Reading the Hex Map

Terrain types, chokepoints, and how to pick your expansion direction in the first thirty seconds.

Every Dominion map is procedurally generated. You don't get to memorize build orders by position — you have to read the map each game and pick an expansion direction from what's in front of you.

The five terrain types

• Plains— yield grain. Roughly forty percent of the map. Grain is what keeps your army paid; don't starve it.
• Mountains — yield iron, and iron buys Warriors. Roughly twenty-five percent of the map, clustered into ridgelines. Owning a ridge is worth fighting for.
• Crystal fields— rare, fifteen percent of the map, clustered into small veins. Crystal buys Scouts and unlocks Watchtowers. If your opening doesn't touch a crystal vein, you probably can't go Scout-first.
• Forest — yields grain like plains and gives a flat +2 HP defensive bonus per unit standing on it. Fortify here.
• Peaks / wasteland — impassable. Creates natural chokes. The map generator clusters peaks intentionally so that one- or two-hex bottlenecks form between spawns.

Chokepoints matter more than yields

Raw iron is nice. Controlling the one-hex choke between your spawn and the enemy's is better. A garrisoned warrior stack on a forest-choke has +5 effective HP per unit (+2 forest, +3 garrison) — that's often enough to turn a losing trade into a winning one. Identify the chokes on your side of the map in the first ten seconds and know whether you have one, two, or zero of them to defend.

Expansion priority

Rank tile candidates by adjacency: a neutral tile that puts two new resource types in your vision on capture is worth more than one that just adds another Plains. Early game, defensive adjacency often beats raw yield — a plains tile tucked behind a mountain chain is safer than a juicy crystal tile on the contested center line.