Where The Wild Things Are Year 2: Spring

Turn 13 - Unlucky For Some (Fomoria)

Meet the Swamp Tribe, and more on Fomorians.

We're under attack! Fomoria had some crappy Jaguar Tribe Warriors hanging around in that border forest; I sent Spike in to crush them, but it seems they made their move before he could get there, attacking The Sodden Mirk. This is potentially v. bad - you may recall that I emptied our treasury last turn to begin construction on another fortress in this province. If it's taken, even for a turn, the accursed Fomorians will slaughter the architects and burn the blueprints and we'll lose ALL THAT CASH. Oh no!

Here's what we're up against:

punk-ASS indies

led by a merman for some reason

On the home team, 3 points of Province Defence (i.e. hardly any) and some secret swamp troops:

Secret swamp troops?! That's right! Time to meet the final tribe of Ur, the ferocious swamp-dwelling hunter-gatherers.

These are my basic Enkidu Hunters, recruitable only in swamps! I've been building up a small force here to support Rob Brydon's Chosen (who are now all dead). They're not great but they are an improvement over the pastoral Enkidus in one or two ways. I hope. I haven't really used them that much. But we'll find out... RIGHT NOW

Our savage swampmen rush forward - I haven't been able to give them any instructions because they've just been a garrison force, with no proper commander. Not that my usual tactics are much more sophisticated than 'Charge!' anyway. The Enkidus are met with a hail of Jaguar Tribe slingshot:

sending several of them into a BERSERKER RAGE!

BERSERKER RAGE PLUS OOOOONE

This is a fun ability. When wounded, the Enkidu Hunters are capable of going berserk, gaining Strength, Attack and Protection (in this case representing their ability to shrug off serious wounds) in return for Defence Skill and getting knackered more quickly. It's only a 1-point stat shift for these guys (Berserk +1) BUT importantly Berserkers will also refuse to flee from battle. Ever! At all! TO THE DEATH. Swamp Enkidus are hard bastards.

They crush the Fomorian Heavy Infantry:

 and pile on into the Jaguar Tribe:

who rout after just a few casualties:

COME BACK AND FIGHT

An easy win, in the end. Good job swamp tribe! Shame you couldn't finish off a few more of them, though. The remnants of the Fomorian raiding force flee back to Raspberry Woods to regroup, and plan future attacks against our fragile defensive

http://society6.com/product/golden-eagle-jaguar-and-peyote-flowers_print#1=45

oh no wait they're all dead. Border secured!

I was worried for a moment there, but everything worked out fiiiiine. Here's our situation at the start of Turn 13:

We're more than twice the size of Fomoria now, and I'll shortly be looking into raising our first serious army and sending it to take their capital. I don't intend to push our advantage just yet, though, as scouting reports from last turn indicate that they still have a decent number of troops running around. Instead of expanding further to the east, they've brought most of them back to the capital:

There're also some Fir Bolgs and Unmarked lurking in that Throne province north-west of Fomoria; from the battle I caught before I know that they're supported by Nemedian Warriors too, but you can't see them in the screenshot above because those guys are invisible. Which reminds me: Fomoria has started to deploy some of their more interesting units, so let's take a look!

First up are some basic Fomorians:

These are the degenerate latter-day Fomorians, the same type as the Unmarked sacreds. Apart from the goat heads the curse upon their people is also manifest in the physical deformities suffered by many Fomorians - in gameplay terms, this means that some of the troops you recruit will come with afflictions, exactly as if they'd been injured in battle. Fomorian mages and the Unmarked are drawn "from a few blessed families, untouched by the physical afflictions of the Curse"; their sacred troops and commanders are the only goatheads they can buy without worrying that they're blind or lame. In fact these unafflicted Fomorians are held to be sacred by their people just because they are spared from the worst of the Curse, and Dominions represents this by giving them Sacred status. I really like this feature; it's a great example of how an existing mechanic (the affliction system) can be used to emphasise elements of a nation's backstory in a natural way. The Curse is a pain! Your regular troops come with limps and stuff! It's then tied into another core mechanic (Sacredness) which encourages you to treat the few affliction-free Fomorians as special and valuable, in much the same way as their own people.

Goat-headedness is not a universal feature of the mythological Fomorians, however (cursory online research suggests that it originates in the Book of the Dun Cow, the Lebor na hUidre, a 12th Century manuscript which is the oldest of its kind in Ireland). Some are also depicted as more-or-less human, as in this relatively famous painting by a Scottish guy called John Duncan:

(please ignore the fish with legs (he's on our side))

Indeed, Lugh - the ancient Celtic sun god - was part Fomorian! Despite also being one of the famously-attractive Tuatha Dé Danann. Lugh's grandfather was Balor, the greatest king of the Fomorians. Balor "was surnamed "of the Evil Eye," because the gaze of his one eye could slay like a thunderbolt those on whom he looked in anger. He was now, however, [at the time of his defeat by Lugh] so old and feeble that the vast eyelid drooped over the death-dealing eye, and had to be lifted up by his men with ropes and pulleys when the time came to turn it on his foes." 

Monstrous to be sure, but no mention of a goat head there. Balor, I take it, is the model for the final type of Fomorian giant, now spotted gathering in our enemy's capital. Behold!

THE HORROR

These are the real Fomorian giants: cycloptic refugees from the realm of the drowned dead, hairy, amphibious, sacred and Big. They're size 6 -as big as an elephant or Spike Jonze himself - and they have 64 hitpoints each, meaning that they take 6.4 times the killing of an average human soldier (it's nice that Dominions lets us quantify these things precisely). Even the rightly-feared Frost Giants of Niefelheim (not featured in this playthrough, sadly) are less massive. They're also decently armed and armoured, with Very Long Spears and javelins that they can fling almost as far as an arrow fired from a bow (fortunately they can't hit anything cos they've only got one eye).

As we've discussed there are various disadvantages to being a giant, the most pressing on the battlefield being the way smaller species tend to swarm around you and cut off your knees. Still they're pretty tough and strong enough to skewer an Enkidu with one strike, so I don't wanna have to fight 40 of them at once.

Finally, but not least interestingly, the Fir Bolgs that constitute much of the Fomorian rank-and-file are bolstered by the addition of these Nemedian Warriors:

In Irish mythology the Partholonians and the Nemedians were the first two groups to invade the island, coming from The Land of the Living (I still don't know why this is synonymous with The Land of the Dead) and giving battle to the Fomorians. They both did ok and then were practically wiped out by plagues; some accounts mentioned in my book about Celts say that only 30 Nemedians survived the final battle and fled Ireland in despair, either "perishing utterly" or fathering the Britons, Firbolgs and/or Tuatha depending on who you're reading. 

In Dominions things are a little different: the Nemedians have been subjugated by the Fomorians, rather than eliminated completely. Interestingly their predecessors the Partholonians are also identified as coming from Sauromatia, an EA Dominions nation loosely based on Ancient Greek depictions of horrible Scythian and Amazon tribes. According to my book both the Partholonians and Nemedians originally "came from the mysterious regions of the dead, though later Irish accounts, which endeavoured to reconcile this mythical matter with Christianity, invented for them a descent from Scriptural patriarchs and an origin in earthly lands such as Spain or Scythia." By taking elements from the reconstructed mediaeval versions of these myths, rather than sticking rigidly to the details laid out in the possibly more ancient versions discussed by some scholars, Illwinter enriches the backstories of both Fomoria and Sauromatia (and justifies giving them some interesting, unusual units). Similarly the decision to make the remnant Nemedians subservient to the Fomorians, rather than simply wiping them out in the past sometime, lets us play around with some cool and thematic - though non-Fomorian - troop types. This, in general, is how Illwinter rolls. Respect.

It's bad news for us in Ur, however. Nemedians are very similar to Fir Bolgs, but stronger, braver, better-armoured and more skillful. They also have Glamour, the innate magical ability to deceive common to all (most?) varieties of elf and fae and similar in British and I think Norse mythology. In gameplay terms this is represented by them being Very Stealthy - normal stealth, like scouts have, but also impossible to detect in friendly provinces - and by having an automatic Mirror Image effect in combat. It won't be as powerful as Spike Jonze's, but then I can't buy 20 of him and sneak them behind enemy lines to wait for the right opportunity to strike.

That's enough about them for now. To summarise the strategic situation, Fomoria has some good stuff but not that much of it, and they'll probably be dead before there's enough of it to worry us.

My orders this turn are accordingly conservative. Forces gather in Jabbernia to finally take out those scaly pricks in the swamp, and our Eastern Expansion Force moves up to the border with Hinnom to scare them off or something. Our dominion hasn't filled out yet so Sendak's sticking with them, and will be tasked with preaching up a storm out there in Bright Gate. Finally a sneaky grey arrow in the east is Adapa roaming the countryside in search of magic sites, while Spike remains stationary for the first time in a year to do the same in newly-conquered Raspberry Woods. Magic sites are something I should probably have made more of an effort to seek out by now, but I won't go on about them here. More than enough room for that... NEXT TIME.

Next time: oh ho ho it's magic, you knoooow