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[E. Albright]

One of the few things that bugged me about dom3 is the power escalation and the attached massive micromanagement, especially if you did bloodslave hunting and all that.

Bloodslaves hunted in a lab province now automatically dump into the lab, and for non-lab provinces, either the most recent patch or the one about to come out added a keyboard shortcut to dump all bloodslaves in a province onto the currently-selected unit.

Also, the tax slider is gone, so you have no more tax-vs-unrest mirco, whether you liked it or not.

[ThtblovesDF]

I got the game and found that to be very nice - also read some of the Dom4 threads in play with your buddys, which are quite intimidating - i'm struggling against well.. normal AI, still trying to get into it (again) - not that I ever was very good.
I might join in the next big game, maybe I can slip past the cracks or find a nation that is really good at not dieing.

Oh and what decides "who goes" first into a army? Often I'd invest heavly into attacking a army... and it just left the moment before i could strike.

[lijacote]

I got the game and found that to be very nice - also read some of the Dom4 threads in play with your buddys, which are quite intimidating - i'm struggling against well.. normal AI, still trying to get into it (again) - not that I ever was very good.
I might join in the next big game, maybe I can slip past the cracks or find a nation that is really good at not dieing.

Oh and what decides "who goes" first into a army? Often I'd invest heavly into attacking a army... and it just left the moment before i could strike.

Movement of the same kind is simultaneous. The first "movement" that happens are rituals and sneak attacks happening in the province that is already snuck into. After that you have movement into friendly provinces, and after that you have movement into hostile provinces. The final movements are broken sieges and stormed forts. If you want to catch someone moving into friendly territory, you have to use rituals or sneaks. If you want to catch someone moving into hostile territory, you have to anticipate where they are going and catch them there.

If armies are somehow contradicting each other with their movements, then the larger army tends to win, or push through.

A more detailed and helpful breakdown of movement can be found in the manual, on page 69, and the specific sequence of the turn is found on page 77.

[Delta Foxtrot]

MP teaches itself pretty fast. You'll bumble your first one or two games, after that you'll still bumble but much less so. Everybody bumbles.
You do want to get some basic grasp of one or two nations in SP and basic game concepts though. I started my first MP with a week or so of SP playing. It wasn't pretty. Could have used a month or so learning the basics much better.

You can wait for the next Bay12 match, a few of the games seem to be dying down so there might be another one or two coming up before the end of the year. Alternatively there's a lot of games going on on desura, where the official general and MP forums are. One potential problem with getting a game here is that games tend towards mixed skill games, that is there might be a newbie or two, some who are better than that, and perhaps a few who could even be described as better still. On desura you just join or start a newbie game and it usually gets filled with equally skill'less players fairly fast, which makes for a fairer game.

That said, there's plenty of people still learning the game here so I wouldn't be surprised if you were able to make a newbie-ish game here. You can of course just join a mixed game, that's what I did and I play fairly well nowadays, but I do feel that the ideal way to get your MP feet wet is a newbie game.

[Frumple]

Newbie game or a mixed-skill disciple game, heh. Having an experienced player (or more than one) effectively on tap is... pretty useful for figuring stuff out. Latter is something more of a commitment, though, only slightly offset by the fact you can pass off your nation to, well, your nation if you need to drop out or miss a few turns or somethin'.

[Shadowlord]

Disciple games with one or two experienced players on your team can help with learning a lot, if you're all communicating and coordinating, since you'll have other people to bounce ideas off of (as well as being able to plan together).

The manual is also very useful as a reference on the game rules (such as turn order and combat calculations, when you feel ready to look into those in more detail) - although some rules may have changed in patches. http://larzm42.github.io/dom4inspector/ is also good for looking up items, spells, units/commanders, etc, seeing the requirements for them, what units and unique spells each nation has, and so on.

[ThtblovesDF]

Hey thanks Shadowlord, i was looking for that link just a while ago : )

I would tend to try one of the gimmiky nations, like the new "ghost emror", since there isn't that much you can do wrong.
(Except... do I spam lvl1 priests to summon spam for ghosts or do I try to go for max research or send combat mages with every army?)

Mhmm so you can have more then 2 Teams? Suggests itself for a buddy programm or "scrubs team up, pros duke it out alone" game with intresting teams.

Mhmm, apperently the "Send Horror" spell has some serious issues, since its always 2 Horrors and ... well, they fight each other, instead of the enemy about 4 out of 5 times. I assume thats intended, since one should really horror mark a enemy and then send the horrors?

[E. Albright]

Actually, uh, Lemuria (which is Dom3 LA Ermor under permanent Soul Gate, but with no corporeal freespawn) is not all that easy of a nation to play. They're master turtles, and they can summon hordes of expensive immortal mages and thugs from turn 1, but they're just not that strong. Summoning extra freespawn isn't great because your freespawn isn't great, and summoning mages costs a fortune since you're paying a premium for holy levels on all, and immortality on the tier 2s and 3s; sadly, your most cost-effective researcher is the lowly reverent...

(Don't get me wrong, I wanna like Lemuria, but every time I try I just can't stand it and quit.)

[chaoticag]

Lemuria seems like a trap. Heck, a lot of the freespawn nations do. As a baseline, your troops don't tend to be that good, and you end up depending on your gem income for firepower. And well, being ethereal doesn't stop a priest from calling down holy light on you, so right off the bat, there's a strategy available to the first temple province in a region. And once magic research hits, well, your freespawn end up... chaffier.

I haven't tried them, but I'm guessing their death/astral. Not a bad combination. But, well, your pretender would need to fill a decent amount of holes for them.

[Frumple]

Honestly, the only thing I can think to do with Lemuria is spam consuls everywhere. They're basically research-0 wraith lords with H3 instead of D3, with everything that entails. Demolish your scales to take a strong (Tri, maybe even quad, though iirc a quad would put off your first consul a handful of turns due to needing to empower something) bless and put those guys out more or less every chance you get. You're pretty much the only nation in the game that can have basically spam an end-game SC chassis by around turn two, and with a good bless those consuls can solo almost any indie province in the game without research or kit -- just a scripted bless, unholy power, holy avenger, and it's off the races. (E2: And with enemy armies? Just bring two or three together and watch as they do hilariously terrible things unto your foe's cloaca.) They are absolutely ridiculously, border-line farcically, strong for their research and gem cost.

As for the reanimation chaff, the closest thing to a trick with them is "Go underwater". Amusingly, the UW shadow soldiers are marginally stronger than the land ones.

Arguably, the real idea is to play lemuria as a disciple, alongside one of the forgier nations (and a god that probably goes a simple N/minor E bless -- it's all the consuls really need, though more helps. Actually, they almost don't need a bless at all but... it helps.), and basically do nothing but produce consuls for the other nations to equip. Use the whole no-domkill thing to nab up indie mages for research and eventually your own kitting and fill the world with immortal, self-blessing, discounted wraith lords. Just... think on that for a little while. Eventually you might translate into using those immortal battlemages alongside the immortal consuls and make any attack into your team's dominion just the most absolutely goddamn miserable thing ever.

E: And yeah, they're astral/death. Tops out at 3S or 4D on 1/4th of the grand lemurs, which are entirely too freaking expensive but 1/4th of them are teleporting immortals right out the gate. So, y'know, you can do things with that. They're also stealthy H3 units, which... you can do things with, since your basically everything (well, everything reanimated, and that's going to be quite a lot after a while) in regards to chaff is also stealthy. It's one thing to not be worried about lemur's chaff because you've got priests or whatever, it's another for 2-300 of them backed by a pretty killer battlemage to just randomly show up anywhere in your nation while you're desperately trying to stave off the infinite march of the consuls.

E3: Really, it's just kinda'... okay, pop quiz. Turn 3, lemuria gets their first consul. Every other turn thereafter, another appears. It's turn 15. There's a half dozen might-as-well-be-wraith-lords rampaging towards your nation. What do you do?

[Delta Foxtrot]

Take a strong dominion and plop down a few fort+temples? Should provide a buffer against their immortality at least. Dust to Dust and Solar Rays are quick to research even with normal research, easy would give some additional advantage to the defender. With those spells the undead should die quickly, Wraith-wannabe or not, though chaff could still overwhelm the small number of battle mages I could muster that early. An aggressive Lemuria could well disrupt my forts, either wrecking them mid-construction or locking down existing ones, making it that much more likely for them to win. But if I got some minimal level of support infrastructure in place before Lemuria went all Leroy Jenkins on me, I would be confident that I can hold them back.

But what if I'm a dimwit who took dom7 against Lemuria and has no S/D magic? Yeah, that could hurt. And either way, actually taking the fight back to them would be just as atrocious as fighting Ermor ever is.

[Mindmaker]

Got the following recruit anywhere sacred in my upcoming nationgen game:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The work really well with a major water bless.
What do you think? Worth building a pretender around it?

[E. Albright]

Would also work well with fire. Cap only or recruit anywhere? That's a very big question...

[E. Albright]

(Tri, maybe even quad, though iirc a quad would put off your first consul a handful of turns due to needing to empower something) bless and put those guys out more or less every chance you get.

The big reason not to go quad isn't the delay on getting a consul out (though you are delayed), it's that you have to tank your dominion and have an imprisoned pretender. On a reasonably large map against the AI you can get away with it - indeed, it may work to your advantage since you can outrun your domrot - but it'd be suicide in MP, or possibly just on a smaller map.

[Mindmaker]

Mentioned it in the previous post, recruit anywhere.

The nation also includes:
Recruit anywhere 80g 1E1A1B with 11 research, which will be my main bloodhunter/researcher.
Recruit anywhere 2A2B, which will be sending Doom Horrors once Astral Corruption is up.
Cap only 2B with the following randoms:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I guess they could be Demon Knight Factories.