Let's Play Dominions: An Experiment in Utilitarianism

Island Crossing

While initially we could be content to simply hold the central crossing against Patala’s expansion, the fact that our western front was going so well meant that we finally had the spare resources to assault Patala. After capturing the Hoburg holdout with an overwhelming force of rangers and priests, the CEF was reformed at the crossing to Patala’s island home. It was a solid army representing several months of fortress production, a smattering of demonic units conjured with our blood magic (in large part just to see what they did), and two additional sanguine meritocrats to supplement Sergio Flores.

The plan for this assault was a little bit more layered than the simple ‘march forward’ assault on Marignon as we now have more tools at our disposal. The Vampire Barons are more or less immune to the massed archers which form the bulk of Patala’s province defense, so unless they had mages or stronger troops in place, we can use them to raid deep into Patala’s territory and capture poorly defended provinces. With their innate stealth, it is very easy for our vampires to simply sneak out of the province once captured if an enemy army moved next to it, allowing them to disrupt Patala’s income and then fade away into the shadows.

Vampires tend to work even better when used defensively on account of their innate immortality. The ‘immortality’ ability means that if they die while in our ‘dominion’ (the area in which people accept Best Practices in their home lives), they reappear at our capital when destroyed. Unfortunately, because we spent the majority of our gold on labs and mages rather than temples and use our priests as combat units rather than preachers, our dominion is actually doing quite poorly. Only the areas closest to our capital and along the western border where we needed to repel the spread of Marignon’s blight shine brightly with our faith. This means that any vampire lost against Patala will be lost in a land where the caste system is valued over team synergy, and will lack the spiritual energy to be reborn at home.

Regardless, as long as we choose our targets carefully, vampires equipped with a few cheap items should have no problem with handling the province defense and escaping, while our conventional army and Sergio Flores attack more hardened targets. We dispatch our two newly promoted immortals, Steve Wilson and Miguel Zenon, to wreak sax and violence in the farmland to the southeast of Patala’s island. They can do so because bridges apparently count as land crossings, allowing them to bypass the traditional vampiric inability to cross rivers. The large and heavily ranger stacked CEF cross the river to lay siege to Patala itself. Our spies have determined that Patala has two large armies remaining in the middle east, but one is locked in place fighting against the undead legions of Ermor and it will take several months for the other to return to their capital - longer if they try to chase down the vampires and retake the provinces which they are raiding.

When the CEF begins its siege against Patala, it became apparent that the other two provinces on the island held very few troops. The mountains that made up the northern region of the island were inaccessible on account of the passes being closed, but that would prove no barrier to our flying vampire count. It appeared to hold only a few mages - a single Bandar guru and a handful of witches, most likely independent units recruited from the province itself. While a strike team of half of our heavy infantry and a third of our rangers took the eastern plains, Sergio Flores flew up through the blocked pass to capture the mountain himself, taking along a few conjured devils for support.

Sergio Flores, the Vampire Baron, Scourge of the Bandar, Conqueror of the Red Peaks, flew into battle with his supporting contingent. He landed in the midst of the witches and their devotees, and slew three guards with one swing of his magic sword, Firebrand. Then one of the witches raised her hands, there was a small flash of light, and with a quiet pop Baron Sergio was destroyed. With their commander so unceremoniously slain, our demonic forces were routed. It looks like we’ll need to rely on our more conventional army to take this province.

Northeastern Neighbor

Having managed to free themselves from the Mountains of Madness, Sergey Stepanov’s line soldiers catch up to him and we begin to make progress in our northeastern expansion as well. We soon come across the northwestern borders of Pythium’s domain, whose far western border reaches the Hoburg holdfast. They have only a small expansion party in the area, as most of their units were tied up in the fighting in the middle east. Unfortunately for us, one of the provinces which Sergey attacks is the target of this Pythium group as well. While our army is easily victorious, thanks to the small number of enemy soldiers, the fact that we fought means that we will now be at war with Pythium as well.

Now that we will have to fight Pythium, it’s worth going over what their armies will look like. As mentioned earlier, Pythium is intended to represent a Byzantine-like empire that has a mix of sacred serpent troops that can be recruited from their capital, varying weights of legionnaires which can be recruited from their forts (including their capital), and heretics which can be recruited only outside of their forts. These heretics include both mages that provide paths of magic otherwise unavailable to Pythium and some fire resistant infantry that follow the cult of the sun. With lands blessed with high production, this particular iteration of Pythium focuses heavily on a mix of traditional and heretical legionnaires, supported by cataphracts from the capital and very small numbers of hydra hatchlings. The use of heretic fire mages to lead their forces (evinced by what our spies in the middle east saw of their main army and the commanders of their expansion force) seemed to be responsible for limiting the spread of Pythium’s dominion, which made them quite good neighbors prior to our unfortunate clash.

The same style of traditional army that we deployed on the other two fronts would actually be decent against Pythium’s army, but a focus on heavy infantry would be even better. Pythium’s legions all use tower shields which make them very resistant to arrow fire. While our rangers would still provide some helpful damage, especially in the high numbers that we tend to use, they will do significantly less damage than we are used to. However, while their shields are quite good at repelling missiles, their javelins and spears do fairly little damage and our hard hitting heavy infantry would absolutely destroy them while shrugging off any blows they received in return. This is exactly the sort of army which our scales are designed not to produce, unfortunately. The fact that the bulk of their forces are even further from us than Patala’s means that it will be some time before fighting begins in earnest, but with our army occupied on an island, our assault will be limited to the group that Sergey brought with him, and locally recruited units, until we are ready to divert forces from the CEF.

With our magic research having advanced steadily, we will instead start to deploy local Illuminati recruits to supplement the group fighting Pythium, given the unavailability of the armies that we traditionally rely on and the fact that the Illuminati can get to the eastern front from their research centers with relative safety thanks to their stealth. We are still leaving the majority of our mages in our home provinces as lab rats valued research providers, but we can spare a dozen or so of these astral mages and will be able to recruit an additional caster or two every turn from labs hastily erected near the front line (at the cost of temporarily reduced mage production to free up the necessary gold). While individually weak, these mages can be very powerful when fighting in large groups thanks to the power of communions and astral thaumaturgy.

Another Strategic Aside

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Spoiler I am putting this one in a spoiler on account of how long the last one ended up being. This time we’ll be talking about Pythium.

Because of Pythium’s unique use of heretics and the fact that they can recruit their line troops outside of forts, they have several avenues available to them.

One of these, which relies on using your heretics abroad, is a rush strategy that uses heretic units to reduce your enemy’s dominion while pushing your own through rapid temple production and aggressive use of your prophet and pretender. This strategy relies on having an awake pretender with a high dominion. Heretics reduce the dominion of the province that they are in regardless of whose dominion it is. This means that if they advance on enemy territory, they don’t even need to win fights to cause serious damage to the opposing faith. Because both your pretender and prophet spread your dominion in provinces they occupy, if your opponent’s dominion is reduced thanks to heretics in their core provinces, you can quickly overrun their dominion with your own by moving them up into provinces where the original dominion has been reduced or even removed entirely by heresy. The strength of this strategy lies in the fact that it requires minimal setup to get started. Heretics can be streamed into enemy territory since they can be built in any province you capture (indeed, they can’t be built in forts), while your pretender will be a powerful combatant from the start. This strategy can also be used later in the game, but will require a very large number of heretics to whittle down an already established dominion, and also a hefty investment in temples to spread your own in their wake. The downside of this strategy is that it absolutely requires aggressive use of your pretender, which can be quite risky if the enemy has units or spells that can destroy it.

Another strategy, which is fairly similar to what our AI opponent did, is to have a distributed economy in which you recruit heavy infantry from all across your empire and then shunt the troops together to form massive legions of conventional troops without needing to invest heavily in forts to build them. With production scales, you can easily spend all of your gold on armies normally gated by resource costs, allowing you to swarm the opponent with armored troops rather than the unprotected units that other factions can amass. This makes battlefield enhancement spells or full-squad enhancement spells especially potent (since your armies can easily be grouped into squads of 120 troops or more). With access to a wide variety of different types of magic, Pythium can stack enhancements onto their troops to turn a stream of mediocre troops into a torrent of impenetrable heavy infantry. Similar to Marignon, Pythium’s access to a wide variety of magic (literally every path that there is, albeit with very shallow access in several paths) also makes them very flexible when it comes to fielding counters to opposing magic. The downside to this strategy is that the massed soldiers are very vulnerable to area of effect spells, especially those that apply fatigue or morale damage due to the heavy armor of the troops and their poor base morale, and it also relies on the pretender to be able to forge boosters for the mages in order to enable them to cast the wide area enhancements which the soldiers rely on to be more than just chaff.

While Pythium has access to no mages with innate reliable blood magic, they do have a unique blood spell called ‘Orgy’ which requires only one blood slave to cast. In spite of its incredibly low cost, this spell summons a satyr, which is the single most attractive male in all of dominions. Every turn, the satyr can entice a woman to tear off all of her clothing and become a maenad. Literally translated to ‘raving ones,’ maenads are a reference to the myth of the followers of Dionysus / Bacchus, who are driven by their god to ecstatic frenzy. Their hands become claws and they are capable of going berserk in combat, making them roughly equivalent to independent barbarians, save for their higher morale. Like modern day ravers, they wear little to no clothing, however, making them vulnerable to even light weapons, especially massed missile fire. While individually weak, because they can be recruited for free every turn, they can be massed in a manner similar to the thralls seduced by Ulm’s vampire counts. Unlike the thralls, however, maenads are actually effective in combat. The satyr themselves are mediocre commanders, but are capable of attempting to seduce (or, failing that, assassinate) enemy commanders as well, which is a very potent ability given their incredibly low cost to summon.

With an awake, blood-focused pretender and the use of hydras for expansion, someone on the official forums found that they were able to summon 40 satyr by the end of the second year, and with two degrees of acceleration on their summoning (as the rate of new blood-empowered casters accelerated with blood hunting), they were able to amass 100 satyrs and 2000 maenads by the end of the third year, with 12 additional satyrs per turn. To put this into perspective, the game whose narrative I am describing in the Let’s Play is into its third year as well, and my largest army has around 250 units (although, admittedly, my play is oriented on having fewer, stronger troops and a rapid research and blood economy instead).

This strategy is interesting as an expensive sidetrack, since it requires the dedication of a pretender to it, but otherwise works in conjunction with other mage and soldier strategies. The satyrs generate unrest, which reduces the amount of gold that a province provides so they generally need to be kept together in a province which produces little enough that its income can be missed. The maenads will also need to be shuttled out to prevent them from starving once their numbers start to grow. Micromanagement aside, however, this strategy can be employed next to a more conventional one, since the maenad and satyrs not only cost no gold, but also require no monetary upkeep. This means that the hordes of sex addled berserkers and seductive assassins can be used to supplement the masses of infantry and diverse mages already available to their faction.

Yet another interesting thing available to Pythium is to embrace the cult of the sun and have an army that thrives in the heat, with fire magic supporting fire resistant troops and cold blooded hydra being employed without needing to fear that they will turn sluggish and unreliable in the winter. This strategy is similar to the second one, except that it cranks the heat up on its scales and recruits primarily Limitane Solaris, led by Leos commanders and backed by Heliodromus evokers. It can then supplement these troops with summoned Fire Drakes, whose area of effect fire attacks will not damage the fire resistant line soldiers. It actually plays fairly similar to a vanilla Abysia (a heavily fire oriented nation with more reliable access to blood), except that its soldiers are recruited outside of forts rather than within them and, if necessary, it also has access to diverse magic paths. This strategy comes at the cost of relying on more expensive troops than the second strategy mentioned earlier, which means that it will have fewer troops in its legions while otherwise sharing the weakness of that strategy to area of effect magic from any path other than fire.

Pythium is also capable of eschewing Productivity entirely and going into Sloth to instead put points into scales to acquire more gold or have an improved bless, and then build the expensive but non resource dependant hydras from Pythium’s capital. This can be problematic, since the hydra cost 250 gold each (compared to the 9 gold required from the basic soldier), and while they are strong and do regenerate in combat, their low protection will cause them to die quickly under sustained fire. They’re expensive enough that you may want to use mages to buff them up further, but this not only makes your army require even more gold and be even more prone to catastrophic losses when facing enemy archers, you will also need to be careful with your mages’ positioning to avoid having them die in the poisonous cloud that the hydras emit. That all said, hydras are pretty cool and with certain blesses can chew through hordes of enemies.