Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism

At the start of our fifth turn, we see our second battle. With significantly more crossbowmen, we are able to really mess up the enemy mob before they even reach our front lines this time.



Their light infantry which, taking the brunt of the crossbow bolts, breaks almost as soon as the melee combat erupts. Unfortunately, our own infantry begins to chase them, allowing their heavy infantry then closes on the flank of our formation. We lose one more of each of our melee units when instead of neat formation combat, the uneven angle turns the fight into a brawl where many of their units can focus on one or two of ours. Fortunately, our crossbowmen are firing throughout this affair, which needles down the heavy infantry, causing them to drop quickly once our troops start trading back blow for blow.



In the end, acceptable losses and I think we'll have enough to carry on to take the forest province to the east of our capital. This will finalize the provinces surrounding our capital, and thus maximize its resource production. It will also make it fairly straightforward to ferry additional troops to the main expansion force as it suffers casualties.

The addition of the resource-rich mountain province already gives our capital a lot of resources to work with, and we can start ramping up the production on our island capturing task force. With 3 black priests to lead it, it should be able to take out the enemies to our north - even if there ends up being 20 of them after all.

In other news, our scout to the south has found our first rival.


Given that they began on this space, we can see that they chose to expand from the other side of the island. This means that while their capital is close by us, their army is not, and we most likely will not be seeing them until they build a second one. If we were an aggressive faction with an awake deity, we could make an attempt to headshot their capital here. However, given our slower-paced strategy, it will be safe to ignore them for now, especially since we are planning on having a fortress between us by the time they have amassed a large enough second army to be a threat to us. My scout will instead set off to the northeast to see if our neighbors in that direction will be equally placid.