Chapter 1 the Baron:
Year 1
In order to get myself back into the swing of this game, and to introduce people not familiar, I’m just going to speed through with one of the least complicated characters.
The baron is fast, he doesn’t really have a late game, other then roll the opponent before they get there. However he gets a lot of units for free, more money for free, and siege engines, which actually does give him a fragile late game strategy of killing things in siege rounds, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Well heres the start, day one, you can see my tiny castle,
The baron himself is a competent leader,
Ok, he is slightly better then a normal footsoldier, probably should be kept out of combat when possible, but he is at least less likely to die in an ambush then some of the other faction leaders,
If the baron dies, he is gone forever, but another baron unit will eventually show up for recruitment. That summoning circle indicates he has a ‘ritual ability’ nothing magical though, just some overworld special action.
Raise levies is a ‘spell’ that can be ‘cast’ in small towns to ‘summon’ some ‘defenders’
Aka we bully some townspeople into standing up for themselves.
Levies are good because they prevent your small farms in the sticks from being overrun by a snake and using that as an excuse to stop sending taxes.
Swift justice is a spell that turns a bandit camp into a gallows,
the mechanical significance of gallows doesn’t matter to us, just the fact that the bandit camp is gone, and will stop spawning bandits
Raise fort is the real important ability, it takes 6 actions to cast, so the baron has to sit around for at least 1 turn after casting it. The ability turns a normal village into a motte and bailey.
This makes the land produce more gold and adds walls making it harder for your peasants to complain.
The level 2 abilities I’ll get to next Update,
We also start with this joker,
High lords are awesome, they hit hard, move fast and can cast all the level 1 abilities that the baron has.
Their only flaw is that they are fast, frontline fighters…. For a leader that isn’t exactly a desirable quality early on.
Anyway I’m going to start off by clearing the local hostiles,
My starting army is a mess of calverymen, spearmen, and longbows, I’m going to make a slightly risky play and send my horsemen with the lord up to the soldier, who is apparently alone in town, and the baron will lead the pokey stick crew heroically to slaughter some villagers.
Most recruits cost a minimum of 50 gold, the baron has one of the few exceptions being a squad of war dogs.
I’m not going to recruit these guys. There are situations where a bunch of dogs tearing into something bigger can be good. But I’d much rather bank my money for the first couple of turns.
Good news, we slaughtered the peasantry, bad news, a siren wandered 1 square away from our fort.
Neutral units, in gray, move entirely randomly as far as I’m aware, but have an uncanny knack of moving towards things you own which makes me think it isn’t random at all.
If we lose our last(only) fort we automatically lose, even if it was to something dumb like a single peasant wandering in. annoyingly since that siren is amphibious I can’t send anything to kill it.
Note the soldiers are not the same shade of gray, but a blue-gray, they belong to a different neutral faction then the wandering wildlife, and these groups stationed at the villages will never move.
I elected to retreat the baron, the archers by themselves are probably enough to deal with the siren before she can do anything. Also she will probably just wander back into the ocean next turn.
Meanwhile the highlord is ‘liberating’ another village. The 2 crossed swords indicate a battle is taking place there.
Turn 3, I decided to leave the barons troops at the castle defending it from the solo sea monsters, while sending the baron to start upgrading the towns, this cost ALL of my money, but we will be getting more money soon. The upgrade process is instant, but it will take 2 turns before my baron can move again. I’m not worried about the hippocampus, because it doesn’t transform and can’t go on land.
Pictured, everything wrong with high lords.
don't mind the battle, that's just the highlord dealing with some local wildlife.
I don’t have enough money yet to build another fort, but I did set up some levies in the one I had built. And the market village… oh yeah the market village.
The market is a very basic system in this game, you don’t interact with other players but some magical independent merchant’s league or something. It basically lets you convert one kind of resource into another, we need iron for our better units so this is good. With 1 trade we can get 1 iron for 1 gold every turn, or if we check the overprice option we can trade 4 gold for 2 iron.
There are other resources with less even ratios. But the baron doesn’t care about them so he can’t even see them in the market. Kingdoms are forged of Iron and gold.
That brings us to winter,
Winter sucks, all the tiles in the temperate areas get covered in snow, slowing movement to a crawl, also several tiles produce less resources during winter. Our two villages and our castle had their gold production cut in half.
However the winter also freezes water to ice, which actually gives me an opportunity to deal with that siren.
We also get a recruitment offer for 2 trebuchets,
Very nice, but at 75 gold AND 75 iron, we can’t really use this yet.
Recruitment offers pop up randomly depending on what tiles you own. Owning a temple gives the baron the chance to recruit priests and monks, while owning a library will give us the chance to hire wizards. The more of these structures we own, the better our recruitment offers will be.
Anyway, after some deliberation I decide to send my lord south towards the desert, where he finds a gem deposit, and uh…
Is that a horde of monkeys on an elephant?
Balanced precariously on a wall?
Well, this is a curious situation. Normally trampling units are a major pain, since they can squash knights and bypass their protection. But since this is a ranged unit, I’m not sure if it will behave that aggressive. Especially in a siege scenario, I should come back with archers and pick this castle apart.
Caught the siren in ice, lets see if I can make it out before the ice melts in spring.
Also a bunch of goblins appeared,
Yowtch, 50% casualties,
The problem is that the siren has an ability that gives it a chance to convert anything that attacks it within a certain range to an ally. I was confident that my longbows could take it down before it got close enough, but I was way off in my estimate.
I also got a recruitment offer for swordsman and archers, its a pretty good deal, 10 men for 70 gold, vs the usual 5 for 50 deal. But I don’t have enough iron for the swordsmen, I’d rather save the gold for forts at the moment, but I do recruit some Longbows at the normal price, to replace the 2 I lost.
Anyway I moved the baron off the ice before spring hit, the changing season will solve our troop concerns soon.
I start looping my highlord back around, after the season changes, and make a critical error.
See that battle, that keep was unoccupied. Which means this is an ambush, no mundane unit can hide in plain sight like that, so that means I likely got ambushed by ghosts.
There are several kinds of ghosts ranging from ‘annoying but mostly harmless’ to ‘welp their goes that army’, so we will have to see what I got…
You have got to be kidding me.
Ok, if you have ever played dominions you probably know horrors are bad news, eldritch monstrosities that do not play fair, this is an endgame tier unit, that I walked into with 5 knights, that is mostly immune to physical damage, most magical damage, casts more spells per round then my entire faction can learn,
I was expecting a disaster, I didn’t expect this much of a disaster though…
Well, it wasn’t really that bad, so the eldritch abomination mind controlled a couple of knights, not really any worse then losing them in some other ambush.
And because this guy is mounted on a fort, he isn’t likely to leave. So at least I don’t need to worry about a roaming moon horror.
Also moon horrors are void aligned, so any neutral unit that wanders in there is going to get eaten, I’ll just think of that fort as an extra-planer bug zapper for a little while… and by a little while I mean the entire game because I don’t think I have a single thing in my arsenal that can kill a moon horror…
It will take me a little while to rebuild from that loss though,
Hilariously, I got an offer for a new highlord the next turn, but I don’t have the 10 iron to get him suited up. Oh well, just keep building forts for a few turns…
Jackpot, this is the real power of the baron, every year at the start of summer, he gets a wave of free units,
Knights are great units at any stage of the game, they hit hard with the lance charge, have a lot of armor for a unit available this early on, as long as your not trying to stab an incorporeal moon horror throwing a ton of knights at things is a reliable strategy. The only real weakness of the knight is that little icon next to the shield. That is ‘battle fast’ meaning the knight gets 2 moves in combat, but still only 3 moves on the overworld. The highlord and calverymen have ‘fast’ which gives them an additional move on the overworld. The downside is pretty negligible since your usually mixing in other slower units anyway, but it does give the highlord with 5 calverymen a bit of a niche.
There are a few more exotic conscripts we can get by capturing certain tiles, but we will get to them when we get the chance.
I think thats a good note to end the update, We survived 1 year, captured a bunch of towns, set up some forts. Found some interesting threats, and introduced a lot of mechanics.
