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[E. Albright]

Well, if the game isn't going to be fast-paced, don't pin your hopes on Doom Horrors, as that's getting toned down with the next patch.

I'd say the apes are viable for a bless strategy. They're shy on defensive skills, though - a Water bless is only going to make them passable, not good. They'll crumple in the face of strong resistance.

[Mindmaker]

Do you have an alternative approach to such a nation?

[E. Albright]

If you're still looking to go the bless route, either a dual Nature-Water, Nature-Fire, or Nature-Death might work. With major nature, you're almost to 30hp, and you get 3 regen a round. Fire makes you a lethal whirlwind on top of that with your two attacks (and softening missle), and Death makes you a slightly less lethal whirlwind in exchange for more survivability. Both of those will up indirectly up your survivability by bypassing armor and reducing the amount of incoming damage in a definitive manner.

You still have the makings of good mages even if you can't do a game-breaking ploy like endless Doom Horrors (and it's not clear how toned down it's gonna be, though I wanna say they said at least half the chance to see them). You've got excellent research efficiency and good communion potential out of the E1S1B1s, and S2B2 has all kinds of fun potential too. Your cap mages would make good communion leaders for assorted earth and astral (and Gift-spewing earth-and-astral, hehehe) combat shenanigans, and as you said, you have some Demon Knight potential if you wanna go down that path.

[Mindmaker]

Well, my other infantry ranges from very expensive, but well armoured and hard hitting lineholders, to lightly armored dual wielding apes (similar to the sacreds).
The latter ones could work very well, once you have buffs like wodden warriors, legions of steel etc.

In case I don't go the bless route, I'm a bit unsure about pretender design.
I could take good scales (Growth, Order, some production), get some points out of bad scales (temp, luck, magic), but that leaves me with magic paths.

I've been considering taking those which would get me the few multipath bloodsummons, since blood is easy to empower.
I'm not sure if Father Illearth and Ice Devils are woth it (not couting Arch Devils, since they can be summoned by Heliophagi).

Not really sure about boosters either, since they are able to craft most of them by themselves, even if it requires some lucky randoms. I guess I could take high S for Rings of Wizardry or Sorcery. which would help with that a lot.

[chaoticag]

[all the good stuff Frumple said]

You know, this is why I like dominions. It's vast and wide enough to hear about hilariously odd and offbeat strategies when I post something stupid, so thanks for that Frumple. They still seem trap like for their freespawn, but a player that early might not take into consideration army composition juuuust yet anyway.

[ThtblovesDF]

I'd love to have a astral/blood nation and mess around with horror marks - since they stay and would make going all out on me unattractive in MP - sadly it seems hard to get a nation with the right paths.

*edit* While looking over screenshots it became clear that only cat horrors fight themselves, only had like 10 samples thou.

http://i.imgur.com/bRmYLtI.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/inIq8Ao.jpg

[Mindmaker]

I could use some bloodhunting advice.
In my nationgen game I have as previously mentioned cheap (80g) bloodhunters, which are also great at research (11RP +2 from magic scales).
Thing is, I don't know if I should rush my blood economy at the cost of research, or the other way round, since I have little experience with blood nations.
Also I wonder if rushing Construction 4 for SDWs would be a wise thing. I guess I could go for master/slave spells first and research up to earth meld at least.

Problem is that my national mages aren't that great at learly combat (mainly astral and blood, although my bloodhunters have E, which would at least let them communion some useful stuff) and my nature/earth access is mostly restricted to StR cap-only mages.
Thankfully at least my national troops are pretty good, so I should come out ahead in regular fights, unless somebody is fielding crazy sacreds.

[Shadowlord]

It probably depends on how many blood slaves you plan to use and how much expansion you can do before you need them. If you find arenas and such while expanding you may not need to blood hunt to do a little blood magic. If you need a lot more blood slaves, or don't find sites that give free blood slaves, you won't really have a choice in the matter, but if you can build a second and maybe even third fort really early you can double or triple your researcher-training rate if you have the gold.

[ThtblovesDF]

On that note, i tried the blood vortex spell and it made a average of 45-50 slaves / turn in a 6 player game. Incase that aids you in anyway.

[Mindmaker]

Doesn't that need high turmoil to be effective?

[Majestic7]

Micromanaging competitive players can easily reach blood income of 150+ with a moderate amount of provinces, 60+ with less management. Basically this requires a few provinces with okay population, two hunters in each province with dousing rods and patrols to keep the unrest down. The blood summon of a devil with imps incidentally works well as an upkeep-free patrol, since flying units get a patrol bonus. They have the added benefit of catching enemy sneakers (since producing unrest or sneak-raiding are the most cost-effective ways to sabotage blood economy).

So yeah, in the hands of a competitive player, blood economy can overpower gem economies in games with low site frequency quite easily. Only bad sides are the requirement for more infrastructure than gem economies. Fighting against such economy requires, in turn, heavy use of decent raiders. Especially so since the blood income is not tied to the ownership of specific provinces like gem income often is.

All this in regards to multiplayer, of course.

[Jacob/Lee]

I just started playing this game with the intent to learn after buying it from the Steam Summer Sale and leaving it to rot in my library.

I'm currently playing LA Pangaea and expanding fairly well, but a massive pain in the ass right now is the war elephant stampedes from a neighbor. The "best" losses I've suffered so far is twelve or so Grove Guards (elite minotaurs) being stomped while fighting five elephants and killing only three.

Also: How do magic sites work? Is there a better way to find them other than searching all my provinces with a Pan?

[E. Albright]

It depends on how OCD you are. Searching with a level-1 mage will generally turn up around 60% of all sites for a given path. Searching with a level-2 will generally turn up around 90%. These stats vary according to path and terrain, but as broad estimates, they're solid. So if you're economizing, you can go with a combination of dryads and sages, and you'll get most of them, though frankly I'd probably do a pan and a couple of sages if I could manage it. If you're willing to go for a longer-term ROI, you can also do the sitesearching spells, though those are best used in a limited and informed manner when you have reason to think you're missing something in a province or you have limited access to the path the mage is searching and want to maximize their utility while minimizing their risk.

A nice brief primer on the "informed manner" bit can be found here: http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/grigio87s-site-searcing-handbook. Mostly, if there's a province with odd scales and no events to explain them (press "i" on provinces you have at least scout-level intel on to see the province event history), there's probably a site causing them.

[Karlito]

Elephants can be pretty strong in the early game, but they have quite a few exploitable weaknesses. Like all tramplers they rely on movement to do damage, so find some way to hold them in place and even crappy troops can carve them into bits. A few low level nature mages casting either tangle vines or vine arrow will help quite a bit.

I'd also think that grove guards wouldn't have too much trouble with them, since steady troops with high damage attacks can often weather the initial elephant assault and then chop them into pieces, but I guess their defense is too low to avoid being trampled, and you can't really afford to lose any at all. However, your best unit is actually the Dryad Hoplite, even if your bless is weak you'll probably be better off recruiting as many of them you can over the Grove Guards: their awe will shut down elephants and most other melee threats. Other options might be a suicide squad of Stymphaligian Birds set to attack "Large Enemy Monsters" the first turn, or enough bowmen (you national crossbow dude is pretty great) scripted to shoot at them.

If you have construction research, a few Cataphract commanders equipped with Rat Tails will probably also be able to hold off elephants and cause them to route (which is actually better than straight killing them, since they'll often trample their allies on the way out).

EDIT: Awesome of Albright to ninja my post with the answer to the other question.

[Frumple]

... I'd probably posit that (one of) LA Pan's best early-game solution to elephants would be a small screen of units up front backed by a handful of dryads spamming tunes. Tune of fear, in particular, should be pretty ruinous to a squad of elephants, and growth is more or less tangle vines or vine arrow, but actually useful

If you can get in range, anyway, which becomes much easier when they're coming right at you. Dryads on tune duty is pretty useful in general for LA Pan, methinks, if you can get a handle on scripting them right.

Could also nab alt 2, bring along a pan and some minotaurs, and enlarge some critters up to no-sell trample size. Pan on panic duty would probably straight-up negate 'em, too -- if you've got const-4 and a D random pan, you could just forge up some skull standards and stick 'em on whatever, as well. That's one of your better things to be doing with non-caster commanders regardless, heh.

Really, anything in general that hits elephants in the morale is a good way to just make them go away. With rare exceptions, their morale is just kinda' terrible, plus when they rout they wreck the enemy as well. S'good stuff.