Dominions 3: The Awakening/Units

Units

Units are the heart of Dominoins 3: The Awakening. With units you wage ware, conquer provinces, fight battles, forge items, cast spells and win the game. Units can be classified:

• Units can be either Commanders or Troops
• Units can be either recruited or summoned
• Units can be either stealth or non-stealth
• Units can be either national or independent

Commanders

Commanders are different in some ways from other units:

• only commanders can wear Magic Items.
• only commanders can lead other troops (if the commander has the right leadership skill).
• only commanders can cast spells, build buildings or search for/ enter into Magic Sites.
• only commanders can increase unrest or perform Assasinations.
• only one recruitable commander can be recruited per province per turn.

Armies can only move when they are led by a commander. Commanders have different leadership ratings, which determine how many units they can control. Commanders can be classified into priests, mages, or generals. Right-click on them to get all their vital details.

Some commanders have the Stealth skill and serve in different roles such as scouts, spies, or assassins. A high value at the stealth skill means a better chance of infiltrating enemy provinces without becoming detected. Scouts provide basic information on enemy assets, while spies provide more detailed information and can raise unrest. Assassins provide the option of attacking one random commander per turn -- and his bodyguards. Scouts, spies, and assassins rarely have the skills necessary to lead other troops. All face the risk of detection and attack by enemy patrols.

Commanders are often reffered by their main role, like Mage, Priest, Scout, Spie, Assassin, Prophet and Pretender. Common roles for Commanders are also Thug and Super Combatant (SC).

Troops

There are a vast amount of different kinds of troops, units and creatures in Dominions 3 but they all have something in common. Troops require a commander with approriate type of Leadership to lead them -- standard, magical, or undead/demon. Troops cannot move around on their own. Recruitable troops can be recruited in great amounts per turn unlike commanders who can only be recruited at pace of one commander per province per turn. Troops also cannot wield magic weapons forged by mages.

Troops have a money and resource cost. Money is permanently reduced from your treasure but resource act more as a limit to how many troops you can build in a province. Every province has it's own resource value. Resource value can change over time but it does not accumulate over turn. So a province with 22 resources in turn 1 won't have 44 resource in turn 2. Resources are replenished at the start of every turn. Troops also cost maintenance for as long as they live.

Sacred units also use the "Holy" that is shown in the recruitment screen. "Holy" equals the level of your Dominion in the province and you can only recruit a number of sacred units equal to the level of "Holy" in the province. "Holy" acts like resources.

Land nations cannot expect to be able to recruit their national units underwater; they will not even be able to construct castles there without the aid of magic. On land, underwater nations may build castles, but will have very limited national troop recruitment regardless.

Recruited Units

Regular troops refer to the national and independent troops that can be recruited from the provinces. Regular troops have a purchase cost of resources and money and an upkeep cost.

Pros of regular troops

• Do not require magic at all
• Essential for the early portion of the game
• Sometimes provide weapons that summons don't have

Cons of regular troops

• Lack many of the special abilities of summoned units
• Significantly weaker than summons in later portion of the game
• Regular troops eat supplies and require upkeep money

Summoned Units

Summoned units play an important part in the wars of the pretender gods. Available to mages with enough skill and research behind them, the summons provide everything from expendable "chaff" to creatures of amazing power. A great number of summonable units are in the Conjuration, Blood and Construction research trees but Enchament tree also has some summons. Most of summons are cast as rituals which require 1 month perform. However, some summoning spells, such as Elemental summoning, Call Horror, Swarm and Summon Lammashta, are cast in battle. These summons only last until the end of the fight. Broadly speaking the game tends to become more summon based as time passes on because at certrain point the power of the summonable creatures exceeds the efficiency of recruitable troops.

Pros of summons

• Do not require supplies or money.
• Provide a wide amount of abilities.
• Often have skills normal troops don't have.

Summons can fill some roles your troops can. Death and Nature magic have easy access to expendable "meat wall" summons such as Vinemen and Soulless, Elemental magics offer access to the unique Elemental Kings and Elemental Queens while Blood magic has strong and affordable summons. Often the summons have useful abilities and resistances.

One caveat is that not all summons are friendly. Pay attention to the spell descriptions if you wish to know which ones might have their own agenda.

National summons

Just as there are national troops there are summons which can only be researched by certain nations. These summons show up with blue text in the research tree.

National Units

National troops are units that are nation-specific and can only be recruited by that nation in their fortresses. If an enemy nation captures the fortress the enemy nation's build roster replaces the build roster of the nation that had the fort. National units given by starting magic sites cannot be recruited by nation that conquered the other nation.

Independent Units

Independent, or indie, troops are troops that are recruited from independent provinces. The type of troops you can recruit is determined by the poptype of the province.

Unit attributes

Every individual unit has a set of attributes. The attributes are used in battle to decide if an enemy is hit, damaged, dead or routing.

Hit Points

The amount of damage that a unit can withstand. If the number reaches zero in a battle, the unit will die. A 'standard' human soldier has 10 hit points.

As each turn is a month, most units will fully recover at the end of every turn. Notable exceptions include unit types which never heal, such as certain brittle units; and diseased units, which instead lose hit points every month and in addition have a chance of gaining afflictions. Most units will not heal during battle, however; regenerating units well, as well as units healed by magic, or units healing themselves by draining life from others.

Prophets and pretenders should beware enemy dominions, as this reduces their hit points as well as other statistics depending on the dominion strength. Conversely, they receive advantages within their own dominion.

Protection

The thickness of any armor worn by the unit. Natural armor such as scaly skin is also accounted for. The protection subtracts from the strength and weapon damage when calculating effective damage on a target.

High levels of natural armor do not stack completely with additional armor; the resulting protection can be less than the sum.

Protection is halved against armor-piercing damage, such as the flames of flaming weapons; protection is ignored by armor-negating damage. Lightning damage is perhaps the most common example of the latter.

Morale

The courage and valor of soldiers. Every time something demoralizing happens morale is checked. Every time a member of a squad dies all other members of the squad check morale and every time an individual is damaged he checks his morale. Failed morale checks result in squad morale reductions. The squad morale reduction relative the size of the squad generates a rout chance. In the beginning of a battle turn all squads with a squad morale reduction makes a rout check based on the average morale of the squad. Failure means the squad routs from the battle field.

Some units are unbreakable -- in particular, units which have gone berserk, and units which are mindless. These correspond to morale values of 99 and 50, respectively.