RE: Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism
11-25-2014, 11:30 PM
East by Southeast
When we completed sufficient research in Construction to produce our dousing rods, we will put a little bit of our research in each school of magic, but focus primarily on Blood Magic itself. Lower levels in each school require fewer research points to acquire, and given that we have so many researchers we will be able to acquire a broad pool of spells. However Blood Magic will take fully half of our research in order for it to advance the most quickly. This will give us the ability to start summoning demons, as well as let our blood magic practitioners cast additional spells in combat.
Blood magic opens up a few very useful utility spells for a communion based line of mages, but we aren’t quite ready to rely on communion casters. While our research into Evocation gave us some minor offense spells that allow our Illuminati researchers to defend themselves from unforeseen incursions, until we invest heavily into Thaumaturgy our Second Order mages will not have access to spells that would take advantage of their increased power and divided casting fatigue. For now this means that those that we promote to vampires will be our primary blood mages as well. If given an item to enhance their blood magic and another to enhance their death magic (both readily available from Utilitarianism), they can promote additional vampires themselves, allowing Utilitarianism to focus on research and item creation.
This recursive vampire promotion is of course not without its costs - it will require massive amounts of blood, which we will not be able to acquire from our capital alone. Fortunately, each laboratory that we built increased the rate of our blood slave acquisition (since blood hunting is more valuable when spread among different provinces) in addition to the delta of our research graph (because each lab will continue to produce Illuminati which each add to our research, barring some being used for scouting). However, with expansion stalled to our south and west and with the need for additional troops to reinforce our two front war, we have already hit the limit that our income can support. Given that we still have independent provinces to our east, it is time to open yet another front of expansion.
Though we will leave our second promoted vampire (Meritocrus Meritocrat the Vampire Count) in charge of giving out duly earned immortality, our third will be sent east to claim additional provinces in the pursuit of additional gold. Sergey Stepanov is equipped in a manner similar to Sergio Flores. The army that deterred our initial foray to the east may have been large and we can expect it to feature necromancers behind the skeletal horde, but the undead cannot fight without their commanders. By employing a tactic similar to the one which had proven so effective against Patala, Sergey was able to destroy their necromancers and therefore route their force before the conventional army which he is bringing with him suffered any significant casualties.
With the once well warded province secured, Sergey advanced eastward rapidly, following the northern curve of the map until we reached a province called the Mountains of Madness. With only two entrances, both of which are narrow passes, passage into or out of the province is available only seasonally - which was not a fact that we were aware of at the time. As soon as we took the province, the pass closed, trapping our army, with the exception of Sergey, who is capable of flight. Though he may be able to capture a lightly defended province by himself, we invested quite a bit into his equipment and don’t want to risk him if we don’t have to. Given that he is capable of stealth as well, we will use him to scout the independent provinces and attack only if there are few defenders. We will recruit an independent commander in the mountains and entrust Sergey’s retinue to him until they are able to catch up. For now, however, progress will be slowed on the northeastern front.
The Marignol Blood Crusade
When the Maginol Blood Crusade moved to capture the independent province between us, the forces of Marignon did as well. The way that fights work when multiple factions are fighting in the same place is that the system randomizes the order and then adjudicates the fights one at a time, with each subsequent force always fighting the winners, who then become the ‘defending’ side. In this case, our army fought the independents first, which fortunately did not cost us a single unit. With more holy darts and crossbow bolts being fired each round than the independents had soldiers, they managed to do little more than wound a few of our infantry.
Dominions tracks wounds for each soldier by marking them with ‘afflictions.’ Afflictions vary from the comparatively minor, such as ‘battle fright’ (a common affliction for routed soldiers) which merely lowers their morale, to serious debilitations such as missing an arm (which would prevent a crossbowman from firing altogether, since their weapon requires two hands) to being lame (which is, in fact, very lame for any unit that you want to get somewhere other than where he begins the battle). While we could go about setting up some sort of veteran’s retirement home for our injured troops, some of them can continue to fight in spite of their injuries and those that cannot can still compete in the crusade’s olympic javelin catching event, found at the front line of every engagement. We are sure that they will understand the importance of their contributions.
Following our capture of the province, we fought Marignon’s forces directly for the first time. We had very similar setups, with lines of infantry supported by crossbowmen. Our melee met in the middle and clashed while our crossbows fired into the opposing mobs. Their mages enhanced their troops’ morale and then shot jets of fire, while ours provided the same benefit and then fired swarms of magic darts.
In spite of the similarities between our compositions, we quickly gained the advantage. First of all, we simply had more black priests than they had inquisitorial ones. This gave us a solid advantage in firepower, which was fortunate since our troops do not resist magic very well. Secondly, while their units were more resistant to magic, ours proved superior in the physical contest. The people of Ulm are larger and stronger than those of Marignon, and similar in skill (save for Marignon’s elite palace guards, of which they had only a few). This meant that had our equipment been similar, they would already have something of an advantage. This advantage was exacerbated by the superiority of our equipment for the situation. Marignon’s troops wielded primarily two handed weapons, which are excellent at cutting down mages or lightly armored troops, while ours used shields and morningstars, making them better at resisting enemy attacks and crushing through enemy armor. Finally, the weapons of our rangers are armor piercing, whereas those of their crossbowmen were not, allowing our troops to absorb their damage more readily while our bolts punctured through their platemail with ease. While we did lose a significant number of infantry compared to our battles against the independent provinces, their army was crushed.
We took another province which was barely defended on the following turn, pushing another province to the west and towards their capital. Meanwhile, the remnants of the WTF led by the independent commander captured the practically abandoned Great Tree province from Marignon with similarly minimal resistance. Our scouts reconnoitered a Marignon contingent heading north from their fortress one province to the south, prompting us to cede this province without a fight in order to defend the province in which our fortress was being built and to combine the small strike team with the forces brought by the priests, who had been busy conducting their inquiries. Marignon pressed the attack in spite of the now bolstered forces and the fact that our side benefited from province defense. With local units bolstering our front line, our combined forces outnumbered Marignon’s, making the battle a very neat and nearly lossless affair for our side.
Scouting and Skullduggery
While this was occurring, our scouts had been penetrating deep into their territory, where we were able to make a few discoveries. Marignon had built a fort over a somewhat poor province just south of the great tree, as our army had seen when it took over that province. It was not a terrible location for providing support to that choke point, but the true reason for the fort to be constructed there would not be discovered until one of our scouts entered the province. The land there housed a demonic gate, which any blood mage could use without sacrifice to bind shadow demons to their cause. Shadow demons are stronger than most human units, but not exceptionally powerful like some of the demons conjured by advanced blood magic, but they are capable of stealth and flying over multiple provinces, making them capable of hitting poorly defended areas behind the front lines, which can be very annoying to fight against. So far, they have not been included in any of Marignon’s conventional armies, which is far more worrying than if we knew where they were.
We were able to get yet more information from their nation’s capital. Illuminati have a special trait called ‘Spy’ which lets them read the ‘score graphs’ of an enemy faction if they are capable of hiding inside of its capital. These graphs give a lot of information - how many provinces they have, how many units they have, how much research they have, and so on. The axes are unlabelled, making getting exact numbers difficult for all but the ‘forts’ graph, but they’re very helpful for figuring out roughly how powerful your rivals are when much of that power is measured in things you might not yet know about, like research and provinces that you haven’t seen yet. Leaving a spy in place to keep access to this information is a risky affair, as there is a chance of them being discovered and killed every turn, but we can at the very least take the risk for a turn to discover how Marignon has expanded.
Our spy produced a very interesting result in their army graph - Marignon suffered a sharp dip on one of the early turns of expansion. This means that they must have lost one of their expansion forces to either independents or an early clash with a rival to their south. This must have stunted their expansion, a fact which is also visible on their provinces graph which grew much more slowly than ours (and ours shouldn’t have been too exciting either, given the emphasis we placed on laboratories and research). We can conclude that Marignon is not only a sick and twisted place, but one that is inefficiently managed as well. We will be doing its people a great favor when we slay their god, a Teotl of Death, and convert them to Utilitarianism.
The Hoburg Holdfast
Maximize Utility, meanwhile, had taken his smaller portion of troops eastward. After taking the poorly defended and little populated swamp (its income is 20 gold per turn, the cost of one infantry unit), we discovered that the province beyond was held by the Hoburg. Hoburg are an independent race in Dominions, which means that they can only be recruited in natively Hoburg provinces or (rarely) hired as mercenaries. They are basically the game’s representation of Hobbits. Here is an example of the description of one of their units -
Their front line was a mix of the pikemen mentioned previously and Burgmeister Guards. While the hoburg don’t hit very hard, they hit very quickly and dodge very well. The guards in particular have incredibly high attack and defense scores, meaning that they won virtually every exchange across the line. While our rangers were excellent at damaging heavily armored targets, the armor piercing bolts aren’t particularly useful when they can’t hit their targets. The fought savagely, cutting up the infantry which had in the same turn proven their superiority to that of Marignon, and their crossbows proved to be almost as deadly as ours and far more likely to hit. Even the assistance of holy magic to improve our front line’s morale didn’t help them defeat the far quicker Hoburg, and soon our shield wall was breached. The little monstrosities surged through the broken line and tore apart our prophet in a flurry of tiny blades, scattering the surviving rangers. Our prophet was dead and expansion across the bridge was brought to a halt. We would need a large force of spellcasters to murder this midget menace help the misguided Hoburg maximize their efficacy.
When we completed sufficient research in Construction to produce our dousing rods, we will put a little bit of our research in each school of magic, but focus primarily on Blood Magic itself. Lower levels in each school require fewer research points to acquire, and given that we have so many researchers we will be able to acquire a broad pool of spells. However Blood Magic will take fully half of our research in order for it to advance the most quickly. This will give us the ability to start summoning demons, as well as let our blood magic practitioners cast additional spells in combat.
Blood magic opens up a few very useful utility spells for a communion based line of mages, but we aren’t quite ready to rely on communion casters. While our research into Evocation gave us some minor offense spells that allow our Illuminati researchers to defend themselves from unforeseen incursions, until we invest heavily into Thaumaturgy our Second Order mages will not have access to spells that would take advantage of their increased power and divided casting fatigue. For now this means that those that we promote to vampires will be our primary blood mages as well. If given an item to enhance their blood magic and another to enhance their death magic (both readily available from Utilitarianism), they can promote additional vampires themselves, allowing Utilitarianism to focus on research and item creation.
This recursive vampire promotion is of course not without its costs - it will require massive amounts of blood, which we will not be able to acquire from our capital alone. Fortunately, each laboratory that we built increased the rate of our blood slave acquisition (since blood hunting is more valuable when spread among different provinces) in addition to the delta of our research graph (because each lab will continue to produce Illuminati which each add to our research, barring some being used for scouting). However, with expansion stalled to our south and west and with the need for additional troops to reinforce our two front war, we have already hit the limit that our income can support. Given that we still have independent provinces to our east, it is time to open yet another front of expansion.
Though we will leave our second promoted vampire (Meritocrus Meritocrat the Vampire Count) in charge of giving out duly earned immortality, our third will be sent east to claim additional provinces in the pursuit of additional gold. Sergey Stepanov is equipped in a manner similar to Sergio Flores. The army that deterred our initial foray to the east may have been large and we can expect it to feature necromancers behind the skeletal horde, but the undead cannot fight without their commanders. By employing a tactic similar to the one which had proven so effective against Patala, Sergey was able to destroy their necromancers and therefore route their force before the conventional army which he is bringing with him suffered any significant casualties.
With the once well warded province secured, Sergey advanced eastward rapidly, following the northern curve of the map until we reached a province called the Mountains of Madness. With only two entrances, both of which are narrow passes, passage into or out of the province is available only seasonally - which was not a fact that we were aware of at the time. As soon as we took the province, the pass closed, trapping our army, with the exception of Sergey, who is capable of flight. Though he may be able to capture a lightly defended province by himself, we invested quite a bit into his equipment and don’t want to risk him if we don’t have to. Given that he is capable of stealth as well, we will use him to scout the independent provinces and attack only if there are few defenders. We will recruit an independent commander in the mountains and entrust Sergey’s retinue to him until they are able to catch up. For now, however, progress will be slowed on the northeastern front.
The Marignol Blood Crusade
When the Maginol Blood Crusade moved to capture the independent province between us, the forces of Marignon did as well. The way that fights work when multiple factions are fighting in the same place is that the system randomizes the order and then adjudicates the fights one at a time, with each subsequent force always fighting the winners, who then become the ‘defending’ side. In this case, our army fought the independents first, which fortunately did not cost us a single unit. With more holy darts and crossbow bolts being fired each round than the independents had soldiers, they managed to do little more than wound a few of our infantry.
Dominions tracks wounds for each soldier by marking them with ‘afflictions.’ Afflictions vary from the comparatively minor, such as ‘battle fright’ (a common affliction for routed soldiers) which merely lowers their morale, to serious debilitations such as missing an arm (which would prevent a crossbowman from firing altogether, since their weapon requires two hands) to being lame (which is, in fact, very lame for any unit that you want to get somewhere other than where he begins the battle). While we could go about setting up some sort of veteran’s retirement home for our injured troops, some of them can continue to fight in spite of their injuries and those that cannot can still compete in the crusade’s olympic javelin catching event, found at the front line of every engagement. We are sure that they will understand the importance of their contributions.
Following our capture of the province, we fought Marignon’s forces directly for the first time. We had very similar setups, with lines of infantry supported by crossbowmen. Our melee met in the middle and clashed while our crossbows fired into the opposing mobs. Their mages enhanced their troops’ morale and then shot jets of fire, while ours provided the same benefit and then fired swarms of magic darts.
In spite of the similarities between our compositions, we quickly gained the advantage. First of all, we simply had more black priests than they had inquisitorial ones. This gave us a solid advantage in firepower, which was fortunate since our troops do not resist magic very well. Secondly, while their units were more resistant to magic, ours proved superior in the physical contest. The people of Ulm are larger and stronger than those of Marignon, and similar in skill (save for Marignon’s elite palace guards, of which they had only a few). This meant that had our equipment been similar, they would already have something of an advantage. This advantage was exacerbated by the superiority of our equipment for the situation. Marignon’s troops wielded primarily two handed weapons, which are excellent at cutting down mages or lightly armored troops, while ours used shields and morningstars, making them better at resisting enemy attacks and crushing through enemy armor. Finally, the weapons of our rangers are armor piercing, whereas those of their crossbowmen were not, allowing our troops to absorb their damage more readily while our bolts punctured through their platemail with ease. While we did lose a significant number of infantry compared to our battles against the independent provinces, their army was crushed.
We took another province which was barely defended on the following turn, pushing another province to the west and towards their capital. Meanwhile, the remnants of the WTF led by the independent commander captured the practically abandoned Great Tree province from Marignon with similarly minimal resistance. Our scouts reconnoitered a Marignon contingent heading north from their fortress one province to the south, prompting us to cede this province without a fight in order to defend the province in which our fortress was being built and to combine the small strike team with the forces brought by the priests, who had been busy conducting their inquiries. Marignon pressed the attack in spite of the now bolstered forces and the fact that our side benefited from province defense. With local units bolstering our front line, our combined forces outnumbered Marignon’s, making the battle a very neat and nearly lossless affair for our side.
Scouting and Skullduggery
While this was occurring, our scouts had been penetrating deep into their territory, where we were able to make a few discoveries. Marignon had built a fort over a somewhat poor province just south of the great tree, as our army had seen when it took over that province. It was not a terrible location for providing support to that choke point, but the true reason for the fort to be constructed there would not be discovered until one of our scouts entered the province. The land there housed a demonic gate, which any blood mage could use without sacrifice to bind shadow demons to their cause. Shadow demons are stronger than most human units, but not exceptionally powerful like some of the demons conjured by advanced blood magic, but they are capable of stealth and flying over multiple provinces, making them capable of hitting poorly defended areas behind the front lines, which can be very annoying to fight against. So far, they have not been included in any of Marignon’s conventional armies, which is far more worrying than if we knew where they were.
We were able to get yet more information from their nation’s capital. Illuminati have a special trait called ‘Spy’ which lets them read the ‘score graphs’ of an enemy faction if they are capable of hiding inside of its capital. These graphs give a lot of information - how many provinces they have, how many units they have, how much research they have, and so on. The axes are unlabelled, making getting exact numbers difficult for all but the ‘forts’ graph, but they’re very helpful for figuring out roughly how powerful your rivals are when much of that power is measured in things you might not yet know about, like research and provinces that you haven’t seen yet. Leaving a spy in place to keep access to this information is a risky affair, as there is a chance of them being discovered and killed every turn, but we can at the very least take the risk for a turn to discover how Marignon has expanded.
Our spy produced a very interesting result in their army graph - Marignon suffered a sharp dip on one of the early turns of expansion. This means that they must have lost one of their expansion forces to either independents or an early clash with a rival to their south. This must have stunted their expansion, a fact which is also visible on their provinces graph which grew much more slowly than ours (and ours shouldn’t have been too exciting either, given the emphasis we placed on laboratories and research). We can conclude that Marignon is not only a sick and twisted place, but one that is inefficiently managed as well. We will be doing its people a great favor when we slay their god, a Teotl of Death, and convert them to Utilitarianism.
The Hoburg Holdfast
Maximize Utility, meanwhile, had taken his smaller portion of troops eastward. After taking the poorly defended and little populated swamp (its income is 20 gold per turn, the cost of one infantry unit), we discovered that the province beyond was held by the Hoburg. Hoburg are an independent race in Dominions, which means that they can only be recruited in natively Hoburg provinces or (rarely) hired as mercenaries. They are basically the game’s representation of Hobbits. Here is an example of the description of one of their units -
Quote:These hoburgs warriors have received proper training with the pike. However, they are still small and weak, which is a problem for all hoburg combatants.And here is one of their commander -
Quote:The Burgmeister is a prominent farmer elected to lead a Hoburg council. Burgmeisters are not particularly good at things military, but they eat a lot and inspire their friends with their merry laughter.In other words, they do not appear to be very fearsome. The province was defended by roughly as many troops as Maximize Utility commanded, but I figured that given their incredibly low strength and health, that it would be an easy fight. It was a slaughter.
Their front line was a mix of the pikemen mentioned previously and Burgmeister Guards. While the hoburg don’t hit very hard, they hit very quickly and dodge very well. The guards in particular have incredibly high attack and defense scores, meaning that they won virtually every exchange across the line. While our rangers were excellent at damaging heavily armored targets, the armor piercing bolts aren’t particularly useful when they can’t hit their targets. The fought savagely, cutting up the infantry which had in the same turn proven their superiority to that of Marignon, and their crossbows proved to be almost as deadly as ours and far more likely to hit. Even the assistance of holy magic to improve our front line’s morale didn’t help them defeat the far quicker Hoburg, and soon our shield wall was breached. The little monstrosities surged through the broken line and tore apart our prophet in a flurry of tiny blades, scattering the surviving rangers. Our prophet was dead and expansion across the bridge was brought to a halt. We would need a large force of spellcasters to murder this midget menace help the misguided Hoburg maximize their efficacy.
![[Image: WFQLHMB.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/WFQLHMB.gif)