RE: Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism
11-21-2014, 02:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-23-2014, 04:26 AM by Sai.)
One-more-turn syndrome got the better of me, so there won’t be any screenshots of much of our narrative. I will try to recap most of what happened since my turn-by-turn posts. Note that most of these events occurred over multiple turns, and are at least partially described in narrative rather than strictly chronological order.
Expansion Continues
When our armies arrived within range of the throne, we saw that it was heavily guarded by a large group of undead. This is fairly normal (well, the large group part is - the undead bit just has to do with the province itself), but unfortunately means that our army wasn’t able to capture it quite yet, which once again means that we had to shift directions for our expansion. This meant that our main group headed down towards the peninsula, where they were supplemented by our battle hardened black priests from the floating island campaign. We took one of our Il-lame-inati with us to build our first additional fortress three spaces away from our capital.
This fortress will let us recruit our rangers and and heavy infantry here once it’s completed, which will take six turns. Only two spaces away from the enemy capital, it will make the perfect staging point for our war against them. In the meantime, our main army will conquer the surrounding areas which will feed their untapped production to the fortress to allow us to build more units. Research into Evocation has advanced steadily thanks to our growing lab nerd conspiracy. We don’t have labs in all of our provinces, but thanks to cherry picking our targets and avoiding significant losses in our expansion forces, we’ve been able to convert most of our income into research. With our Black Priests now functioning as able ranged units, we have a lot of firepower - a very effective doctrine for fighting the primarily infantry mob defensive forces of the independents.
Our capital has not been silent during this time. Since our main expansion party sustained very few losses and was able to supplement its front line with locally recruited basic heavy infantry (not as strong or heavily armored as our national forces, but able to soak up a few hits which is really all we need them to do), we were able to put together a second expansion force large enough to take on the cavalry guarding the wealthy farmland to our west. Our Dominion had been spreading steadily, given the lack of rival gods nearby, so the populace of the province that we assaulted already had begun to respect utilitarian values. This gave a morale bonus to our troops and a penalty to theirs when we captured it, as well as increased the income of the land, rather than needing to wait for it to ramp up after it was conquered.
Our God Arrives, Our Knowledge Grows
On turn 14, Utilitarianism Incarnate awakens from its slumber. Blood begins to flow from the once silent fountain, and a child is possessed to speak with Utilitarianism’s voice and forge with Utilitarianism’s hands. The people of our land rejoiced and celebrated by changing absolutely nothing about their routines because it would be inefficient to take the day off and there’s still so much work to be done.
With construction of our first additional fort in progress, the first vital evocation spell completed, a reasonable amount of researchers tucked away in our core provinces, and two expansion forces already out and about, we are well positioned to transition into the second stage of our strategy - blood magic.
The first step in this transition is research not into blood magic itself (though we will spare some research in that category as well), but into Construction. We will need to research Construction to level four in order to build Sanguine Dowsing Rods. They do exactly what you’d think - they point blood hunters in the right direction for finding blood slaves. Since the majority of our blood hunters have only one point in Blood Magic, they will be limited in the numbers of blood slaves they can find even in our large provinces. The dowsing rods will be a huge boost to our blood slave economy.
The second step is to go about finding the blood slaves for our first vampire. We had a few Second Order illuminati running about looking for magical sites and building labs, and while they’re not the best at it, they can at least help with our search. In our capital, Utilitarianism guides its possessed child to find citizens whose blood is more utile than their lives. As it turns out, there are a lot of them and it takes only two turns before we have sufficient blood slaves to promote a civilian go-getter into a magic wielding, flying, undead go-getter.
Just as our transition got underway, a large number of events occurred on the same turn. Our scout to the east has found another rival, the faction to our south sends out its first attack, our first vampire is recruited, our commanding priest to the west gets sick and goes on a conquest spree in a Breaking Bad style quest to make the most of his life before he dies, our western scout finds a third enemy faction, and we began to churn out magic items.
Pythia and the Search for War
So having travelled more or less all the way to the throne in the north-east corner of the map, I sent our scout south just to see what was going on elsewhere in the world. I discovered that there actually was a faction very close to the throne, but like the nation on the island in the center, they chose to expand away from us. This nation is Pythium, the Serpent Cult. Pythium is one of two factions that split off from a Rome-like state where the living and the undead lived side by side. The soulless undead formed a worker class to supply menial labor, albeit one that needed to be replaced by mages every so often. The thaumaturges then had the clever idea to open a gate to the underworld so that even the weakest of mages could draw out necromantic energy to reanimate the dead. It worked, but it also tore all of their souls out and allowed a legion of ghosts to stream forth and capture the nation’s capital, from which they began to spread throughout the land. Pythium is the living remnants of this civilization and intended to be thematically similar to the Byzantine Empire. They managed to survive the undead horde through a combination of their distance from the capital and the assistance of the snakemen who made up much of the native populace.
The forces of Pythium are diverse thanks to their mixed heritage. The human legionnaires, who wield spears and javelins and specialize at fighting in formation, make up the core of their forces. They are supplemented by serpentine cataphracts and heavy infantry, hydras, and ‘heretic’ mages. The heretics provide a wide variety of magic types that are otherwise unavailable to Pythium’s armies, but steadily lower the dominion of the provinces that they occupy.
With nothing between us in the North and provincial capitals tending to be the same distance apart from each other, we can conclude that another faction is almost certainly going to be at the far eastern edge of the circle (as it turned out, we were right - it was Ermor, the Ashen Empire of the undead. I don’t know if the game put the two together intentionally or if it was just happy happenstance). Since we also know that both Pythium and the first faction that we discovered (which is Patala, as we would learn from their attack on our province) expanded in that direction, those three factions are most likely embroiled in a three way war over the farms and forests in the central-eastern section of the map. A war torn middle east, if you would. We’ll send our scout directly south from his current location, where he’ll be able to cross the thin central ocean on the island-bridge, just to keep an eye on this war and see how it develops.
The Patalan Incursion Begins
The nation to our south, as it turns out, is Patala. Based on Hindu mythology, it is comprised primarily of four types of primates: Markati, Vanara, Atavi, and Bandar. Each of the four races supplies their own types of units and commanders, and they are united by the sacred naga - a race of amphibious snake people from the underworld. The Bandar are the largest and most intelligent of the four races, and appear as fully bipedal gorillas. They wear the heaviest armor, have trained war elephants, and supply their faction’s most powerful mages, the Gurus.
The army that attacks us is primarily the Naga themselves. Though these are capital-exclusive units, since the attack comes from their capital directly, there is no difficulty in logistics in gathering this force. They are supported primarily by Bandar, with a small number of war elephants, a large group of stone throwing light infantry, and a backline contingent of gurus. Since our expansion force had taken the lightly defended neutral province between their capital and our fort-to-be early, it was defended only by the local province defense.
Province defence is something which can be purchased in any province under our control. It costs gold equal to the level of province defense that you want it raised to (so raising it from 0-10 costs a total of 55 gold and 10-20 costs 155). Each level of provincial defense adds defenders whose quality increases as the provincial defense rises. Every 10 levels also reduces unrest (a fact that we had already taken advantage of in our home regions - we increased the defense of some of our home provinces so that we had armed soldiers on hand to ‘accommodate’ the complaints of those whose families had utile blood).
During the battle, the elephants charged our position and quickly overran our infantry, taking mere scratches from the spears and arrows of our small defensive force. Fortunately for us, several of the elephants were spooked by the fighting which they had borne the brunt of, and fled the combat. In fleeing, they stomped over a row of Patala forces, killing several Naga and Bandar light infantry. These were ironically their only casualties in the battle.
With our fort only one turn away from being completed, I brought together almost all of our central expansion force (or CEF for short) to defend that province. Given that we had been bringing down a steady stream of additional crossbowmen from the capital, we had a very solid army once everyone was brought together. While the totality of Patala’s armies most likely exceeded ours significantly given our focus on research, the invasion was made up of what we can guess to be their secondary army, whereas the CEF was by far the larger of our two armies and, in addition to Prophet Maximize Efficiency himself, was led by a large number of experienced Black Priests who had already proven the potency of their Iron Darts against the heavy infantry and crossbowmen of the independent forces. The bulk of their army chose to avoid a head on confrontation, and took the less valuable hilly province to their west, and our castle was completed.
Fire, Steel, Magic, Death
The blood hunting in our capital in order to acquire the blood needed to promote Baron Sergio Flores to vampiric immortality caused a spike in the population’s unrest. Unrest reduction occurs naturally from our province defense and the bonus provided by our scales, but increased reduction requires that we have a commander patrol the province. The amount that is reduced scales based on the movement speed of the commander, how many troops he commands, and how fast those troops are, as well as any patrol-specific benefits that the units may have. The fastest commander that we can recruit is our Black Knight Commander - the heavily armored cavalry leader that we’re too resource starved to traditionally rely on. We will put him in command of our Sergio’s groupies, since the thralls aren’t going to be very useful in combat, and have him permanently patrol the streets for signs of unhappiness, poetry, and other antiutilitarian sentiments.
Meanwhile, we don’t have enough blood for a second vampire quite yet, but the critical Construction research which we focused on for our blood detectors has opened up quite a few options for our forges. While not quite as potent at smithing as the Master Smiths which they had killed, because Black Priests all have either advanced Earth magic or an additional magic path, they are adept at making a number of magic items. Between our god and the priests not actively engaged in conquest, we are able to put together quite the arsenal.
While our vampire has some amazing abilities and high combat stats, he is equipped as a spellcaster rather than a fighter, and as a result has no damage mitigation whatsoever and relies on his magical life drain attack, which doesn’t take any advantage of his unholy justly deserved strength. With items, we can fix this. In spite of the lore explicitly stating that Ulm lost the ability to forge black steel, one of our priests can, in fact, forge black steel armor. Another is capable of forging a powerful sword that deals fire damage in an area around it while granting resistance to its wielder (very helpful, given vampires’ natural vulnerability to fire). A third forges a girdle of strength, making him both hit harder and recover from fatigue in combat. Our Illuminati supply a shield that will grant him luck and an amulet that will grant him resistance to magic. Utilitarianism itself crowns him with a Helm of Horror, which in addition to providing physical protection makes all units in close range with him lose morale every turn. Bedecked in the armory and arsenal of our magic-rich nation, Sergio heads south to join the CEF and fight the Patala incursion.
Praise Value's Final Glory
On the western front, we have come across the spread of a rival god’s dominion in the independent provinces. Part of his dominion effect is a heavy ‘misfortune’ scale and a slight ‘death’ scale. Our forces, who are used to the vibrant lands of Utilitarianism’s administration, suffer heavily. The leader of the Western Task Force (the WTF, for short), Praise Value has contracted an incurable disease. He will no longer heal and will lose 10% of his health until he dies. While we originally intended to wait on additional reinforcements from the capital, Praise Value’s impending demise demands action, and so he leads his rangers and infantry into battle while uncertain of its outcome, and the handful of additional priests along with a Second Order mage will simply assume control of the WTF when they catch up with the remnants of his army.
The first fight goes as expected, with minor infantry losses, but at the second province we encounter a cavalry charge which decimates our infantry. Heavy Cavalry use a lance in combat, giving them a large bonus to their first attack. While our rangers are able to finish the cavalry, we are left with only a single pikeman living. With mortality looming, Praise Value sets some of his rangers ahead to stand just behind the pikeneer so that the enemy assault will be paused before they close on the remainder of our crossbows. The tactic works, and we secure a third province, but the rangers do not form nearly as resilient a wall as the heavy infantry did, and the forward line is wiped out. With one last province remaining on the northern side of the river and Praise Value’s life dwindling fast, we take the risk and engage.
The enemy in this province is a tribe of barbarians. These units favor two handed weapons and minimal armor, so they deal a great deal of damage. In addition, they have a ‘berserker’ trait which causes them to go berserk and charge forward after taking some damage. While berserk, they hit even harder and are immune to morale effects. However, they have a number of weaknesses. Their morale is naturally low, so any barbarians that do not go berserk are likely to break and route in combat. Additionally, since they have little armor they will die very quickly. Since our rangers will likely die in one hit once the barbarians close, we eschewed the suicide squad of archers. Instead, we would have Praise Value take up the front line himself.
Praise Value had been blessed with a point in Astral Magic. While not particularly exciting offensively, Astral Magic has some interesting tricks. One of these is a spell that gives the caster Luck, making any attack that would kill them have a 75% chance to miss. With one hit away from death, this essentially makes Praise Value capable of evading most of the attacks he’ll receive. Another spell, called Twist Fate, simply makes the next attack that would hit them miss. This means that it would take on average 8 hits that make it past the attack vs defense check for Praise Value to die. This should let our crossbows get off a number of attacks, and if they get lucky, they’ll be able to take out the leaders or deal enough damage to make the non-berserk barbarians route. I script Praise Value to cast Lucky, then Twist Fate four times. While the effects don't stack, recasting the spell would 'refresh' the twist fate if it got triggered. When he dies, our archers would route, and they could then be led back into the province by the independent commander that I was recruiting in the one we had just finished conquering.
That was the plan, at least. One man proved too thin of a barrier to hold the line by himself, and most of the barbarians simply ran past him. As it turned out, the independents had two Barbarian Chiefs. One of them fell to some lucky shots from our crossbows. The other was injured and enraged. With the barbarians streaming past him and his script concluded, Praise Value began to engage the barbarians closest to him in melee combat while the rangers continued to fire on the barbarians that ran past him. The barbarians soon closed on our archers, and while their ranks had been somewhat thinned, we didn’t have enough rangers to resist them. As the crash of the barbarians hit their line and instantly killed several crossbowmen (as we expected it to) the morale of our rangers gave out, and they fled, leaving Praise Value alone to stand against the horde. Then Praise Value fought his first and final duel. With his aura of luck holding strong, the disease-ridden, nearly dead priest proceeded to kill two barbarians and the enraged chief with his hammer. With their commanders both slain, the remaining barbarians were routed and Praise Value was left the sole soldier left on the field. He claimed the province for Utilitarianism and died of his illness in the land that he alone had conquered. Requiescat in pace.
Marignon - the Source of the Infection
Our scout which had been sent across the river in the winter soon found the reason that several of these independent provinces had an aura of death and disarray - the kingdom of Marignon. Styled loosely on 15th and 16th century spain, Marignon is a feudal theocracy led by powerful fire priests. When Ermor fell, the priesthood turned to blood magic to defend their nation from the undead threat. The devil lords and the fire priests now work together, and demons walk freely among the populace - imp jesters are fashionable and flagellants are well respected. They rely primarily on human infantry, supported by versatile mages and powerful priests. While their infantry and crossbowmen are slightly worse than ours across the board, they have slightly better resistance to magic and their mages are more immediately useful in combat. Fortunately, we are currently far enough ahead on our magical research that we should be stronger than them on all counts.
In spite of being another nation that makes use of blood magic, their scales are profoundly awful - their land is as misfortunate as it could possibly be, their realms ooze death instead of life, and there is even some slight magical drain, making their research less effective. The only possible explanation is that their pretender has some powerful magic, but given their encroaching dominion, leaving them as a living neighbor is unacceptable. As soon as the Patalan incursion is repelled, we will send the bulk of our forces west on the heels of the army already en route. A great crusade is called to avenge Praise Value and rid the source of this misfortune and illness from the land. Marignon may seek blood, but I will drown them in it.
Expansion Continues
When our armies arrived within range of the throne, we saw that it was heavily guarded by a large group of undead. This is fairly normal (well, the large group part is - the undead bit just has to do with the province itself), but unfortunately means that our army wasn’t able to capture it quite yet, which once again means that we had to shift directions for our expansion. This meant that our main group headed down towards the peninsula, where they were supplemented by our battle hardened black priests from the floating island campaign. We took one of our Il-lame-inati with us to build our first additional fortress three spaces away from our capital.
This fortress will let us recruit our rangers and and heavy infantry here once it’s completed, which will take six turns. Only two spaces away from the enemy capital, it will make the perfect staging point for our war against them. In the meantime, our main army will conquer the surrounding areas which will feed their untapped production to the fortress to allow us to build more units. Research into Evocation has advanced steadily thanks to our growing lab nerd conspiracy. We don’t have labs in all of our provinces, but thanks to cherry picking our targets and avoiding significant losses in our expansion forces, we’ve been able to convert most of our income into research. With our Black Priests now functioning as able ranged units, we have a lot of firepower - a very effective doctrine for fighting the primarily infantry mob defensive forces of the independents.
Our capital has not been silent during this time. Since our main expansion party sustained very few losses and was able to supplement its front line with locally recruited basic heavy infantry (not as strong or heavily armored as our national forces, but able to soak up a few hits which is really all we need them to do), we were able to put together a second expansion force large enough to take on the cavalry guarding the wealthy farmland to our west. Our Dominion had been spreading steadily, given the lack of rival gods nearby, so the populace of the province that we assaulted already had begun to respect utilitarian values. This gave a morale bonus to our troops and a penalty to theirs when we captured it, as well as increased the income of the land, rather than needing to wait for it to ramp up after it was conquered.
Our God Arrives, Our Knowledge Grows
On turn 14, Utilitarianism Incarnate awakens from its slumber. Blood begins to flow from the once silent fountain, and a child is possessed to speak with Utilitarianism’s voice and forge with Utilitarianism’s hands. The people of our land rejoiced and celebrated by changing absolutely nothing about their routines because it would be inefficient to take the day off and there’s still so much work to be done.
With construction of our first additional fort in progress, the first vital evocation spell completed, a reasonable amount of researchers tucked away in our core provinces, and two expansion forces already out and about, we are well positioned to transition into the second stage of our strategy - blood magic.
The first step in this transition is research not into blood magic itself (though we will spare some research in that category as well), but into Construction. We will need to research Construction to level four in order to build Sanguine Dowsing Rods. They do exactly what you’d think - they point blood hunters in the right direction for finding blood slaves. Since the majority of our blood hunters have only one point in Blood Magic, they will be limited in the numbers of blood slaves they can find even in our large provinces. The dowsing rods will be a huge boost to our blood slave economy.
The second step is to go about finding the blood slaves for our first vampire. We had a few Second Order illuminati running about looking for magical sites and building labs, and while they’re not the best at it, they can at least help with our search. In our capital, Utilitarianism guides its possessed child to find citizens whose blood is more utile than their lives. As it turns out, there are a lot of them and it takes only two turns before we have sufficient blood slaves to promote a civilian go-getter into a magic wielding, flying, undead go-getter.
Just as our transition got underway, a large number of events occurred on the same turn. Our scout to the east has found another rival, the faction to our south sends out its first attack, our first vampire is recruited, our commanding priest to the west gets sick and goes on a conquest spree in a Breaking Bad style quest to make the most of his life before he dies, our western scout finds a third enemy faction, and we began to churn out magic items.
Pythia and the Search for War
So having travelled more or less all the way to the throne in the north-east corner of the map, I sent our scout south just to see what was going on elsewhere in the world. I discovered that there actually was a faction very close to the throne, but like the nation on the island in the center, they chose to expand away from us. This nation is Pythium, the Serpent Cult. Pythium is one of two factions that split off from a Rome-like state where the living and the undead lived side by side. The soulless undead formed a worker class to supply menial labor, albeit one that needed to be replaced by mages every so often. The thaumaturges then had the clever idea to open a gate to the underworld so that even the weakest of mages could draw out necromantic energy to reanimate the dead. It worked, but it also tore all of their souls out and allowed a legion of ghosts to stream forth and capture the nation’s capital, from which they began to spread throughout the land. Pythium is the living remnants of this civilization and intended to be thematically similar to the Byzantine Empire. They managed to survive the undead horde through a combination of their distance from the capital and the assistance of the snakemen who made up much of the native populace.
The forces of Pythium are diverse thanks to their mixed heritage. The human legionnaires, who wield spears and javelins and specialize at fighting in formation, make up the core of their forces. They are supplemented by serpentine cataphracts and heavy infantry, hydras, and ‘heretic’ mages. The heretics provide a wide variety of magic types that are otherwise unavailable to Pythium’s armies, but steadily lower the dominion of the provinces that they occupy.
With nothing between us in the North and provincial capitals tending to be the same distance apart from each other, we can conclude that another faction is almost certainly going to be at the far eastern edge of the circle (as it turned out, we were right - it was Ermor, the Ashen Empire of the undead. I don’t know if the game put the two together intentionally or if it was just happy happenstance). Since we also know that both Pythium and the first faction that we discovered (which is Patala, as we would learn from their attack on our province) expanded in that direction, those three factions are most likely embroiled in a three way war over the farms and forests in the central-eastern section of the map. A war torn middle east, if you would. We’ll send our scout directly south from his current location, where he’ll be able to cross the thin central ocean on the island-bridge, just to keep an eye on this war and see how it develops.
The Patalan Incursion Begins
The nation to our south, as it turns out, is Patala. Based on Hindu mythology, it is comprised primarily of four types of primates: Markati, Vanara, Atavi, and Bandar. Each of the four races supplies their own types of units and commanders, and they are united by the sacred naga - a race of amphibious snake people from the underworld. The Bandar are the largest and most intelligent of the four races, and appear as fully bipedal gorillas. They wear the heaviest armor, have trained war elephants, and supply their faction’s most powerful mages, the Gurus.
The army that attacks us is primarily the Naga themselves. Though these are capital-exclusive units, since the attack comes from their capital directly, there is no difficulty in logistics in gathering this force. They are supported primarily by Bandar, with a small number of war elephants, a large group of stone throwing light infantry, and a backline contingent of gurus. Since our expansion force had taken the lightly defended neutral province between their capital and our fort-to-be early, it was defended only by the local province defense.
Province defence is something which can be purchased in any province under our control. It costs gold equal to the level of province defense that you want it raised to (so raising it from 0-10 costs a total of 55 gold and 10-20 costs 155). Each level of provincial defense adds defenders whose quality increases as the provincial defense rises. Every 10 levels also reduces unrest (a fact that we had already taken advantage of in our home regions - we increased the defense of some of our home provinces so that we had armed soldiers on hand to ‘accommodate’ the complaints of those whose families had utile blood).
During the battle, the elephants charged our position and quickly overran our infantry, taking mere scratches from the spears and arrows of our small defensive force. Fortunately for us, several of the elephants were spooked by the fighting which they had borne the brunt of, and fled the combat. In fleeing, they stomped over a row of Patala forces, killing several Naga and Bandar light infantry. These were ironically their only casualties in the battle.
With our fort only one turn away from being completed, I brought together almost all of our central expansion force (or CEF for short) to defend that province. Given that we had been bringing down a steady stream of additional crossbowmen from the capital, we had a very solid army once everyone was brought together. While the totality of Patala’s armies most likely exceeded ours significantly given our focus on research, the invasion was made up of what we can guess to be their secondary army, whereas the CEF was by far the larger of our two armies and, in addition to Prophet Maximize Efficiency himself, was led by a large number of experienced Black Priests who had already proven the potency of their Iron Darts against the heavy infantry and crossbowmen of the independent forces. The bulk of their army chose to avoid a head on confrontation, and took the less valuable hilly province to their west, and our castle was completed.
Fire, Steel, Magic, Death
The blood hunting in our capital in order to acquire the blood needed to promote Baron Sergio Flores to vampiric immortality caused a spike in the population’s unrest. Unrest reduction occurs naturally from our province defense and the bonus provided by our scales, but increased reduction requires that we have a commander patrol the province. The amount that is reduced scales based on the movement speed of the commander, how many troops he commands, and how fast those troops are, as well as any patrol-specific benefits that the units may have. The fastest commander that we can recruit is our Black Knight Commander - the heavily armored cavalry leader that we’re too resource starved to traditionally rely on. We will put him in command of our Sergio’s groupies, since the thralls aren’t going to be very useful in combat, and have him permanently patrol the streets for signs of unhappiness, poetry, and other antiutilitarian sentiments.
Meanwhile, we don’t have enough blood for a second vampire quite yet, but the critical Construction research which we focused on for our blood detectors has opened up quite a few options for our forges. While not quite as potent at smithing as the Master Smiths which they had killed, because Black Priests all have either advanced Earth magic or an additional magic path, they are adept at making a number of magic items. Between our god and the priests not actively engaged in conquest, we are able to put together quite the arsenal.
While our vampire has some amazing abilities and high combat stats, he is equipped as a spellcaster rather than a fighter, and as a result has no damage mitigation whatsoever and relies on his magical life drain attack, which doesn’t take any advantage of his unholy justly deserved strength. With items, we can fix this. In spite of the lore explicitly stating that Ulm lost the ability to forge black steel, one of our priests can, in fact, forge black steel armor. Another is capable of forging a powerful sword that deals fire damage in an area around it while granting resistance to its wielder (very helpful, given vampires’ natural vulnerability to fire). A third forges a girdle of strength, making him both hit harder and recover from fatigue in combat. Our Illuminati supply a shield that will grant him luck and an amulet that will grant him resistance to magic. Utilitarianism itself crowns him with a Helm of Horror, which in addition to providing physical protection makes all units in close range with him lose morale every turn. Bedecked in the armory and arsenal of our magic-rich nation, Sergio heads south to join the CEF and fight the Patala incursion.
Praise Value's Final Glory
On the western front, we have come across the spread of a rival god’s dominion in the independent provinces. Part of his dominion effect is a heavy ‘misfortune’ scale and a slight ‘death’ scale. Our forces, who are used to the vibrant lands of Utilitarianism’s administration, suffer heavily. The leader of the Western Task Force (the WTF, for short), Praise Value has contracted an incurable disease. He will no longer heal and will lose 10% of his health until he dies. While we originally intended to wait on additional reinforcements from the capital, Praise Value’s impending demise demands action, and so he leads his rangers and infantry into battle while uncertain of its outcome, and the handful of additional priests along with a Second Order mage will simply assume control of the WTF when they catch up with the remnants of his army.
The first fight goes as expected, with minor infantry losses, but at the second province we encounter a cavalry charge which decimates our infantry. Heavy Cavalry use a lance in combat, giving them a large bonus to their first attack. While our rangers are able to finish the cavalry, we are left with only a single pikeman living. With mortality looming, Praise Value sets some of his rangers ahead to stand just behind the pikeneer so that the enemy assault will be paused before they close on the remainder of our crossbows. The tactic works, and we secure a third province, but the rangers do not form nearly as resilient a wall as the heavy infantry did, and the forward line is wiped out. With one last province remaining on the northern side of the river and Praise Value’s life dwindling fast, we take the risk and engage.
The enemy in this province is a tribe of barbarians. These units favor two handed weapons and minimal armor, so they deal a great deal of damage. In addition, they have a ‘berserker’ trait which causes them to go berserk and charge forward after taking some damage. While berserk, they hit even harder and are immune to morale effects. However, they have a number of weaknesses. Their morale is naturally low, so any barbarians that do not go berserk are likely to break and route in combat. Additionally, since they have little armor they will die very quickly. Since our rangers will likely die in one hit once the barbarians close, we eschewed the suicide squad of archers. Instead, we would have Praise Value take up the front line himself.
Praise Value had been blessed with a point in Astral Magic. While not particularly exciting offensively, Astral Magic has some interesting tricks. One of these is a spell that gives the caster Luck, making any attack that would kill them have a 75% chance to miss. With one hit away from death, this essentially makes Praise Value capable of evading most of the attacks he’ll receive. Another spell, called Twist Fate, simply makes the next attack that would hit them miss. This means that it would take on average 8 hits that make it past the attack vs defense check for Praise Value to die. This should let our crossbows get off a number of attacks, and if they get lucky, they’ll be able to take out the leaders or deal enough damage to make the non-berserk barbarians route. I script Praise Value to cast Lucky, then Twist Fate four times. While the effects don't stack, recasting the spell would 'refresh' the twist fate if it got triggered. When he dies, our archers would route, and they could then be led back into the province by the independent commander that I was recruiting in the one we had just finished conquering.
That was the plan, at least. One man proved too thin of a barrier to hold the line by himself, and most of the barbarians simply ran past him. As it turned out, the independents had two Barbarian Chiefs. One of them fell to some lucky shots from our crossbows. The other was injured and enraged. With the barbarians streaming past him and his script concluded, Praise Value began to engage the barbarians closest to him in melee combat while the rangers continued to fire on the barbarians that ran past him. The barbarians soon closed on our archers, and while their ranks had been somewhat thinned, we didn’t have enough rangers to resist them. As the crash of the barbarians hit their line and instantly killed several crossbowmen (as we expected it to) the morale of our rangers gave out, and they fled, leaving Praise Value alone to stand against the horde. Then Praise Value fought his first and final duel. With his aura of luck holding strong, the disease-ridden, nearly dead priest proceeded to kill two barbarians and the enraged chief with his hammer. With their commanders both slain, the remaining barbarians were routed and Praise Value was left the sole soldier left on the field. He claimed the province for Utilitarianism and died of his illness in the land that he alone had conquered. Requiescat in pace.
Marignon - the Source of the Infection
Our scout which had been sent across the river in the winter soon found the reason that several of these independent provinces had an aura of death and disarray - the kingdom of Marignon. Styled loosely on 15th and 16th century spain, Marignon is a feudal theocracy led by powerful fire priests. When Ermor fell, the priesthood turned to blood magic to defend their nation from the undead threat. The devil lords and the fire priests now work together, and demons walk freely among the populace - imp jesters are fashionable and flagellants are well respected. They rely primarily on human infantry, supported by versatile mages and powerful priests. While their infantry and crossbowmen are slightly worse than ours across the board, they have slightly better resistance to magic and their mages are more immediately useful in combat. Fortunately, we are currently far enough ahead on our magical research that we should be stronger than them on all counts.
In spite of being another nation that makes use of blood magic, their scales are profoundly awful - their land is as misfortunate as it could possibly be, their realms ooze death instead of life, and there is even some slight magical drain, making their research less effective. The only possible explanation is that their pretender has some powerful magic, but given their encroaching dominion, leaving them as a living neighbor is unacceptable. As soon as the Patalan incursion is repelled, we will send the bulk of our forces west on the heels of the army already en route. A great crusade is called to avenge Praise Value and rid the source of this misfortune and illness from the land. Marignon may seek blood, but I will drown them in it.
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