I just remembered some experiences with the Dominions demo. The first one, without a turn limit.
As with all the demos, research was capped at level 4. However, since there was no imposed turn limit, it was quite rare that a game would finish before all the schools had been long since maxed out.
Here's the catch... The AI cheats. Bad. Not only do they get all the standard naughtiness of troop placement and army movement prediction, but they also completely ignore the research level cap.
I remember playing one match against an AI Arcosephale. I was playing Ermor, and jsut minding my own business when I make contact with Arco. A huge war breaks out, with titanic masses of infantry and elephants crashing against my vast legions of the dead. Also, since the AI was a dick, it could predict my movement and abandon the province before my army got there, sometimes passing them on the road and taking the province I had just left.
Anyways, this was going just fine... Until Arco decided it would be awesome to cast the Wrath of God enchantment, which is level 7 evocation.
So now my warriors, restricted all across the board to paltry level 4 magicks, were trying desperately to fend off giant hordes of elephants with the Fog Warriors enchantment (Alt 7), backed up by Wooden constructs (Cons 5), Treelords (Enc
, and all manner of other high-end beasties and spells.
The war ground itself down into a horrific standstill, with my legions just barely being able to force back their magically-enhanced humans. One section of provinces became the site of conflict after conflict after conflict as our armies chased each other around. However, I knew that this was a war of attrition... And as with all wars of attrition, Ermor is bound to win.
What scared me, however, was that although I was putting all my resources into this one war and getting about as far with it as Arco was, they were fighting on two fronts. Man was up north and pestering them at the other end of the empire, and they were
still scaring the hell out of me.
That's really the only thing I seriously dislike about the demo... One thing is having a spell research cap, another is having it only be assigned to YOU. It's sort of a 'soft' turn limit, since there's only so far you can go before the AI develops the resources necessary to completely destroy you without blinking an eye.
To combat this, I regularly design 'poor' pretenders for various nations, with scales and magic picks that are not at all helpful for the nation, and then start as them before switching over to AI control. The most recent one was an Ermorian golden naga. Heat 3, Drain 3, no death magic picks. This means no national summons, which Ermor
relies upon.
I did give her a very strong dominion though. So we'll see how this goes.
Poll
