Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism

Patala is Repelled

With the construction of our fortress complete, the center of the peninsula is secure. To conquer the province, Patala would need to first defeat the provincial defense (incurring some minor attrition), then lay siege to the fortress. Our units garrisoned within can choose to try to break the siege at any time if there is a commander within, which they can either do right away if we feel that we can win with the forces that we have, or wait until additional reinforcements have arrived. If we feel that we need a larger advantage, we can wait until the enemy breaks down the gate. This takes several turns - the exact amount of time varies based on the number of attacking forces vs the number of defending forces. Certain units have bonuses for this as well. Once the gates are breached, we can then fight behind our towers, which fire arrows at the enemy. In other words, it is safe to leave the fortress with only a few units as a token garrison since they will not be able to capture it right away. During the siege, we will not be able to recruit additional units from the fortress, so it is certainly not ideal, but the province is far better secured than it was before the construction was completed.

With the core province secure and the massive CEF assembled - with additional reinforcements able to be built locally - we engage the Patalan army. It is here that Sergio first proves his worth. While he is a potent spellcaster (and this facet alone would have been enough to make him worth his blood), his partial invulnerability to physical damage combined with his now very heavy armor, makes him nearly untouchable by all of their non armor piercing weaponry. The only units that they have that ignore armor are their trampling elephants and chariots. We can expect these to charge forward ahead of their army, so Sergio should be able to fly right over them to kill their Gurus. Though the mages would ordinarily be their army's biggest threat, we can be confident that Sergio will be able to kill them before they can kill him. There are two reasons to think we will succeed - first, it is still quite early in the game and Patala is unlikely to have access to the more dangerous magic already. The second is that Sergio is equipped with an amulet that increases his already naturally high magic resistance.

While the bulk of our army adopts the tried and true formation of the shield wall backed by large double-lines of archers and black priests, Sergio is positioned in between the infantry and the archers at first. We then script him to summon undead for two turns, then attack the furthest enemy (which we are expecting to be the Gurus). The undead summoning spell is a fairly minor spell, given that we have put only a few research points into enchantment so far, but it will provide a few extra bodies for our front line and more importantly keep Sergio out of harm's way while the bulk of their forces charge forward.

The main battle goes more or less as expected - the elephants and chariots charge forward, get absolutely swamped by arrows, and only manage to run over a few of our infantry before breaking, damaging their own units as they flee. The armored naga soldiers, who have the ‘sacred’ special ability, are blessed by the priests that they had brought with them, giving them a boost to their morale and additional bonuses based on their pretender’s magic. As it turns out, their pretender had advanced water and earth magic, giving them a large defensive boost and allowing them to recover some of their fatigue. These soldiers survive the hail of crossbow bolts - mundane and magic alike - far better than the initial chargers, and a sustained engagement breaks out between our infantry and theirs while our ranged units continue raining down steel over them. With our soldiers only being hit by the melee units at the front of their formation and with the bulk of our damage coming from our crossbows and spells that were all able to fire at once, we quickly gained the advantage.

It took me a little while to notice this, but one of the major reasons that so few of our infantry were dying was that their ranged units, the Bandar light infantry, were not firing on our infantry at all. Unlike the Naga which had to march all the way across the field to engage, they had only a little ways to go before they were in range of our infantry. They only ever managed to loose one volley of stones before turning around, and once I noticed this I immediately discovered why - when Sergio had leaped onto their mages, they had turned around to fight him instead.

I had expected Sergio to be able to kill or at least occupy their mages, and in this he did not disappoint. With his sword Firebrand capable of dealing damage in an area of effect where he attacked, he killed the first guru and the handful of bandar guards at the same time. He then not so much as ran but simply appeared by the second guru, whose guards had started to run towards him, and assassinated the second mage as well. Due to his orders to hit the rearmost units, he then turned on the cavalry that were trying to flee and killed them as well. The rearmost units were then the bandar honor guard - promptly slain. With their final guru seemingly set on firing vine arrows which could not even hit, much less damage, the highly mobile baron, and with their brahmas’ holy magic far too weak to have a chance of banishing Sergio through his heightened magic resistance, they had no effect on the remainder of the battle while Sergio engaged their sizable contingent of light infantry, which had been pursuing him this whole time. He proceeded to kill everyone. The bandar soldiers were incapable of damaging him enough to get past his regeneration, and while the naga fought the rest of our army, the apes were slaughtered by Sergio himself. Many of them fled from the combination of the demoralizing combat and the fearsome aura exuded from his magic helmet, but Sergio’s orders made him prioritize the fleeing enemies, and he hunted them down until the whole of the army broke and the fleeing mob of naga and bandar was too numerous for him to manage to eliminate before they escaped.

Not only had we shattered their army, but Sergio’s performance had caused them to suffer staggering casualties. The province of the Red Peaks was reclaimed, and the first army that Patala sent against us was almost entirely wiped out.

Logistics and Organization

Throughout our provinces, Second Order blood mages with dousing rods were being recruited and set to work as well as our finances allowed, but the bulk of our blood slaves continued to be recruited from the capital, where Utilitarianism’s incredibly efficient blood magic detection made it capable of finding blood slaves every turn that it searched, barring the chance of failure caused by unrest (a chance which was being helpfully reduced thanks to the tireless patrolling of the good knight Maintain Worth)

The final province that Praise Value captured controlled a choke point where the edge of the river met the great tree at the northwestern edge of the map. The reassembled WTF begins to construct our third fortress while the Black Priests at the helm focus on removing Marignon’s vile dominion. Given that the drain effect from their dominion limits our research and severely impacts our income, we need to build temples and have our priests preach the glory of our god to the people. Fortunately for us, the Black Priests have a special ability called ‘Inquisitor,’ which means that their Holy level counts as double when working to lower an enemy’s dominion from our provinces rather than raise our own. The icon shows a pair of pliers with red on the end, so we can assume this to mean that our friendly priests have inquisitive minds and are quick to use science to discover the flaws in the dogma of our rivals.

While the WTF convokes its conscripts, continues its construction, and conducts its congregations, the CEF has achieved its historic victory over Patala and splits into three forces. The weakest force is intended to continue the expansion for which the force had been named. This group, led by our prophet Maximize Utility, a handful of black priests, and a Second Order bloodmage, intends to capture the marsh to our east and cross the bridge to investigate the strength of the independents there. They will move slowly, taking their time to search for any magic sites while Maximize Utility spreads our dominion, and take any provinces that we can expect to be easily captured by the relatively small group.

The second group, led by Baron Sergio Flores, will recapture the province to our south which Patala had used as a beach head and, once sufficient forces had been assembled from our castle, make the crossing to Patala’s island and besiege their capital. We will send some scouts to the island now, but should expect this force to mostly be defensive, since an assault on their capital without a solid chance of victory would be very costly, whereas defending allows us to keep our small group of infantry in reserve and use the units produced by our Province Defense as chaff while our spellcasters (whose power is ever growing as our research continues to accelerate) and rangers (of which the CEF had over a hundred) deal the damage. While waiting for sufficient power to invade the island, this group will search the peninsula for magic sites as well.

The third group was dispatched west, toting a little more than half of the CEF’s rangers and almost all of its infantry. There was only one province of independents between us and Marignol’s lands to the west, and we already had provinces bordering each other which were divided by the river running throughout the northern half of the map. While this provides an effective barrier for now that prevents us from needing to fortify the lands that Praise Value had conquered, come winter the rivers would be frozen and armies will be able to cross, meaning that our war would be fought with wide open borders rather than through narrow choke points which are easier to micromanage and help provide a clear understanding of whether or not our armies are stronger than theirs or if reinforcements are needed. With the clock of the seasons ticking, the Marignol Blood Crusade began.