Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism

So recently I’ve gotten into a turn based strategy game called Dominions 4. The basic premise of the game is that each player is a pretender to the throne of godhood and must lead his worshippers to world domination. Its main appeals are its strategic depth (I’ve played this game for thirty hours or so, and have really only just started to figure out how to play it) and the fact that you’re playing a god who does some pretty neat stuff for his faction, ranging to freezing the seas, creating a fireball in the sky to function as a second sun, and covering the world in neverending darkness. These sorts of things come up in the late game. For now, we’ll get started with choosing our god and civilization.

One of the big things in Dominions is that you basically want to plan out your game plan in advance, so that you can have a faction and complementary deity to make it work. In this game, we will be playing as the divine embodiment of Utilitarianism. For our faction, we’ll be leading Ulm, a human faction defined by themes of steel, magic, and blood. This faction is comprised of the living remnants of a kingdom that was struck with a powerful curse, which led to the outlaw and execution of their magic smiths. It is now ruled by two groups. The public rulers, and the units which will guide our early expansion and form the backbone of our fighting force, are the Black Priests, who are potent at fighting other magic users and command the remnants of the armies of the Iron Kingdom. The second group is a widespread, shadowy conspiracy of wizards called the Illuminated Ones, who use a mix of astral and blood magic. We will call them ‘Illuminati’ for short.



Our mundane armies have a decent mix of units, with strong but absurdly expensive cavalry, decent heavy infantry, and (most importantly) the ranger - a long range, armor piercing, highly precise crossbow unit. It is possible to focus our strategy on these units by having our deity focus on our resource acquisition and physical prowess, but Ulm has magical options as well.

Ulm is unique in that it allows us to build Illuminati in any province they control that has a lab, a building which any wizard can make in one turn. The weaker Illuminati are also very inexpensive. Most races require a fort in order to recruit additional mages, which greatly limits how many they can make, and even then need to pay more for each of their mages. While our mages are individually unimpressive, the ability to produce huge numbers of them means that we can use them to research magic very quickly. Astral mages are also capable of casting a spell that lets weak mages link together to give power to a single strong mage - potentially at the cost of their life. This form of magic, called a Communion, fits our thematic ideology to a T. The combination of this magic and our accelerated research means that our mages will be able to cast more powerful spells much earlier in the game than any of our rivals, as long as we can protect our provinces stocked with fragile researchers. We will make this the core of our strategy, and design our deity around it.

When creating our god (the game officially calls them ‘pretenders,’ but we know that ours is the one true god of the realm), the first step is to choose its physical form. We will be playing as a sentient fountain of blood, which is naturally a powerful focus for a civilization based on blood magic. While Ulm isn’t the best race at blood magic (some races rely on it almost exclusively), they can use it to do some very cool tricks. Blood Magic is different from the other forms of magic in Dominions. Instead of relying on ‘gems,’ which are produced by sites that must be discovered in your provinces, Blood Magic consumes people whose blood meets this magic’s unusual and exacting standards. These civilians, who may have trouble understanding that we are increasing their expected utility via murder, are collected from your civilian population by Blood Magic capable spellcasters and, once collected, appear as a resource called ‘blood slaves,’ which may be spent in spellcasting and item creation just as any of the magic gems.

Blood spells are very versatile, and range from demon summoning to healing to literally sending enemies to hell (in both burning and frozen variants). For Ulm, we have a faction-unique blood spell which allows us to bathe nobles meritocratically selected individuals in blood to create Vampire Counts. Though this spell is fairly expensive in slaves, the Vampire Counts are themselves blood and death mages. They are also stealthy, flying, immortal (respawn after being killed in combat), cost no upkeep, are excellent in single combat, and produce thralls for free every turn by simple virtue of being so damn handsome. While the thralls aren’t anything to write home about in combat, they can fill all kinds of roles in your composition - provincial police force, meat shields, arrow catchers - the possibilities are nearly endless! Unlike blood slave collecting, thralls understand that their duty is to the greater good and do not generate unrest when they volunteer for service.



Unfortunately, none of the units Ulm produces can actually cast this spell, so we need to make sure that our god can. It requires Death Magic 3 and Blood Magic 3. Luckily, our fountain starts with Blood Magic 3, so we’ll just bump up the Death Magic. Next, we’re going to bump up the Blood Magic further - all the way up to 5. This is going to do a few things for us - it lets us build an armor that enhances blood magic to give to our favorite the most deserving commanders, it increases our ability to find blood slaves, and it lets us cast some of the more powerful blood spells without needing to waste slaves on increasing our blood magic level. These are the two essential magic paths - we will add some more later, but those will be luxury options which we’ll look at if we have points left over.



Next, we are going to adjust his Dominion and Scales. Dominion, for which the game is named, is the representation of belief. If we have no dominion, we will fade away and lose. Dominion is spread from our deity, our prophet, and the temples and priests that we build on our lands.The dominion stat which we are setting now governs how quickly our dominion spreads. Since the enemy factions will be trying to spread their dominion as well, it is possible to lose a game without ever fighting the enemy player simply because our people stopped believing in us. We will set the Dominion to 6 to be safe. The other effects here, called the Scales, cause changes within our provinces as a result of our peoples’ belief in us. These modify the orderliness of our people, control how productive our people are, set the average temperature of our lands, set how fertile our lands are, set how fortunate our lands are, and finally set the potency of magic in our lands. These effects are not based on the political control of the province - instead they are determined by the spread of our dominion.

Order basically makes our provinces more boring. It reduces the chances of receiving random events (which isn’t necessarily a good thing), provides a percentage increase to income, and reduces the level of ‘unrest’ in provinces. Unrest is basically a measurement of unhappiness - the higher it is, the lower our income is and the more likely we are to have problems with the locals. Life increases our income directly by a little bit, and also provides a bonus to population growth. Because our income scales with the population of our provinces, the life bonus will cause provinces under our dominion to increase in value more quickly as the game goes on. In other words, both of these scales not only increase our income, but also give bonuses to other effects that impact our income.

While blood magic does not require magic gems, it does upset the population and also kills some of them. You know, for their blood. While great for our utilitarian ideals, it can also spread unrest amongst our populace, so we will be taking full advantage of the boost to our ability to deal with unrest. Because we can produce wizards everywhere that we have labs and because both labs and the wizards themselves cost a fair bit of gold, we will also want as much gold as possible. Increasing the Life scale is similarly important for blood magic. In addition to helping to pay for all of our wizards, the odds of finding blood slaves is partially dependant on the population of our provinces, so growth provides both an income advantage and a direct advantage to our magic resource of choice. We will increase both of these scales.

The next tab which we will increase is our magic. Every point in magic increases the research generated by each researcher by one. Since our plan is to fill every inch of our land with researchers, we’re going to set this one as high as it can go as well.

Next, we’re going to reduce our productivity, which reduces our gold by a little bit and reduces our ‘resources’ by a significant amount. While gold income is shared between provinces and all flows into one treasury, resources limit the amount of troops that can be built in a single province. The rule of thumb is that the better equipped a unit is, the more resources it costs. Typically, gold will be more of a limiting factor than resources (especially in the early game where you have few provinces to supply income or in the late game when you have multiple places to build units), but having more resources would allow us to concentrate our building in one place more easily, as well as raise more of the heavily armored units where they’re needed. If we were planning on relying on our powerful but expensive cavalry units, we would need as many resources as possible. However, because we are instead relying on gold-hungry mages and crossbowmen, we will almost never be limited by resources before we run out of money, making this a very safe place to take a penalty for additional points.

Fiddling with temperature would give us additional points for making our provinces warmer or colder, but does so at the cost of reducing our income, which we are trying to keep as high as possible.

Throughout the game, random events will occur, ranging from finding bonus magic gems to having your research labs blow up. Luck can be thought of as another income scale in that better luck increases your odds of finding bonus money or events worth gold, while unfortunate events can be costly. Additionally, Luck is the only scale that affects your magic gem supplies directly as a result of events which give you free gems, which are fairly common as long as your luck isn’t bad. However, while we do benefit from luck, increasing our luck is not economical - since we have decreased the chances of any events occurring, the money / gem bonuses that we would receive from having higher luck will occur less frequently. Additionally, we are less reliant on gems than those whose spellcasting isn’t provided by their earnest populace. We still do not want to reduce this scale, if we don’t have to, though. Our utilitarian society doesn’t believe in luck and will earn this victory with the sweat of our brow and the brilliance of our minds, but there’s no need to give fortune the finger. We’ll leave this scale alone.

Unfortunately, we have overspent ourselves on points to get our heavily favorable scales. The easiest way to fix this problem is by setting our deity to be dormant. This means that we won’t be able to use him for the first twelve turns or so. Since our deity is an immobile fountain anyways, he won’t be able to run around conquering provinces for us in the early game. While being able to promote our most meritorious men into immortal vampires is nice, our god’s capabilities really kick into gear only after we have some research completed, so it’s okay to leave him dormant. This more than makes up for our losses, so we can start looking into additional magic to master.

Blood magic has crossover spells with every other school, so no new field of magic will be wasted.

[[One of the elements of blood magic which we will not be exploring is the ‘crossbreed’ spell and its accompanying items. This spell is a nature/blood mix which lets you do crazy experiments to produce units of varying strength, with various items and units that give bonuses to your chance of success. While unlocking the utility of your animals through experimentation sounds great, we do not have any native nature casters aside from the Fortune Teller, and even she has only a ¼ chance of having 1 point in nature. Not the most reliable assistant. This means that only our god would be doing the crazy experiments, and his time is usually better spent being the locus of our people’s collective sacrifice.]]

We’re going to go with Fire for our additional focus for two reasons. First, while each of the elements lets us summon an additional type of demon, the fire demons (called devils) fill a void in our army. Because we are going to lack the resources to build cavalry, we won’t have any units for rushing the back row of the enemy formations - a very valuable tool indeed against enemy spellcasters. The devils have flying and a very high combat speed, allowing them to quickly close on the enemy. Once there, they will deal damage in an area around them due to their heat without even hitting anything, in addition to being able to attack as a powerful melee fighter. This makes them excellent at killing spellcasters even when they have friendly infantry to protect them, as well as great at disrupting large groups of archers. Additionally, fire opens up the option to summon Archdevils later on in the game, a powerful commander unit that is very similar in function to the regular devils, but also has access to fire magic which will work great with our planned magical research. Finally, the fire path allows our god to craft items that will work well with our planned magical advancement. These spells require only two points in Fire. This leaves us enough to add another point to both Blood and Death magic, as well as one more point in Dominion, and we’re all done with only two points wasted.



Now that we have our nation, our strategy, and our pretender, let’s take a look and see what weaknesses we’ll have to play around. The first is that the fundamental premise of our strategy is having a reasonable amount of territory that is safe from enemy attacks. Once we have some combat magic researched and a large number of mages in each province, they’ll be able to defend themselves against small groups of enemies, but they’ll be vulnerable to attack before then. This is especially true since we do not start the game with our deity and since we will be spending a significant portion of our money on labs that other factions might spend on units. This means two things - First, we are exceptionally vulnerable to being rushed. Second, we want to limit the number of fronts that we engage on until we are ready to start converting our Illuminati from pacifist lab geeks into violent pyramid scheme cultists by way of the Communion spells. Both of these weaknesses will mean that we will want to play into a corner if at all possible. Some dominion maps are wrap-around (meaning that there are no corners!), but the very cool map which we are using is not.

Our second weakness is that we have no native amphibious units and no reliable access to water magic. This means that we should not try to expand into any water territories unless we know that there is no aquatic or amphibious nation nearby. Simply put, we will lose those territories without a fight until we are sufficiently far ahead on research to simply throw magic at all of our problems. Fortunately for us, most aquatic nations are fairly poor at fighting on land, so unless we fight them while we are still in our vulnerable developing phase, we should be able to protect ourselves on land. Given that the water runs through the middle of the map, our play-into-a-corner strategy should allow us to avoid this hassle altogether for the most part.

Now we’re ready to get started and see where RNG places us our wisdom determines would maximize the expected utility of a fountain of blood and its willing followers.