Gonna copy this over here too, hopefully some of you will see fit to go buy it and we can strike up some games.
For you unbelievers out there:
What is Dominions and why haven't I heard of it?
Dominions is what happens when you shove 2 people in a room who decide to make a Dungeons and Dragons strategy game based on virtually every mythology they can dig up in their spare time.
As a student of mythology, myself, it is a fantastic collection of study on display here. The flavor texts and backstories for nearly every unit, I can actually tell you where most of them come from. And, while I can niggle about directions they took this or that mythology, I can appreciate where they are coming from at the same time.
As a wargame, it is interesting in it's design, if not always the most refined or complex. The "competetive" folks get REALLY, and I mean REALLY serious about this aspect. Me, not so much. I'd rather roleplay.
Your job in Dominions is to become THE god. Prior to 4, this amounted to erradicating non-believers. 4 has introduced the Thrones of Ascention, randomly placed map locations you need to claim.
For my SP game, I chose a nice small map, Silent Seas. This is an island surrounded by a small ocean. Early age, since prior to the game with Bad Mojo, I'd only ever played Dominions in Early Age and didn't want to go into this totally blind like I did there. I chose to play a water nation for the simplicity it brings for an AAR. Your one big hurdle is climbing up out of the sea. Atlantis trades a weaker ocean presence for an easier climb out, as all your troops are amphibious.
So, our setup.
The next aspect is to choose your god.
The game cannot be won in selecting your form, scales, magic, and dominion, but it sure can be lost. This is, most likely, not the best selection available for Atlantis, but I really like the idea of a giant sea kraken leading an underwater nation. There was a new sea dragon option as well, which was tempting.
Water magic was an easy choice, I mean, I'm an underwater god, you can't NOT have water magic, right? Astral is also an easy go-to as being representative of the most ancient magics. Nature was my final choice, to represent my god being a leader of the animals of the sea. Thematically, this feals right.
Sure, I could have gone with the good ole 'king triton' cliche, but Tritons are a whole other race in Dominions which makes it just a little 'off' choice fore me.
The level 3 magic is decent, but not overly powerful, and was mostly just picked to fit in some scale choices and still be able to be awake.
Speaking of the scales, Productive 2 was picked because underwater nations struggle with resources (not a lot of underwater mining going on), and Growth is darn near a mandatory economic pick. More people = more money. Cold 2 was needed to pay for growth, which is still a good deal even though it wiped out the income bonus I would have had without it. (I still get the supply and growth bonus)
One last note is on dominion. (the candle) I don't like to run much below 4 dominion. As you might guess for a game called DOMINIONS, dominion is a little important. This selection does several things.
1: It limits the number of sacred units you can recruit. *
2: It sets the maximum dominion for your provinces. *
3: It sets the % you will spread your dominion. 1 candle = 10%
* THESE can be increased as you gain an additional candle for every 5 temples you build. However, the chance per tick (each temple or blood sacrifice get's one tick per turn, the prophet/god get some ticks as well but I forget how many) is a snapshot from the beginning. I don't like to be much below 40% as if you lose your dominion, you lose, period, and you need your dominion to spread your scales (stronger dominion spreads them faster).
As I've seen in the game with Bad_Mojo, Thrones of ascention can be spaced...unevenly. So, I'm mitigating that possibility by doubling the points needed (default to one point per nation), and providing 12 total points to capture.
Theoretically, this will spread them out more evenly at the disadvantage of having more locations on the map.
One of the first things you need to decide when playing Dominions is how you're going to find magic sites. Are you going to walk around and look for them, or are you going to use magic?
Conjuration, for water nations, provides one of the more useful search spells available, and is a fairly clear early research goal. COMBAT underwater is also a lot more straightforward than on land...it's a numbers and magic game, period. So, the first several turns were spent just recruiting a mage and infantry each turn while researching Conjuration.
Soon, I had my army. There's little reason to dance around in battle, so just jam them all up front and let her fly. I do send my Kraken along with the army just in case. He's pretty badass himself, and if I hadn't increased the strength of independant armies, he probably could take new land himself. Here, he's just insurance and stands a good chance that if the army routes, he can handle any leftovers.
The turn they leave, however, we get this excellent event.
So, I immediately spend all that cash.
As, said, numbers game. Who routes first. Likely the one with fewer units. Though my prophet preaching courage sure helps.
Buying province defense in my wake.
While I have to pay to maintain my army (and can barely do that right now), Province defense is free to maintain. Generally: Province defence of a decent strength is more expensive up front, but pays for itself in the long run. My goal is to capture all the ocean, and it would suck to have a random event or enemy commander come ruin those plans. (Competetive folks would say I should be gaining a foothold on the island first...the hell with them)
One nice thing about it being a numbers game, you can fill in with the trash locals as you go.
Hitting a bump in the road here, needing to wait for that big reinforcement army to catch up, time to quit for the morning.
