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[Delta Foxtrot]

I've had difficulty pulling off dust to dust in the past because of how close you have to get to cast it. Did you figure out a way to get your mages to keep distance?

Haven't scripted a battle in few months, but...

Have some troops ahead of the mages. Have the mages either cast something else or on attack orders, then dust-to-dust. Ideally, there should be a constant thick line of friendly troops between your mages and the enemy. Of course, battles have a way of going down south fast, and forward placing mages is always a risk. But that's how I've done it in the past with reasonable success.

But something to keep in mind: sometimes you don't need anti-undead spells. Sometimes anti-everything works just fine. Thunder doesn't care what it's hitting

edit:
obviously all that advice could go to heck if you're handling flying mages like zotz. No idea how you keep those guys in leash.

[EnigmaticHat]

In my limited experience you can get away with placing mages forward... sometimes.  Like, only do it sometimes.

Also if your armies are moving around, always leave them scripted with generic orders.  Put the infantry in the middle with "hold and attack" and the mages/archers behind them.  Then if you get in a fight where you need forward mages, switch the scripting right before the fight so your opponent has no chance to see what your actual formation is.  Only bother if there's a significant chance that you'll lose, its a bit tedious.

[Blitzkrieg]

Are there any future plans to enable more control over tactical combat in Dominions as an update or for future iterations? I've played the heck out of every game in the series, but I am getting a bit tired of it and looking for new games. The two biggest issues are the lag time during turn change, and the lack of any control in tactical combat. I understand there are too many units for individual control over units; so how about as "squads"?

At any rate, the game is deep and varied, but the game has not seen any major innovation in four successive games. It's basically (slightly-) better graphics and a few more factions, units, items, and spells, etc.

[Shadowlord]

What kind of additional control would you add?

And by "lag time between turns," how would you speed up the other human players? :V

Or do you only play singleplayer, and aren't considering everyone who plays PBEM?

[Blitzkrieg]

What kind of additional control would you add?

The ability to actually control units in tactical combat as it unfolds!

And by "lag time between turns," how would you speed up the other human players? :V

Or do you only play singleplayer, and aren't considering everyone who plays PBEM?

Indeed. I only play SP.

[Il Palazzo]

Dominions SP is rather quite like masturbation. It's got some potential for fun, and nothing wrong with that. But complaining that the toy is not ideally suited to what you're using it for is somewhat missing the intentions behind the design.

[RexMundi]

hah, wasn't expecting that Il. I've a question though. how to best defeat elephants? I am playing Utgard LA in a lan game with family (Brother and father plus AI) and ragtha(the mix birds and abysians) were using some. Only ended up killing them because enough pop defense they couldn't trample everything and they fled, then I cornered them and no commander killed them.
So what is good versus them? The would trample my giants, and massed arrows seemed to do jack all.

Unrelated, I see blitzkrieg, my brother goes by blitzeking, kinda close, and then shadowlord, what my other brother goes by.

[pondicherry]

(Thank you Blazeeee....)

I am reading the manual and I'm having soooo much fun.
I started with Arcoscephale in the Middle Age (I have so much to learn.)

"Elephants and chariots, unpredictable but devastating"
Oh and Shadowlord I did create a prophet with your name ! (if you remember...)

[EnigmaticHat]

hah, wasn't expecting that Il. I've a question though. how to best defeat elephants?

As usual, "depends".

They have bad MR and morale, so you can try to use fascinate or panic or something to exploit that.  "Resist or die" effects like Bone Melter or Soul Slay also work but they're not very available.  You can increase the size of your troops or bring in a thug with an amulet of the giant, to prevent the trampling.  Or an innate size 6 unit.

They have a tendency to push into infantry formations and then get attacked from all sides, so a unit with glaives or broadswords should be able to cut them to pieces with hopefully even loses.  That will only work against small numbers, if they've got 20+ elephants in one place no amount of infantry will be a good idea.  You might get some mileage out of cavalry, their high defense stat lets them dodge trampling and their lances might burst down the elephants, but that's a potentially expensive mistake if it doesn't work.  You can also use overwhelming firepower from well equipped ranged units like crossbowmen or with evocation mages (who I believe will naturally target high-health units).  Flaming arrows or wind guide could help on that front.

Skelespam sort of works too.  I mean it won't kill them very quickly but its not like you care if your temp summons get trampled.  Its like I always say in TBS games, being expendable is a form of tankiness.

[RexMundi]

Thanks. I only had to face 2 of them luckily, and was able to swarm them to scare them off as my other guys took out the rest of their forces. I'm just glad I was able to find and take their capitol so early in the game, and no remorse since it's an ai anyway.

Another question, what's the best way to maximize income? As far as I know it's order3/production3/growth3, no temp (or perfect for your nation), and no unrest. Anything else major that I'm missing? Besides the few units to increase it.

[Shadowlord]

You'll want every land province to be adjacent to or containing one land fort as well. (And the same for sea provinces with sea forts)

[EnigmaticHat]

Focus on taking valuable provinces, I think the general hierarchy is farms>plains>forests>swamps>mountains (although these are high resource)>wastes.  Take provinces in general; a twenty province nation has a huge advantage over a ten province one.

The most important thing sans taking provinces is maintenance costs on your troops and commanders.  Generally speaking, in terms of efficiency from best to worst: no maintenance summons>sacreds (including priest-mages)>low gold/high resource troops>high gold/low resource troops.  However high gold/low resource troops have the advantage of being able to serve as a "levy" that is only recruited in times of war.  Yomi is great at this with many 1 resource troops, you can raise a hundreds of infantry in a turn.  Most nations and players won't bother with this tho because its a risky strategy if you're caught unawares in MP.

For beginners I'd say the main thing is having cost-efficient researchers because as the game goes on those will often be over half your maintenance fees.  There are three main strats for this: hire astral mages, because that gives a research bonus.  Hire priest-mages because they have higher starting costs but halved maintenance.  Or take magic scales and recruit a horde of cheap mages, because the research points magic grants are not factored in to a mage's costs or maintenance fees.

You'll want every land province to be adjacent to or containing one land fort as well. (And the same for sea provinces with sea forts)

That has almost no effect on income.  Its more for getting all your resources in one place where you can hire your national troops.  A faction like Mictlan that has low resource costs doesn't really care about that.  Still good advice that you should follow.

[Shadowlord]

You'll want every land province to be adjacent to or containing one land fort as well. (And the same for sea provinces with sea forts)

That has almost no effect on income.  Its more for getting all your resources in one place where you can hire your national troops.  A faction like Mictlan that has low resource costs doesn't really care about that.  Still good advice that you should follow.

Right. The forts also add supplies to provinces, the amount depending on their admin value (The manual says (Admin * 4) / (Distance + 1)), with four provinces being the maximum distance, and income is increased in the fort's own province by Admin/2%, so it's also useful to put your forts in high-income provinces to get a greater boost there. (In practice, I often build them where there are indie troops I want to mass-produce because of their resource-corralling functionality)

[Delta Foxtrot]

Re: forts and income bonus

I haven't done the math, but it's not a no-brainer to get forts everywhere because you get an income bonus. Forts aren't free. In fact, if you prefer LA as much as I do you're generally paying 800-1200g for one. It takes a long while for that investment to pay itself back if I'm concerned mainly with income. You could probably crunch a few numbers to calculate some ideal amount of turns after which a fort has effectively paid for itself. But before that special turn, you're losing money by building forts (of course you get awesome things for forts so you build them anyway, just not for income reasons).

Another question, what's the best way to maximize income? As far as I know it's order3/production3/growth3, no temp (or perfect for your nation), and no unrest. Anything else major that I'm missing?

Assuming similar amount of provinces, that's indeed what keeps wealth rolling in.

But it's never the same amount of provinces. The guy with an awake dragon (or similar) will get one province per turn without any attempt at expanding with anything else. That's easily ten provinces by the end of year 1. And you can expect another 5-15 from your national troops with good expansion pace. Other option is to get a good bless (simple X9 is usually good enough) and expand like crazy with your sacreds. You don't need either though, some nations are rather good at expanding with just scales as long as they have enough income and production (favourite of mine being EA/MA Pangaea and its centaur warriors). Conventional wisdom is that your expansion is going to be slower if you don't have an awake fighting god, good sacreds or good national expanders.

Also be mindful of your upkeep. Everything you recruit should be for a purpose, and ideally cost effective at that purpose. Troops that just sit there aren't earning their keep (well they might act as a deterrent, but that's difficult to appraise). Troops that are constantly marching and fighting and winning and dying don't weigh on your treasury as much as idle troops. Of course you can't usually create a full fighting strength army in a single turn, so what I wrote above is more of an ideal one should strive towards rather than hard reality.
In an infinite game, mages with low upkeep/RP are preferrable over high upkeep/RP mages when it comes to research. This is generally opposite for battle mages, thought it varies. Of course no game of Dominions is infinite, but generally speaking, if a unit is going to sit in a province for fifty turns I'd prefer that unit to be cheap.
And tying into that, don't over recruit. I sometimes get a bit trigger happy with forts and as a result I end up recruiting far more than I can comfortably afford. It's happened once or twice that I've had a billion useless highly efficient research monkies who drain my income every turn and thus prevent me from getting stuff done as much as I'd like.

[E. Albright]

If you don't need the design points for something else, don't underestimate the earning potential of Luck scales, especially coupled with Order. It's not reliable, nor steady, but it's usually going to throw you several hundred every few turns and may throw you several thousand and/or a fort or such...