulm, MA Ulm, and LA Man) but what I haven't really touched upon is how to properly evaluate nations in Dominions 4. A problem with many old Dominions 3 nation guides is that they were basically just unit-by-unit reviews, when in reality nations are much more than just the sum of its recruitable units.

This guide is meant to help people figure out how nations work by giving them a workable methodology (and, incidentally, to help other people write their own guides. Guide-writing is lonely work and I wanna see more of them) - with a sequel article in the works that allows you to turn your national analysis into a viable Pretender Design.

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Dominions 4 is a complex game, and it's often a very long game that can take many turns to complete (sometimes taking months if via PBEM multiplayer). Hence, it can be easy to lose sight of what's important in this game.

I am fond of the term "giving people rope to hang themselves with", and Dominions 4 is frankly a game to which the term applies to a frightening degree. “What does Innate Spellcaster do?”, “How do I take advantage of my +1 Siege bonus?”, and “I wanna try to cast all my national summons!” are all things that a beginner would probably ask, and devote a lot of attention to. Unfortunately, most of these details are only situationally useful – stuff that is rightly called “petty-fogging”.

One of your main jobs, as the player, is to look past all the petty-fogging and focus on the important things that win you the game.

And what's most important is to remember that your nation in Dominions 4 is an engine.

Again, for emphasis: Your nation in Dominions 4 is an engine

It takes resources (in the form of gold, resources, and research), and converts them into combat power in the form of mages, troops, and spells. Your combat power allows you to conquer more provinces, which provides more resources, which in turn lets you have more combat power.

Keep feeding this cycle, and you eventually get enough power to win the game. If you forget to feed this cycle – e.g. pursuing national summons that don’t enhance your combat power – you will lose the game.

Hence, it's not only important to know what kind of leaders/troops a nation can recruit - but also how efficiently and how quickly they can convert their resources into combat power. It doesn’t matter if your have, stat for stat, the best unit in the game if the said unit takes forever to recruit. The game could already be lost before you deploy that unit in the first place!

Take for instance EA Yomi's Dai-Oni commander. He may seem awesome because he gets a lot of magic (F2E2D3 + 1 more), fantastic stats (20 Str! 14 attack!), and various special abilities (Fear! Ghost form!), but all that falls apart when you look at this price tag: 490 gold. He costs almost as much as a laboratory. He costs more (gold-wise) than 40 EA Ulmish basic Axe Warriors - who are very likely to tear him limb from limb in a 40 vs 1 battle. Worse, the Dai Oni takes two turns to recruit (so there won’t be many of them), bad research, and prefers Turmoil scales - which further reduces your income. In short, EA Yomi, for all the apparent "awesomeness" of its biggest mage, suffers from the unenviable combination of having poor income coupled with high-cost units.

Thus, the first thing you need to identify are the go-to units of your nation: The guys who you can consistently recruit given your nation's probable income. In the case of LA Man, for instance, they only get one real mage (the Magister Arcane), but it’s a mage that’s decent, versatile, and affordable. As a general rule of thumb though, look for mages that are:

1) Can be recruited everywhere (not capital-only, but be on the lookout for mages that can be recruited without a fort. Almost all of these are major game changers!)

2) Are not StR or “Slow to Recruit” (albeit expensive and powerful non-capital mages may become acceptable despite StR).

3) Don't break the gold budget – most especially when taking upkeep into consideration (something best figured out by single player testing)

4) Can cast several viable combat spells with enough research (more on this later).

[Note: Some nations can have multiple go-to recruits. Your extra task for these nations is to figure out what proportion of each type to recruit, especially considering potential enemies]

For troops, consistency and recruitability are again what you're looking for. Everyone wants elite troops, but you should remember that those troops need to appear in adequate numbers or else they could be swamped by “less elite” but more numerically superior foes. If you’re outnumbered three to one, you’ll often be in trouble even if the enemy is just deploying militia (albeit some really powerful units will just rout the more numerous militia, so don’t make a habit of deploying really bad troops!).

Hence, try to get troops that are both good and easy to mass. Mictlan for instance is famed for its Jaguar Warriors - as they can be blessed and have a second form that makes them very good against many enemies. But what really makes them better than most other blessed units - even those with theoretically superior stats - is that they are NOT capital-only recruits. Each and every Mictlan fort can pump out a Jaguar Warrior. In comparison, something like EA Vanheim's Valkyries can only be produced in the capital - meaning at most only 9 or so at a time. What's scarier - nine Valkyries, or 20, 30, or 40 Jaguar Warriors per turn?

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Once you've identified your go-to units (or read one of my guides, which revolves primarily around identifying the go-to units), then your next task is to figure out how to further enhance your units; more specifically via research. The magic on your go-to mage (s) often dictates what kind of magic you should be researching.

For instance, in the MA Ulm guide the go-to mage is the Master Smith (you don't really have anyone else), who gets Fire 1 and Earth 2. Among the most effective Fire+Earth spells are the Magma Eruption spells in the Evocation line - hence your research priority for the MA Ulm is going to be Evocation 6 (with a side dish of Alteration and Conjuration spells).

Take another example - MA C'tis. Their go-to mage is going to be the Marshmaster, who gets D2N2W1 + DNWS. Reviewing the available spells, you're going to be very hard-pressed to find something better than Enchantment 5 for them. At that level, every Marshmaster can cast at least three Horde of Skeletons - each one adding 6+ undead on the battlefield for C'Tis (that translates to 18 additional troops per Marshmaster per battle. If you bring just 10 Marshmasters, you increase your army size by 180). At that level, you also get Foul Vapors - which poisons the battlefield, but that's fine for you because lizards are poison immune. Finally, when you get some kind of boosting item (e.g. a Robe of the Sea), you can also cast Quagmire - which turns the battlefield into a swamp - and guess which nation has an army wherein every unit has swamp survival?

The point of these examples is to show how intuitive a nation's "game plan" becomes once you've figured out your go-to mage and your go-to troop. MA C'Tis will be mass-producing mages with Death, Water, and Nature magic. They will be mass-producing troops that are poison-immune and have swamp survival. Obviously, cast the Water/Nature spells that poison the battlefield and turn it into a swamp; and then use the Death spells you also get from that level to give you 18 extra undead summons per mage.

That said, this "game plan" is still lacking one key element. And that is the element of time. You don't go from lizardmen armies with no magic, to lizardmen armies supported by undead hordes and poisoned battlefields with the flick of a finger. It takes time and research; and that's why I'm now going to shift the discussion to how a typical Dominions 4 games plays in terms of the timeline.

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A game of Dominions 4 can be divided into three very IN-distinct phases - the early game, the middle game, and the late game. I do not expect universal agreement on what these terms mean. What I am doing however, is to give beginners a general idea of what these phases are.

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The "Early Game" is generally the first twelve turns of the game (Year 1). In this time, your primary goal is expansion against independent provinces. Send out your armies and expansion parties to capture as much land as possible - more than your "fair share" if possible (a fair share being the total number of provinces divided by the number of players) - using every dirty trick you can think of.

This can involve sending out cheap, small, but highly efficient expansion parties (which will be based primarily on the quality of your national go-to troops). Or it can be about hiring mercenaries to supplement your expansion.

You probably won't be trying to actively destroy an enemy power at this point (albeit some specialized builds may attempt this), because in Dominions 4 fortress defenses are now considerably more effective against an early rush. Also, just about everyone will be building a second fort anyway to prevent an early knock out, and you can expect that fort to be completed near the end of Year 1.

Do expect, however, some early skirmishes between your expansion parties. At this point, army scripting ability and the quality of your national troops will be the prime determinant of victory – as most people simply won’t have any spells researched yet.

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Once everyone has their second fort and most of the indies have been gobbled up, we enter the middle game. This is where the bulk of the game is played, probably lasting at least 3 years (36 turns). At this point, you'll be doing the following:

- Expanding your recruitment capacity to build more troops / mages; usually by building more forts. Gold sitting in the bank does nothing for you. They need to be converted into combat units that win you battles; and for most nations the only means of conversion is via forts

(Note: Some nations have units that can be recruited without a fort; and many of these non-fort recruits are absolutely vital to how the nation works. Always keep an eye out for them - and check my LA Ulm guide on how ridiculously powerful this can be

Also, some nations are reliant on summoning more units via their mages, rather than recruitment. In which case, you need more gems and blood slaves, as noted in the next bullet point).

In most cases, the number and quality of mages you recruit every turn will translate into your combat power later on in the midgame. And, in general, you only get one mage per fort per turn (or even less for StR nations). Don’t fall behind in mage count!

- Finishing critical research for your nation to give you the combat edge; following the "game plan" I described earlier. When the magic is online, you can start deploying mages enmasse in combat..

- Increasing the productivity of your lands by site-searching (for gems) or bloodhunting - eventually gems and slaves can be converted to combat power with research; and the stuff you summon from gems / slaves is often much more powerful than what you get from gold recruits.

- Finally, and most critically - Fight and win some wars. All of your troop building and research will be for naught unless you actually beat an enemy, take their lands / thrones, and therefore give you more resources to let you win in the end (or even win as early as the middle game if you get enough thrones).

Tip: Assuming diplomacy is allowed, try to have multiple people gang up on one player – as one vs one wars tend to be long, protracted, and self-defeating for both sides.

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After all the midgame wars comes the end game when people start deploying higher level spells. In many cases though, the midgame will have already sorted out who won or lost - especially since you don't have to conquer the whole map anymore (only the Thrones). But if the game DOES make it to the end game and there are still evenly matched powers, then you'll be glad if you also planned for this eventuality and are ready to cast a big game-changing spell like Mass Enslave on the enemy's army.

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An interesting thing to note at this point is that people will finish their "critical research" or achieve "critical mass" for their armies at different points in the game. Let's take, for instance, an MA Ulm vs MA C'tis matchup.

MA Ulm gets various resource bonuses to help them build troops, giving them a strong early game and a leg up in the early midgame. However, they need to research Evocation 6 to power up their mages.

By contrast, MA C'tis wants Enchantment 5. If research was equal (which it probably isn't, as MA C'Tis will likely have a research lead), MA C'Tis will get to its key research areas first - which is a good thing for MA C'Tis because they don't get a production bonus for their troops, who will likely find themselves overwhelmed in battle by Ulm's superior (better-armored) troops.

Thus, one of the most important (and difficult!) things to watch out for are these ebbs and flows of a nation's power. If you're MA Ulm fighting against MA C'Tis, it is to your benefit to attack C'Tis before he gets to the critical Enchantment 5 research. You have better troops anyway than C'Tis in general, so an early attack can pay dividends. Likewise, if you know that C'Tis already has Enchantment 5, then it's in your best interest to delay a decisive engagement until you get Evocation 6 yourself.

Identify your nations “peaks”, as well as your opponent’s – then ram the advantage home when you’re “peaking” while they’re at their nadir. This is how even theoretically weaker nations can win.

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So, to summarize, to evaluate a nation you need to follow these steps:

1) Identify your go-to troops and mages. These aren't just your exciting mages/troops - these are the ones you can reliably recruit in large numbers.

2) Based on your go-to troops and mages, develop a game plan revolving around key research goals. Know what schools you will be trying to research before you even start a game (or even start making your Pretender!)

3) Test the nation based on your evaluations in single player, and get an idea of the nation's timeline. How many turns does it usually it take for you to reach your critical research goals? It will give you an idea of when your power "peaks".

If you've properly done your nation evaluation, then it becomes relatively easy to design your Pretender. In fact, it becomes almost intuitive. Just pick out your strengths (peaks) and choose to enhance them (or make it come sooner), or identify your weaknesses and try to mitigate them.

My next article will be more of a checklist - a step by step list of things to look out for when designing a Pretender as a beginner. Ideally, with this article as a foundation, you can just breeze through the next article, picking up the stuff you need specifically for your nation, following the plan you formulated using this methodology.

One final note though: I cannot guarantee that your evaluations will be 100% correct. Even the evaluations in my guides may not be 100% correct. A fair bit of the "fun" of Dominions is learning which units are actually good or bad; which is why you need to test your ideas out even if it's single-player.

That said, remember the old saying: "No plan survives contact with the enemy, but nobody survives contact with the enemy unless they have a plan". Even if your evaluation turns out to be flawed, you’ll still have a leg up on the guy who’s only beginning to figure out what spells he wants to research twelve turns into the game!

Edited by: Zinegata

STFU. I'm playing m/a Ctis. Don't go there... My evil plans are not to be mentioned....

Edited by: Bwaha

Bwaha wrote: STFU. I'm playing m/e Ctis. Don't go there... My evil plans are not to be mentioned....

Lol, I'm pretty sure MA C'Tis' game plan is extremely obvious if anyone just spent five minutes looking at the spell list and the unit list.

Nothing going on, nothing to see. Move along... :p

Can you link your EA and MA Ulm guides, or put them in your signature? I only saw the LA Strategy primer (and only because it made council of sages).

Well, it's not going to be alone in the Council of Sages for long! Thanks, Zinegata!

Oh, so that's where the LA Ulm guide thread went >_>;;;.

Anyway, as requested here's the MA Ulm and LA Man guides. EA Ulm is still in the works.

Indiedb.com

Indiedb.com