Turn 6 - Adapa The Wisdom Fish
Heroes, afflictions and foreign recruitment.
Oh!
Cool, we got a hero! There are a few unique heroes for each nation, and they show up at random. Their importance and usefulness varies greatly; the only mod I regularly play with is the Worthy Heroes mod which adds extra heroes for those nations with hardly any and gives loser heroes extra abilities to make them more interesting (if not more powerful). Adapa comes from the mod!
The unit text of the vanilla heroes often holds unique information about the history or culture of their nation, and as they appear randomly and are in general quite rare you might play a dozen games with a nation before discovering something new about their background. I don't know how much licence the Worthy Heroes' creators have given themselves in general but Adapa at least seems a great choice for Ur, fleshing out their metaphysical pre-history a bit without undermining any of the established national lore. I'm glad he showed up in this play-through; Ur is coastal in this particular game so it seems fitting that an ancient spirit fish from the dawn of time should rise from beneath the waves to help guide our nation to glory.
In gameplay terms Adapa is a powerful Air, Water and Nature mage as well as a level 3 priest, and has a few weird special abilities that we may or may not be able to find a use for. I consider renaming him for comic effect, narrowing it down to either Socrates or Robert Shaw before deciding that Adapa the Seventh Sage is cool enough already. More on him later; on to the battles!
I'm surprised the independents keep showing up to these battles. At this point I'm ignoring the replay altogether, imagining instead a glowing eagle descending from the high noon sun to bombard hapless villagers with fireballs until they pledge allegiance. Another province claimed for Spike Jonze.
Meanwhile we're up against Ordinary Humans again in the chokepoint province of Titan's Steps (and this time they remain human, and are not transfigured into sentient apemen by a quirk in the space-time continuum). We kill them with our hatchets:
Unfortunately the handful of heavy cavalry present in this province make a bit of an impact with their lance charge, and we lose a few more Enkidus.
This might still be a viable expansion force even with these casualties, were it not for the fact that most of these troops have picked up afflictions in the battles they've survived so far. Shattered limbs and gaping chest wounds are scattered liberally amongst the Enkidu Soldiers, and half of the remaining Chosen are outright Crippled.
That's right! Dominions models attrition at the level of the individual soldier and the horrific wounds they sustain while e.g. charging naked into a squadron of spearmen. There are a couples of ways to remove afflictions but they're generally either restricted to certain nations - Arcoscephale, for example, has mages with healing abilities - or a fair bit of trouble to access, so in general soldiers crippled, blinded or lamed will stay that way. This means that the affliction system helps to represent the way an army can lose combat effectiveness over time through injury and fatigue (and not just through everyone getting killed). Had our expansion force been twice as big it would likely have made it to this point with far fewer afflictions, and the same would be true if we'd had highly-skilled or well-armoured troops, or done most of our fighting with ranged weapons. As it is we've been relying on big angry Enkidus going toe-to-toe with indie battlelines, and though they've always won through they've been worn down by a season of hard fighting.
We'll take a turn to bring in reinforcements. Our battered expansion force withdraws from the mountain pass, pulling back to Monkey Forest, and a bevy of Enki's Chosen leaves the capital with a commander brought in from the northern provinces last turn.
This was the role I had in mind for Steve Coogan the Enkidu Slave, but sadly it appears that in this timeline he failed to escape his Avvite masters. Pity. Fortunately troop commanders are readily available in most provinces; I have hired a basic Enkidu Chief from the province north-west of Ur to lead a new force to the front in Steve Coogan's place. He has very similar capabilities, but is useful in a slightly wider range of situations and is generally just a little more professional. I've named him Rob Brydon.
He's leading three turns' worth of Enki's Chosen as well as a handful of basic soldiers and some horn players.
This isn't really an overwhelming force, but we'll be able to drum up (horn up) some more troops before sending it into battle thanks to one of Ur's special features: foreign recruitment!
Last turn I mentioned that you need forts to get resources to get troops. Resources are a limiting factor, it's true, but most nations also need a fort to access any of their troops at all. You can recruit subjugated independents in any province (though you'd hardly ever want to) but national troops can only be recruited where you've spent the time and gold necessary to put up a fort. This all adds up to fun things like logistics and troop disposition and swamps slowing people down.
Some nations partially break these rules, however, having access to special troop types outside of forts. Ur isn't alone in this, although I believe I'm right in saying that it has more foreign recruitment options than anybody else. Behold!
This is what the recruitment screen looks like in the forest next to our capital. Most other nations would only see the crappy human troops on the right-hand side, but we get Enkidus.
These are drawn from the first tribe of Ur: the pastoral, frolicking Enkidus who love animals and hate clothes. They are even less civilized than the hairy naked men we've deployed so far, but these Warriors are almost identical to the basic Soldiers we've seen before. They have one less point of morale, being marginally less disciplined, and wield stone spears instead of bronze hatchets (which is probably an improvement, especially for fairly unskilled troops like these).
They're not great but they don't need to be! We're just drafting in some of these nature-loving freaks to back up the professional soldiers of Eridu, next to our capital and in Monkey Forest as well. Picture Rob Brydon marching through the woods with his entourage of Chosen behind him, their bronze scale armour gleaming in the dappled sunlight, proceeding in time with the Horn Blowers' accompaniment. The large hairy wild men of the forests pause in their frolicking as they hear the unfamiliar sound of Abdullah Ibrahim's Blues For A Hip King (adapted for Two Ancient Mesopotamian Horns) wafting over the treetops. They've never heard this sound before, but they know what it means. They know that the time for war has come.
Meanwhile in the north Spike Jonze flies back over occupied lands to fireball some peasants.
That's all for this turn!
Next time: mystery arrows I explained some of them, the grey ones are scouts ok? They get a grey arrow cos they're sneaking.
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