Turn 3 - Starting To Expand
Introduction to scales, scripting and random events.
Summertime, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping, and an unexpected event has occurred in Ur.
You get messages at the start of every turn, but I haven't shown you before because all our messages were boring. Not this time though! Unexpected events happen unexpectedly and can be good or bad or weird or all three. You can actually strategise about this to some extent: one of the pseudo-economic Dominion scales I mentioned before is Luck/Misfortune, and it affects both the frequency and quality of random happenings. Positive scales here increase the likelihood of you getting free money and treasure, while negative scales make everything horrible. Taking Misfortune 3 is considered one of few definitely bad choices in Dominions, as barbarians invade provinces and shit catches fire with great frequency; furthermore that number 3 supposedly unlocks a hidden category of extra-horrible events that will never befall a Lucky (or neutral) nation. There are some other weird hidden factors in play such as that taking a negative Magic scale (Drain) makes it more likely that you'll lose magic gems to events. I think? How does this game work I don't know I just write about it. Our Luck scale was neutral so this could be good or bad but probably won't be very extreme. Let's have a look!
Cool! I don't know if this is a nation-specific event or if we were just lucky to get a relevant one on Turn 3 in the game where I'm writing about narrative emerging from gameplay. Incidentally one of the few non-standard settings I set this game up with was Story Events Enabled, which is supposed to turn on longer and more significant multi-part happenings. Is this one of them? I don't know okay get off my case.
The upshot of this particular event is that we got a free commander and a free magic item. Here is the commander, who has been renamed Steve Coogan for some reason:
He's not very good. Actually he's a bad unit from another nation, Hinnom - which has lots of better things to buy so probably will never use him - but with the added ability to command 40 troops which is moderately handy. His flavour text is pretty interesting, though, especially when you consider that it's background information on Ur that a Hinnom player has access to that we don't (Ur's nation text mentions them learning civilization from the Avvites but doesn't say anything about slavery). Quite a few of the backstories in Dominions are interwoven in this way, and I love it.
Even better, if you cast your eyes back up to the message screen you will see that there has been A proclamation from Hinnom! (which was just them declaring a Prophet everyone does it it's no big deal). That means they're in the game. That means we might get to fight them. They might even use Enkidu slaves against us.
THOSE BASTARDS.
Fingers crossed we get to fight them - Hinnom's a pretty tough nation too so it should be a good one. Hinnom is populated by the Avvim (aka Avvites), who are horrible giants led by their descendants the Rephaim, who are horrible-er. They're all very cannibalistic and incestuous, and are inspired by bits of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls and also Sumerian stuff so we're a sort of double spin-off. One of their big things is Blood Magic, which a couple of nations are into and which involves hunting up pure-hearted maidens from amongst the general populace and then sacrificing them to summon demons and make jewellery. The Ring of the Warrior Steve Coogan jacked for us is a minor Blood item. Behold:
It cost 5 flayed virgins to make. While the nation of Ur does not approve of or condone the use of Blood Magic, Spike Jonze does not have a problem wearing this stolen ring into battle.
Bit of extra Attack and Morale won't hurt. You'll observe that Spike has only three places for magic items (plus the long one with the chest on it which is for magic gems to fuel spells). This is because he is a giant bird, and does not have hands or feet in the traditional sense. He can wear something on his head and has the standard pair of miscellaneous slots but nothing else; the ring, we can assume, is magically resized and slipped onto a gnarléd claw, but we can't make him hold a burning sword in his mouth or anything. This is one of the drawbacks to taking a giant monster as a Pretender instead of a giant humanoid. On the plus side our Pretender is a giant monster so it all balances out in the end.
Our final message was to inform us that our research in Evocation has been completed. I'll go into the magic system in more detail in future but for now know that in Dominions there are 8 Paths and 7 Schools of Magic. Evocation is the school which involves 'the projection of arcane power into the world' (paraphrasing the manual). Fire is the path that is to do with fire. We have now unlocked all level 1 Evocation spells, which means Spike Jonze is now more able to blast people with magical fire, and I promptly tell him to do just that. For our first target we select some suitable-looking punks in a province adjacent to the capital:
The Eagle shall descend upon the Wolf Tribe. Battles are carried out without the player's direct intervention: I've ordered Spike Jonze to attack and we'll get the result next turn. You have a certain degree of control over what your forces do in battle, in the form of orders assigned to troops and their commanders. Spike's orders for this turn are pictured below.
Commanders get up to 5 specific instructions, followed by a general order. This is particularly useful for mages and giant monsters, and especially for Spike who is BOTH. We don't have much research yet though so our options are narrowed: I've gone with Air Shield (the caster is protected from missiles due to a magical swirling shield of air) followed by many Fire Darts (a basic spell that shoots fire). This is the spell we chilled for two turns to get. There's a basic fire-shooting spell called Fire Flies at Evocation 0 (i.e. automatically unlocked) which is only a little bit worse, but that little bit is enough to make it not really kill very much (as opposed to killing enough, which Fire Darts should do). After the 5 spells I've specified I've told Spike to continue using magic - the AI will freestyle it. It's bad at doing clever things with magic but good at shooting fire at people so this should work out fine.
Finally, we send a small expansion force out against the hapless undead on the other side of our capital:
Carol the Commander leads our starting squad of basic semi-naked men with horns, supplemented by all six of the Enki's Chosen I've recruited and backed up by Sendak the Prophet. Troop orders are a little more basic, and commanders who aren't giant eagles are best off chilling in the backfield for the most part, so my instructions to this mini-army look like this:
You can see everyone's respective positions by their illuminated square's position in the big green square. The infantry in the centre will hang out for a couple of rounds while Sendak lays down supporting fire with his Holy magic - undead are very vulnerable to Banishment, which is a basic priestly spell, and Sendak is our Prophet so he's a powerful priest - before charging in to finish the job.
We have issued our orders, and now we just have to click End Turn to see how it all turns out. I have failed to deliver on any of the promises I made about what would happen this time last time, but don't worry. You'll see it all next time. I promise.
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