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[USEC_OFFICER]

You know, I really like the data from that survey, simply because it's so fascinating. Like, you have some nations who people see with varying spreads of competency/power. And then you get EA Rlyeh with 8/11 people thinking that it's utter crap _{with abstaining}. Or LA Ulm with 9/11 players saying that it's stupidly strong. Hopefully more people will submit their opinions so that we can see what everybody actually thinks of the different nations.

[Shadowlord]

How do you see the results without voting?

[sum1won]

How do you see the results without voting?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NqWCD3hoDWFZQ5d7QXRNlHAOSYQDSPd7yQEiH9u00xk/viewanalytics

There's the summary of results.  I'd appreciate people vote, though.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I did.

Mostly "Don't Know", but still.

[Shadowlord]

I didn't because I would be voting "Don't know" on everything.

[EnigmaticHat]

Got this on sale, saw you guys have some games running.

It looks pretty complicated.  I've gotten down the controls and some basic first turn stuff (although I still have no idea what an optimal way to handle the early game is).  So some questions:

1.  How good am I going to have to get to bother playing multiplayer?

2.  I know you can recruit local troops from conquered provinces.  So to what extent is my choice of race a "starting package" versus a class that will define me for the whole game?

3.  You guys keep talking about "chaff".  What is the strongest troop you would categorize as chaff?  Am I going to spend most of the game fighting with summoned monsters or are my starting elites good enough?

4.  Any tips for what to research at first?

5.  How quickly should I gobble up the independents, and how concerned should I be with defense at this stage of the game?

[Karlito]

1.  How good am I going to have to get to bother playing multiplayer?

You don't need to be very good at all. I personally consider single player pointless; multiplayer is the core of the game. I'd say, at minimum, know how the UI works, and have a vague notion of how at least 1 nation plays earlygame(expanding against independents; rushing other players; troops dominant) to midgame(fighting other players; magic becomes important), and that's probably enough. You can look for newbie games and only play against less experienced players, if you like.

2.  I know you can recruit local troops from conquered provinces.  So to what extent is my choice of race a "starting package" versus a class that will define me for the whole game?

Nation choice is very much a "defining class" sort of thing, though most nations support more than one strategy. Generally, independent troops suck even more than your national troops, and won't be worth recruiting, but there are exceptions. For example, a nation with no archers may find it beneficial to recruit independent archers. It can often be worthwhile to recruit independent mages that have access to magical paths that your national ones don't.
Also, keep in mind that to recruit (most) units in any kind of quantity from a province, that province will need to have a fort, and any province with a fort will be able to recruit your national units.
Even in the "lategame", which is maybe 80 to 100 turns into a standard multiplayer match, where you've acquired enough magical diversity and research that you have many many tactical options on the table, nation choice is still very influential on your playstyle.

3.  You guys keep talking about "chaff".  What is the strongest troop you would categorize as chaff? 

Hmmm, chaff is really more of a troop role than a troop descriptor, in my mind. Like, most human nations will start out using their infantry as the primary way to kill enemies, but eventually research into magic will cause them to become obsolete in this role, and they'll be relegated to soaking up fire and guarding the back row. Conversely, even the lowly makarta can become quite deadly with a few well-picked buffs.

Am I going to spend most of the game fighting with summoned monsters or are my starting elites good enough?
Any tips for what to research at first?

I've put these questions together because the answer is the same: it depends entirely on your nation choice and strategy. If you have a particular nation that you like to play, we could discuss these questions in more detail.

How quickly should I gobble up the independents,

As fast as possible. As a rule of thumb, average at least 1 province/month in the first year.

how concerned should I be with defense at this stage of the game?

At every stage of the game, I usually put only 1 point of province defense everywhere. In most cases, spending gold on troops is more worthwhile. However, as you are playing singleplayer, this advice is not necessarily applicable. It's very easy for a player to kill 20 or 30 gold worth of pd, but the AI probably has more trouble (though I have not seriously played dominions 4 singleplayer ever).


Anyway, I'm just one guy with my own views, so I hope other players will chime in if they feel the need.

[RexMundi]

All good answers imo. also, if i hosted a more noobish game who'd be in?

[Frumple]

At every stage of the game, I usually put only 1 point of province defense everywhere.

More explicitly here, if you're playing multiplayer, you always put at least one point of PD everywhere. No exceptions, ever. If PD = 0, make PD >= 1.

Otherwise, at some point in the game, that critter that's been spewing scouts everywhere (which is, quite possibly, everyone*) will cheerfully conquer every single undefended province you have on the same turn their major military forces decide to slam into you.

... which is kinda' fun to be on the giving end of, but not on the receiving :V

*And should definitely include you. If you don't have particularly notable national scouts (Fliers, spies, assassins), the instant you conquer an indie province that produces scouts, you set that province to auto-recruit scouts and never turn it off. There's not terribly many ways you can better spend 25 gold.

[Shadowlord]

The AI doesn't really have a problem making armies and killing PD. It has problems, in my experience, with being too impatient to amass sufficient force to overcome your defense (instead suicidally charging with fresh troops every turn), with not getting dom-killed (although this was just because it made pretenders with low dominion ratings), and seems unaware of crafting or using crafted items, and thus making thugs/SCs. It also doesn't really do diplomacy at all.

It might be smarter about making pretenders now, that was several patches ago (you can make it use pretenders of your own design in any case).

[E. Albright]

The AI does craft, but it doesn't do so extensively. And there have been dev efforts to improve that (albeit not recently) and it is doing better (though not dramatically).

2014-01-26 12:52:23 +0100
AI improved item distribution
AI improved thug creation
AI improved research item creation

I'd add to the "1 PD everywhere, always" that there are a few magic numbers for both SP and MP.

The SP AI is fairly simple, but it does actually have war and peace states, and if you want to stay at peace with an AI neighbor, strong PD is the starting point for that (though it's not always enough). The AI will consider provinces with PD under 20 or 25-ish to be vulnerable unless they have comparable amounts of troops present instead, and it tends to attack vulnerable neighbors when it's feasible to do so. I usually play it safe and make my borders with AI nations I don't wanna fight right now PD 30 if at all possible (and never below 20 unless I truly can't even), and it really reduces how many AIs I have to fight at once.

For MP, the magic numbers are 1 (for obvious reasons), and 6, 20, and 35 (for less obvious reasons). Unless it's a spy doing it, scout reports give rough estimates of local PD, and they do it according to hard cutoffs. So any PD of 1-5 looks the same to a scout, as does all between 6-19, 20-34, and 35+, respectively.

[EnigmaticHat]

So far I've been playing Neifelhiem.  Not doing much specific with them though, just find the idea of playing as an entire race of giants entertaining.  I picked Great Mother as my pretender's physical form, but again, not doing much gameplay wise there.  Gave her some growth and earth magic, as well some growth domain and a domain boost.  Now that I think about it though, given the free -3 temp giants get it might be useful to take a bunch of domain and spread cold everywhere?  Maybe even take some negative traits so I can give them to my enemies?  I don't know.

As a side note, funny thing happened.  I had a Gygja (old witch, giant of course) who was in a backwater province searching for magic sites, but I wanted her to wait a turn for another mage to catch up.  So I tell her to search for blood sacrifices, because it seemed to be the main useful thing for her to do at the time.

Next turn, I hear that a battle happened there.  I zoom in to check, and I see that a single heroic peasant charged the giant hag.  He shrugged off a half dozen hits of some bleed spell or another, ran up to her, and killed her with a fucking pitchfork.  I love that, they're going to be telling stories of that guy for centuries to come.  Probably where no giants can hear them.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Karlito gave pretty good answers. If you want a newbie game, you can try organizing one here or looking up the desura multiplayer forum, they have a bunch of newbie and non games there.
If you can manage roughly 10 provinces and a second fort under construction by year-2 start you're already doing better than many newbies, though there are nations/builds that can manage much better than that if you know what you're doing.

N9Ex (Nature 9 Earth 4 or more) pretender is often recommended for Niefelheim due to it being very beneficial on Niefel sacreds. It's a nation with good (and expensive) things all over, so you don't really need your pretender to be around. I would take it imprisoned for good scales & bless as that seems like an obvious choice (caveat: I don't play Niefelheim).
Dominionwise you should consider 7 to be low but acceptable. I prefer to go higher, but I guess 7 works if you're cheap.

Gist of Niefelheim vs AI is to mass up your Niefel troops who can withstand large AI hordes thanks to their N9 regeneration and kill them thanks to their native cold aura. Later on you can also get Niefel Jarl "thugs" (powerful commander units with powerful gear). Well kitted your thugs can do a lot of things that would require thousands of gold to achieve otherwise. Badly kitted your bloated price tag will only ensure extravagant and unnecessary losses when they inevitably die. Though I'm sure you could play without a bless and rely less on your frost giants.

And if you want to give any of those vague builds a shot, Irminsul (the big tree) would be a cheaper pretender than the Great Mother. It would be an immobile tree sitting in your capital for the entire game but there's a reason that tree is called OP by some.

You should be aware of the mod inspector tool:
http://larzm42.github.io/dom4inspector/
It's basically a browsable database of all the entities in the game. Quite useful.

edit:
Depending on a particular game, the first 10-15, maybe 20 turns but definitely no more are fairly similar between SP and MP. Incidentally that's around when you start to transition from earlygame to midgame. So that early time period is fairly easy to practice. To really get mid-/endgame you need to do some MP and fail at it a few times. It's fun trust me. Get some practical experience on the first game year or two and a vague theory on what you should achieve on year 3 and that's honestly both pretty basic and more than most newbies do.

Also there's guides here:
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/board/the-council-of-sages-strategy-guides
Here's a few basic gameplay guides related to pretender creation:
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/primer-pretender-design
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/pretender-design-and-analysis-updated-to-dominions-4
http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/pretender-design-golden-rule

I'm guessing you got the game from steam? The folks on the steam general forum aren't quite as MP minded (nothing wrong with that but it does colour some advice) and while they have an unpinned guide compilation thread, it doesn't have any quality control unlike desura (it requires moderator action to move a thread to the guide section).

[RexMundi]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146830.0

Did end up starting a new game, or, i'm trying to anyway. Very new at hosting, heh.

[EnigmaticHat]

Ok, few more minor questions:

1.  Am I correct in noticing that province defense increases resolve BEFORE move orders?  Cause that seems a bit cruel.

2.  If a province is cut off from the capital/main mass of a faction, does it suffer supply damage?  One time an AI force advanced into my territory, only for me to cut off their gains into a two province bubble.  In one turn, 30/50 of them died (without any fight I could see).  This is with 3 cold mind you, and the attackers were those bat people vulnerable to cold.

3.  Anyone know a mod, hotkey or option that makes stealthed scouts more visually obvious?  I keep forgetting to move them.  Warning on end turn sort of helps but not in finding the damn guys.

4.  I used my pretender to help expand rapidly... and now she has a limp.  Any way to deal with that?

5.  This is less of a minor question, but if I wanted to make a "suicide squad" that could go up against a huge enemy force and still inflict reasonable casualties, how would I go about doing that?  I've heard talk in this thread of mages who curse the whole army before they die and such, but there don't seem to be many AoE spells and all of them are restricted to higher levels.