Dominions 4 Ur Campaign: Where The Wild Things Are

Introduction and Set-up 

What is this place, and why?

I've been wanting to write something about Dominions for a while now, because it's great. It's great in at least two ways. First, it's an excellent turn-based strategy game with a lot of depth and probably unparalleled breadth of content (the official figures are more than 2000 unique units and “about 75” distinct nations; the game is frequently patched so these numbers are always rising). Second, the world of Dominions is one of the best fantasy worlds I've encountered, and is presented through the game in a compelling and strangely evocative way that is, arguably, unique. 

I'm going to try to write about both these things at once. Competitive gameplay and an enjoyable narrative might not seem like particularly congruent elements, particularly in a strategy game, but I will contend that they can be made to work in perfect harmony. Surely, I hear you say, such a videogame - in which the best strategic decisions were at the same time the most thematically appropriate given the narrative setting in which they take place - would be a masterpiece of design! Well yes I agree. And in these pages, I intend to prove that Dominions 4 is this game. If I succeed, I will have established that Dominions 4 is the best game ever and deserves nothing less than the coveted Perfect 100 score on Metacritic. If I fail, I will have had fun playing some Dominions, and hopefully shown it off in a positive light anyway. I cannot lose. I like those odds.

So! Let's go. I will playing a single-player game against 6 random land nations on the Streamlands map which is included with the main game. Half of the AI nations will be on the highest difficulty level, and half on the second-highest. 

I haven't played against the AI very much lately so I'm not sure how strong it is - from what I've heard it gets better every update, but I still doubt that it's gonna be quite as hardcore as a human player would be even on Impossible. Hopefully it will still be hard enough to provide a challenge, and render any successes I may have non-trivial. Hopefully it will not be so hard that I am completely wiped out in ten turns.

I will be playing Ur, The First City (a new nation in this iteration of Dominions). Here's what the craic is:

I like the look of Ur but I'm not very familiar with them, and I don't believe they're considered particularly strong (Dominions is balanced enough that you can win with whatever nation you pick, but some are certainly easier to play than others). Thematically they are inspired by the history and mythology of Ancient Mesopotamia. In Dominions, Ur is populated by large hairy men called Enkidus: the race is named for a character from the Epic of Gilgamesh which is a poem from 4,000 years ago. Enkidu was good buddies with the eponymous king of Uruk, and they are depicted together in the following image:

Enkidu is the one not choking a lion.

The Enkidus of Ur sound like a cool group of guys. Big on frolicking. There aren't many nations in Dominions who I would say are definitively 'good' or 'evil', but the Enkidus seem friendlier than most. Maybe it's just me - for some reason I feel very sympathetic towards them, perhaps because I am myself a large, hairy wild man with horns and unkempt hair.

After choosing a nation, the biggest choice you have to make is your choice of a Pretender God. This is you! Your character in the game! Strangely enough I don't find this to be such a big hook for roleplaying, identifying more strongly with my race or nation as a whole than with the Pretender God whose role I'm supposed to be playing. This may have something to do with my propensity to design Pretenders who are e.g. giant rocks or trees that are locked away in an invisible metaphysical prison for the first three years of the game so that I'm finished before they even show up. Just in case, I'm going for an awake Pretender this time. Here is the build:

Pretender design is actually very important, as it to a great extent defines what strategies you will or will not be able to pursue over the course of the game. You can choose your god's physical form and magical skills, there at the top, and can gain more points to spend by leaving your pretended Dormant or Imprisoned, meaning that they won't show up in the game for ~1 or ~3 years, respectively. The things you do in the 'Dominion' box in the middle have a big effect on your economy; your Dominion is the influence of your god, and the Dominion effects ('scales') you choose here will gradually come to determine the economic state of the provinces under your control (plus other stuff like with some nations your Dominion also kills everyone). The choice of positive or negative scales usually has further-reaching consequences than the choice of whether to make your Pretender a big bird or a bird tree, but it all hangs in a delicate balance and I'll shut up about it now.

My choice of an eagle for our Pretender god is a practical one: I thought about the magic abilities and scales I wanted first, and the Solar Eagle happened to be the form that fit them best. I'll go into more detail on the specifics next time when we get started on the game itself, but suffice it to say for now that our god is a giant bird that shoots fire. Happily, this is a thematically appropriate choice. Eagles feature in a few Ancient Mesopotamian myths: Etanu, one of Gilgamesh's predecessors, is said to have flown up to heaven on the back of a great eagle, and in another story Gilgamesh himself scares off a fire-breathing demon bird named Anzû. We're getting started, then, with perfect harmony between our strategy and our storytelling. I can almost taste that Perfect 100.

Next time: I decided to name the eagle Spike Jonze.