Dominions 5: EA Ermor, Caligula campaign, turn 1

I had an epiphany while researching the units for this civ. With the Augur unit negating bad events the Luck scale becomes much much better for me.

I also took the helpful comment that Dominion 10 was excessive into account and designed a new version of Caligula.

I went all in on Turmoil which is mostly negative (and is point scored as negative) but actually helps us because we love events. I went all in on Luck. I cut Dominion down to 6 which freed up enough points to give me 3 Production and 3 Growth.

Caligula version 2

My main drawback is a lack of Recruitment Points. There are three bottlenecks when building units: Gold, Resources and Recruitment Points. (Plus a 4th for Sacred units: Dominion) If I'm building heavily armoured units the Recruitment Points probably won't matter as Resources is the bottle neck. (All that heavy armour uses up a lot of metal). I should be ok to increase Resources and decrease Recruitment Points and still not hit the bottleneck. We'll see.

Let's start a game.

Here are my map settings:

Choose participants.

Set victory conditions. I like to add an extra throne in case on spawns in a very awkward place so the wincon is 4 out of 5 available thrones.

Game settings:

And let's fire up a game!

Here's our start position:

OK, we're in the North East in something of a corner. I'd like to get the land provinces around my city and then make a western front where the line of forests and mountains creates a natural wall.

I think I should start by trying to conquer west fast then backfill. I'd like to get provinces before the AI as I don't want any more wars then necessary in a 4 player game.

The diplomacy in this game seems perfunctory. Once they get a border with you at some point they'll declare war and attack. You find out you're at war at the same time you get to read the results of their first assault. They seem to like declaring war if they perceive you as weak. Once at war there seems to be no option to make peace.

What I'd like to do is get castles and Province Defence in a North South line on the three provinces I hope will be my choke then I may be able to get away with being relatively slack behind it.

Sometimes on maps I use my Scout as an extra archer in my initial combat stack. He's fairly safe when he's at the back shooring and an extra archer is pretty nice when I'd otherwise only have about 10 units. On this map I want to check out the "wall" provinces early. I send the scout west.

My other commander is a Centurion. I'd rather use a Legatus as my army commander though as he gives an extra point of morale. The Centurion will make a fine Prophet though so I promote him. Arise Pope Iconium!

We have 15 leves (skirmishers armed with javelins and spears) and 10 Hastati (heavy infantry armed with javelin shortsword and tower shield). I decide to recruit as many as possible of my sacred units then a standard bearer then round out with as many heavy infantry as possible.

In the early game you fight a lot of archers and the ideal way to counter them is to get them shooting heavily armoured units that they don't really damage then flank them with cavalry. Cavalry are a funny tool in most of these 4x games. They are rarely suitable for a meatgrinder role. They need to be deployed with some finesse to get the most from them. It's very bad news if your cavalry get into the enemy army while your heavy infantry are still miles behind as you open your forces up to being destroyed in detail, a piece at a time.

As it turns out I only have enough to get 3 Equites of the Sacred Shroud and one Standard as well as my commander. Luckily after this I'll not be recruiting many commanders who need armour which should free up more resources for the units. Interestingly despite having severely nerfed my recruitment points and buffed my resources I still bottleneck on resources. There are surely some races where recruitment points matter but for me I now feel justified in going full Turmoil scale with my Pretender God design.

Magic

The next thing to think about is how to develop my magic. My options are to go Construction to unlock various magic items or go for some battlefield magic. As I will have my Prophet and my Legatus with my army I don't think I'm yet looking for battle magic. I decide to go towards Construction 2, the next tier of magic items.

Rivals

The three other Pretenders to Godhood are T'ien C'hi (human, Chinese mythos), Machaka (Humans, African mythos, heavy on use of animals including war elephants) and C'Tis (Lizardmen).

I don't fancy those elephants, things didn't go too well for Rome last time.


OK, that's a wrap for turn 1 and this part of the story.