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if you want to take an awake god for a jumpstart take a Thrice horned Boar with e4 n7 for reinvigoration +2 and regeneration. Take Growth 3 and dump whatever scales so that it evens out.
If you want to test out troops more, go with an imprisioned Duid of War with f4 n5 b4 (+attack,+moral, recouperation, bloodsurge) take order 3 prod 3 growth 3 and use Nemedian Warriors or Unmarked to expand.
I take EA Helheim. My pretender is a Frost Father with the following paths :
Fire 3, Air 3, Water 4, Earth 6, Astral 4, Death 3, Nature 3, Blood 3
My scales are :
Dominion strength 6, Cold 3, Growth 3
And my bless :
Major fire resistance (fire), Major shock resistance (air), Defence skill and minor cold resistance (water), 2xStrength of the earth (earth), magic weapons (astral), 3xUndying (death), Major poison resistance and Resilient (nature), Strengh of the flesh (blood)
Of course, to make it work, he has to be Imprisonned. Then you can name him "Kallisto", because that how I named that build.
After that, my gameplay is the following :
- Recruit as many Valkyries as possible every turn
- Recruit a Dis
- Make her a Prophet
- Give her a host of valkyries (order = Divine blessing + Attack rear/closest for your prophet, Attack rear/closest for your valkyries, also position them in the rear of the battlefield, on a corner)
- Then, crush every indie province you meet (well, not all of them, it depends on how large is your host, you have to learn what you can do or not do) [Side note : given those troops are stealthy, you have to Ctrl+Click to attack, otherwise they just get there under stealth]
- Meanwhile, recruit at least 2 other Dis to ferry valkyries back and forth to your prophet
- When you reach 100+ valkyries, there's not much the computer can do against that army ...
Then with that elite force under your command, you'll have enough leverage to do some testings with other units and battle magic, and thus get some better handle of the game.
I think it's important that new players be prepared to lose. I must have lost my first fifty games of Dominions, if not more. But I learned a little bit each time until I won my first game, yet that learning process continues even now. I could be alone in this, but Dominions is one of those games that I enjoy losing as much as winning.
Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide.
Not that I learn from them, but I have frustrating fun.
For most straightforward, as McMurdo said, MA Marignon is very good and lets you muck about quite well.
What that is depends on the nation but a few suggestions are:
Abysia - Conjuration 5 for summon fire elemental
Vanheim - Evocation 4 for thunder strike
Sauromatia and C'tis - Enchantment 5 for horde of skeletons
Niefelheim and Formoria - Construction 4 for gearing your giant thugs, alteration is also good (quicken self and liquid body for Niefelheim, mistform for Formoria)
These are game changing spells in an early war.
Your choice of pretender will depend on your strategy, which in turn will depend mostly on your chosen nation. Broadly speaking there are four pretender types.
Combat pretender: You pick a powerful physical form for your pretender, such as a dragon. This form will allow you to acquire regions very quickly early on, and can be made into a powerful force through spells and magic items in the late game. However, if you intend to use your combat pretender to acquire territories early on, you'll naturally need him to be awake, which means you're not going to have that many design points to invest anywhere but in the scales (the order, productivity, and so on) of your dominion.
Magic pretender: Your chosen pretender can excel in multiple magic paths. Some players like to create "rainbow pretenders", which are pretenders that are trained in most or even all magic paths. One benefit of this is that such pretenders can find all magic site types (since you can only find a magic site of a particular path if the searching mage is skilled in that path). When creating a pretender based on magic, you'll almost certainly want to go for a Dominion 1 humanoid pretender form, since it's typically far cheaper for them to be trained in magic paths that they aren't already trained in. Now maybe I'm imagining things, but I seem to remember that the statistics of your pretender change depending on how powerful they are in the different magic paths. If I recall it worked in a fairly logical way, so for example, having them excel in earth magic would make them physically tougher. The game doesn't spell (ha) this out anywhere, but I'm sure that I read it in the manual (or again I could just be imagining things). Regardless, I can't recall ever seeing anyone develop a strategy around this feature, assuming I didn't just make it up, so I wouldn't worry about it. Probably shouldn't have mentioned it. What I should mention is that the more skilled your pretender (or any mage) is in magic, the greater their skill in research is. So a magic pretender can serve as your best researcher when he's got nothing better to do.
If your chosen nation has many sacred units (units that can benefit from being blessed) in its basic troop roster, you might want to go for a "bless strategy". In a bless strategy you increase your pretender's magic skill to at least four in multiple magic paths, because it's at level four that you gain access to additional bless effects. In a bless strategy you want to find the most effective combination of blessings for your chosen nation's sacred units. For each point of dominion strength you have, you will receive a single holy point per turn, and sacred units cost a single holy point each to recruit in addition to the other resources. And so it may seem logical that if you're going with a bless strategy that depends upon you recruiting sacred units, you'd want to up your pretenders dominion strength as much as possible, but that isn't necessarily the case. You get another point in dominion strength and therefore another holy point for every five temples that you build. Since in the early game you rarely have enough resources to be churning out sacred units anyway, you can often get away with creating your pretender with only four points in dominion strength and increasing that in game by building temples as you expand.
Scales pretender: If your chosen nation lacks sacred units and their troops are costly (or you just think a more basic military approach is best), you might want to focus on getting as much order, productivity, and growth in your dominion as possible in order to be able to recruit and sustain their powerful armies.
Balanced pretender: If you have no particular strategy in mind, you can just make a nice, all round pretender that's competent in a few magic paths, offers two or three nice blessings, and whose dominion bestows a few benefits.
That's just an overview of the kind of thinking that's typically involved in pretender creation, but there's a lot more that could be said. For example, if magic is going to be a focus of your pretender, it's probably a good idea to try and have your pretender excel in paths of magic that your nation's mages don't. This is especially true when it comes to astral magic, because the "dispel" spell is an astral spell, and you'll use it to dispel the global enchantments of other players, so it's often pretty important.
As for being confused about magic research, don't worry about it. The best way to go in the beginning is to just look at the magic paths your mages excel at and to what degree. Let's say that your chosen nation's mages are primarily fire mages, with their skills ranging from two to three. Just scroll through the spells of each magic school looking for fire spells that require a level three fire mage or below. There won't be THAT many. Read their descriptions and see what sounds the most useful, or even just the most fun. It makes no sense to research a school of magic that contains few spells that your nation's mages can actually make use of, so just have a quick scan through each school to see what's there for them. This is the most organic way to learn the magic system. You don't need to memorise each magic school; just go through this simple process each time you play a new nation. In time you'll find yourself thinking "hey what was that cool spell my water mages were using in that one game? That'd be great here." Then you remember that it was Falling Frost from Evocation and go for it. The Conjuration school is about summoning creatures, so you may want to emphasise research there to boost your armies.
I typically get a few good offensive spells that my mages can make use of, switch to Construction research to get access to some magic items, and then do a few levels of Conjuration, because by that point in the game I've accumulated enough magic gems to supplement my armies with summons. Finally I'll go deep into research on a single magic school to access a powerful spell (or spells) that only my pretender is capable of casting. Although all of this is subject to change depending on the situation. A lot of the players around here have very specific spells they want to obtain whenever they begin a game with a particular nation (as in Uncle Al's example), because experience has taught them which are the most effective.
I recommend going to YouTube and watching the first video of someone experienced who's playing that nation (or who's just giving a rundown of that nation's characteristics) - someone like Lucid Tactics, Saquenay, General Confusion, etc.
You can see how they look at a nation and how they decide what kind of pretender to use. You don't have to follow their example, but it's very helpful when learning the game.
That's harder. There are just so many different spells! But if you're playing single-player with a strong nation, that shouldn't be critical. And you'll learn through experience. At least, that's what I HOPE I'm doing. :)
The point I was trying to make is (and note, I don't play much MP at all, but I do watch games and read AARs) there seems to be a tendency when players are learning the game they get hooked on research. They tend to keep a body of mages researching and trickle one or two mages out into armies here and there.
What works much better, in my experience, is to have everyone researching (except maybe a site searcher or two) until you hit a crucial, battle winning spell, then put every single mage into battle (except the crappy research only cheap ones that are useless in a fight). Basically stop research for a few turns and demolish a neighbour.
Once you've won the major battles against the neighbour you can hunker down and research again until you hit another milestone spell, then get the mages out fighting again and kill someone else.
if you want to play in the Early Ages, I suggest going for the underwater Atlantis or the aforementionted Fomoria. Both have good troops & mages and can later field supercombatents (Fomorian Kings / Basalt Kings) that can single handedly destroy AI armies.
For specific tips, researcher objectives and pretender builds for the nations, head on over to Dominions 5 - All Nations Guide[dominionsmods.com].
You might also take a look at the pinned strategy index and the YouTube channels that are listed there.