Basic interface for the uninitiated.

Picking up dominions 4 for the first time is daunting. What does all the buttons do? How does things work? How do i control my units?

I'm here to try to help.

This isn't here to go intro any real depths, but to give the basics.

So hope it helps, and that you too enjoy Dominions 4, Thrones of ascension.
May the best disciple win!

Welcome.

I'm gonna try to keep this short, but correct and so that new players can start to grasp the basics so that they can finish a game!

Starting out. Selecting the map.

You bought the game, downloaded it and installed it, you hear that sweet music starting and after the brief loading screen, you are on the main menu.

From here, there are a lot of options.
For the purpose of this tutorial, simply choose "Create a new game."

The map selection screen comes up. Here you can choose any of the premade maps, or generate one with the top 3 options.

By Left clicking one of the names, you get to know more about that particular map. You get a pretty picture of it, a description, and a few options about it.
"Ok","Delete map","Cancel."

Ok selects the map for play.
Delete map should be rather obvious, you shouldn't delete the premade maps since they look the best.
And cancel, simply go back to the map selection screen.

For the purpose of this tutorial, choose the map. "Valanis"
It's one of the most gorgeous maps there is and filled with little fun bits.

Now it's time to enter a game name, this is the name that turns up in the load game menu, so it should remind you of what is going on in this particular playthrough.

Note: To write, just start typing.

Simply name it "Learning on Valanis."
Or Testing, or some profanity, your choice.

Era and nation.

Now we have reached the screen where you choose your era to play in. Apart from the information you can read in the separate fields the eras represent which teams can be played.

Most teams have a version in each era, but some don't.

For the purpose of this tutorial, choose the "Middle Ages."

Now we're at the choose participants screen.
Here you choose what nations will participate in this struggle and who controls who.

Under the Nation, it says Random. Click random.
A long list of the nations appear, mouse over the different names to get small tidbits of information and hype for each nation.

For this tutorial, choose "Ulm, forges of Ulm" it has a dark blue flag and is 7th from the top.

And simply do the same for your opponet.
Except for this one, Choose "Bandar Log, Land of the Apes." It is closer to the bottom.

The reason we choose which teams is so that both are land based, so you don't end up meeting a water nation, who is underwater and therefore a bit more challanging to face.

Under the player field, click "Normal AI" until it becomes "Easy AI"
You can see there are several difficulties, and also the option for another human player playing hotseat.
<Add new player> does just what it says, it adds a nes line like the ones you've already tampered with.
If you add another nation by accident, just scroll down in the nation selection part, and choose <None>

Ai type can be left as Random, but if you want to change it the different types are rather self explanatory.

If it is all right, there should be two teams, Ulm controlled by a Human (you), and Bandar Log, controlled by an AI.

Now press "Ok."


Now an information box about the faction comes up, it has backstory, some examples of its strengths and weaknesses and a brief of the magic the team possess.

I suggest you read it, reading background, coming up with stories and figuring out the cryptic descriptions of the devs is half the fun of this game.

Press "Ok" when you are done.

Your magnificent God!

Now you have reached one of the most fun parts of the game, and where some of the most important strategic decisions are made.

All this probably doesn't make much sense right now, but don't worry.

Press "Select Physical Form."
You are faced with lots of sprites, some amazing, some... really old.

These are the different chassis you can build your god from.

By LEFT clicking any of them, you select that as you god.
By RIGHT clicking, you get to see their stats and special abilities, and background.

Right click the tree.
It's an Irminsul, you can see that it costs 0 points to have this chassis as your god,
it got good protection and lots of hitpoints.

Mouse over the small icons to see what they are on about, this is the main way of the game showing a units special abilities.

If you check again among the stats though, you will see it has a "Move" of 0 / 2.
This means it can move Zero provinses per turn, and has 2 action points in combat.

Having an immobile god makes it cheaper, but at the cost of not being able to claim Thrones of ascension. Or Capture points.

Press "Exit."

Check out the different god chassis avaliable to you. For starter, i'd not suggest any from the tree to the fountain, since none of those can move. Neither can the Demilich.

Choose any god chassis you want, i'd suggest the Forge lord though, since he is good at crafting, and fits the crafting theme of Ulm.

Or the Great mother. She might not look much, but she can trample. Basically, she is huge and can just run over everything smaller than her. She is a frikkin TANK.

Basically, a good idea is to take a Giant person, and then forge cool items to kit him/her out with.

Now you are back on the first screen.
As you can see, there is a "Design points" number top left. This is how many points you have to build your god.
Different things cost different amounts depending on you chassis.

For magic, i'd suggest raising a school the god already knows up to 3. Then be fine at that.

Dominion.
This is the native bonus your faith has. By mousing over the different things, you get to see what they are.
This gives a smart tooltip for each of the "Scales" as they are called.

Since we are playing Ulm, we want good "Production", and "Order" is also nice.
LEFT click those two to a value you like.

As the game told us in the team info screen, Ulm mages don't care about "Drain"
RIGHT click the purple drain icon three times.

Right clicking tips the scale in the bad balance, giving your domain bad things.
With Drain 3, normal mages will have a hard time researching, but since Ulm mages don't care you get loads of free points :D (The god cares though, but if you just make an Earth mother with no magic she won't be doing much magic anyway.)

The last thing i'll mention is the candles. This is your faiths strength, how much people believe in it, believe in you!

You want this as high as possible, there is a way to raise this in game, but it's easier to just get a lot to begin with.

I made a Great mother with earth 3, nature 3 dominion 10, order and production 2 and drain 3.

You might be tempted to raise a magic school really high, and get those cool "Bless effects" that pop up with that. But Ulm has NO reason to do this.

In the bottom, there is also some imprisonment options. This will give you points at the cost of not having your god at the start of the game.

For the purpose of this tutorial, leave it at "Awake", that means from turn one you can run around and do stuff with your god.

Now press "ok"

Name you god! :D
My god is now named Big Momma.

Press ok.

All praise ________

Ok.

Game settings. Game start.

For the purpose of this tutorial, i'll mostly leave things as is, but you should explore the options at least a bit.

I like to be able to rename my commanders, so that is a fun option. Also if you want you can raise or lower the amount of money the nations get in the match.
Do remember though that this applies to ALL nations.

By clicking the "Thrones of Ascension" option, you get into the win condition screen.
Here you can modify how common thrones are, what level they are or change the victory condition all together.
You should explore this in the future.

For this Tutorial, press Ok, and then Ok.

Now it will load for a while, and then give you a pair of messages!

Basic controls.

If you want you can left click the messages to read them, i strongly advice you do since they are the story of this game.

When done, press "Exit"

You can return to that screen during your turn by pressing "M"

Now you will see your province on the map, with the blue flag behind a fortress icon. The flag is blinking.

This indicates which province is currently selected.

RIGHT click a nearby province.
This is how you select different provinces.

Scroll with the mouse wheel.
This zooms in and out.
(You can also zoom with Page up/down)

Press the ARROW keys.
This moves the map around.

Check out the beutiful map Valanis.

Right click your capital.
Here you have a whole bunch of things going on, there are commanders next to your god, a THOUSAND MILLION menu options and everything is crazy!

Don't worry, you don't need even half of it for now.

The fellows hanging out with your god, is you commanders.
Commanders are a central part of the game, units need commanders to move.

You see that guy that looks like an assassin? He's a spy! (Don't worry, he works for you) LEFT click on his box.
Now his box is white, that means he is selected.

LEFT click a province that is next to your capital.
A massive arrow appears, try clicking other provinces.

As long as an arrow appears, that is a valid move order.

Now RIGHT click the spy.
Here you can see the stats of the spy. Since he is a human, his values usually are much worse than your gods stats.
Basically, a value of 10 in most stats is the human norm.
You can see he has a sword, some leather armour and two abilities.

By hovering over abilities, you get the simple tooltip. By right clicking it you get the advanced info.
Right click "Stealthy"
Did you remember what it said the commander was doing when the arrow appeared? That was "Sneak" and it is this ability that makes him able to do it.
Only commanders with sneaky can sneak.

Press exit.

If you changed the "Renaming is allowed" option, press "R" Otherwise remember this option in future games.
Now you can rename him anything you want :D
This doesn't work on your God, and a few special characters.
Let's call him Garreth.
Just start typing.
Ok.
Exit.

Have Garreth selected, and left click. It says sneak in his box.
By HOLDING CONTROL and left clicking, you make him move normally instead.
Now he will ATTACK the province!...... but we don't want that....
Just left click to have him sneak to a neighbouring province.

Now, right click the capitol or left click his box again to deselect him.

If you want, you can take your commander of Ulm, who is a badass dude with some infantry to attack a neighbouring province.
But since we don't know what is there this is unwise.

By holding zontrol, and selecting multiple commanders, you group select.
Now you select the entire group when selecting one of them.

To ungroup select them, hold control and left click them again.

Building units. And squads.

Now to the right, press "Recruit Units."
Here you see all the units avaliable to this nation, and specifically in this province.

Mouse over the different units to get the name and costs in a tooltip.
LEFT click to put in the build queu, RIGHT click to get info about the unit.

Right click the guy in brown clothes on the first row, the Master smith.
This is your standard mage.

If you check his abilities you will recognize some icons from creating your god. Those are magic paths he know. The ? means he can get more paths randomly.

As you can see, he ignores drain, has something called a forge bonus and a resource bonus.
For now, ignore the forge bonus.

The resource bonus is important though.
Right click this one.
As you can see, he makes resources for the fort he is in.
Exit. Exit.

Build one of those by left clicking.
Since this is a commander, you can only make one for now. You can only build ONE commander in each province, every turn.

Basically, build as many smiths as possible. Since they give you more resource to buy heavy infantry for.

Click one of the "Unit"s you want to build. Right click brings up info so you can inspect what you are buying.

For this tutorial, click the War dog.
For every time you click, one of that unit is put into the queue.
If you hold SHIFT and left click, 10 of that unit is put into the queue.
You can see how much you have left to spend below.

LEFT clicking a unit in a queue removes it from the queue.
"Reset recruitment" clears both queues.
Do that, get a smith and get any units you want. And can afford.

Press Exit.

Now you see the "Recruit units" button is brown.
This means there are units in the build queue in this province.

Press "Army Setup."
Here you see the commanders in this province, what units they command, and a bunch of other info.

Focus on the commander of Ulm, and his men.
Left click one of the axe-men. Left click beneath the little fort icon above.
Now that soldier is in the garrison of this province, this is where all newly constructed units go.
Put him back with his friends.
Double click a pikeman. This selects all units of that type in that squad or garrison.
Then click once in the same field as the axe-men.
Now they are in the same squad.
Click the axe-man to the left. Move to the axe-man furthes right, shift click.
Now every unit inbetwen those two units are selected.
Click the god.
Now the axe-men are commanded by your god.
Reselect the axe-men and click the commander.

This is the basics of creating squads and moving units about.
The only way to move units is to have them in squads commanded by a commander.

Left click the green box on the same line as the pikemen.
This decides where on the battlefield this squad deploys, and what formation it has. Simply left click in the green area to deploy it in different places. The further right, the closer to the enemy.
If you change the formation the unit looses morale, but this can be worth it, especially in large armies.

When you are stisfied, exit.
Press <Set battle order> of the axe-men.
The deafult order for a melee unit like this is to attack closest, you can change what the unit will do when the battle starts with these orders.
Press "Attack"
Here you choose what targets this unt attacks, be advised though that units like to fall back to simply attacking closest enemy.
If the enemy you specified is not present in the battle, it will deafault to attack closest.
Choose none.
Then "Clear orders."

Ranged units deafult to Fire closest.
A good idea here is to order them to fire at archers.

Press Ok.

Set battle orders for the god.
Commanders, and especially mages have a larger variety than units when given battle orders.
You can chain several orders after each others, to a maximum of six.

Press cast a specific spell.
Here you can see what spells your god can cast in battle.
You can make you god cast specific spells you like, or any mage for that matter.
Priest powers count as spells, and are also chosen from here.

Press Exit. Ok. Exit.

Next turn.

Now you can press "End turn" in the top right corner.

Now it's a new turn, and the first thing i notice is that i'm getting my scout reports. And my new smith!

Provinces close to your provinces are automatically "scouted" by border patrols. This gives you an idea of what might be defending the place.
Do note though that border scouts are notoriously inaccurate, and only get the unit types right, and at times even forget some types.

The area the spy went into though, if you select that he will give a more trustworthy report.

Get back to your capitol.
Press the smiths little defend text in his box.
Here is all the things he can do, most of the things are not important now though (and some unwanted)

Click "Forge Magic item"
Here you can browse all the magic items he can build, they are categorized into item types which are.
1 handed, 2 handed, shield, helm, armour, shoes, misc.
I'm gonna have my smith forge an armour.

Click the armour icon.
You get further info on these items the same way as with units, hover for tooltip, right click for info.
Build the "Black steel full plate." (Unless your god is a Crone, then build any non armour item.)

As you can see, there is a magic gem cost, and an amount of gems avaliable.
We have 10 earth gems, so we can afford the armour, on top of that the smith is so good at this, it costs 2 less gems to craft items! (That was the forge bonus.)

Now we can see our gem treasury is only 2, and that the smith is working on the item, it will be finished next turn.

Press the Defend of your god.
Research.

Now go to the Research button on the right of the UI.
Now you see a green bar filling one of the metres next to magical sounding names.

Theese are the different schools avaliable for research, every school have spells for every path.
One can sit for hours checking different spells, plan evil tricks or just read descriptions.

For now, press one of the bars far to the left.
A second further to the right.
And a third furthest to the right.
This is how you assign research points, all you mages who are researching generate these points.
For this tutorial (and a general tip for Ulm) go for Construction.

You can see how much you generate, and how many points are needed for the next level.

By clicking the school name you see what you get each level, what paths they require and how much progress has been made.

Left click "Conjuration."
Scroll down to level 8.
You will notice a pair of spells were blue. That's spells only this nation possess. All the others are generic and can be cast by anyone.
You will also see what magic paths are required for each spell. And that many require two path types.
Right click "Contact Iron Angel."
Here you get the info about the spell, what it does its limitations and cost.

This spell summons an Iron Angel, a badass winged knight of doom!
Next time you play Ulm, you might want to try to get the magic to cast this with your god.

Exit. Scroll down, Exit. Exit.
As mentioned, you can sit and look at spells all day long.

Now it is time to fight.
Press Army setup.
Here you see the units you bought are in the garrison. Now put them in the army of the Commander of Ulm.

Exit this screen.

Recruit a Lord guardian.
The guardians are a special Ulm unit, and can only be constructed in the capitol.

Go out from recruitment and select the commander.
Now attack a province with as few enemies as possible. Go for Wolf / Deer / Lion -tribe provinces first. Or other weaker looking forces.
Beware of provinces with Militia, since they often have heavy cavalry.

When you find a suitable place to attack, send in your dudes. Ulm units are kinda powerful and usually win with few casualties even if outnumbered 2 to 1.

If no provinces with small forces are near, you might have had a poor start.
Attack, by having the commander move to a province.

End turn.

Almost done.

Now you are at the message screen, and there will be a battle that was fought.
You can see on the small flags that it was Ulm fighting independents, and where it was fought.

If you want you can click the "There was a battle in _____" to get the battle results.
What i like to do is press "View Battle" instead, this is more exciting since you don't know how the battle went.

Regardless of what, this turn, look at the battle.
Immidiately press "Space" when the battle starts. This pauses the battle replay.
This screen navigates similarily to the main map, with scrolling, arrow keys and such.

When moving your cursor along the screen, you see a white selection box, this way you can select units to inspect. You can inspect the enemies as well.

Try to find the/an enemy commander.
He/she is best recognized by having an inventory like your commanders.

When selecting several units in a bunch, you can select different individuals by pressing the small icons below their info.

Did you find the enemy commander?
The arrows in the top right decide playback speed, and the menu.

Sadly, you cannot influence how the battle went from here, just see how it turned out and if your planning was good.
In this game, planning is everything.

Now either Press P or Space or the left of the playback icons.
See how it went.

Hopefully, like in my case you will see some of your proud infantry ripping some independents to shreds with very few casualties. (One in my case.)
Now press the Battle message to see the losses.

Now you can begin your new turn.

Right click your god.
Press any of the inventory slots.
Select your black steel armour.
Exit.

Voila, your god now has some fancy armour!
If you want to remove it, press the specific item you want to remove, and choose to give it to someone else, put in labratory or throw away.
Press cancel.

If you noticed the armour value of the black steel plate, and then compare to the lord guardians armour. You will notice that he basically already has one for free.
That's one of the strengths of this team. VERY HEAVY ARMOUR!

Go to the map screen.
Give your lord guardian an order. (By pressing the little text in his box.)
"Become Prophet"
You can do this with 1 of your commanders. Your prophet automatically becomes a priest 3 mage. Or +1 if he already was that good or better.

Only lvl 3 priests and the god can claim thrones of ascension.

Select the province you attacked (if you took it over.) In the top left you see this provinces stats.
Compare it to your capitol.
Laugh at its ineptitude.

In your new province, press the "Defense 0+/-"
This is province defense, it's useful to buy some to defend the provinde against bandits, and to create stalling forced against your enemies.
Buy some province defense. Every point in province defense cost the current level in gold, so it quickly rises in price.
Go for 10 or so now.

A way to speed up selection is to hold down the up or down arrow key.

Now have your commander return home to get more troops or attack another place to reap more glory.

If you lost the battle, chances are your commander managed to flee (if not, dang, that's a bad start.)
The units who fled will flee to adjacent friendly provinces.
If there are no friendly adjacent provinces they all DIE. But that won't happen to you here.
Units who have fled give up their former squads and just spread out in the garrisons of adjacent provinces. Luckily, there is only one adjacent province.
Buy units until you get an army you are confident will win. Or attack another place.

To the bottom right there are a bunch of icons when you have you capitol selected.
Fortification labaratory temple and so on.
These are the special sites that are in this province. Most of these are good and give you gems.
If you mouse over them you get a tooltip, clicking gives info.

As you can see, the "Keep of Ulm" unlocks a bunch of units.
These units can only be bought at the province with this site. IE your capitol.

Select your new province.
Press recruit units.
As you can see, a very different set of units are avaliable here.

You can buy them, but often not many because of cost.
If a unit is greyed out, something is missing, probably a temple, lab or both.

Unless you go there with a mage or priest or build it, you cannot build such units.

From now on, i hope you have a firm grasp of the basics of playing the game.
You should explore the different orders, build a larger army and conquer everything!

Just a quick summary of things that can be done.
Priests can construct building Temple. This is a good thing since it spreads your dominion.
Mages can construct building Lab. Labs are needed to research and create items and cast ritual spells.
Any commander in a friendly province can construct building Castle or Citadel.
A castle makes most of your capitol units avaliable in that province, and it collects extra money from nearby provinces and must be sieged.
Priest 3 or god can, after you've taken a throne province (it has a little throne icon on it) claim the throne. The throne can be good or bad. You can always win by annahilating all opponets.

I hope this was useful, have fun!

(Fun fact, first time i played dominions 3 i played mid Ulm, and fought Bandar Log, and got SLAUGHTERED, killed, covered in monkey feces and vanished because no one believed in me :P)

[Klomster]

All the dominions games are at their core the same games (at least 3-6 which i played), but they make genuine improvements and add more content as they go along.

From 4 to 5 is the biggest difference since it adds simultaneous movement in combat which is a significant difference from the previous games.

So my answer is, do what you feel like, dom 6 is fun, i got it from a friend but unless he would have gotten it, i'm not sure i'd gotten it. Dom 6 adds a lot to the assassination part of the game and completely changes up the mechanic of cavalry in all their forms.

So i'd say play the previous, if you like it, get dom 6.
You could sort of see it as an expansion pack. New nations, new mechanics, new spells etc etc.

[mpcg]

OMG! Thank you for this. Now I can start playing DOMINION 3 which has been in my library for years! I'm super new to this and willing to learn. Question - should I just keep playing and learning DOM4 or get DOM6 - which is still pricey ugh.

[Klomster]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmP90S60ocI
Found a video i did and uploaded it.

[John Pork]

understandable, thank you for replying!

[Klomster]

Nah, i felt that others have a better grasp on the deeper fields of dominions. I did this guide since i saw there was a lack of a guide for complete noobs.

Most other guides have a deep grasp of tactics, stategy and mechanical optimisation.
Like what god builds are the best, how to play this team or how temples are calculated.
I don't have that deep a knowledge, the only thing i feel confident in trying to make a guide for is magic items.
And even then i'm not sure what to write really.
What items are worth it? Could be an interesting guide sure, but i'm not really sure how many are interested in such a guide.

[John Pork]

have you done any more dominion 4 guides?

[Klomster]

It's good to see that my guide keeps being useful to people. :)

[John Pork]

fantastic, thank you.

[TheSleepingDead]

hey dude hoping we could do a multiplayer game, sometime :D

[InTo_The_Sun]

Very nice tutorial for the complete beginner! Well done.