The Let's Play Archive

Dominions 3

by ZorbaTHut

Part 28: Turn 25 Charts And Graphs

Yep, that's right: you get an entry consisting entirely of lines! Aren't you excited? I know I'm excited.

This is Future Me again - you'll be getting Future Me for any post that isn't an actual turn. I'll be showing all the statistical stuff we have available and telling you what I can about it.



Before I go to the charts, here's a map of the important locations so far. I've got capitals marked for myself and everyone adjacent to me. (Does this format work? Let me know! If this helps, I'll do them more often.)

Jome is the fort I built early on, and it's only notable now because it's supplying me with troops and Mystics.

Carnag is the province with those amazing researching Sages - I literally just built a fort there. Barra is the other Agarthan provinces that I'm sieging. As mentioned, Carnag and Barra are two mapmove apart, and the same is true of Barra and Agartha. All my units besides Hoplites and Slingers have two mapmove, so the bulk of my army can get from Barra to either one of them in one turn.

Sadly, Carnag and Agartha are three mapmove and thus two turns apart from each other.

Incidentally, you see Agartha's sole remaining non-sieged province? You see the little deadend province to the east, apparently past a mountain range? Those two provinces are actually connected. I didn't realize this for a while, but this is just one great example of how Dom3 maps can be incredibly misleading.



Let's start with provinces, usually the most important chart. This comes at an unfortunate time - for the first point in 15 turns, I'm no longer #1 in provinces. Such is life. Ulm is pulling ahead nicely, presumably by conquering Bogarus. Speaking of which, Bogarus is down to #2 on the province list. That would be two provinces they have, compared to Agartha's one. (I'm pretty sure sieged forts are considered owned by the sieger.)

T'ien Ch'i, the cheerful pink line, has been making good strides lately - partially off me - but despite that they're still third worst. There's no other huge swings going on. Abysia's stagnated, as you can expect from an AI nation. Midgard passed C'tis, and then C'tis probably ate a bit of Midgard. Most of the other nations don't seem to have wars going on, though, or at least no wars that they're losing territory in.

That will change.



Bogarus is out of forts. That is bad for them. Bye-bye Bogarus, you're probably not lasting much longer. Man is building forts like a motherfucker, but that's to be expected - LA Man gets ridiculously cheap forts and pretty much wants to spam them everywhere. I'm low on forts, considering my size - I've been spending all that money on mages and troops.



I'm pushing forward in income nicely, however, and that gold income site is certainly not hurting that. Ulm's beating me, but everyone else is kind of where I'd expect them to be - collapsing nations at the bottom, big nations at the top. No huge surprises here.



Gem income's a different story. Jomon's sitesearching up a storm for such an otherwise small nation, and Atlantis is pulling amazing things out of its hat. (It has an advantage here - underwater sitesearching involves a single Water spell to search all of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.)

I'm amazed at how much gem income Midgard, the top red line in this picture, has been losing. They've only lost a small handful of provinces and yet those provinces accounted for about half their gem production. In retrospect, I should have taken a note of this - there's some really valuable site on the C'tis/Midgard border, and I definitely should have written that down.

I didn't, though.



Research is curious because it usually has no bearing on the nation's military success. If anything, it's inversely proportional - losing players tend to hunker down in their capital and research their asses off for a spell that they think will save them. See Agartha's near-top research, for example. It's not like those mages can do much else, so they may as well research.

Bogarus is no longer researching thanks to no longer having a capital - presumably all their capital mages are now dead, and there's a good chance they no longer have access to a Lab.

C'tis has some interesting kinks in his research line. Those are spots where C'tis got a new fort, and presumably started recruiting research mages there as well. We're using our mages for combat, so our line doesn't have those jogs (instead it has a bunch of wacky flatlines where we get new sitesearching spells.)

Man, the bottom-most line, appears to have remembered that research exists just recently.



The Dominion graph is a bit odd. Why the fuck does T'ien Ch'i have so much dominion? I really have no idea what's going on there. You can see the hop up and down where we lost dominion in Mark (at least, I'm assuming that's what that is.) In any case, Dominion tends to not be one of the more useful graphs.



That loss of C'tis's must sting. You can see our Slinger recruitment pretty easily too.

As bad off as Bogarus is, Ulm lost a good number of troops on the same day. Bogarus was probably beelining down Evocation, and probably had a ton of powerful magic spells to use. It wasn't enough, obviously, but that may not have been a trivial battle for Ulm.

Agartha hasn't been recruiting much, but they do have significant forces.

So there's where we stand. Any other insights that people notice? I'm not the best at reading these charts, and I'd love to hear what crazy shit you guys can deduce.