Domina – Gameplay Tips

Domina is a unique management sim with an awesome theme. Unfortunately many (most) of its mechanics are left unexplained. Therefore, I made this guide containing ten tips for new players in order to help you get started. The guide is available both in video and text format. Hope it’s useful!

Gameplay Tips for New Players

All credit goes to Waervyn\'s World!

• At the beginning of the game you get a choice to do the tutorial or not. I suggest not doing the tutorial as it actually doesn’t explain anything, but it does hold back on a lot of important gameplay elements. You won’t have access to the Blessings of Jupiter if you do the tutorial, which puts you in an immediate disadvantage 
• Always have some extra slaves at hand which you won’t be upgrading. Sometimes you will be given a battle in which even your best champion can lose. In this case it’s good to have some cannon fodder so you can still accept the match and give the crowd what they want, but not run the risk of killing your champions. 
• At the beginning of the game, immediately hire three employees. You can hire them through the city marketplace. There’s many choices, but I would consider some to be very important. I normally start with the Faber, Architect and Medicus. Once you’ve hired these, there’s a couple of things to do. First go to your Doctore in order to ‘Enable automatic gladiator training’. This will tell all your gladiators to keep training, so you don’t have to waste time rightclicking them all the time. Then go to the faber and click on auto repair, and research ‘automatic upgrade’. Once this is research, check the box to have the Faber upgrade your gladiators free of charge automatically. With the medicus you can click on Auto-heal. With the Architect you can build lots of improvements to your ludus. 
• Related to the previous tip, the ‘cost-structure’ in this game is weirdly interesting. You can upgrade your helm many times for example. However, normally this doesn’t cost a lot, but then all of a sudden the next upgrade is very expensive. After this upgrade the price returns to normal. Therefore, as the faber upgrades your gladiators free of charge, upgrade your gladiators until the next upgrade is very expensive. Wait until the faber upgrades that item and then you can purchase the next upgrades again. In the long run this will save quite some gold. 
• I normally play this game without controlling the gladiators manually. For this, make sure to first train your gladiators in Meditation until they have 100 score in this. This will make the ‘AI-control’ much more efficient. Once they are at 100, be sure to not train meditation at all anymore, as it will be a waste of time. 
• You can rearrange your gladiators by clicking on them and dragging them around. This is handy as your architect will be making some tings (such as sparring-dummies) in specific places. Drag your favourite gladiators to these improvements. Alternatively you can drag the improvements but I never use this. 
• Bribe your Legate and Magistrate as much as possible with wine. The cost for this doubles every time. The reason you want to do this is that these people organize your matches. The more they like you, the better the matches will be organized in your favour. 
• Buy wine every two days. Every day, the marketplace will be restocked with one wine, however, the maximum stock is 2. Make sure to buy this, as wine is very good to have. Even when Legate and Magistrate have max favour already, continue to buy wine. The reason for this is that you can have events that make them unhappy, or outright kill them. Afterwards you’ll need lots of wine again! 
• Take care of your gladiator temperament. Always try to reward them with a coin (very cheap!) to see if it has an effect on their temperament. The reason for this is that temperament affects stats, and you want to have your stats as high as possible to have less chance of dying! 
• The game gets harder the more battles you win. Therefore, make sure to sometimes lose a match on purpose with ‘cannon fodder’. This will prevent you from being surprised with way too strong opponents.