The Dominions Wiki

Note this is heavily incomplete. I started doing this for fun, then got carried away, then got about 14000 words in, then got bored. As such I’ve left a bunch out.

These are the easiest independents in the game. They have low morale, low damage and low defences. They also have a human sized HP pool so they HP rout relatively easily, and this can have a chain effect to other independents joined to their army. If you get these early, they are usually worth expanding into even with weak parties. Virtually every expansion tactic works well here, bows, infantry, cavalry, mages, thugs, hence them being the easiest type of independent

The same but with a shield. Considerably stronger than the unshielded version, these are still exceptionally weak. They are still relatively vulnerable to archer fire and the like, but fare considerably better in melee – that is to say, they may take 2 rounds to crumple up and die rather than 1.

These move faster than other infantry and have javelins. The javelin ones are complicated as it’s very indie/army/nation/tactics dependent whether this is better or worse for you. They aren’t especially scary as far as troops go, but some high damage unshielded units fare badly vs javelins so it’s worth keeping in mind

The faster movement can make it debatable when to forward position on attack and backward position on hold and attack. It means they usually end up ‘not’ at the back, and in front of at least some units of another type. These are still weak units, but they can go toe to toe with some of the weaker national infantries, usually being marginally worse.

Barbarians are some of the toughest independents in the game for a few reasons. Firstly they have some big weaknesses, low morale, no protection to speak of, so they’re easy to underestimate. They come in large numbers, and have a high volume of high damage attacks. This means they kill things very quickly – including pretenders. It also means they have a bad habit of wiping out entire expansion parties, and being functionally immune to certain types of unit. Many line troops are totally ineffectual against them and will simply die within the first round of combat. Furthermore, their commanders have a wide range of positionings and are often ‘unsnipable’, standing in the front, middle or back of the formation. This makes a lot of fancy tactics ineffective. Troops that fare poorly rely on protection and shorter weapons. If the barbarian lands a hit, it’s like to land a kill, and because they tend to come in high volume, a thin line of high protection, elite shielded shortsword users is going to fold like cheese.

Functionally, to beat barbarians – there are four basic strategies.

• The first is to morale shock them. This means your damage is enough to trigger morale checks and send them running. This is the hardest way to expand into them and high risk – as lossless success and catastrophe hinges on the outcome of said dice roll. This can be intermixed with the other
• The second is to have a ‘line’ of troops. Barbarians attack in a sort of blob that is moderately wide but also deep. If you can match their width, they do not gain an attack density advantage (basically meaning they have to rely on their very low attack scores without being able to achieve a harassment penalty to lower your defence – which in short means they struggle to hit), and often can be cleared out quickly by your own troops – aka when they aren’t outnumbering you or collapsing a flank, they’re much less dangerous. Spears and weapons with repel values do this well – as you don’t need much damage given their lacking armor
• The third is archers. Basically because they lack any defence whatsoever against archers, if you add a pile to a party, it’s going to fare much better vs barbarians. This is very much a critical mass thing. Too few and the barbarians will just walk up and kill the archers. Too many and you’ll have an easy clear, but be committing an awful lot of troops
• * It’s important to note that even bad archers are good for this – so independent recruitment is often a good way to achieve this
• * Mages can fill a similar role, there are a lot of evocation 1 and 2 spells that will kill several barbarians per cast

Strategies 1-3 can be mix/matched

• Some sacred units (usually cavalry with defence stacking) can fare well against barbarians.

Heavy infantry are deceptively tough in dominions 6. Their weapons hit moderately hard and they are often the only part of an independent force that overmatches a players weaker troops. They also chew through weaker infantry relatively quickly – which can pose a range of problems.

Their complexity and difficulty comes from four places. Firstly is the increased damage. This makes them a threat to a lot of units that would otherwise be relatively safe in expansion. Secondly is their armour – often weaker infantry the player might have are totally ineffective against the more heavily armoured heavy infantry. Thirdly is an amalgamation of the first two points – combined with the unknown number of them that may be in a province. An army may be able to deal with 10 heavy infantry, but 15 can easily be a step too far. Their mere presence forces tough judgement calls. Fourthly is that the player often wants to send weak expansion forces into tiles that consist mostly of weaker troops – but have some heavy infantry. The heavy infantry are the complicating factor of a lot of these expansions – and sufficiently alter the dynamic of the fight to earn their complexity rank – especially if the player is trying to use the minimum number of viable troops.

Generally the best way to beat heavy infantry is to send more good troops than there are heavy infantry (or at least a large number), engage the other units in the province and just rout them off – not bothering to try to actually ‘directly’ defeat them – or to send ultraheavy or sacred type troops that can withstand the damage. Archers are relatively ineffective here, and it’s generally hard to use small expansion forces on provinces with a lot of these. Some nations really struggle with heavy infantry, as the 16 prot variants are as good as some nations best national troops.

These units vary wildly in difficulty depending how they line up against your troops. They usually result in some level of attrition, or at least afflictions even in a good matchup. They deal high armor piercing damage but also crumple like paper, so they are very strong against heavily armoured, slow units that take a while to reach them. The difficulty of these largely depends what they’re paired with and against. For example, if a province has mostly militia and crossbows, it is likely to be realtively easy – as the millita will collapse quickly and the crossbows will get ‘relatively’ few shots. Conversely, heavy infantry and crossbows can be very dangerous (or heavy cavalty and crossbows), as there is a very real blockade that allows the crossbows to maximize their damage.

Loosely – there are 5 strategies against crossbows.

• Collapse the enemy line as quickly as possible so you can get to the crossbows
• Have a fast cavalry unit use an attack rear command and kill /rout them quickly
• Use a bait squad up front to lure the arrow fire. Ideally these have big shields and are troops you don’t mind losing.
• Ignore them and focus on optimizing against the other troops – as when they die, the crossbows will likely soon follow
• Fire archers into them. This usually results in trading units. This is one of the rare circumstances skirmish formation comes in handy as it substantially reduces the number of hits (and therefore damage) from the crossbows.

These deserve their own category as they are significantly more annoying than the lighter variants. They take longer to kill, so any unit attacking them is liable to take a few extra more crossbow volleys. If this routs the unit, there can very much be ‘no unit near enough to deal with the crossbows’ and set off a chain reaction. Basically, these are dealt with the same way as the lighter crossbows – it’s just slower, riskier and much more likely to cause some attrition.

Lots of variants

Complications: The thing that can make archers complicated is their targeting. Basically, you can position squads so one ‘absorbs’ the archer fire. This is very useful when you have one squad with big shields, and another without. Otherwise, some of the tougher archers (or longbowmen) have competent melee weapons, which can be more dangerous than one might imagine from a ranged unit. Overall they aren’t complex, but there’s a few tricks. Finally, units without shields or helmets or armour will be much more vulnerable to archers. It’s a bit obvious, but certain units fare very badly against them. There is a large number of archer types, but the basic principles and problems remain the same.

Regardless of the above occasionally posing issues - archers are a weak unit, and often can be on par with militia – dependent on your unit composition. There are exceptions, but most unit rosters can easily deal with these. Essentially, every tactic on the crossbow works on the archer with one caveat – archers also struggle to damage armoured units so they ‘nullify’ the archers so to speak – as opposed to just reducing the effectiveness of crossbows. Since most nations want to expand with heavily shielded or armoured troops anyways, this is a significant boon for expanding – as the archers often pose no threat.

Wolf tribe are the melee tribe. Their gimmick is they have 2 dagger attacks, so they can harass down the defence score of units, especially if they outnumber you. They are unshielded, have low morale, and are a combination of bad archers and these 2 dagger melee infantry. It is usually best to focus down the melee units first as they threaten much more damage in most circumstances than the archers – and can cause a chain rout. Plus – when they contact a players infantry – they will suffer attrition there too – as well as from the archers.

A good way to perceive their threat – is if a fight against wolf tribe starts going sour – it turns to ash very quickly. Once they start to flank units and surround a formation, they can kill units very quickly due to the defence penalties they cause stacking from the high volume of attacks. The larger troop sizes of dominions 6 had the effect of making wolf tribe less threatening than previously as being in the AI’s box formation vs the player whom is likely to have a wider formation – which put simply means its harder for them to surround you than before. With low morale – once you start doing well against wolf tribe, they rout quickly – especially in friendly dominion where they have a further morale malus.

Regarding dealing with them – wolf tribe is very much a ‘critical mass’ deal. If they don’t envelop troops – or if they absorb some arrow fire, they collapse quickly. If they don’t collapse quickly, they can decimate heavily armoured, valuable units and easily wipe out an expansion force. The ‘trick’ is knowing how much you need to win, how much you need to essentially wipe them out losslessly, and to avoid them overwhelming a unit composition Has a barbarian commander – can’t commander snipe

These have 2 components. Firstly a bunch of manakins, and secondly a bunch of poison blowdarters. The manakins have attack range 0 and are easily repellable – their threat and damage occurs if they envelop a players troops – otherwise they are ‘relatively’ harmless. They do come in high numbers however. The blowdarters have low morale and low damage – albeit it is poisonous which can be dangerous for troops that would otherwise not fear them. Neither of these elemetns is especially hard to deal with, but the provinces often have high troop numbers, and both have their nuances. If a strong force is sent to one of these provinces, it can often wipe out the province losslessly. However they can be very hard to expand into with low unit volume compositions – as often the most important thing is numbers rather than quality (as the manakins are so bad – even the weakest troops will cleave through them).

These are some of the most deceptively dangerous independents in the game. As it turns out, 5 bloodhenge druids, summoning an extra 50 or so imps to the fight, turns a province into a nightmare – requiring commander protection, better units, a plan to deal with the mages, and that’s the easiest kind – ignoring the super-monsters that can be in the party.

I have yet to find an easy way to clear these. The easiest conceptually is to send a bait expansion force to ‘use up’ all the blood slaves, but the imps kill fast enough that it’s going to have to be a large bait squad, otherwise there will still be slaves leftover on the druids. Otherwise, you need quite a lot to clear these provinces and a lot can still go wrong. The worst part is the deceptively low difficulty from the troops. However the mages and super-troops make these provinces very difficult, and very high attrition

Lion tribe have big shields, spears and javelins, making them the most effective tribe against arrow fire. The melee version can be compared to light infantry – only they tend to come in larger numbers and have lower morale. The combination of spear and javelin fire can be surprisingly damaging (compared to the other tribes. The fact they’re shielded and have javelins means that it’s not always obvious ‘what’ unit is optimal against them. Archers still fare passibly, as do heavy infantry and cavalry into the archers.

Light infantry and medium infantry tend to suffer here, the arrows and javelins have a tendency to eat them alive, and the increased survivability of the lion tribe means they’re liable to get in some chip damage. In many ways – the tricky part about choosing which unit composition to send into lion tribe (assuming you have the luxury of choice), is choosing which types of units to send in, as there are valid pros and cons to them all. It is worth noting however, there is a hint of ‘critical mass’ to lion tribe, and lines of weak infantry struggle to cut it and will often rout to the javelin and archer fire.

//No embedded barb – commander + mage – can be sniped //

Split of spears (with javelins and hatchets) this force tends to split in two due to the ranged weapon so can be picked off in two halves. Can easily be picked apart. Nothing hard about them beyond numbers

Blunt damage slings is the name of the game. All the units use them – meaning the ‘archer blob’ is twice the size of most tribe. As such – they can really mess up lighter infantry on the advance. Their complexity comes from their linearity in a small sense of irony – a large blob of slingers is deceptively threatening with halfway competent melee to ward off the initial ‘hit’. In many senses, they resemble horse tribe more than their infantry tribe peers.

Helmets, shields, armor and volume are the best answer to these. As far as tribe goes, they are moderately difficult and likely to cause some attrition – however ultimately they are high volume weak archer units that survive that first melee impact ok

//Commanders at back can be sniped //

Firstly a warning. These are considerably harder than the other tribe units. If you lump them together, a party that would comfortably clear wolf or lion tribe may be massacred by bone tribe.

Bone tribe berserk – have high morale, highly damaging weapons with reach, and are often accompanied by mages. They punch through armor in a similar way to Lizardfolk. In many ways bone tribe are uncomplicated – their raw damage and staying power is their threat. They have better attack scores and morale than barbarians, so they make contact more, and they kill whatever they touch – including heavily armoured units and pretenders.

They are unshielded, and still have relatively low HP. Archers are the ideal unit against them, followed by high damage units. Armor is marginally useful but somewhat wasted against them as their attacks will be punching through even heavily armoured units. Otherwise, they are susceptible to evocation spells (an extension of the archery weakness) – and their difficulty can mean it is wise to take a mage or two.

Split of archers and troops makes this usually an easy clear – just be careful of the higher than usual volume of arrow fire (every unit has a ranged weapon). Less damaging than jaguar tribe – a fairly easy province. Has a Mage and a Barbarian

Armored/Unarmored variants Lizardfolk are uncomplicated but scary. They’re like barbarians with more morale, long weapons, and that gain a very small malus in cold provinces due to being cold blooded. Javelins and archer fire are the best tools against them, whilst heavy infantry struggles. The armored version is much scarier, as they can shrug off a lot of archer fire, making them extremely dangerous – as they act like barbarians that always get into melee and hit much more. Lizardfolk are quite similar to bone tribe, although usually easier to deal with. Be forewarned – Lizardfolk, Barbarians and Bone Tribe can kill expander pretenders relatively easily.

This is a troop type that small parties struggle against. In any sort of prolonged engagement, the lizardfolk weapons will deal massive damage. That includes to pretenders. The best way to deal with them is a large party that clears them at – or just before impact – ideally with a morale penalty from dominion.

Ironically they're simpler than barbs - being stronger means the decision is usually to not rush into them where with barbs there can be tough calls whether to take a chancy line or not.

Ordinarily, light cavalry are relatively simple units to deal with. They serve as archers with more HP that are harder to kill in melee (and deal more melee damage). This makes them somewhat unthreatening, your units will not be surrounded as they advance, the cavalry dies fairly quickly, and it doesn’t cause frontage issues or issues for heavy armour. All that said, being stronger in melee and tankier is non-trivial, but they remain relatively weak.

The majority of the complexity and difficulty of this unit is housed in the fact it runs into melee when it runs out of ammo. This can be quite dangerous. Typically this occurs only on really razor edge expansion parties with low damage. However the mode-change means they do surround units, they do attack en masse, and suddenly become a large source of both frontage and damage. Now this is still far from terrifying – but it can be problematic for small expansion parties, relying on dominion and low enemy morale more than killing power – as if the rolls go bad and the enemy doesn’t rout quickly, these things can come into melee. It should be noted that most expansion never has to deal with this problem and as such I’ve left the difficulty and complexity low – however these units are deceptively annoying for low damage barely sufficient expansion parties.

14-16-18 Prot + Knights

Heavy cavalry varies in difficulty based on what the cavalry is. The biggest mistake is not checking the map sprites for the ‘type’ of heavy cavalry. There are 14, 16, and 18 prot indies, and the tactics needed differ widly – a lot of effective tactics on the 14 prot ones will get stack wiped on the 18 prot cavalry. Knights are a beast of their own.

Heavy cavalry charges ahead of its formation. Usually, a player needs to deploy in a corner against this to make sure they don’t hit the players commanders, on hold and attack closest. This isolates the cavalry and gives the player a couple of rounds to kill them before other units make impact.

Lance catchers or chaff can be used to reduce the impact damage (lances break after 1 hit). These substantially reduce the difficulty of the province. After that, the goal is to usually surround the cavalry with medium to good infantry. When surrounded, they die fairly quickly. If not, they can chew through a line.

Usually a player needs to slightly stagger their troops so the ones of their choosing absorb the impace, then the damage dealers connect – but aren’t being directly attacked. This is easy in theory, but often getting the timing or positioning just right can be a pain.

The biggest threat of heavy cavalry comes from the need for the player to have critical mass – and the higher prot variants shrugging off weaker units. The difference between 10 and 20 heavy cavalry is colossal, one may be easily cleared whilst the other almost losslessly clears a stack. As such, they make for very dangerous provinces, and it’s usually worthwhile to scout ping larger heavy cav provinces.

These are a hybrid of light and heavy cavalry. They have tolerable melee stats, and bows – and typically come in large numbers. They have a timer so to speak – as if they ever run out of ammunition they get significantly more dangerous as you cease to pick them off with a frontage advantage (most will be firing and not in the frontage). The tricky part is getting over ‘critical mass’. There can be a lot of horse tribe, and sending too little often results in arrows or early melee routing a party – only to be chased down. Once you hit that critical mass – they become unthreatening. It’s worth noting that their melee stats are good enough to beat through the weakest of infantry units – meaning chaff centric parties tend to fare badly against them. Notably – the commanders hang at the back of this formation

These are weak troops that come in large numbers. Holy units and mages decimate them (aka anti-undead magic) and the prophet army is usually the best tool here, as H3 casters banishment spells get increased effectiveness. Otherwise – their main threat comes when they surround units, as they have low attack scores and length 0 weapons. All that said, they are not ‘so’ weak such that an undersize party should be used – and they have enough damage to defeat a small party of heavily armored units.

In short, don’t get cute – use a prophet or a holy 2 priest with some cheap infantry – and just spam banishment until they’re dead. Other tricks will generally work – but risk some level of attrition – when you can often clear these attritionless with the priest.

The commanders start at the back of this formation but generally move faster than the troops so ‘embed’ themselves quickly

Basically – a bunch of passible troops, lead by decent mages, with a swath of very dangerous high defence heavy cavalry. These units got substantially harder since dominions 5 – largely because there now tends to be quite a lot of the cavalry.

The simplest way to beat these is to throw large expansion parties and lots of bodies at them. Due to the mass of high defence cavalry – it’s hard to do anything tricky. However they do present interesting opportunities for the ambitious expander – between lance blocking, tanking, high attack/damage units and the like. Usually however – it’s just better to throw a lot of good units at them. It’s worth noting they chew through chaff, so bad infantry isn’t going to do much here.

I have finite time – this can be filled in by other players later or just steadily added to.

* Shamblers 1 commander at the back (snipable) high damage otherwise bad

Elephants tend to be high difficulty high complexity due to rout RNG, the number of elephants etc.

I've left out underground (probably wrongly)