Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism

And here's where we landed -


This is actually really amazing for our strategy. I don't think it's possible to have gotten a better starting position, except maybe for the caverns at the south end of the world. We basically have three pocket provinces on the floating island to our north which are completely unassailable without losing our capital - the perfect place for our burgeoning research department.



Not only do we have the freebie spaces to the north, we also have spaces on either side of us which will grant us bonuses. Forests produce extra resources, and once we conquer them, they will feed some of that to the adjacent fort. This means that once we have the provinces next to our fort, we'll be able to recruit more heavy infantry than our usually slothful nation would be capable of. Just past the forest to our west is fertile farmland - an area with a naturally high population and income. This will work perfectly with our bonus and help fund our empire if we can conquer it and keep it.

Finally, we have easy access to one of the Thrones of Ascension (the little golden throne to our East). Thrones can be claimed only by units with Holy 3 (which for us will be exclusively our Prophet), but once claimed provide a bonus to your kingdom. They're also how we win the game - victory requires that we claim the majority of the thrones on the map.

We can't see how these spaces are defended yet, but we will at the start of our next turn. Attacking on your first turn is called a 'blind push,' and typically is only done if your god is awake and capable of leading your army in combat.

We start with one commander and one scout. The commander comes with two small stacks of infantry units which, given our early game strategy, we are going to be using as the wall behind which our archers will hide.



As you can see, we are recruiting one of the Black Priests, whose supporting magic is the best that we'll have in the early game, and as many archers as we can afford.

For our melee units, we are going to use the 'Line' formation to, well, form a line. The pikeneers have longer reach than our shield bearing infantry and weaker armor. They also have a slightly higher movement speed on account of their lack of armor, so if we want them to arrive at the same time as the heavier infantry, we need to have them start further back when they advance.


Once we recruit our rangers, we will stage them behind the wall of infantry. Our infantry are set to use the 'hold and attack' command, which means they will stay still for two turns while the archers fire, and then attack the enemy after they've crossed some distance beneath our rain of steel.



If the commander falls in combat and you have no other commanders remaining, your entire army will route. As a result, I'm not a huge fan of melee commanders until we have some other commanders in the same group to take over if they die. Luckily for us, we can declare commander Maximize Pleasure to be our prophet. This will let him claim thrones, as mentioned above, and give him Holy 3, which will let him cast some very useful spells rather than just stand in the back being useless. Becoming a prophet takes a turn's action for that commander, which is fine for us since we aren't looking to use him to expand until we have his archers recruited anyways.

I am going to send our scout to the south. The reason for this is that I want to take the farmland on that peninsula for its income and quite possibly use it as the location of our first additional fort (a place that is hard to capture and allows you to recruit additional national units), but since we know that we are going to be slow at expanding, we need to see who else is coming towards it in order to determine if striking out at it is viable. I would much rather take the safe provinces behind me if I can at all afford to do so, but it may need to wait until I have built a second province capturing army.

With only two units and one province, there isn't a whole lot to do during this turn. We'll have to wait until we see the independent defenses before we can plan any combat.