Erix wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 15, 2024 11:32 am

It’s still going! There’s a new round starting this weekend—In approx 54 hours.

DiplomacyandWarfare wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 11:14 pm

sweetandcool wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 5:36 pm

DiplomacyandWarfare wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 4:49 pm

I also tried OpenDominion and had a slightly worse experience. I tried a more conservative approach than sweet, exploring and playing it like an idle game rather than attacking (which is supposed to be more newbie-friendly). I got attacked early on and more or less knocked out of the game. There were also cool mechanics like a research tree and a variety of buildings and spells, but the game was too short for me to get far in the research tree, and they were off meta and weak anyways. It's extremely meta-dominated and hard to play as a casual.

Did your team help you at all?

It's not helpful that the wiki is kinda not great.

I think the general strategy is not hard to grasp:

Build alchemy during the protection phase, and smithies to reduce unit recruitment costs and whatever the building is to reduce construction costs.

Then if you are going for attacking strategy, you sacrifice some of your economic base to build offensive units and maybe make a few more smithies.

Then, throughout the game, as you grow, you transition slowly away from those buildings and more towards other buildings that support your chosen strategy.

Since the effects of buildings (other than homes and production buildings) scale with the percentage of the total buildings you own, this is why the wiki says never to build alchemy buildings outside of protection. It's actually rotten advice for a newcomer because while it generally is true, if you get invaded and lose half of your alchemy buildings, and you are an explorer, there is no way to recover your economy other than building some more alchemy buildings.

So I actually think the strategy is easy to pick up after a game or two, the experience of knowing the "meta" of knowing when to build or recruit and how much, definitely is not easy to pick up.

I also realized late game there is a handy tool to see who all is in range and can attack you. But there are tons of people in range generally, so if you want to use that info to get a feel for how much DP you need then you will have to run a ton of info ops, I suppose.

But at least then, in regards to knowing how much DP you "should" have, you don't need to rely on meta except in the early game right out of protection.

This is all stuff I figured out on my own, because the community is poor at teaching new players and their advice is more a matter of telling new players what to do. But I don't really hold that against them since I've realized that the skill of teaching is actually not a very common skill at all, and most communities rely on telling.

I, in fact, spent an hour reading the wiki and talked to a bunch of people in the discord, then used an excel sheet someone made for the protection phase. I'm not saying the game is too complicated (in fact it is, in principal, pretty simple). It's just meta-dominated.

sweetandcool wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 5:36 pm

DiplomacyandWarfare wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 4:49 pm

I also tried OpenDominion and had a slightly worse experience. I tried a more conservative approach than sweet, exploring and playing it like an idle game rather than attacking (which is supposed to be more newbie-friendly). I got attacked early on and more or less knocked out of the game. There were also cool mechanics like a research tree and a variety of buildings and spells, but the game was too short for me to get far in the research tree, and they were off meta and weak anyways. It's extremely meta-dominated and hard to play as a casual.

Did your team help you at all?

It's not helpful that the wiki is kinda not great.

I think the general strategy is not hard to grasp:

Build alchemy during the protection phase, and smithies to reduce unit recruitment costs and whatever the building is to reduce construction costs.

Then if you are going for attacking strategy, you sacrifice some of your economic base to build offensive units and maybe make a few more smithies.

Then, throughout the game, as you grow, you transition slowly away from those buildings and more towards other buildings that support your chosen strategy.

Since the effects of buildings (other than homes and production buildings) scale with the percentage of the total buildings you own, this is why the wiki says never to build alchemy buildings outside of protection. It's actually rotten advice for a newcomer because while it generally is true, if you get invaded and lose half of your alchemy buildings, and you are an explorer, there is no way to recover your economy other than building some more alchemy buildings.

So I actually think the strategy is easy to pick up after a game or two, the experience of knowing the "meta" of knowing when to build or recruit and how much, definitely is not easy to pick up.

I also realized late game there is a handy tool to see who all is in range and can attack you. But there are tons of people in range generally, so if you want to use that info to get a feel for how much DP you need then you will have to run a ton of info ops, I suppose.

But at least then, in regards to knowing how much DP you "should" have, you don't need to rely on meta except in the early game right out of protection.

This is all stuff I figured out on my own, because the community is poor at teaching new players and their advice is more a matter of telling new players what to do. But I don't really hold that against them since I've realized that the skill of teaching is actually not a very common skill at all, and most communities rely on telling.

DiplomacyandWarfare wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2024 4:49 pm

I also tried OpenDominion and had a slightly worse experience. I tried a more conservative approach than sweet, exploring and playing it like an idle game rather than attacking (which is supposed to be more newbie-friendly). I got attacked early on and more or less knocked out of the game. There were also cool mechanics like a research tree and a variety of buildings and spells, but the game was too short for me to get far in the research tree, and they were off meta and weak anyways. It's extremely meta-dominated and hard to play as a casual.

Pengwinja wrote: ↑

Wed May 08, 2024 4:34 pm

Do you, Erix, have a recommended starting race?

Erix wrote: ↑

Wed May 08, 2024 4:06 pm

You do not compete against others in your same realm. A realm is essentially a team and you cannot take negative actions against them, whereas you can attack, steal from, assassinate, fireball, etc people in other realms.

The individual goal is to get as large and strong as possible, but there is a subset of players that focus more on helping their realmmates succeed at their own expense (like investing heavily into intel-operations, at the expense of their own growth). A secondary goal is to try and get your realm as big as you can.