Magic, Research and Early Expansion

[Tokogawa [GER]]

Im trying to become better in the Game since I obviously suck (losing to easy KI no matter which map/enemy/God) and these are my two biggest Problems. At least I guess.
Is there any Way to know what Research to priorize? There are surely some great Must have spells one aims for when going for, example, Earth magic. Honestly like many of the Blood Spells but getting it to work disturbs your countries and its rather unreliable to get virgins.
Also I seem to ♥♥♥♥ up my early Expansion. The Army you get at the Start rarely managed to take over one Region and when I increase it for, lets say, 2-3 Turns, you lose Ressources etc. etc. But I guess this Question can only be answered individually for each Race.
Since its important for Answers, All Races I like are Early Age. Primarly Agartha, Fomodian and Lion Kings. Lion Kings are so far the most successful ones, probably because they have cheap troops.

[Draken]

Let's start with what research you should get.
Short answer: It's complicated.
Long answer: It's complicated and depends on a lot of different factors. Such as what magic paths you have access to, what paths you have a lot of access too (there is a difference between having one Nature 4 mage or being able to mass produce them), what gem income you have, what enemies you are up against and a few more minor ones.

I generally would advice to take a look at what mages you have access to and note down their paths. Then go to the research screen and check those the spells of those paths for the next 1-3 research levels. You can press certain keys to only show spells of one path, 's' for example will only show you astral spells.
Make a note of spells that sounds useful or interesting and then research them and try them out. After a while you should learn what spells do what and how useful they are in a given situation.
Two outliers here are construction and blood. Construction gives you new magical items you can forge every even level, and blood is a bit more complicated to get running due to having to send out mages to hunt for blood slaves.

It's honestly mostly an experience things, so you should improve over time.

As to expansion, try to find out what kind of army works against what independent guards.
Barbarians will slaughter cavalry or melee troops, while being weak to massed archers.
Shielded units are good against massed archers.
High protection units can win without taking any damage.
Cavalry can kill the enemy commanders and route all the units.

It's, again, an experience thing. After a while you kind of know what kind of province defense you can take with your current army, and which will wreck it.
For example heavy cavalry is usually a difficult opponent for small expansion armies.

As for the starting army, I would send out the scout to check out a nice looking province, while prophetizing the commander and getting one round of troop recruitment in before the first expansion. Then expend into something that looks weak, like militia, while hiring reinforcements at home.

Have fun and just continue playing. You will get better.

[Dacen]

since it depends completely, as draken said, of what u play and how u intend to play it, no real answer. But there are guides, they are what they are, but it can give you guidelines when you start on a nation.
The all nation guide by Traorec give general guidelines for research : http://dominionsmods.com/index.php?showtopic=3364

The magic guide by shinuyama give you ideas of noob traps and stuff generaly good by magic : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2023973143

However as you play the nation you should get a clear idea of what you want, and the guides are not perfect, experiment.


To add on expansion, some thought : depends a lot of what u face.

Difficult to beat without much casualities for most nations : barbarians, heavy cavalry, mounted archers

Tricky, take care but with good compo not much trouble : amazons, cyclopeans trolls and the like, lizard warriors

medium : heavy infantry, hoplites, crossbowmen, bone tribe, etc

♥♥♥♥ : light infantry, archers, all tribes beside bone

Take special care of swamps and caverns too. Fighting undeads is easy, fighting them in the dark is not

[Kamiyama]

I generally go for Construction 4 first to get the boosters. Depending on your civ's mages this may or may not make sense.

Fire - Flame Helmet (F4, 25 fgems)
Air - Winged Helmet (A4, 25 agems)
Water - Robe of the Sea (W3, 15 wgems)
Earth - Earth Boots (E2, 10 egems)
Astral - Crystal Coin (E2S2, 10 egems, 10 sgems)
Death - Skull Staff (D2, 10 dgems)
Nature - Thistle Mace (N2, 10 ngems)
Blood - Armor of Souls (B5, 40 bslaves)

Earth, Death, and Nature are the easiest. They have the cheapest boosters available at level 4.

Water, Astral, and Blood have cheaper boosters at level 6. These would be the Water Bracelet, Starshine Skullcap, and Blood Thorn.

Fire is hard to boost unless you have a cross-path fire and death mage. The Skull of Fire is available at level 6.

Air is very difficult to boost it has no low level boosters.

Now that's just some of the boost items. There are also research items that you can get at Construction 4 that make your research queue easier.

Death - Skull Mentor (lvl 4)
Blood - Imp Familiar (lvl 2)
Air - Owl Quill (lvl 2)
Fire - Lightless Lantern (lvl 6)

Of those the Imp Familiar is the best one. All your other magic gems have a limited income. However if your civ has recruitable blood mages you can recruit as many blood slaves as you want each turn and have mages craft imp familiar every turn without sucking away at your gem income. These imps are basically free research points.

If you have a titan pretender you should also have an idea what level 4 gear you want to give him too. This way you can boost your mages, get research boosters, and gear your pretender in the early game.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

I mean the imp familiar also comes with a horrormark chance but, unlike the lightless lantern, offers only a piddly +3 RP/turn. It's cheap, sure, and cost-efficiency has value, but blood slaves are not unlimited and calling it the best is a bold claim.

[Kamiyama]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

I mean the imp familiar also comes with a horrormark chance but, unlike the lightless lantern, offers only a piddly +3 RP/turn. It's cheap, sure, and cost-efficiency has value, but blood slaves are not unlimited and calling it the best is a bold claim.

I quickly run out of the other gems with all the crafting and spellcasting I do. So in my experience it is. A few blood mages doing bood hunting each turn can easily outpace the gem income I get from the other paths.

[Kamiyama]

After getting my boosters I then research my gem generator globals. If it's a water mage nation I go for Maelstrom. If it's a nature mage nation I go for Mother Oak.

First I get my boosters, then I get my gem generators. Then it's more free form.

[Draken]

I usually go for the site searching rituals first. But that is personal preference, which is why I did not mention it.
I think going for some path booster is fine, but all the path climbing via boosters and summons is a bit more complex and almost a science on it's own. Not something to throw at someone that just starting out to learn the magic system.
Same with running a blood economy.

As for running out of gems, my personal experience is that at the start using up all your gems is actually the difficult part. XD

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

I quickly run out of the other gems with all the crafting and spellcasting I do. So in my experience it is. A few blood mages doing bood hunting each turn can easily outpace the gem income I get from the other paths.

I mean, yeah, but there's also a lot of things you can dump blood slaves into, and comparatively few of them require keeping a reserve for battlecasting. Lifelong Protections, Horde From Hell, a dripfeed of demon knights or other summons...

[Kamiyama]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

I quickly run out of the other gems with all the crafting and spellcasting I do. So in my experience it is. A few blood mages doing bood hunting each turn can easily outpace the gem income I get from the other paths.

I mean, yeah, but there's also a lot of things you can dump blood slaves into, and comparatively few of them require keeping a reserve for battlecasting. Lifelong Protections, Horde From Hell, a dripfeed of demon knights or other summons...

You can totally go into the deep end on blood magic. You can do all that or even summon the high level demons that require a blood pretender.

But just having B2 on your pretender is enough to cast reinvigoration and blood feast, which require low level research and only a handful of blood slaves. I think blood feast needs 5 and reinvigoration needs 1. A B2 mage can find 5 slaves with a turn or two of blood hunting.

That's an easy way to deal with ailments if getting the recuperation bless is too expensive. Also reinvigoration is powerful all by itself. Your pretender can cast powerful magic that hits with 80 or 90 fatigue and then wipe out all the fatigue casting that, and then go on to casting another powerful spell.

So B2 is totally worth it just for those two things, even if that civ has no blood mages.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

You can totally go into the deep end on blood magic. You can do all that or even summon the high level demons that require a blood pretender.

But just having B2 on your pretender is enough to cast reinvigoration and blood feast, which require low level research and only a handful of blood slaves. I think blood feast needs 5 and reinvigoration needs 1. A B2 mage can find 5 slaves with a turn or two of blood hunting.

That's an easy way to deal with ailments if getting the recuperation bless is too expensive. Also reinvigoration is powerful all by itself. Your pretender can cast powerful magic that hits with 80 or 90 fatigue and then wipe out all the fatigue casting that, and then go on to casting another powerful spell.

So B2 is totally worth it just for those two things, even if that civ has no blood mages.

Yeah but that's irrelevant. If all you've got for blood mages is your pretender, you're not gonna be racking up scores of blood slaves to where it's worth it to make imp familiars. I mean come on, your god has better things to do with their turns. I know you CAN bootstrap into blood without national access, but it's never going to be something you do as much as well as someone with national blood mages, blood magic wants industrial support that you can't get if every one of your hunters has to be empowered or random-rolled through a 10% indie or whatever.

[1337Dude]

While in a sense the game is complicated as in there are a ton of different strategies that encompass all the different factions, if you focus on one nation and study their common strategies online, it's no longer difficult to figure out what research path you should be taking. In general most nations have one or two viable strategies and after you learn a few nations and how their best research paths go, you will understand the premise for other factions as well. Eventually you will understand the game more intuitively and won't need guides, but I would recommend them when first starting out.

[Kamiyama]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

You can totally go into the deep end on blood magic. You can do all that or even summon the high level demons that require a blood pretender.

But just having B2 on your pretender is enough to cast reinvigoration and blood feast, which require low level research and only a handful of blood slaves. I think blood feast needs 5 and reinvigoration needs 1. A B2 mage can find 5 slaves with a turn or two of blood hunting.

That's an easy way to deal with ailments if getting the recuperation bless is too expensive. Also reinvigoration is powerful all by itself. Your pretender can cast powerful magic that hits with 80 or 90 fatigue and then wipe out all the fatigue casting that, and then go on to casting another powerful spell.

So B2 is totally worth it just for those two things, even if that civ has no blood mages.

Yeah but that's irrelevant. If all you've got for blood mages is your pretender, you're not gonna be racking up scores of blood slaves to where it's worth it to make imp familiars. I mean come on, your god has better things to do with their turns. I know you CAN bootstrap into blood without national access, but it's never going to be something you do as much as well as someone with national blood mages, blood magic wants industrial support that you can't get if every one of your hunters has to be empowered or random-rolled through a 10% indie or whatever.

Yes that's why in my first post I said that if you have recruitable blood mages you can recruit pretty much as many slaves as you want and make imp familiars each turn. The only limit is the number of mages doing blood hunting.

But even B2 on a pretender is useful even if your civ doesn't have blood mages. You don't necessarily need a blood economy to cast blood feast or reinvigoration. Healing afflictions without needing nature magic is really useful and the reinvigoration spell is game changing for a pretender with powerful magic paths. That's all I wanted to point out.

[Tokogawa [GER]]

Really interesting read overall, got a few nice Ideas and tested them out in the game. Have been much more successful overall now.
Another Question: Is it a good Idea to try and make a Pretender that taps into every magic way?
Only Tier 1 Pretenders seem to be able to do this realistically. Whilst I prefer Titan and Monster Pretenders the Idea of being a Everything Mage sounds good. Obvously he can only cast one spell at the time so its doesnt sound OP, then again he wont be good at anything. Will help finding all magic sites thought. Thoughts?

[Bumc]

Rainbow pretender is a thing you bring when you actually have a plan for it.
His biggest upsides are crosspath crafts and research speed.
Using a rainbow pretender for manual site searching is a huge waste (even if sometimes justified), and often his ability to cast cool spells is limited by the fact you won't have gems for that spell in the first place.

That being said if your race has a clear win condition battle spell hidden somewhere in 5-7 level research, having a 60+ RP per turn boost to get there is a relevant tactic.
An example here would be Foul Vapors which can insta-win battles against both AI swarms and unprepared human players.

Also any race with wide magic coverage, but low maximum path level will actually be able to use the rainbow pretender to cast globals or summons from multiple different paths.
An example here would be MA Tien-Chi with their almost full spectrum site searching and no mages that can cast high complexity rituals starting from Mother Oak all the way to Wish.
Just keep in mind that anything that offs your frail mage also dispels all his globals, unless you use Twiceborn, which also has its downsides.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Tokogawa GER:

Really interesting read overall, got a few nice Ideas and tested them out in the game. Have been much more successful overall now.
Another Question: Is it a good Idea to try and make a Pretender that taps into every magic way?
Only Tier 1 Pretenders seem to be able to do this realistically. Whilst I prefer Titan and Monster Pretenders the Idea of being a Everything Mage sounds good. Obvously he can only cast one spell at the time so its doesnt sound OP, then again he wont be good at anything. Will help finding all magic sites thought. Thoughts?

It CAN be. Whether it IS a good idea... As with many things in this game, it depends. "It Depends" is something of a stock answer to many questions about this game - if you go on Dominions discord servers, they often have emojis for it, lol.

What you're describing is called a 'rainbow mage'. It's a recognised build in the meta, and can be strong, but it depends on the nation. As you noticed, it makes for good sitesearching, which makes them valuable for nations that have access to a broad array of magic paths to use many different kinds of gem. It can also be used to break you into new magic paths, but it's important not to over-value that - some magic paths are relatively easy to break into to a usable degree, others can be difficult to the point of not being worth trying.

It's mostly a function of how easily having one mage of a given path will enable you to summon more of them, and forge boosters to climb the ratings in that path. So, breaking into nature is relatively easy; an N4 can summon Ivy Kings for 30N to produce more N3's, which isn't a cheap summon, but it's cheap enough that you can have a few of them for casting big magic like Regeneration, and getting that starting N4 is as easy as having an N3 forge a thistle mace. Air, on the other hand, is very difficult to break into because very few summons can provide air magic (basically just Faerie Queens at conj 8), and the 'easiest' Air booster is the Winged Helm, which itself requires A4. If you're not already a nation with big access to air, you'll often never have it.

Rainbow mages are also often valuable for covering gaps in a nation's capacities, like forging important items. A nation that caps out at E1, for example, will be very happy to have a god with more earth magic to forge them their first set of Earth Boots, after which those E1's can forge more boots to enable usable battlecasting. The broad pathing also tends to be suited for a bless that picks up a lot of unfancy but economical traits - resists are a common candidate here, so if you have sacreds that are already pretty solid and you want them to be difficult to zap with magic, a rainbow bless might be just the thing.

Where rainbow mages suffer is that being a squishy human means they're often too fragile to risk committing to battle, the broad but shallow pathing means they don't help as much for pushing for key globals, and having such a diverse array of ritual and forging options means they frequently have many competing demands for what to spend their turn on, so you've gotta know what your plan is - they're great sitesearchers, but they often have more important things to do.

Depending on whether you can afford to take them awake they can also make for a powerful research boost to hit some key research goals for winning early wars, but while almost all awake researchers are some kind of rainbow mage, not all rainbow mages are awake researchers - it depends what your build calls for.