Yes a fair distance apart would be nice plus perhaps strong starting independents?
That way us noobs won't be as susceptible to rushes. I'll trust whoever hosts though.

Cool, I was just clarifying my view on my participation in the game.  I like the chance to at least make an army before I get smashed by someone who made a bigger one

But, as you may have seen in the other game, a lot of the game really is how you do the diplo.  For better or worse.  You need borders, you need allies, and you need targets.  How that all gets sorted out is often not about how good you are at diplo, just about if you bother with more than one line PMs like 'Hey, NAP-3?'.

Not very interesting, nor useful.

Then again there are (R)AND games where there is ZERO diplo and no one even knows who is playing which nation, so it's geared to be more of a SP style game, but where the AI is actually other players.  I'm not recommending that for a learning game though, because there will be no feedback to you from anyone.

As to CBM...

Seems 1.6 is the last version which is just 'balance', from there it has gone and done a bit more  than just 'balance' (but that depends on who you ask).  In any case, Vanilla is fine, but there are some glaring issues which CBM does smooth over.  Not a big deal to me either way.  I like CBM for how it makes different Pretender chasis more competative (otherwise you have games where everyone is a Prince of Death or Oracle), and for how it spruces up some nations who are clearly 'underpowered', but some of the rest of  it is just 'different' because that's how the creator/contributors thought things should be.

Now, that's not bad in and of itself, and clearly many people really enjoy using CBM over Vanilla, so I don't much care one way or the other.  I don't know that there is an advantage to Vanilla for noobs, the game has so much content already, and the mod isn't changing any game mechanics.

A completely modless game is certainly 'easy' for people to set up, but on the other hand, part of learning to play dominions, is learning how to use different mods (especially for SP, some like Better Independents, and Wise Wizards really help the AI by making it impossible for it to do some of the dumb things it otherwise does).

There are many map editors for Dom3 depending on your operating system and programming language of preference.

Here is an online one that might do for you.

http://users.on.net/~dfidge/cgi-bin/dom3map.pl

Open the results with notepad and save to create a small file. Open it with wordpad for a more readable version but be sure to save it as an ascii (text) file and not a word .doc

But the game does try to do a good job of this on its own. Generally the problems pop up because of too many players on a map which doesnt give the AI enough options. Its always best done manually

Well we could simply do a large random map?

We could have random,luck of the draw empires for each of us?

Thoughts?

I'd like to actually get this off the ground in a few days if not sooner.

It had been expressed that playing pbem other than through a server was an option....how so? Simply e-mail the turn file to the next player in order?

No a pbem passing around files like that would be a real hassle. Someone has to be a server. It can be one of you, or one of the online servers for Dominions 3.

Once thats been decided then you have two choices:

PBEM like www.LLamaServer.net uses. Or some variation for manually sending in turns like FTP, or Web Uploads, or a shared file space like DropBox.

DIRECT like www.Dom3Minions.com uses which is more like Solo play. You connect, do your turn, and hit end. Thats it. And most of player-hosted games on most of the forums prefer this method also.

The other difference between the two main server types is that LLamaServer is menu driven. Its simple but does have many options so for many games its pretty good. Dom3Minions has a template (example) of what you email in to have a game setup. And it stresses that you can ask for ANYTHING so its better for games that are "outside of the box" from what LLamaServers menu allows.

Hmmmn,several links within Dom3Minions regarding maps were dead links. This first game isn't going to be out of the box so i lean heavily to LLamaServer............thoughts?

Still like a list of who actually is going to play...........

First decisions:

EA.................?

MA................?

LA.................?

Also nation choice for each of the three ages.

I'll start off by saying time period I'd like to use.... MA 

Nation choice..................................................... I actually have no prference

I don't know about Dom3minions because I've never used it.

Llamaserver is great though.  Allows for you to resend turns, update them, all kinds of things I have found useful in the past.  It's also really easy to manage turn lengths, extensions (which will be asked for and should be granted, usually), and that sort of thing.

Of course maybe Dom3minions allows for all that as well.  But from my past experience, everyone used llama, and from peeking around various threads, I see llama everywhere still.  I'm willing to go with Dom3minions though if that's what people want.

I have no experience with map editing, but I am sure I can figure it out. When there is a head count, I can generate a random map of the appropriate size and assign some fixed starting provinces.

I'd vote for MA or EA, myself.  Regardless of what age we go with, I'd like to take another crack at playing as Abysia.

Thats not a bad suggestion no matter what method is used. Altho, on the more "official" servers they can take steps to insure that no one plays you but you, it is best to password your gods.

Yes. Magic is reduced. I think gem sites are rarer, and troops are less magically strong. Magic is strongest EA, and it gets weaker as you get later. I do not know the exact mechanics. Late Age seems less popular, probably because it is lower magic, and Ermor and R'yleh probably do not help when it comes to MP. If you start near one of those nations, even if you take them out, you will probably not be very competitive in the end game due to their pop killing dominion.

Tophat, if you want to start the game quickly, it might be easiest to propose your initial choice for setting-age, mod, etc. and let people sign up. It does not have to be set in stone, but it will give you a good starting point. Reserve the right to make the final decision, so you do not get bogged down in discussion too long.

Decide on age, mods (if any) and whether or not you want diplomatic agreements to be binding. Also, determine how many people you want to play.

I recommend binding diplomatic agreements for a newbie game. It makes it that much more difficult if the person who signed an NAP-3 with you can attack without breaking that NAP.

Post your preferred settings in a new post, so people following will be sure to notice them, and also put them in the initial post for easy reference.