By the Light of the North Star: a Dominions 4 AAR

[Karlito]

A battle is raging. Snarling lizards are let loose from their chains to charge their foe. A group of dancing men twirl across the field to meet them, their swords bursting into flame. White clad Amazons launch arrows with uncanny precision. And today, the dead fight on both sides. Serpentine mages call down the light of the sun, trying to stem the tide of spectral men that threaten to overwhelm them. Will it be enough?
Welcome to Dominions.

What's This?
Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension is a turn-based fantasy strategy war-game, with ugly graphics and some of the most engaging multiplayer gameplay I've ever had the pleasure to experience. If you want to know more, check out our SV threads here or here. Even if you don't know what this is, if you like strategy games, fantasy, or mythology, keep reading! I'll do my best to make this AAR accessible and entertaining for Dominions neophytes.

Anyway I'm currently involved in an email game with a few other players, and this is a live record of the turns I play as I play them. I'm fairly confident in my chosen strategy this game, but it's still entirely possible that the game will end in my complete defeat in another 5 turns, rather than complete victory in another 50.

"First" Turn

Spoiler

Situation Overview

This is the game map, where most of the action takes place. It's now actually turn 22. For me, the first score turns just consisted of expanding into neutral provinces, building up an army, and hitting my magical research targets (more on that later).
I'm playing Marverni, a nation of Celtic Gauls ruled by druids; that's the green with gold-fringe flags in the upper center of the map. My capital is the coastal fort with all the white candles next to it. All around me you see my neighbors and opponents in this match. Starting with the underwater one to the north we have Therodos, the ghosts of a sunken Atlantis-like city who don't know they're dead. Clockwise from them we have Sauromatia, a nation of Amazonian warrior-women ruled by cannibalistic witch kings. South of them we have Hinnom, a land of Jewish giants (also with a taste for human flesh). The other big green nation to the south of me is C'tis, a bunch of Egyptian-flavored lizard people. In the far southwest, the yellow flag is Lanka (Hindu demons) and the purple flag is Ermor (Roman Empire). Directly to the west of my nation is Ur, populated by Enikdu beastmen of Mesopotamian origin. You can also see one province of Tir na N'Og in the northwest, which also has roots in Celtic mythology. Formoria was also playing but isn't visible, though it doesn't matter since that player has since dropped out. The empty spots on the map are provinces I can't see this turn, due to not having a scout in position.

Anyway, that's quite the eclectic collection of foes! Pretty typical for a Dominions game, I have to say. Each of those nations is led by a false god, trying to claim the throne of the Pantokrator for their-selves. Luckily, our nation is led by the One True God, so we shouldn't have any trouble putting these false Pretenders in their place.


This is the message screen I'm greeted with when I open up the turn. The only interesting thing is the first message, informing me that my national mages have completed another level of magical research, giving me access to more spells. This is the last step in my prewar plan, but again more on that later. The random events in the middle are respectively, brigands attempting to usurp my rule in a province, brigands moving into another province, and one of my mages having a vision of eternal darkness falling over the land in 3 months time yada yada. Like I said, not interesting. The battle that occurred is a result of the first random event, but luckily the 1 gold I spent garrisoning the province paid off and I retained control. I could show the battle in more detail, but it's not really worth seeing. Anyway, this post has gotten long enough.

Next Time: I go to War

 

[Cornuthaum]

@stormbringer951, paging you here. Domineeriong dominionists of the world, dominate your foes~

 

[stormbringer951]

Ooh. You're braver than me, posting a LP of a game that's still ongoing .

Not much to comment on gameplay wise so far, although I am wondering whether you're going to use those earth gems for summoning earth elementals, reducing fatigue from gifts from heaven (that's "dropping a large meteor on enemies' heads", for people who don't play Dom4), or casting earthquake - although I don't think you'd have the spells researched to mitigate self-damage from earthquake yet.

The darkness thing could be interesting for some nations. Lanka might win a battle they'd normally lose, because suddenly their horde of longdead could suddenly be fighting at night and their opponents would be boned without darkvision.

I think you could add a small intro section about the game to the OP to give people who haven't heard of Dom4 a reason to want to follow the LP. Something like the SB thread OP or the intro to the Doomed to Fail LP, to give people some idea of what they're getting into and why it's especially awesome.

 

[Althaea]

Earth elementals or Curse of Stones, presumably, though the mix of earth gems and astral pearls on those Elder Druids does confuse. If there were more earth gems than astral pearls, sure, Power of the Spheres, but the other way around? Maws of the Earth is also possible, though less likely - he's got to have at least Conj 5 and Evo 5, if his strategy is what I think it is, and Alteration 5 might be a tall order on top of that with only four recruitment centers so far. He might also be planning ahead, of course. Iron Bane is another possibility with Alteration (but that is a big stretch in year 2, even late year 2), but to my squinty eyes it looks like he's mostly using the Noble and Marverni soldiers, not the Barechested. It'd still be in his favour compared to Ur, but if he was planning on it I'd expect Barechested.

(It's probably not Earthquake for the simple reason that Earthquake is hellishly expensive to cast, needs to be spammed, and the enemy being invaded - Ur - is highly resistant to it.)

Also, hm. Did someone rush Lanka, or is there more to their territory that can't be seen in that picture?

edit: Therodos is attacking C'tis? Are they mad? That's a terrible match-up. I could see Therodos ganging up on C'tis with another power to make sure they won't be a problem later, but this does not look to be the case.

 

[Karlito]

I think you could add a small intro section about the game to the OP to give people who haven't heard of Dom4 a reason to want to follow the LP. Something like the SB thread OP or the intro to the Doomed to Fail LP, to give people some idea of what they're getting into and why it's especially awesome.

Click to shrink...

This is a fair point; I'll look into improving the OP.

Also, hm. Did someone rush Lanka, or is there more to their territory that can't be seen in that picture?

edit: Therodos is attacking C'tis? Are they mad? That's a terrible match-up. I could see Therodos ganging up on C'tis with another power to make sure they won't be a problem later, but this does not look to be the case.

Click to shrink...

Lanka has lost provinces to Hinnom, C'tis, and Ermor.
Actually, Therodos approached me about ganging up on C'tis. I declined, because the player of Therodos is known to me and cannot be trusted. It's interesting that they seem to be going it alone.

Also, I'll point out that attempts to analyze my tactics will surely be doomed to fail, since I no doubt will not be playing as well as I could be.

Turn 23

Spoiler

A lot of these messages are about things happening elsewhere in the world, which I'm taking note of, but aren't directly relevant to me now. One of them though, is a report of the battle my army fought in Bahguloth, the Ur province I ordered them into last turn. We'll take a look at that, but first I'm going to talk about some game mechanics.
Provinces and Unit Recruitment
The basic economic unit in Dominions is the province. Each province has stats like population, unrest level, terrain type, and connections to other provinces. Every province generates resources, the most important being Gold, and one confusingly called Resources. Anyway, I take all the Gold and Resources made by my provinces use them to buy units. I use my units to take provinces from my opponents, which gives me more resources, from which I get more units, and so on and so on until I win the game. In theory, anyway.
I can recruit units in any province, but I'll mostly only be recruiting them in places where I've built a fort. The reason is twofold: forts have more Resources, and more importantly, forts let me recruit guys from my national roster, who tend to suck slightly less than whatever naked barbarians happen to be living there.


This here is the recruitment screen in my Capital, showing all the units native to my nation, Marverni. Most every nation in dominions gets a roster like this, with over 20 unique recruitables, each with their own pixel sprite, flavor text, and one attack animation. Like most Dominions playthroughs, I'm going to ignore 90% of this beautiful handcrafted content, and almost exclusively recruit only 3 or 4 of these. Up top are the Commander type units, these guys are the ones you see me giving orders to on the strategic map, basically all my generals, priests, and wizards. The bottom half is all the ordinary grunts who will actually have to fight my battles; they have to be attached to a commander to do anything useful on the strategic level. I'll point out a few of the standouts.

The Sequani Stargazer - Wandering astrologers and philosophers, these guys don't look like much, but in fact they're going to be the workhorse of my strategy. They only have a little magical skill, but they're cheap enough that I can build them in large numbers. Right now they're doing the majority of magical research in my nation, and they'll actually be incredibly useful in battle.
The Druid - Thematically the core of my nation, they're a little more magically powerful than the Sequani, but cost 4x as much. Until the time when I need their priestly skills to combat hordes of undead, I'll only be recruiting a few of these guys to support the next entry...
The Elder Druid - These fellows are my magical powerhouses. They're going to be throwing around the big spells in battle and casting the world changing rituals. The downside is that they are extremely expensive, take two turns to recruit, and can only be recruited in my capital province. Right now I have 4 and intend to get 1 every other turn for the rest of the game. I'll never have as many as I wished I had.
The Marverni Noble Warrior - Currently most of my armies are made out of this guy. He's got a shield, helmet, chainmail, and a pointy sword. By the standards of Dominions he's a little better than your average human, though few of my opponents will be fielding average humans.

And the honorable mentions...
The Marverni Bare Chested Warrior - This guy is the typical naked screaming Gaul. He's pretty similar to the guy above, only worse in every way and without the armor. He does have a javelin though. I relied heavily on these guys during the early phase of the game, and may fall back on them if I need a lot of men in a hurry, or when my magic develops more.
The Marverni Horn Blower - I stick a few of these guys in every squad to improve morale, though I'm not convinced it's actually worth it. They don't wear any armor, so they tend to die quickly.

A Closer Look at Units
Dominions models units in detail, tracking many stats and abilities for each individual. Battle can leave scars as soldiers walk away with permanent wounds, curses, or rarely, beneficial experience.


This here is one soldier in my army. Unfortunately battles against the Lion Tribes conquered by my empire have left him without arms. He can no longer carry a sword or shield, but at least he can use Struggle Useless Kick. Somehow he can still throw his javelin though; I guess he uses his teeth or something, lol.

And Finally, We get to the Battle
As the attacker, my army forms up on the left

And the opposing province garrison forms up on the right

(That's 10 points of province defense, for those keeping score at home)

Player turns in Dominions resolve simultaneously, so I don't have any input while the battle happens. I can only give my units a limited set of orders the turn before and hope they carry out my will. In this case I just told them all to charge forward, which they do, stabbing the Enkidu to death. The horse archers which hang back turn and run once my mages start calling down meteors on their heads, and just like that the battle is over. Only one loss on my side, a horn blower took an arrow to the face (I said they would die quickly). All in all, pretty anticlimatic. There will be more battles in future though. In fact, there will be a big one next turn.


My Orders

My army will attack Ur's eastern fort, which happens to be the City of Ur itself. However, Ur has a large number of troops in his western fort, which will also be able to join the battle, provided he has enough leadership over there to move them all. I'm fairly confident in the power of my force, but I'm sure Ur has plenty of surprises to spring on me. A direct attack like this is certainly a gamble. If I win decisively, I'll be able to bring the war to a swift end. On the other hand, a hard loss on my part this early in the game could be pretty crippling. I have to take risks like this though, several of my neighbors are already quite a bit larger than me, and sooner or later their hungry gazes will turn my way. Marverni needs to expand to survive.

 

[Karlito]

Spoiler: Turn 24

The turn is in, the turn is in! Time to see what sort of devastation my forces inflicted upon the pride of Ur.

Oh. That's disappointing. Seems that the armies of Ur didn't want to come out and play.
First of all, if you're confused by the fact that it seems like 6 of my soldiers tripped on their own swords and skewered themselves because there were no opposing forces, it's because each province has a garrison which doesn't show up in the battle report because they aren't real properly recruited units. In fact, because this province was Ur's Capital, the garrison was a pretty significant force. So much so, my mages decided they'd bring out the big spells (right now they'll ignore some of my orders if the battle is too small). Thus, since Ur has seen my entire battle script, I might as well show it to you guys as well. For it to make any sense, I'm going to have to explain a few more game mechanics.

Magic, in brief
Dominions 4 boasts a selection of something like 800 spells. To be able to cast a spell, your nations needs to have researched it, and you need to have a mage with the right magical skills to cast it. To this end each spell has a School, which you research, and a Path requirement, which your mage must meet. For example, the classic Fireball has School Evocation 3, and Path Fire 2. Utterdark, a ritual that destroys the sun, has School Enchantment 9 and Path Death 9. The spell to summon a succubus has School Blood 5 and Path Blood 4 (Blood magic is confusing).
Let's take a closer look at a spell.

This is Stellar Cascades. It has School Evocation 5, Path Astral 2, or Evo5 S2 for short (A is for Air magic). It is a battlefield spell. It has the range of a shortbow, an AoE large enough to hit 15 human-sized units (or 10 Ur-sized units), it never misses, and it does a whopping 25!! damage. Oh wait, what's that? Stun damage? Yeah, getting hit by this won't kill you, just make you slightly more tired. At least, just getting hit once will. If a unit gets hit by Stellar Cascades 4 or 5 times, they'll fall unconscious on the battlefield, completely unable to defend themselves. Hmmm, if only I was recruiting a ton of mages that could cast this spell...

Ah yes, the Sequani Stargazer, remember him? But it looks like his only magic path is S1, and I need S2 to be able to cast the spell. If only there was some way to boost magic...

Now we're talking! Light of the Northern Star (from where this AAR gets its title) is a battlefield enchantment that will temporarily give my Sequani the power to cast Stellar Cascades. It sits at Conjuration 4, and has Path S3, castable by some of my Elder Druids.
Thus you see my plan taking shape. Get midway down two research lines and get a two spell combo will have my rare, expensive mage boost up my cheap, plentiful mages and then blast my enemy with (eventually) deadly magic. I can scale up the effect just by bringing more Sequani to battlefield, and it's cheap enough that I can afford a lot of Sequani.
This isn't a strategy that will carry me through the entire game, but for now it works and it works well.

(You can't really tell, but at this point basically all the opposing force has been gently lulled to sleep. Shortly after this picture is taken, the stabbing commences)

Back to the Turn


Besides the battle in Ur, there's a few things to note. I sent a smaller force to capture Ur's province of Palea, which they did, my research toward Alteration 5 is plugging along, a random event gave me some magic gems, and another event cast the entire world into eternal darkness. Don't worry, it's not actually eternal, just for this turn. My soldiers will fight worse because of the darkness, but so will Ur's, but that won't even matter because they'll be asleep anyway.
One of the things of interest is that one of my scouts witnessed a battle between Therodos and C'tis down south. C'tis used magic to destroy a bunch of Therodos's free ghostly soldiers, but didn't bring enough soldiers to hold the line and was overwhelmed. If C'tis had brought more soldiers, I think he would have carried they day, though he'd also have to come up with a response to Therodos's elite sacred troops. As it was, C'tis lost almost 1000 gold worth of mages (and more in soldiers) to inflict basically no lasting damage to Therodos; ouch.
The other thing to note is that Ur attacked me in Bahguloth with only a single mage. This sort of tactic isn't uncommon in Dominions. Give a powerful unit a magic weapon, script them to cast some buffs on themself, and they'll absolutely destroy any local province defense. We call it "Thugging". Only, Ur doesn't do it very well. His Gala, a fertility priestess type, casts a few pointless buffs on herself, like Gift of the Hare and Poison Resistance and then she just sits there doing nothing for 3 rounds before being chased off by the 1 gold worth of garrison I bothered to invest in the province, minus an arm for her trouble. Still, I increase the garrison in that province a little. The horse tribesmen there have lances, which should foil any repeat attempts.

The Map

Ur's orders last turn are somewhat puzzling. You can see that he moved some of the troops in his western fort one province closer. I don't want to explain all the nitty gritty of movement rules in Dominions, but he could have moved them all the way to his Capital, and joined them together with the forces now besieged there to fight me. He's still going to have to do that if he wants to relieve the siege of his Capital, only now without the help of the free province defense. In the meantime, I'm laying siege to his Capital, lowering his gold income and preventing him from recruiting new troops there. The delay also lets me bring in more reinforcements of my own, that's another 103 soldiers coming from my fort in the Royal forest to help with the siege. In the mean time, my secondary expansion force will continue south to seize the farmlands of Lombaria, sure to be a valuable source of gold income. Hopefully next turn will bring that decisive battle that I want.

 

[stormbringer951]

You don't really need to spoiler-tag your turns. It mostly just makes it one more click to go read the things.

The other thing to note is that Ur attacked me in Bahguloth with only a single mage. This sort of tactic isn't uncommon in Dominions. Give a powerful unit a magic weapon, script them to cast some buffs on themself, and they'll absolutely destroy any local province defense. We call it "Thugging". Only, Ur doesn't do it very well. His Gala, a fertility priestess type, casts a few pointless buffs on herself, like Gift of the Hare and Poison Resistance and then she just sits there doing nothing for 3 rounds before being chased off by the 1 gold worth of garrison I bothered to invest in the province, minus an arm for her trouble. Still, I increase the garrison in that province a little. The horse tribesmen there have lances, which should foil any repeat attempts.

Click to shrink...

It sounds like it could have been a misclick, but if it wasn't a misclick then they really have a dire understanding of how thugs/solo mage raiders work. I'd expect an N1H1 with no exceptional combat stats to be a swarm caster solo mage raider, but maybe he went full Ench (for what, foul vapours + poison ward and grip of winter and winter ward? Over all the great W/N/E pathed stuff in Alt?).

 

[Karlito]

You don't really need to spoiler-tag your turns. It mostly just makes it one more click to go read the things.

Click to shrink...

Well, it makes it easier for me to look at the thread without images popping up all over the place, so they'll stay.

Turn 25 was not too exciting, so I've lumped it together with turn 26.

Spoiler: 25 & 26

Turn 25
Once again, I fail to get the massive decisive battle that I want. Rather than send his mobile force to relieve the siege of his Capital, they move NE instead, to a province called Dershid, presumably to try a counter-invasion of my own territory.

To that end, my orders on turn 25 are defensive in nature. The small force that was send out to capture his farmland (and it did so without even a battle), will move to reinforce the siege, while at the same time I detach part of my sieging army to defend Bahguloth, one of his possible moves next turn. That force will meet up with some mages coming from my fort in The Royal Forest, so that I don't have to thin out the mages in my main force too much. If your curious why I'm not concerned about him turning to attack in Ur after I split my forces, it's because he can't, actually. There's a river separating Ur and Dershid (indicated by the blue border on this map), which he won't be able to cross with most of his forces.


I said there wasn't too much else to mention on turn 25, though it looks like my message log is full. The highlights are, I hit another level of magical research, built another fort, set some of my mages to summon wolves as it's a decently economical use of my nature gems, but the truth is none of that is really of immediate consequence.
One last thing to note is that I was wrong when I said the global darkness would only last a turn, it's continued into this turn as well. If there's a battle next turn, it will be fought with the darkness penalties.

Turn 26

When turn 26 arrives, it seems that my defensive play paid off. The army I assembled in Bahguloth fought against his still mobile army, which was indeed trying to get around my flank. Let's take a close look at the battle.

Finally, a Real Battle
Here are my defending forces. The top squad is mostly barechested warriors left over from the early game. Most of them have an experience star or two which makes them tougher, but many also have permanent battle wounds that will give them penalties.

And here's the army Ur's attacking with.

He's got one squad of undead. These guys usually aren't very good combatants, but right now they aren't suffering from the darkness penalties affecting every other living unit on the battlefield, which tilts the odds in their favor. There's also one other squad containing a mix of his national troops. Despite their impressive look, the bronze armor their wearing is actually inferior to the chain mail my noble warriors have. He also has a few individual units that are worth taking a closer look at.

The Sirrush is a sort of wingless Giraffe-Dragon that Ur can recruit. They're considered to be sacred units, which means they can receive a buff from a priest (a blessing). The exact effect of the blessing will vary based on choices each player makes before the game. Here's Ur's blessing:

The biggest effect here is the regeneration, which means his Sirrushs will heal 9 hit points every combat turn. My guys will have to be doing a lot more than 9 points of damage each turn if they want to have a chance of killing them. Fortunately for me, the Sirrush doesn't have any other defensive abilities that will prevent my men from doing a lot of damage to them. They are dangerous for one other reason though.

The Sirrush has a level 5 Cause Fear ability. This means that just by standing next to my soldiers, it will eventually cause them to rout off the battlefield. Hopefully my army will be able to put down the Sirrush quickly.

Here's another interesting part of Ur's army; he has a Vampire prophet. Every nation in the game gets the ability to make one of their commanders the prophet of their god, which gives that unit a number of bonuses. Every other player besides Ur did this on the first turn with one of their starting commanders, but I think he forgot to do this, and then got lucky enough to get a vampire through a random event early in the game. I gotta say, Ur would probably get better value out of this guy by sending him off alone to raid my rear echelon provinces rather than using him to command a measly 40 undead.

Unsupported, my soldiers would likely be badly beaten by this array of monstrosities. Fortunately, I've brought along the Light of the Northern Star and 8 Sequani to spam out Stellar Cascades, where as Ur's 3 mages are only able to throw in a few minor evocations. Mage support is the artillery of the Dominions world, the army that can bring more of it will usually win.

So anyway, the living half of Ur's army is quickly blasted into unconsciousness after several turns Stellar Cascades. My warriors on the bottom only have to march forward and finish the job. Even the Sirrush's hard scales don't offer it much protection when it's asleep.

Unfortunately Stellar Cascades doesn't work on the undead half of Ur's army. Fortunately for me, I brought my own Prophet, and he and my Elder Druids cast banishment, a spell that all priests know which does direct damage to undead. The battle comes to an end pretty quickly after that.

In terms of gold expenditure, I calculated Ur's losses to be 1101, and my own at 221. A ratio I'm perfectly happy with, and one that nicely demonstrates the power coordinated use of battlefield magic can have in this game.

One Other Event
In terms of the war with Ur, there was one other significant happening. An assassination attempt on one of my commanders. And a successful one at that.

I believe Ur also acquired this guy through a lucky random event. I expect he'll attempt to assassinate a random commander in the province of Ur every turn if I can't stop him. This turn he only manged to kill an unimportant Barbarian chief I had with my army, but he could hit a more valuable mage in the future. Hopefully one of his targets will eventually get lucky and kill him, but until then all I can do is assign some bodyguards to my most valuable commanders.

Turn 26 Orders

This turn I'm ordering attacks on two of Ur's provinces, while bringing in yet more troops to the front. The plan is to put together a second army that will be able to lay siege to his second fort, and then once all his available forces are bottled up, claim the rest of his provinces. The forts themselves will be tougher nuts to crack. I suppose at this point my best hope is that the player decides to throw in the towel and let the AI take over the defense of the forts.

 

[Ehorin]

ok, so ummm actually I have a comment to make on a potential reason why that Barechest with no arms can still throw his javelins

So you know Cuchulain?(Autocorrect wants me to spell it that way... I thought there was a space in there? maybe not) anyway, you know Cu Chulain? Famous Irish hero dude who was kind of a total badass. He had this weapon that is often called a spear but was actually a Javelin, Flying Barbed Impaling Death or something when translated, Gae Bolg when not, anyway, it had this special magic thing it did BUT only when thrown while held by the toes...

That Barechest has clearly been practicing and deserves a Gift of Reason so you can thug him out and make him Cu Chulain. (note, I would totally do this in single player if I ever got a shitty javelin thrower who actually manages to survive losing both arms, haven't seen it yet, though I once gave a Commander of Ulm a Copper Arm b/c fuck not having a shield on a guy surrounded by archer powers, I need my chaff dude!)

 

[Karlito]

No, it's not dead! I've been travelling a bit, so it was hard to sit down and write updates. Fortunately this coincided with a period of relative uneventfulness in-game, so I don't feel too bad about grouping these turns together.

Turns 27-32: The Long Siege

Spoiler

During this period, I seal Ur's fate, but my offensive stalls out a bit, and I don't accomplish quite as much as I would have wished. There are a couple reasons for this.
Reason 1: The Forts
On turn 29, a second army that I've put together lays siege to Ur's second fort. This is essentially uncontested by Ur. The 100+ strong force of undead and fish-men that h he has there remains behind the walls.

To be sure, this is a fairly big deal. With all of his forts under siege by my armies, Ur's ability to recruit new units is seriously hampered, and more importantly, his gold income will drop to zero. Units demand a certain amount of gold as upkeep every turn, so eventually his treasury will run out and his troops will start to desert. This means victory for me, but it's going to be a slow victory, won through attrition.

So, Ur has two armies, both inside forts that I have armies outside. You might ask, how the heck do I actually get in there and kill him?

Here are stats for Ur's second fort. The important one here is the Defense value: 250. Basically, every turn of a siege, a comparison is made between the size of the army outside the fort and the size of the army inside the fort. If the army outside is larger, the difference in size is subtracted from the defense value of the fort; if the army inside is larger, the difference is added back on to the fort (up to the original defense value). Once the defense value reaches zero, the besieging force has the ability to storm the fort, which is like a regular battle between armies, except the defenders have some extra advantages. Something to note is that I've simplified a bit here, it's not the number of units which is compared, but the total Strength of the armies. So giants contribute more to a siege than puny humans. There are some units which have an ability that makes them better at attacking or defending during sieges, and flying units get bonuses to both.

So you might ask, how are my sieges progressing?


In short, I need more men.
Of course, I can simply recruit more, though I'm limited in the number of men I can recruit in one turn, and it takes time to gather them up and move them to the front. Plus, my gold income is not limitless, and I even start having some cashflow problems (see Reason 2 below). Fortunately, gold isn't my only resource.


I haven't really explained the magic part of the game's economy, but for now it suffices to say that some of my provinces produce "nature gems" and that I can convert these into wolves at a fairly favorable rate. As you might expect, wolves aren't great soldiers, but I can summon up a bunch of them fairly cheaply, and they'll contribute to siege strength almost as well as a human soldier. How they're able to smash down castle gates with their claws and teeth is just one of Dominions' mysteries.

Later on as my magical research advances, I switch to a different summoning spell.

This is a special spell, unique to my nation. The one unit it summons, the Great Boar, isn't that much to look at, except for one ability, every turn they'll summon up some lesser boars, for free. Over the long run, you can get a lot of free units, making it more economical than pack of wolves. I've even seen some players go hog-wild with this spell, investing all their resources into getting it early and trying to conquer others with hundreds of free boars. I won't be going quite that far, but a few of these will definitely allow me to supplement my troop numbers on the cheap. To be honest, I get them too late to really make much of a difference in the battle against Ur, but they should help out during the next war.

Of course, summoned units still have the same logistical problems that recruiting them does, it takes time and leadership to gather them up and move them to where they're needed. Fortunately, there's another source of soldiers in Dominions: mercenaries!

The game has a rotating cast of mercenary companies. Players can place bids to secure their services for a few months. The best part is that they'll just appear in whatever province you want, so I don't have to waste time moving them to the front. Of course, this eats into my precious gold budget, but the other players don't seem to be too interested in hiring mercenaries right now, so I can get a few for close to the minimum bid. Rozul's Red Raptors, the company I'm placing a bid on in the image is full of flying units, which get bonuses during the siege.

Unfortunately, I can't just endlessly stack units on one province until I break through the castle defenses.

There are a few ways let your armies carry around extra supplies, but for the most part they have to scavenge what they can from the local terrain. I wasn't paying attention and went over the supply limit for one turn, meaning a bunch of my troops started starving. This didn't cost me too much as I immediately corrected the issue, but it does limit how fast I can break down the walls in Noranthion.

Anyway, because of these obstacles, it's like turn 31 before I finally feel like my sieges start to be effective at wall-busting. I don't actually get to see how much damage I'm doing to the walls, I only get a notification that damage is being done. This is only one aspect of the problems I was facing during these turns.

Reason 2: Ur Finally Uses His Prophet
In a previous update, I commented that Ur could be better utilizing his Vampire prophet by raiding some of my less well-defended provinces. Well...


He started doing that.
I didn't really have an answer to this, except to send in some forces afterwards to recapture the province. It takes a pretty large or well-supported force to take this guy down, and even if I killed him in battle, he would resurrect on the following turn. So while I would have liked to be conquering all of Ur's hinterlands during this time, I mostly spent it reconquering territories I had already captured. Remember I'm trying to concentrate my troops on his forts to break down the walls and keep his remaining armies pinned down inside; I can only spare a few soldiers to go out and take his other provinces. So between losing one province per turn from this Vampire and only being able to use a small mobile force to recapture them, my province count is basically flat over this period. To make matters worse,

Reason 3: That damn Province Defense
I'd sort of made fun of Ur earlier for spending so much gold on the local province garrisons, but it did mean that I needed to use proper troops to capture his provinces, and again, proper troops are in short supply. I made two sort of embarrassing attempts to attack a province in the north with wolves, it failed both times.



I know you can't even tell these are two separate battles, since it played out exactly the same way both times, but believe me, I was that dumb.
This is sort of a minor thing, but it does help explain why I just didn't blitz over all of Ur's "weakly defended" provinces.

Which Brings Us to Turn 32

All of this is essentially to explain why, besides the two sieges which are progressing nicely, the turn 32 map doesn't actually look that different from the turn 27 map. Of course, it turned out that all the work I put into breaking down the gates may have been wasted effort, because on turn 32 the entire garrison of Noranthion sallied forth from the gates to be massacred by my troops.

This battle went basically the same as the last big one I showed, with his mages not really contributing to fight. On my side, the Light of the Northern Star once again carried the day. Anyway, deprived of its defenders my troops immediately achieve a breach, and I order them to storm the fort on the following turn.

So why did I say that my efforts were wasted? Well, I found out through public channels that the reason Ur's garrison took the field is that the lack of gold income was really starting to hurt. He figured he might as well try to get some use out of his troops before they all deserted. It definitely seems that I would have been better served leaving a smaller pinning force to hold his forts and used more of my troops to capture his remaining provinces. I certainly be sitting on a larger pile of gold right now.

Next Time: The Fall of Ur (for realsies)


Postcript: Hey weren't you having problems with an assassin in the last update?
Oh yeah, he picked a fight with the wrong dude and died back on turn 27. It didn't actually turn out to be a problem.

ok, so ummm actually I have a comment to make on a potential reason why that Barechest with no arms can still throw his javelins

So you know Cuchulain?(Autocorrect wants me to spell it that way... I thought there was a space in there? maybe not) anyway, you know Cu Chulain? Famous Irish hero dude who was kind of a total badass. He had this weapon that is often called a spear but was actually a Javelin, Flying Barbed Impaling Death or something when translated, Gae Bolg when not, anyway, it had this special magic thing it did BUT only when thrown while held by the toes...

That Barechest has clearly been practicing and deserves a Gift of Reason so you can thug him out and make him Cu Chulain. (note, I would totally do this in single player if I ever got a shitty javelin thrower who actually manages to survive losing both arms, haven't seen it yet, though I once gave a Commander of Ulm a Copper Arm b/c fuck not having a shield on a guy surrounded by archer powers, I need my chaff dude!)

Click to shrink...

Sadly, I looked, and by turn 32 Armless Barechest seems to have perished.

 

[Karlito]

Bonus: What's been going on in the rest of the world?

Spoiler

When I last checked in, C'tis was having some trouble with Therodos in the south of their territory.

Well by Turn 32, they finally gathered enough troops to push Therodos out of their two southern forts.

Therodos, for their part, seems to have abandoned that axis of attack completely, and has taken some provinces from Tir na'Nog. I don't really have enough scouts there to get a clear picture of events.


Unfortunately for C'tis, in this same time period, they were forced to abandon their siege of Lanka's capital, perhaps due to an attack by Ermor. Again, I don't really have a clear picture of what's happening in this theater.

Before

And After
For now, Lanka is hanging on with only one province. Go Lanka! You can do it!

To my east, Hinnon launched an invasion of Sauromatia, and things are not looking good for the amazons. Unfortunately, I didn't have a scout in place to see any of the battles.

So, to summarize, everyone is fighting everyone else, everywhere.