The Complete Newbie Guide

Introduction

Welcome to the The Complete Newbie Guide! This guide is intended for the complete newbie to OpenDominion. Absolutely no prior knowledge is necessary. While there are links to other articles in this text, you will most likely not understand what they say until you have read this entire guide, so please read the whole guide as some things are clarified further below from where they are first mentioned. Dominion is a difficult and challenging game so it will take a while for everything to sink in. However, to use the words of the late Douglas Adams: Don't panic!

Structure

The game is structured into rounds with each round lasting 50 days. When a round is over, the final rankings for that round are entered into Valhalla, the game is reset and a new round begins.

When you register, you are assigned a dominion (comparable to a nation). Your dominion starts 250 acres large and with a minute army. The 250 acres are in turn split into different landtypes, whose purpose is to build buildings upon. Different buildings can only be built on a certain landtype. You defend your land with your military. What you build and what army you train depend on your play style and race.

Your dominion is placed in a realm (comparable to a region). Realms typically contain 10 or 15 dominions (including yourself) but may contain less. Realms are numbered from 1 and up. You interact with your realm mates (realmies) using the Council, which is a simple messageboard only accessible within your realm.

The game is based on an hour-system, which means that everything moves forward every hour. It, for instance, takes 12 hours to construct a building, meaning that if you construct a building at 7 AM, it will be complete at 7 PM. Every hour, you gain new resources from your production.

Getting Started

So you just signed up and someone was kind enough to throw you this link (or maybe they did it before you even signed up)? Excellent! Let's Begin by Picking a Style.

Style

Before picking a race, you must know what style you will be playing. Style is the most fundamental part of a strategy. There are three basic styles of playing:

1. Exploring 
2. Attacking 
3. Converting

There is a fourth style called 'atteching' which is most definitely not recommended for new players. It will not be discussed here.

Exploring

Exploring is the act of growing by simply exploring for land. To play as explorer means that you will not train any offensive army and solely train enough military to defend your land.

This is a very easy and simple way to get to know the game but you will not get the thrills of attacking. It is also good if you will not be able to be very active in your playing.

Attacking

Attacking is the act of growing by invading other dominions. When you invade another dominion, a portion of their land will become yours (they lose some and you gain some). This is by most considered much more difficult than to explore. You have to train a military capable of both defending your own land while also having an offensive military strong enough to break other, less fortunate, dominions' defenses.

This is recommended if you want to have fun and will be able to be active during the round.

Converting

Converting is the act of first exploring and then converting into an attacker. A converter will normally explore the first half or so of the round, training only a defensive army. When they have reached their converting point, they will cease to explore and instead of it, train an offensive army and invade other dominions for the rest of the round.

This is recommended if you want to try out both exploring and attacking. It will give you the benefit of learning and studying the game as an explorer and then the thrills as an attacker.

Race

Once you have decided what style to play, it's time to pick a race. In theory, you can play any style with any race but chances are it will be a terrible experience. To make it easy for you as a newbie, here are lists of suitable races for the three play styles.

The races described here are the only ones that will be discussed in this guide.

Exploring

• Human / Nomad
• Icekin
• Merfolk
• Nox
• Sylvan
• Wood Elf

Humans, Nomads and Merfolks have the advantage of not being dependent on a landtype. Icekin, Nox*, Sylvan and Wood Elf have defensive units whose strength depends on what percentage of a certain landtype your dominions consists of (mountain, swamp, forest and forest respectively). Keep this mind and remember that different buildings can only be built on certain landtypes and you will realize that you will be able to have a more diverse build layout with Human, Nomad or Merfolk than with the other races. However, the other races' defensive units are really good. In the end, it's entirely up to you what race you pick. * Nox Nightshades actually depend on built/constructed acres of swamp.

Attacking

• Human / Nomad
• Lizardfolk
• Merfolk

Humans and Nomads have very strong units but their offensive units are on the expensive side but while other attack units take 12 hours to return home from an invasion, the Human and Nomad units will return in 9 hours. This is a great advantage.

Lizardfolks however have cheap offensive units, but bothersome defense. Their main advantage is that their defensive units act as partial spies which will help you greatly. Their units swim and do not require boats to be sent out on invasion.

Merfolks are similar to Lizardfolks in that they have expensive defense, cheap offense and do not need boats. They do however not have the espionage advantage but they have more efficient DP, which means that you have to train fewer (but more expensive) units which pay off in the long run.

Converting

• Human / Nomad
• Wood Elf

Surprise, surprise - Humans and Nomads are on this list too. They are excellent explorers and fine attackers so they naturally make for great converters.

Wood Elves are among the strongest converters in the game and thankfully also one of the easiest. Their defensive units are, as mentioned above, landtype dependent but unlike any other race, their offensive unit too depends on a landtype (forest). This means that the more forest you have, the stronger your entire army becomes. Their units are however too expensive to attack with, but for converting they are superb.

Registration

• The fields First Name, Last Name and Age are completely unimportant and can be anything you want (although age has to be a number and if you are under 13, you will be told to ask your parents' permission and have them send an email to the game administrator). Email is important and must be a working one since you will receive a verification mail. Be sure it's correct.
• Username is the username with which you log in. It is not visible to anyone else and is not important. You can vary this from round to round if you wish. The same goes for password. If you specify a password with special characters (other than A-Z and 0-9), the game will strip these without letting you know. The final password will be in the verification mail.
• Dominion Name is the name of your dominion and it will be what other players see you as. A-Z, 0-9, !, -, . and : can be used to form a Dominion Name.
• Ruler's Name is the name of the ruler of your dominion. It is suggested to not use your Username as Ruler's Name, nor is it recommended to use the alias or nick you use otherwise. The latter is to avoid people from finding out who you are. What title(Lord, General, Duchess) you use has no significance at all other than determining gender of your ruler (see titles).
• Race should be a piece of cake to pick by now.
• The next and final option is Realm. Here you can pick if you want to be randomly put in a realm, if you have a pack that you are going to join or if you are going to create a pack for you and a group of friends. Since this is a newbie guide, you probably should stick to the default selection.
• Click Submit.
• Confirm the information.
• Click Submit this Information.
• Log in and specify your authentication code. Click Verify.
• Done!