Game01 Pretender Design

Having looked around I've learned that Arcosephale is a very versatile nation. Positive aspects I've noted so far:

• Myrmidons, heavily armored and powerful infantry.

• Chariots, competent cavalry unit that can trample small troops.

• Wind Rider, Sacred flying unit with a map move of 3. Useful for tactical strikes or attacking the enemies rear.

• Versatile mages with several paths and strong research.

• Skeptics, a sneaky commander unit that lowers an enemy's dominion while in a territory

Cons:

• Weak archers in the form of slingers.

• Many commanders have old age and may die of disease etc

• Units are expensive in both Gold and Resources.

My plan is to capitalize on the sacred Wind Riders and create a powerful and highly mobile strike force. Secondarily on the ground I will amass spell casters and myrmidons as a slower, heavier hitting force.

In Dominions 3 the one true ancient god has just perished. Each player takes the role of a Pretender, a powerful being that has decided it will be the new true god. No true god would allow another to lay claim to his title, so you must crush all competition. At this point I will create my Pretender.

There are a staggering number of potential Pretenders that can be designed, and it helps to have an idea of how your strategy is going to play out before

you begin, hence the information gathering stage. There are three main design elements to your Pretender, a physical form, magic and dominion. A physical form is the body of your Pretender and varies from ancient wizards, to titans to dragons. Magic is your Pretender's talent with the various forms of magic. Dominion is the spread of your god's holy presence. I'll go more in-depth on each of these concepts farther in the future.

My objective is to make my sacred Wind Rider troops as powerful as possible while fielding a ground army of heavily armored myrmidons. By increasing magic of a particular element to a high level a bless is gained. Any sacred unit that is blessed by a priest will gain the affects of your Pretender's bless. I chose to use a Water 9 bless giving my Sacred units +4 defense and Quickness, giving them increased survivability and an extra attack every other round. In order to ensure I have enough gold and resources to recruit a large number of Wind Riders as well as myrmidons I will need to optimize my Pretender's dominion to give +income and +resources.

Designing a Pretender is based on a point buy system starting with 350 points. This is a laundry list of tasks I want to accomplish, and will be very hard to fit into my 350 points. In order to maximize the use of every point I settled on the Blue Dragon physical form. It isn't shown in the Screenshot but the Blue Dragon has Water magic level two by default. This gives me a physically powerful pretender that saves a few points by starting higher than 0 on the path of magic. After spending some time playing with my Dominion and magic I have finalized my Pretender.

Awake Blue Dragon
Water 9 for a powerful bless

Dominion Strength 6/10

Order 2 (Income +14%, random events -10%)
Productivity 1 (Income +2%, resources +10%)
Misfortune 2 (Random events +20%, event is good -26%)
Drain 2 (Research – 1 RP)

I've chosen this setup to provide additional income and resources at the price of negative random events and reduced researching power. Reduced researching power is somewhat neutralized by my powerful researching commanders.

I enter his name as Vellon and the game dubs me “Vellon, God of Patience, King of Kings, Opener of Wells”