RE: Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism
12-09-2014, 02:06 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2014, 02:18 AM by Sai.)
I recently started researching Marignon, which gave me something to write about. While it veers off from just the gameplay, it was fun to compile my thoughts this way.
Demons from Hell! and Other Trivialities
As the Marignon Blood Crusade reached our enemy’s heartland, the small contingents produced from our foe’s two fortresses had been stiffened with the shadow demons that we had thus far managed to avoid encountering. Encountering them revealed a few interesting things about our army composition.
First of all, the fact that we rely on a slow, heavy front line with a preponderance of ranged damage meant that our battles actually tended to last for a fairly long time. This meant that once a unit was poisoned, they would almost certainly die as the damage over time wore down their health even if they did not take damage from any other source. Fortunately, since our army was quite large to begin with compared to the armies that Marignon could muster with a single turn of production, losses otherwise were quite low, and since our Black Priests were huddled in the middle of our formation of rangers, we didn’t lose any commanders when the fiends dove onto our back line - losses were limited to one or two rangers per fiend that Marignon fielded, and the odd infantry unit lost to the rest of their army. Independent infantry, which were not quite as physically large or well armored as the men of Ulm, were placed at the front of our formation to mitigate the loss of troops which would require a fortress to produce.
Secondly, black priests are very good at killing demons. On the rare occasions when Marignon featured demons summoned by blood magic to supplement their freely recruited fiends, the area of effect Banishment spell which the priests could cast simply murdered them. The fact that our priests were capable of doing damage to regular opponents meant that we had far more of them than a normal army composition would contain, which made them naturally excellent against demons.
Meanwhile, with the pressure relieved from our western fortress, the Western Task Force was free to advance as well, giving us two armies which rolled over Marignon’s territory. Within a few turns, the WTF laid siege to Marignon’s northern fortress, while the Blood Crusade focused on capturing their less defended provinces.
A Strategic Aside - Marignon
I’m going to take a little while to interrupt the let’s play to go over a few things regarding the way that the AI played Marignon and how the faction and the pretender that the AI chose should instead be played.
Marignon is on the surface actually very similar to Ulm in its general playstyle early (Crossbows + Heavy Infantry with magic support), but is significantly worse at it before it gets research for the reasons which we saw in our first engagement. Marignon’s advantage in the mid game is that it has access to air and fire magic, both of which have buffs that boost their crossbows. Marignon is one of the only factions with very natural access to both Wind Guide (a spell that greatly increases the precision of all friendly units) and Flame Arrows (which does exactly what it says on the tin). This means that two casters, if given the items and gems required to cast these spells, can nearly double the effective firepower of their units. However, if their units are instead used as simple evokers, they don’t provide nearly as much direct damage as Black Priests, who have a pair of special evocation spells just to ensure that they can provide some serious firepower. While their fire and earth mages can shoot stuff, they are fairly expensive for the damage that they put out, since they’re intended to provide magical diversity (great for finding magic sites and providing synergistic enchantments) rather than focus on one path (which is preferred for the direct damage spells). The AI won’t use these buffs because they require enhancing the commanders with items or direct boosts beforehand and giving them magic gems in order to allow them to cast the spells. This means that their ranged units were significantly weaker than ours, when they should instead hit much harder by the midgame.
Marignon’s blood magic transition also looks very different from Ulm’s. Ulm has access to its vampire counts right away (if it can hunt up the sacrifices for them, at least), whereas Marignon’s valuable unique blood spell doesn’t come until late in the game, when Blood 7 is researched. If they get to this point, they can summon Fallen Angels, which are incredibly powerful spellcasting commanders. While there are spells of this level accessible to all nations, the other spells are limited by having a set number of unique commanders, of which there can only be one on the map at a time, and also tend to have even higher casting requirements. Fallen Angels can be summoned as many times as they can be afforded, making them a mainstay of Marignon’s lategame. Marignon never got to use them, however, so while our Vampire Counts ensured that our borders were secure and our income rose unabated, Marignon’s blood magic was limited to the weak early game spells which we had even greater access to thanks to our significantly better research and bloodhunting economy.
Furthermore, Marignon has access to an incredible ability called ‘Sailing’ on many of their commanders. This allows a commander to effectively pretend that coastal provinces border each other, as long as the total distance over sea squares is less than the commander’s movement speed. This makes Marignon’s armies incredibly mobile, both because water provinces tend to take up much more space on the map than land provinces (meaning they border more & further provinces, on average) and because units that can normally move only one space, like heavy infantry, can travel great distances when ferried about by the sailing commanders. This makes it possible for Marignon to avoid unwanted confrontations and quickly bring huge armies together to stamp out split up expeditionary forces if their empire is built up along a coastal region. With our war occurring inland, Marignon was fighting on our terms - a front at which units were forced to move at one space per turn anyways, where Ulm’s slow armies can engage at the leisurely pace at which they’re forced to move.
Finally, Marignon’s pretender didn’t fit their faction at all. Marignon has a few options for pretenders that work well with their faction’s natural strengths or help make up for its weaknesses. One method is to focus on having the pretender start out with a moderate level in each of Marignon’s elemental paths (earth, fire, air, and water), research construction early, and then have the pretender forge boosting items. This is the most economical way of boosting the potence of their spellcasters, and a strategy that Marignon can afford to employ thanks to their ability to find magic sites in each of these elements. This strategy makes the most of the natural advantages which I just described, and tends to be at its strongest at the start of the midgame when they can fill the sky with flaming, guided crossbow bolts before their opponents have the appropriate spells to counter them. Additionally, because Marignon naturally has a wide spread of elemental magic available to them, they are able to switch their focus in order to adapt to whatever counter their opponent can field. If countered by air magic, they can focus on their own air mages to throw lightning and thunder spells which are empowered by the same storms summoned to dampen the power of their crossbows. If countered by death magic which armors their troops against piercing damage, Marignon’s powerful priests and fire mages become incredibly effective. If countered by hefty protection spells that simply raise the armor of units to the point that the crossbow bolts become ineffective, the enemy army will need to cluster their forces together to receive buffs, making literally any of Marignon’s offensive area of effect spells deadly.
Another option is to have a pretender similar to Utilitarianism that focuses heavily on blood magic to forge the items that boost their blood mages to get their blood seeking economy going (which is very similar to what we did to start spamming our Vampire Counts). This strategy tends to utilize a strong Blood bless as well, which makes their early game look very different. Instead of the armor + crossbow formations, they spam the cheap, sacred Flagellant units backed up by priests, which with the Blood blessing have a chance of damaging the opponents whenever they receive damage. This turns a unit that is normally practically worthless due to its lack of protection into a unit that can trade with the more expensive units of their opponents. While the flagellant strategy is ineffective in the mid to late game, by that point they’re reliant on demons and (admittedly smaller) regular armies instead. With a pretender capable of casting the strongest blood spells with little support, their late game is defined by demon lords and fallen angels which are both individually very strong and have the spellcasting capabilities that this strategy otherwise would lack.
Yet another option would be to help make up for Marignon’s weak early game by instead relying on an awake dragon pretender to do their expansion for them. Remember how their armies are across the board weaker than that of Ulm? It’s incredibly noticeable when fighting province defense as well. Marignon ordinarily suffers higher infantry losses in each successful attack and is significantly more prone to being overrun if the player underestimates the strength of the independents. By having a pretender capable of doing this expansion for them, they can make up for this early weakness and get a jumpstart on provinces to search for gems or blood and gold to produce more mages. This strategy therefore works for either the blood oriented play or the elemental magic style of play. More money means more mages. Moreover, more mages means more magical medallions, magnifying Marignon’s magnificent magical malleability, meaning marshalling more mages makes multiplicative melioration. The fact that their expansion is incredibly fast also has the advantage of allowing them to get early access to a coastal empire to work with their sailing ability.
The AI instead opted for a Teotl of Death. This pretender is unique in that it has the Assassination ability. This means that when the Teotl is hidden in a province, it can ‘assassinate’ a commander, which prompts a duel between the commander (and, occasionally, bodyguards) and the assassin. With the Teotl being a pretender, it has naturally incredible strength and health, and with death magic it can summon skeletons to make the fight even more unfair. To put it into less mechanical terms, the Teotl will sneak into your bedroom, animate the skeletons in your closet, and then have them murder you in your sleep. It’s a scary fucker.
It also is best used for a pretty niche strategy, however. If it finds its way into your home province and you don’t have your own pretender yet, it will kill all of your commanders as you build them, all while spreading its dominion in your home. It is even strong enough to kill certain pretenders that prefer to stay at home, like the Great Sage. When combined with a faction that has a strong early game to match your own expansion forces, this strategy enables a ‘dom-kill’ (or death due to dominion loss) faster than would otherwise be possible. In other words, the Teotl is such a good assassin, he can assassinate belief. Marignon, sadly, has a very weak expansion force, which provide much less support than the assassin-god would need to assassinate an enemy faith.
Demons from Hell! and Other Trivialities
As the Marignon Blood Crusade reached our enemy’s heartland, the small contingents produced from our foe’s two fortresses had been stiffened with the shadow demons that we had thus far managed to avoid encountering. Encountering them revealed a few interesting things about our army composition.
First of all, the fact that we rely on a slow, heavy front line with a preponderance of ranged damage meant that our battles actually tended to last for a fairly long time. This meant that once a unit was poisoned, they would almost certainly die as the damage over time wore down their health even if they did not take damage from any other source. Fortunately, since our army was quite large to begin with compared to the armies that Marignon could muster with a single turn of production, losses otherwise were quite low, and since our Black Priests were huddled in the middle of our formation of rangers, we didn’t lose any commanders when the fiends dove onto our back line - losses were limited to one or two rangers per fiend that Marignon fielded, and the odd infantry unit lost to the rest of their army. Independent infantry, which were not quite as physically large or well armored as the men of Ulm, were placed at the front of our formation to mitigate the loss of troops which would require a fortress to produce.
Secondly, black priests are very good at killing demons. On the rare occasions when Marignon featured demons summoned by blood magic to supplement their freely recruited fiends, the area of effect Banishment spell which the priests could cast simply murdered them. The fact that our priests were capable of doing damage to regular opponents meant that we had far more of them than a normal army composition would contain, which made them naturally excellent against demons.
Meanwhile, with the pressure relieved from our western fortress, the Western Task Force was free to advance as well, giving us two armies which rolled over Marignon’s territory. Within a few turns, the WTF laid siege to Marignon’s northern fortress, while the Blood Crusade focused on capturing their less defended provinces.
A Strategic Aside - Marignon
I’m going to take a little while to interrupt the let’s play to go over a few things regarding the way that the AI played Marignon and how the faction and the pretender that the AI chose should instead be played.
Marignon is on the surface actually very similar to Ulm in its general playstyle early (Crossbows + Heavy Infantry with magic support), but is significantly worse at it before it gets research for the reasons which we saw in our first engagement. Marignon’s advantage in the mid game is that it has access to air and fire magic, both of which have buffs that boost their crossbows. Marignon is one of the only factions with very natural access to both Wind Guide (a spell that greatly increases the precision of all friendly units) and Flame Arrows (which does exactly what it says on the tin). This means that two casters, if given the items and gems required to cast these spells, can nearly double the effective firepower of their units. However, if their units are instead used as simple evokers, they don’t provide nearly as much direct damage as Black Priests, who have a pair of special evocation spells just to ensure that they can provide some serious firepower. While their fire and earth mages can shoot stuff, they are fairly expensive for the damage that they put out, since they’re intended to provide magical diversity (great for finding magic sites and providing synergistic enchantments) rather than focus on one path (which is preferred for the direct damage spells). The AI won’t use these buffs because they require enhancing the commanders with items or direct boosts beforehand and giving them magic gems in order to allow them to cast the spells. This means that their ranged units were significantly weaker than ours, when they should instead hit much harder by the midgame.
Marignon’s blood magic transition also looks very different from Ulm’s. Ulm has access to its vampire counts right away (if it can hunt up the sacrifices for them, at least), whereas Marignon’s valuable unique blood spell doesn’t come until late in the game, when Blood 7 is researched. If they get to this point, they can summon Fallen Angels, which are incredibly powerful spellcasting commanders. While there are spells of this level accessible to all nations, the other spells are limited by having a set number of unique commanders, of which there can only be one on the map at a time, and also tend to have even higher casting requirements. Fallen Angels can be summoned as many times as they can be afforded, making them a mainstay of Marignon’s lategame. Marignon never got to use them, however, so while our Vampire Counts ensured that our borders were secure and our income rose unabated, Marignon’s blood magic was limited to the weak early game spells which we had even greater access to thanks to our significantly better research and bloodhunting economy.
Furthermore, Marignon has access to an incredible ability called ‘Sailing’ on many of their commanders. This allows a commander to effectively pretend that coastal provinces border each other, as long as the total distance over sea squares is less than the commander’s movement speed. This makes Marignon’s armies incredibly mobile, both because water provinces tend to take up much more space on the map than land provinces (meaning they border more & further provinces, on average) and because units that can normally move only one space, like heavy infantry, can travel great distances when ferried about by the sailing commanders. This makes it possible for Marignon to avoid unwanted confrontations and quickly bring huge armies together to stamp out split up expeditionary forces if their empire is built up along a coastal region. With our war occurring inland, Marignon was fighting on our terms - a front at which units were forced to move at one space per turn anyways, where Ulm’s slow armies can engage at the leisurely pace at which they’re forced to move.
Finally, Marignon’s pretender didn’t fit their faction at all. Marignon has a few options for pretenders that work well with their faction’s natural strengths or help make up for its weaknesses. One method is to focus on having the pretender start out with a moderate level in each of Marignon’s elemental paths (earth, fire, air, and water), research construction early, and then have the pretender forge boosting items. This is the most economical way of boosting the potence of their spellcasters, and a strategy that Marignon can afford to employ thanks to their ability to find magic sites in each of these elements. This strategy makes the most of the natural advantages which I just described, and tends to be at its strongest at the start of the midgame when they can fill the sky with flaming, guided crossbow bolts before their opponents have the appropriate spells to counter them. Additionally, because Marignon naturally has a wide spread of elemental magic available to them, they are able to switch their focus in order to adapt to whatever counter their opponent can field. If countered by air magic, they can focus on their own air mages to throw lightning and thunder spells which are empowered by the same storms summoned to dampen the power of their crossbows. If countered by death magic which armors their troops against piercing damage, Marignon’s powerful priests and fire mages become incredibly effective. If countered by hefty protection spells that simply raise the armor of units to the point that the crossbow bolts become ineffective, the enemy army will need to cluster their forces together to receive buffs, making literally any of Marignon’s offensive area of effect spells deadly.
Another option is to have a pretender similar to Utilitarianism that focuses heavily on blood magic to forge the items that boost their blood mages to get their blood seeking economy going (which is very similar to what we did to start spamming our Vampire Counts). This strategy tends to utilize a strong Blood bless as well, which makes their early game look very different. Instead of the armor + crossbow formations, they spam the cheap, sacred Flagellant units backed up by priests, which with the Blood blessing have a chance of damaging the opponents whenever they receive damage. This turns a unit that is normally practically worthless due to its lack of protection into a unit that can trade with the more expensive units of their opponents. While the flagellant strategy is ineffective in the mid to late game, by that point they’re reliant on demons and (admittedly smaller) regular armies instead. With a pretender capable of casting the strongest blood spells with little support, their late game is defined by demon lords and fallen angels which are both individually very strong and have the spellcasting capabilities that this strategy otherwise would lack.
Yet another option would be to help make up for Marignon’s weak early game by instead relying on an awake dragon pretender to do their expansion for them. Remember how their armies are across the board weaker than that of Ulm? It’s incredibly noticeable when fighting province defense as well. Marignon ordinarily suffers higher infantry losses in each successful attack and is significantly more prone to being overrun if the player underestimates the strength of the independents. By having a pretender capable of doing this expansion for them, they can make up for this early weakness and get a jumpstart on provinces to search for gems or blood and gold to produce more mages. This strategy therefore works for either the blood oriented play or the elemental magic style of play. More money means more mages. Moreover, more mages means more magical medallions, magnifying Marignon’s magnificent magical malleability, meaning marshalling more mages makes multiplicative melioration. The fact that their expansion is incredibly fast also has the advantage of allowing them to get early access to a coastal empire to work with their sailing ability.
The AI instead opted for a Teotl of Death. This pretender is unique in that it has the Assassination ability. This means that when the Teotl is hidden in a province, it can ‘assassinate’ a commander, which prompts a duel between the commander (and, occasionally, bodyguards) and the assassin. With the Teotl being a pretender, it has naturally incredible strength and health, and with death magic it can summon skeletons to make the fight even more unfair. To put it into less mechanical terms, the Teotl will sneak into your bedroom, animate the skeletons in your closet, and then have them murder you in your sleep. It’s a scary fucker.
It also is best used for a pretty niche strategy, however. If it finds its way into your home province and you don’t have your own pretender yet, it will kill all of your commanders as you build them, all while spreading its dominion in your home. It is even strong enough to kill certain pretenders that prefer to stay at home, like the Great Sage. When combined with a faction that has a strong early game to match your own expansion forces, this strategy enables a ‘dom-kill’ (or death due to dominion loss) faster than would otherwise be possible. In other words, the Teotl is such a good assassin, he can assassinate belief. Marignon, sadly, has a very weak expansion force, which provide much less support than the assassin-god would need to assassinate an enemy faith.
![[Image: WFQLHMB.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/WFQLHMB.gif)