This one, on the other hand, is a Dominions 4 post
Last time I left off with my armies conquering most of the remaining neutral territory around me and advancing towards the cave-dwelling necromancers of Agartha, but yet to reach their lines. This time I'll finish knocking over the independents (with a slight reverse due to incompetence), and actually engage the armies of Agartha (which, to be fair is controlled by the AI, so I've still yet to fight an actual human). We also might see my first uses of heavy battlefield evocations; I'm not sure how many turns ago that was.
Turns 19-26
So at the end of the last update we were approximately here, save that I'd also taken the throne province all of my armies (red arrows) are pointing at. Diplomacy with Gath reached an impasse over the state of the final unclaimed province on that front, so for now neither of us are claiming it, but Marignon's happy for me to deal with Agartha (the AI is sufficiently bad that this war would be a guaranteed win even if I wasn't three times as big as Agartha, which I am) so I'm going to carry on advancing in that direction.
So for this turn armies are sent at the neutral province just across the lake from the throne where most of my armies are, and to the province next door to Agartha's fort. Since my primary commanders have sailing, they can traverse this distance in a single turn, which most sides would not be able to do. The much faster strategic movement of sailing is part of the reason I've aimed my expansion around a body of water. Sadly what I don't do is rescript the army aimed at the province near the lake from the script it had when attacking the throne. This means my vanir cavalry are still set to "attack archers", and off they merrily go to harry the enemy back line, leaving their Vanjarl on his own against the charge of the independent heavy cavalry. He dies under a storm of lances (likely his illusions protected him from some, but there were 20 or so) and my leaderless force routs, the cavalry striking them down as they run - a disaster only equalled in proportion by my forgetting to take any screenshots of it. The other attack goes smoothly, which is not really much consolation.The next turn I polished off the final independent between me and Agartha, setting the stage for my first attacks on an enemy nation on turn 21. So, the front lines:
Actually, that's the full extent of Agartha, so they don't have much of a chance. My goal is to finish this war as rapidly as possible, to free up troops for other adventures (at this point, I'm still thinking Pangaea, though that's not how things end up). So my first two attacks hit Agartha's capital and the province which appears to have the weakest defences. I'm only going to show the attack on the capital province, since the other one is fairly similar only somewhat easier a victory.
The opposition looks like this:
This isn't the sum total of Agartha's forces in this province, but when you have a fort (which you start with in a capital), units will sit in their fort rather than patrolling to encounter the enemy. So what I'm fighting here is Agartha's province defence. Province defence are troops you can recruit that are tied to that province and recruited from whatever lives there - since this is Agartha's capital, they're national Agarthan troops. Each point of province defence costs 1 more gold than the previous one; this is probably the 25pd a capital site starts with. The units are Agartha's light, heavy, and extremely heavy infantry, from left to right. Practically speaking they're all fairly heavy as far as I'm concerned - that means they cost a lot of resources, though, so the fact that Agartha picked scales with a big penalty to resource construction is bizarre and means they can't recruit that many. As for this lot, it's their spread-out nature that dooms them. The light infantry meet the charge of my vanir cavalry and are scattered by it. The next group and the vanir are basically stalemated - they can't even see the vanir to hit them; but the vans are struggling to penetrate the Agarthan armour. But then my skinshifters arrive and this happens:
The double envelopment means that both flanks are now being attacked by far more troops than they can handle, and the additional bonuses for multiple attacks break through the Agarthan armour and the heavy infantry fall; at that point the basically untouched elite infantry (with the pink shields) notice that 66% of the army is dead and promptly rout. Rout checks for an entire army start happening at 50% losses, and it's why small leavenings of very good troops in armies of mediocre ones is usually a bad idea.
For Turn 22, I'm after revenge on that independent province from Turn 19, and this time we're making absolutely sure the scripting is right:
This is the Dominions scripting window for armies. The green boxes show the positioning of my squads, and they've all got some variation of the "attack cavalry" order so that the initial charge is met with all the force at my command. The commanders are set to hang back, and the mages set to spam lightning bolts after protecting themselves from archers (you can only give five turns of direct orders), looks good to me. (This time the attack went off without a hitch - I lose three skinshifters and nothing else). I also grab one other independent province, and on the Agarthan front I combine my two attack groups to take on the largest Agarthan field army I think I can handle. This costs me the two provinces I took last time, but that's not really the goal right now; I'm looking to keep the AI reacting to me and not attacking, and I can't really hold territory before my reinforcements arrive.
Here's the opposition this time:
That's mostly undead troops; some generic skeletons and a lot of Agartha's special Iron Corpses; some barbarian woodsmen native to the province as archers, some of Agartha's infantry again and three of their cave Drake-riding cavalry. On my side we have the usual mix of Vans and Skinshifters. I'd hoped that my commanders, all of whom have priest levels, would be able to banish the undead quite easily, but in practice this doesn't happen and I end up in the following meatgrinder:
On the flank, my vans have broken through the front line and are merrily slaughtering the enemy archers, but in the front line my skinshifters have been pinned in place by the heavily armoured cave drakes and are at best breaking even against the undead, even with banishment support - you can see that a lot of them have already been killed once and forced into their werewolf form. But as my losses amongst the skinshifters mount, theirs mount faster, and as the cavalry finishes up with the enemy archers and wheels about the Agarthan army breaks and runs. I'm now going to need quite a few more reinforcements to hold Agarthan territory, but the attacking threat they pose is mostly neutralised.
Turn 23, then, is obviously going to be about consolidation, right? Well, that would have been the sensible plan, wouldn't it? Instead I gather reinforcements from the mainland and attack the capital again, as well as the province containing the bridge. This is stupid; I win both battles, naturally, but I don't actually gain anything in doing it - the central province allows me to interdict Agartha's movement back and forth now I've got greater strength in armies than they do, but instead I'm continuing to raid when I can win a conventional victory and should be doing so. On the brighter side, my magic site searching hits its first big payoff; I find one of these:
The gem income is nice, but being able to recruit Enchantresses is great. Enchantresses have skill in several of the magic paths my Galdermen don't - notably Water and Nature, both of which can produce some excellent equipment, and Fire, which is good for burning stuff and I have lots of fire gems because of one of the thrones I claimed earlier. I plonk a lab down here at the earliest opportunity and get recruiting. This expands my magical capability significantly, and it was already a strength.
On Turn 24 I actually realise the tactical insight I've related to you above about the war against Agartha, but it takes the arrival of more reinforcements from Midgard proper (I had not wanted to use this many troops on the campaign) and another turns' victories before I can re-establish a suffocatingly strong strategic position, like so:
This time, when part of my force is sent to attack the capital and another part to clean up the force in Agartha's detached province (which contains only archers so can be overrun quite easily), I'm confident of retaining the strangle against any counterattacks, and indeed at the dawn of Turn 26 I've managed to reduce Agartha to the three provinces in the top corner, his beseiged capital (you can't recruit units in a beseiged fort), and that underwater province he grabbed with some undead units (undead are amphibious, logically enough) and which, in about six turns, will prove to be the bane of my life. Next update we'll see the AI's attempted breakout against the closing trap, and the debut of my mid-game strategy to deal with it (it involves a lot of lightning). I'll also do a step-back-and-strategic overview, but I thought this post was long enough already.
Turns 19-26
So at the end of the last update we were approximately here, save that I'd also taken the throne province all of my armies (red arrows) are pointing at. Diplomacy with Gath reached an impasse over the state of the final unclaimed province on that front, so for now neither of us are claiming it, but Marignon's happy for me to deal with Agartha (the AI is sufficiently bad that this war would be a guaranteed win even if I wasn't three times as big as Agartha, which I am) so I'm going to carry on advancing in that direction.
So for this turn armies are sent at the neutral province just across the lake from the throne where most of my armies are, and to the province next door to Agartha's fort. Since my primary commanders have sailing, they can traverse this distance in a single turn, which most sides would not be able to do. The much faster strategic movement of sailing is part of the reason I've aimed my expansion around a body of water. Sadly what I don't do is rescript the army aimed at the province near the lake from the script it had when attacking the throne. This means my vanir cavalry are still set to "attack archers", and off they merrily go to harry the enemy back line, leaving their Vanjarl on his own against the charge of the independent heavy cavalry. He dies under a storm of lances (likely his illusions protected him from some, but there were 20 or so) and my leaderless force routs, the cavalry striking them down as they run - a disaster only equalled in proportion by my forgetting to take any screenshots of it. The other attack goes smoothly, which is not really much consolation.The next turn I polished off the final independent between me and Agartha, setting the stage for my first attacks on an enemy nation on turn 21. So, the front lines:
Actually, that's the full extent of Agartha, so they don't have much of a chance. My goal is to finish this war as rapidly as possible, to free up troops for other adventures (at this point, I'm still thinking Pangaea, though that's not how things end up). So my first two attacks hit Agartha's capital and the province which appears to have the weakest defences. I'm only going to show the attack on the capital province, since the other one is fairly similar only somewhat easier a victory.
The opposition looks like this:
This isn't the sum total of Agartha's forces in this province, but when you have a fort (which you start with in a capital), units will sit in their fort rather than patrolling to encounter the enemy. So what I'm fighting here is Agartha's province defence. Province defence are troops you can recruit that are tied to that province and recruited from whatever lives there - since this is Agartha's capital, they're national Agarthan troops. Each point of province defence costs 1 more gold than the previous one; this is probably the 25pd a capital site starts with. The units are Agartha's light, heavy, and extremely heavy infantry, from left to right. Practically speaking they're all fairly heavy as far as I'm concerned - that means they cost a lot of resources, though, so the fact that Agartha picked scales with a big penalty to resource construction is bizarre and means they can't recruit that many. As for this lot, it's their spread-out nature that dooms them. The light infantry meet the charge of my vanir cavalry and are scattered by it. The next group and the vanir are basically stalemated - they can't even see the vanir to hit them; but the vans are struggling to penetrate the Agarthan armour. But then my skinshifters arrive and this happens:
The double envelopment means that both flanks are now being attacked by far more troops than they can handle, and the additional bonuses for multiple attacks break through the Agarthan armour and the heavy infantry fall; at that point the basically untouched elite infantry (with the pink shields) notice that 66% of the army is dead and promptly rout. Rout checks for an entire army start happening at 50% losses, and it's why small leavenings of very good troops in armies of mediocre ones is usually a bad idea.
For Turn 22, I'm after revenge on that independent province from Turn 19, and this time we're making absolutely sure the scripting is right:
This is the Dominions scripting window for armies. The green boxes show the positioning of my squads, and they've all got some variation of the "attack cavalry" order so that the initial charge is met with all the force at my command. The commanders are set to hang back, and the mages set to spam lightning bolts after protecting themselves from archers (you can only give five turns of direct orders), looks good to me. (This time the attack went off without a hitch - I lose three skinshifters and nothing else). I also grab one other independent province, and on the Agarthan front I combine my two attack groups to take on the largest Agarthan field army I think I can handle. This costs me the two provinces I took last time, but that's not really the goal right now; I'm looking to keep the AI reacting to me and not attacking, and I can't really hold territory before my reinforcements arrive.
Here's the opposition this time:
That's mostly undead troops; some generic skeletons and a lot of Agartha's special Iron Corpses; some barbarian woodsmen native to the province as archers, some of Agartha's infantry again and three of their cave Drake-riding cavalry. On my side we have the usual mix of Vans and Skinshifters. I'd hoped that my commanders, all of whom have priest levels, would be able to banish the undead quite easily, but in practice this doesn't happen and I end up in the following meatgrinder:
On the flank, my vans have broken through the front line and are merrily slaughtering the enemy archers, but in the front line my skinshifters have been pinned in place by the heavily armoured cave drakes and are at best breaking even against the undead, even with banishment support - you can see that a lot of them have already been killed once and forced into their werewolf form. But as my losses amongst the skinshifters mount, theirs mount faster, and as the cavalry finishes up with the enemy archers and wheels about the Agarthan army breaks and runs. I'm now going to need quite a few more reinforcements to hold Agarthan territory, but the attacking threat they pose is mostly neutralised.
Turn 23, then, is obviously going to be about consolidation, right? Well, that would have been the sensible plan, wouldn't it? Instead I gather reinforcements from the mainland and attack the capital again, as well as the province containing the bridge. This is stupid; I win both battles, naturally, but I don't actually gain anything in doing it - the central province allows me to interdict Agartha's movement back and forth now I've got greater strength in armies than they do, but instead I'm continuing to raid when I can win a conventional victory and should be doing so. On the brighter side, my magic site searching hits its first big payoff; I find one of these:
The gem income is nice, but being able to recruit Enchantresses is great. Enchantresses have skill in several of the magic paths my Galdermen don't - notably Water and Nature, both of which can produce some excellent equipment, and Fire, which is good for burning stuff and I have lots of fire gems because of one of the thrones I claimed earlier. I plonk a lab down here at the earliest opportunity and get recruiting. This expands my magical capability significantly, and it was already a strength.
On Turn 24 I actually realise the tactical insight I've related to you above about the war against Agartha, but it takes the arrival of more reinforcements from Midgard proper (I had not wanted to use this many troops on the campaign) and another turns' victories before I can re-establish a suffocatingly strong strategic position, like so:
This time, when part of my force is sent to attack the capital and another part to clean up the force in Agartha's detached province (which contains only archers so can be overrun quite easily), I'm confident of retaining the strangle against any counterattacks, and indeed at the dawn of Turn 26 I've managed to reduce Agartha to the three provinces in the top corner, his beseiged capital (you can't recruit units in a beseiged fort), and that underwater province he grabbed with some undead units (undead are amphibious, logically enough) and which, in about six turns, will prove to be the bane of my life. Next update we'll see the AI's attempted breakout against the closing trap, and the debut of my mid-game strategy to deal with it (it involves a lot of lightning). I'll also do a step-back-and-strategic overview, but I thought this post was long enough already.