RE: Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism
01-07-2015, 07:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-07-2015, 07:30 AM by Sai.)
It looks like not too many people are particularly interested in this (since it’s, y’know, not been very interesting), but since I do still want to finish it, the remainder of the game is going to be radically summarized.
Hello. My Name is Astral Magic and Welcome to the Late Game
Astral magic in Dominions is a versatile field of magic that gives access to strategic scrying and assassination spells and a myriad of options in combat. When combined with blood magic, both become even more potent.
On the strategic level, one of the most powerful Astral Spells is a spell called ‘Mind Hunt.’ When cast on a province, the astral mage scans it for an enemy commander and casts an offensive spell on them. Since one of the astral combat spells is ‘Soul Slay,’ a spell which instantly kills the target if it pierces their magic resistance, Mind Hunt almost always kills a random enemy commander when the spellcaster has sufficiently advanced magic and is bedecked with items to pierce magic resistance (which also, incidentally, tend to require Astral paths to construct). The one weakness is that if an enemy astral mage is in the province, the spellcaster may become ‘Feebleminded,’ rendering them incapable of casting any spells or leading troops.
In tactical combat, there are two extremely effective methods of using large numbers of weak astral mages. One of these involves increasing the power of our astral mages by equipping a member of our army with a magic item designed for this purpose, and then having all of the mages cast Stellar Cascade. This spell increases the fatigue of all enemy units, which does not sound particularly exciting at first glance. However, five casts of this spell will completely immobilize an enemy, and each casting of the spell can hit up to five separate targets. This means that a sufficient number of casters can stop the entire enemy army dead in its tracks, allowing our soldiers to simply mop up the stunned and sleeping army without suffering any damage in return. This is almost impossible to beat with an army that relies on infantry.
The second method, instead of having a large number of spellcasters firing accessibly low level spells, utilizes Communions to empower a few mages to cast incredibly powerful spells instead. The way that communions work is that mages are scripted to be either a Communion Slave or a Communion Master. The levels of all magic paths available mage that has cast Communion Master are raised by n, where there are 2^n mages that cast, Communion Slave, rounded down. So two slaves raises the level by one, four slaves raises the level by two, and so on. When you can field sixteen slaves, even the weakest astral mages become incredibly powerful, as it raises their spellcasting to levels higher than even the best mages can access innately. Additionally, the fatigue cost of the spells that these mages cast (which can now be quite high, given that they are casting the most powerful spells in the game) is divided by the number of slaves in the Communion. Normally this limits the ratio of masters to slaves to prevent your slaves from being drained dry and killed, since each master is inflicting fatigue on all of the mages empowering them. This is where the Blood Magic comes in to play. Blood Magic has a spell that enables to caster to restore all of their fatigue. This effect is applied to the slaves as well. This means that we can have our suped up mages burning through fatigue like there’s no limit to their reserves, and then reinvigorate all of our underlings with a single sacrifice. Both the communion itself and the human sacrifice to sustain it are about as perfect of a manifestation of our philosophy as we could ask for.
The spell that we will be relying on having our Communion Masters cast is similarly a good moral fit. I had already mentioned that astral mages can instantly kill any low magic resistance target with Soul Slay, but with access to more powerful spells in the field of Thaumaturgy we don’t have to kill anyone thanks to a spell called ‘Enslave.’ It does exactly what it says on the tin. Now, while taking over the minds of enemies to fight their friends already sounds amazing, it gets even better when you look at the way that melee mechanics work. Essentially, if a unit borders another unit, it must stop moving and fight. This means that enslaving enemies not only forces them to kill their friends (and take damage while doing so), it also slows breaks up enemy formations, meaning that if we even bother with a front line, it and our supporting damage will be able to massacre their army piecemeal as disjoined bits and pieces of it stagger to the front. It also means that at the end of every battle, we find a few pleasant surprises comprised of enemy troops that managed to find their way to joining the Good Guys. At the far end of the Thaumaturgy research, we have Master Enslave.
![[Image: CuJyRQw.png]](https://i.imgur.com/CuJyRQw.png)
Requiring a huge communion and a large number of astral gems to cast, it casts Enslave on the entire enemy army. It’s difficult and expensive to ever deploy in a fight, and by the time we cast it the game was already just about over, but oh my goodness is it funny.
Blood Magic Also Kicks Ass in the Late Game
The highest levels of Blood Magic open up the ability to summon demonic commanders of various flavors. Archdevils are powerful fire mages that also command armies better than any of our commanders. Heliophagi are blood mages that can cast just about any blood spell you want them to. The Demon Lords are so powerful, many of them draw away worship in whatever province they happen to be in towards their personal cult. Many of these units can just wade into an enemy army and, unless it has the right types of units to counteract their stupidly high damage attacks and plethora of spells, force hundreds of units to flee before them. Also, most of them can fly - which is nice for getting them out of our capital before they sow panic in our citizens that don’t understand that bringing out godlike manifestations of pure evil is well in line with the pursuit of the greater good.
![[Image: bZVNRIe.png]](https://i.imgur.com/bZVNRIe.png)
The Three Front War
With our army knocking at the gates to their citadel, Patala recalled its armies from the near east to relieve their besieged capital.While their army on the field was sizeable, Patala had only one other fortress, and its production was required to attempt to fend off the approaching undead horde of Lemuria (the Ermor ghosts). Even this didn’t seem to be working out too well for them, and our scouts saw a massive horde of ethereal undead just outside of the castle, so we can assume that they will be facing a siege there shortly. The ‘final battle’ against Patala featured a large and heavily reinforced army bearing the majority of our mundane troops and black priests against a severely worn down force that had far weaker magic and no reinforcement. While we suffered some losses, it proved that Patala’s demise was inevitable and we soon took over their capital and marched some of our forces across the river to the Middle East. The majority of our forces moved East, where they assisted in the conquest of Pythium. This proved to be an expensive adjustment, as the undead of Lemuria were able to seize control over the area which had once been contested between them, Pythium, and Patala, including several provinces which we had captured.
The West had already been all but wrapped up by this point. The one noteworthy discovery was that Agara had advanced all the way from their cave stronghold in the far south to probe the borders of the river, which their amphibious forces were uniquely well suited to conquering. We were able to stymie their advances thanks to the use of long-ranged astral and blood magic - namely conjuring horrors (powerful extra-planar creatures that the caster has no control over) and using the Mind Hunt spell to assassinate their commanders. The one battle that we lost was the first attempt on Marignon’s capital, where their pretender managed to spew out a stream of skeletons that slowed down our infantry long enough for them to be worn down. Meanwhile, the bolts fired from Marignon’s crossbows and from the towers of the capital itself scored some lucky blows and killed several of our mages, severely reducing our firepower in return. The subsequent assault, which featured a host of conjured devils, was easily successful as the flying demons were able to close immediately on Marignon’s back line and slaughter their spellcasters before they could inflict much damage.
The war with Pythium, conversely, was decided primarily by our mages. Prior to deploying the stellar cascade spam script, I had no idea that it would be so incredibly effective. A force of fifteen mages supported by twenty troops could crush an army that doubled its size, and since the enemies were fatigued before they were routed, every battle was a massacre that inflicted exorbitant losses on Pythium’s legions. We were only ever able to field two such groups, however, as the magic item required to enable the weaker mages to cast the slightly more advanced spell required using up the turns of the powerful astral mage that we had been using to single handedly stave off Agartha’s advance. That was when we discovered the potence of Enslave in combat. While the small number of units in the East meant that we could not effectively siege Pythium’s castles until after we finished off Patala, Pythium literally never won a battle against anything other than province defense, and in several engagements our army actually grew when the battle ended.
Closing the Game
Since the victory condition for this map required capturing the Thrones of Ascension and we owned a bit over half of the map given our three fronts of success, we were able to secure the final victory by using strike teams of an army supporting either a priest empowered by artifacts to have enough Holy magic to take a site or a demon lord granted prophet status for the sole purpose of claiming the throne. The last large battle of the game occurred when a host made up almost entirely of flying demons and their lords engaged Agartha’s capital defenses to capture a throne located in the caverns just beyond. After a tight victory, we discovered that the throne in question was underwater, which necessitated sending one of the demons back to friendly territory to pick up the items that would enable them to breathe underwater, and then return to the force besieging Agartha to enable them to abandon their siege and secure the objective. At this point, we had neglected to really take care of silly things like attacks from the undead legion on non-throne provinces, so our borders were frayed a bit just before victory was finally achieved.
AAR
So this game was essentially handed to us on a platter due to the ease of our early game. With a heavy investment on the long-term infrastructure required for research, our army should have been easily overmatched by any enemies that we met in the first few turns, and we should also have had difficulties taking as many provinces as we did. Since our neighbors happened to expand away from us, we not only avoided the potentially catastrophic early engagements, but we were also able to cherry-pick the targets that we attacked, giving us a level of expansion usually only available to aggressive nations. This, in turn, meant that our ability to build up researching centers quickly went out of control, and we had the advantage of more advanced magic for the entirety of the game, an advantage that grew parabolically as the game went on.
So there we have it. The world was really ours all along, it simply took our enemies some time to understand it.
![[Image: SWXIQJo.png]](https://i.imgur.com/SWXIQJo.png)
Hello. My Name is Astral Magic and Welcome to the Late Game
Astral magic in Dominions is a versatile field of magic that gives access to strategic scrying and assassination spells and a myriad of options in combat. When combined with blood magic, both become even more potent.
On the strategic level, one of the most powerful Astral Spells is a spell called ‘Mind Hunt.’ When cast on a province, the astral mage scans it for an enemy commander and casts an offensive spell on them. Since one of the astral combat spells is ‘Soul Slay,’ a spell which instantly kills the target if it pierces their magic resistance, Mind Hunt almost always kills a random enemy commander when the spellcaster has sufficiently advanced magic and is bedecked with items to pierce magic resistance (which also, incidentally, tend to require Astral paths to construct). The one weakness is that if an enemy astral mage is in the province, the spellcaster may become ‘Feebleminded,’ rendering them incapable of casting any spells or leading troops.
In tactical combat, there are two extremely effective methods of using large numbers of weak astral mages. One of these involves increasing the power of our astral mages by equipping a member of our army with a magic item designed for this purpose, and then having all of the mages cast Stellar Cascade. This spell increases the fatigue of all enemy units, which does not sound particularly exciting at first glance. However, five casts of this spell will completely immobilize an enemy, and each casting of the spell can hit up to five separate targets. This means that a sufficient number of casters can stop the entire enemy army dead in its tracks, allowing our soldiers to simply mop up the stunned and sleeping army without suffering any damage in return. This is almost impossible to beat with an army that relies on infantry.
The second method, instead of having a large number of spellcasters firing accessibly low level spells, utilizes Communions to empower a few mages to cast incredibly powerful spells instead. The way that communions work is that mages are scripted to be either a Communion Slave or a Communion Master. The levels of all magic paths available mage that has cast Communion Master are raised by n, where there are 2^n mages that cast, Communion Slave, rounded down. So two slaves raises the level by one, four slaves raises the level by two, and so on. When you can field sixteen slaves, even the weakest astral mages become incredibly powerful, as it raises their spellcasting to levels higher than even the best mages can access innately. Additionally, the fatigue cost of the spells that these mages cast (which can now be quite high, given that they are casting the most powerful spells in the game) is divided by the number of slaves in the Communion. Normally this limits the ratio of masters to slaves to prevent your slaves from being drained dry and killed, since each master is inflicting fatigue on all of the mages empowering them. This is where the Blood Magic comes in to play. Blood Magic has a spell that enables to caster to restore all of their fatigue. This effect is applied to the slaves as well. This means that we can have our suped up mages burning through fatigue like there’s no limit to their reserves, and then reinvigorate all of our underlings with a single sacrifice. Both the communion itself and the human sacrifice to sustain it are about as perfect of a manifestation of our philosophy as we could ask for.
The spell that we will be relying on having our Communion Masters cast is similarly a good moral fit. I had already mentioned that astral mages can instantly kill any low magic resistance target with Soul Slay, but with access to more powerful spells in the field of Thaumaturgy we don’t have to kill anyone thanks to a spell called ‘Enslave.’ It does exactly what it says on the tin. Now, while taking over the minds of enemies to fight their friends already sounds amazing, it gets even better when you look at the way that melee mechanics work. Essentially, if a unit borders another unit, it must stop moving and fight. This means that enslaving enemies not only forces them to kill their friends (and take damage while doing so), it also slows breaks up enemy formations, meaning that if we even bother with a front line, it and our supporting damage will be able to massacre their army piecemeal as disjoined bits and pieces of it stagger to the front. It also means that at the end of every battle, we find a few pleasant surprises comprised of enemy troops that managed to find their way to joining the Good Guys. At the far end of the Thaumaturgy research, we have Master Enslave.
Requiring a huge communion and a large number of astral gems to cast, it casts Enslave on the entire enemy army. It’s difficult and expensive to ever deploy in a fight, and by the time we cast it the game was already just about over, but oh my goodness is it funny.
Blood Magic Also Kicks Ass in the Late Game
The highest levels of Blood Magic open up the ability to summon demonic commanders of various flavors. Archdevils are powerful fire mages that also command armies better than any of our commanders. Heliophagi are blood mages that can cast just about any blood spell you want them to. The Demon Lords are so powerful, many of them draw away worship in whatever province they happen to be in towards their personal cult. Many of these units can just wade into an enemy army and, unless it has the right types of units to counteract their stupidly high damage attacks and plethora of spells, force hundreds of units to flee before them. Also, most of them can fly - which is nice for getting them out of our capital before they sow panic in our citizens that don’t understand that bringing out godlike manifestations of pure evil is well in line with the pursuit of the greater good.
The Three Front War
With our army knocking at the gates to their citadel, Patala recalled its armies from the near east to relieve their besieged capital.While their army on the field was sizeable, Patala had only one other fortress, and its production was required to attempt to fend off the approaching undead horde of Lemuria (the Ermor ghosts). Even this didn’t seem to be working out too well for them, and our scouts saw a massive horde of ethereal undead just outside of the castle, so we can assume that they will be facing a siege there shortly. The ‘final battle’ against Patala featured a large and heavily reinforced army bearing the majority of our mundane troops and black priests against a severely worn down force that had far weaker magic and no reinforcement. While we suffered some losses, it proved that Patala’s demise was inevitable and we soon took over their capital and marched some of our forces across the river to the Middle East. The majority of our forces moved East, where they assisted in the conquest of Pythium. This proved to be an expensive adjustment, as the undead of Lemuria were able to seize control over the area which had once been contested between them, Pythium, and Patala, including several provinces which we had captured.
The West had already been all but wrapped up by this point. The one noteworthy discovery was that Agara had advanced all the way from their cave stronghold in the far south to probe the borders of the river, which their amphibious forces were uniquely well suited to conquering. We were able to stymie their advances thanks to the use of long-ranged astral and blood magic - namely conjuring horrors (powerful extra-planar creatures that the caster has no control over) and using the Mind Hunt spell to assassinate their commanders. The one battle that we lost was the first attempt on Marignon’s capital, where their pretender managed to spew out a stream of skeletons that slowed down our infantry long enough for them to be worn down. Meanwhile, the bolts fired from Marignon’s crossbows and from the towers of the capital itself scored some lucky blows and killed several of our mages, severely reducing our firepower in return. The subsequent assault, which featured a host of conjured devils, was easily successful as the flying demons were able to close immediately on Marignon’s back line and slaughter their spellcasters before they could inflict much damage.
The war with Pythium, conversely, was decided primarily by our mages. Prior to deploying the stellar cascade spam script, I had no idea that it would be so incredibly effective. A force of fifteen mages supported by twenty troops could crush an army that doubled its size, and since the enemies were fatigued before they were routed, every battle was a massacre that inflicted exorbitant losses on Pythium’s legions. We were only ever able to field two such groups, however, as the magic item required to enable the weaker mages to cast the slightly more advanced spell required using up the turns of the powerful astral mage that we had been using to single handedly stave off Agartha’s advance. That was when we discovered the potence of Enslave in combat. While the small number of units in the East meant that we could not effectively siege Pythium’s castles until after we finished off Patala, Pythium literally never won a battle against anything other than province defense, and in several engagements our army actually grew when the battle ended.
Closing the Game
Since the victory condition for this map required capturing the Thrones of Ascension and we owned a bit over half of the map given our three fronts of success, we were able to secure the final victory by using strike teams of an army supporting either a priest empowered by artifacts to have enough Holy magic to take a site or a demon lord granted prophet status for the sole purpose of claiming the throne. The last large battle of the game occurred when a host made up almost entirely of flying demons and their lords engaged Agartha’s capital defenses to capture a throne located in the caverns just beyond. After a tight victory, we discovered that the throne in question was underwater, which necessitated sending one of the demons back to friendly territory to pick up the items that would enable them to breathe underwater, and then return to the force besieging Agartha to enable them to abandon their siege and secure the objective. At this point, we had neglected to really take care of silly things like attacks from the undead legion on non-throne provinces, so our borders were frayed a bit just before victory was finally achieved.
AAR
So this game was essentially handed to us on a platter due to the ease of our early game. With a heavy investment on the long-term infrastructure required for research, our army should have been easily overmatched by any enemies that we met in the first few turns, and we should also have had difficulties taking as many provinces as we did. Since our neighbors happened to expand away from us, we not only avoided the potentially catastrophic early engagements, but we were also able to cherry-pick the targets that we attacked, giving us a level of expansion usually only available to aggressive nations. This, in turn, meant that our ability to build up researching centers quickly went out of control, and we had the advantage of more advanced magic for the entirety of the game, an advantage that grew parabolically as the game went on.
![[Image: l1eK61d.png]](https://i.imgur.com/l1eK61d.png)
![[Image: qUakwvp.png]](https://i.imgur.com/qUakwvp.png)
![[Image: WFQLHMB.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/WFQLHMB.gif)