Dominions 5 – Tips & Tricks
1) Commanders have a leadership value that determines how many squads you can lead. However, this is not a set limit. Let’s say you can lead 2 squads; you can actually lead more than that. However, this comes at the cost of a morale penalty for all your troops. That said, you CAN add one additional squad without a morale penalty, but only if it has 5 or fewer units in it. If you set their battle orders to ‘guard commander,’ they don’t count as an additional squad, and they will forever stick with your commander and protect him/her. Very useful, especially when the commander is a squishy mage or priest.
2) Your mages/priests will have a wide selection of spells and will choose to cast what they think is best. However, you will probably not always agree with them. You actually have some control over what they cast. To do this, go to your mage’s province, click army setup, and then <set battle orders>. There you can click on ‘cast a specific spell’ to set which spells should be cast in the first couple of turns of the game.
3) Let’s say you’ve set the spells to be cast by your mage. Now you have 15 mages left to set all the orders with because you decided to go mage heavy. Instead of clicking and setting commands for all of them, you can copy the orders of the first mage to the other ones. To do this, hover over one of their orders, press CTRL-1. Then, hover over <set battle orders> for the other mage and press 1. This will copy all the commands.
4) When you take over a region and then leave again, the region can easily be taken over by single scouts or even some random events. To prevent this from happening, always leave some defenses. To do this, click on the region, and at the top of the screen, click on ‘Defence: 0 +/-‘. Here you can produce a standing army for not a lot of money. The cost of each additional troop is increased by 1 every time you click on the +. Once you have 10 defense values, you’ll start reducing unrest. Once you get to 15, you’ll also have patrol strength, which means your defending units will try to find scouts/spies/assassins every turn and root them out.
5) There’s a couple of options in the preferences you might want to turn on. First of all, ‘give orders to new commanders automatically’ puts mages to research immediately instead of defending when they get produced. ‘Warn on end turn’ makes sure you don’t forget about commanders, as you will get a warning at the end of the turn if a commander is idle. Multi-turn movement allows you to set movement orders that will take more than one turn to complete. Lastly, there is ‘show tips when starting game.’ This puts tips on the main menu. You can cycle through these with ‘t.’ Very useful ones in there!
6) When you have troops with the ‘sacred’ attribute, you can bless them with priests. Blessing gives a +1 morale. However, you can increase the effectiveness of the Bless spell when creating your pretender. Once he has 4 or more in one magic path, you can spend points under ‘bless effects’ in order to add effects to the bless spell. Let’s say you have 4 in air and 5 in the earth; then you would have 4+5 points to spend on bless effects. This can get quite crazy quite fast.
7) Let’s say you’ve hit someone, and your troop has a damage of 20, and they have protection of 15. In most games, this would mean you would do 20-15=5 damage. Here, both roll 2 dice. Let’s say you roll 4+2 = 6. This gets added to the damage. The defender rolls 5+6. Instead of 11 being added to the protection, we have what they called an ‘open-ended 2d6 roll’. This means the 6 is turned to a 5 (so now we have 5+5), but you get to roll another die. Let’s say this is 6 again. It gets turned into a 5 again (5+5+5), and you roll again. This time it’s a 4. Therefore, your damage was 20+4+2 = 26, but the protection is 15+5+5+5+4=34. Now the protection is higher than the damage, so no damage is done. This means that very weak troops still have a chance of hitting and damaging your pretender, so watch out!
8) When giving orders to troops, there are options such as attack rearmost enemy or attach archers. However, there’s no option saying ‘attack commander’ or ‘attach mage.’ Therefore, if you have a mage in your army, it might be good to put them a little bit in front of your rear units (e.g., archers), or put a block of units behind the mage, so when they are walking forward, they can intercept the flying units landing on top of the mage.
9) Spells require certain skill levels. If you have death2, that means you have 2 skill levels in death magic. However, skills with, e.g., 3 skulls need 3 levels of death magic. To increase it, you can click on a mage and press empower. Here you can spend gems to increase skill levels. The first skill level is 50 gems. Afterward, it’s 15xtarget level (so from level 2 to 3 would be 45 gems). If you don’t have enough gems of the type, you want. You can click on the mage and then ‘alchemy.’ This allows you to turn gems into astral pearls (2 gems per pearl) and then turn those pearls into gems of a different type (2 pearls per gem). This means it will cost you 4 gems to increase another gem by 1. Very expensive, but it can be worth it.
