Repelling the invasion, introducing size mechanics, and scouting Xibalba.
The long hard winter is drawing to a close.
I wrote that as a way to get the post started but my income does in fact suffer from the colder temperatures in winter, presumably because the Enkidus don't wear trousers. Mostly fights this turn! The first one is a surprisingly tough indie province in the eastern foothills: a squadron of heavy cavalry accompanies the more usual horse archers and militia, and they do a fair bit of damage charging into our Enkidu battleline.
They are then surrounded and crushed.
Still, I think this is the most casualties we've suffered in a single battle. Good thing I brought plenty of wildmen! As we all know from reading Don Quixote, lances are a traditional giant-slaying weapon, second only to the beanstalk in absolute effectiveness and considerably more practical; Dominions models this accurately, and so knights and similar tend to do quite well against small numbers of big scary guys. This is one of many circumstances where having fewer tough soldiers is worse than having more smaller ones; opponents with high-damage attacks are more efficient against us than, say, Xibalba (featured below!). A lance will impale an Enkidu as surely as a tiny naked bat-person (for instance), but we'll tend to have fewer naked people in reserve so the effect is proportionately greater.
Our own Enkidus are mighty mighty, often doing 20 or 30 damage per hatchet-strike themselves, which would be great against other Enkidus but is overkill against 10 hitpoint militia. It does, happily, render the Fir Bolg Warriors' extra few HP largely inconsequential, as demonstrated in the following battle.
Not bad against giants neither. The Fomorians, pushing deeper into our territory, have run up against a fresh squad of Chosen led out of the capital by Rob Brydon. JUST as PLANNED.
They make a fair go of it, but they're badly outnumbered. In this shot you can see why the Fomorians are referred to as 'giants' while the Enkidu are merely 'large and hairy'; the Fomorians are a bit bigger. In the following screenshot I've turned the grid on to better illustrate differences in size:
Sorry about the white on white. You can still just about see that the Enkidus are two to a square, the humans and Fir Bolgs three, and the Fomorian Unmarked only one. You can fit 6 size points in a square; humans are size 2, Enkidus and ogres and similar are size 3, while giants are even bigger. Spike Jonze and elephants are size 6, so no-one can get in the square with them.
These differences in size mean that smaller troops are generally at an advantage in melee - humans gang up on Enkidus, Enkidus gang up on Fomorians, everyone gangs up on Spike. You can see this happening above, where two Chosen of Enki are powerstancing a lone Unmarked to death. It's more significant in big battles than in this skirmish, however; here we have twice as many melee infantry as the Fomorians so we wrap round the flank and hack them up good. It takes a while, as our giants are clumsy and the Fomorians skilful, but soon enough they break and run.
If you don't count the slingers (don't), this was actually quite a close fight: we had twice as many Chosen as they had Fir Bolg and Unmarked, and still lost 4 infantry to their 6. Furthermore their stylish Prophet Donnabhan escaped to fight another day! Generally battles finish when one side flees, rather than when everyone is dead; fast troops can chase down fleeing enemies and slaughter them with ease, but often mages and generals lurking in the rear can retreat to friendly territory and regroup with reinforcements or with other cowards.
This might have happened here. However, the only place the Fomorian remnants had to run was Jabbernia, the province they occupied last turn.
Unfortunately for them, a giant illusory awe-inspiring sunbird got there first. Units that rout without an adjacent friendly province are lost, representing their death, desertion or imprisonment as they scatter across hostile territory.
In this particular instance, of course, Spike Jonze ate them all.
Textbook stuff. The Fomorian threat is neutralised for now, but Spike has a taste for goat so he presses on into Vician Forest.
Which is occupied by Jaguar Tribe for some reason. Rob Brydon, flush with victory, leads his force across the frozen river to pick off that last hold-out indie province.
Normally we would have had to go round, across the bridge and through Jabbernia, but the solid blue lines in the picture above denote a river made passable by the cold weather. They'll fade to light blue in summer, denoting a liquid river passable only to fishmen like Adapa (and all other amphibious troops).
With that attack and this one from the Eastern Enkidu Expansion Force, we should hopefully have captured all the indie provinces I had earmarked. Hooray!
Just two more messages this turn. One is an Unexpected Event, in this case a bad one:
Nothing too serious. The other one is a bit more interesting; one of our scouts has spotted another rival nation, Xibalba, expanding into an indie province just the other side of Fomoria. The Xibalbans are one of the newest nations in Dominions, and I don't know much about them, but they can be roughly summarised as 'underground Mayan bat-people'.
They've got some weird stuff, there. Apart from being bat people themselves, which is arguably quite weird already, the Xibalbans are heavily into Blood Magic, which involves rounding up purehearted innocents and sacrificing them to summon demons and other abominations onto this our earthly plane. They can also fly!
The Zotz, primary inhabitants of Xibalba, are small, weak and practically naked. Combined these factors encourage them to employ swarming tactics on the battlefield, which seems quite characterful for bat-people.
Could be a worry for our big fat Enkidus! But we'll murder that bridge when we come to it.
That's all for this turn, and all for Year 1! Thank you for joining me this far. My next post will be a retrospective on the first year of Where The Wild Things Are, analysing and evaluating my strategy so far and seeing how well it has meshed with the narrative elements of the game.
Next year: we burn Fomoria to the ground before being simultaneously invaded by every other nation in the game. I haven't played this far yet so this isn't a spoiler, but it might still be a spoiler.
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