Sword of Aragon: A Conqueror's Mentality

My vast (and, unfortunately, not very profitable) holdings.

My path to global conquest has progressed largely unimpeded. Since the last posting, I accomplished the following:

1. Defeated a dragon on the way up to Gernok, the city of goblins. It was easier than I expected: it fell in a couple of rounds in which I took virtually no damage. For my four-minute combat, I received 72,000 gold pieces and 50 points.

At least, unlike most RPGs, it seems to be the right scale.

2. Attacked and conquered Gernok itself. There were a lot of goblins there with many monster allies, but like most besieged armies, they were loathe to leave their fortifications and were easy fodder for my bowmen. When I won, I not only got the city but the Crown of the Westrealm.

Who is actually saying that I'm the "rightful ruler of Aragon"? Not that I mind.

3. Conquered and occupied Char, the city of giants, for which I found the Wand of the Lake Goddess. It supposedly caused some improvements to the area around Tentula, but I didn't really notice them. A couple turns later, I had to defend Marinia, my vassal, from another group of giants. I didn't have many forces in the area, but sending a single battalion was fortunately enough. Malacon did most of the rest.

My units face off against giants at Char.

4. Had a few skirmishes with Khalikhan horsemen bands who were angry that I'd sided with Jantri Khali. (From what language or mythology did both this game and George R. R. Martin draw the syllable "Khal" as relates to horsemen?) But after an episode where I saved them from some trolls, they agreed to lay down their arms and join Jantri. For this, the overjoyed Jantri gave me 5,000 gold pieces. I never heard about horsemen again after that.

Jantri Khali will now marry and beget the Stallion Who Mounts the World.

5. Conquered Zarnix from the orcs. This involved two huge battles, one in front of the city and one at the city itself. This was necessary to open the southern pass to the east coast.

6. North of Zarnix, my hero found a clearing with a large stone tablet that called me the "True Heir." The ghost of an old emperor (my ancestor) appeared and told me I was destined to unite the land and become emperor, but I need the Crown and the Sceptre. I'd already found the Crown, and I got the Sceptre in Dersh. He also gave me the Amulet of Aladda and 50 points. I was told that I was compelled by magic to "wear the amulet for as long as [I] shall live."

Can I at least take it off when I shower?

7. Invaded and conquered Dersh from the titans. It was the toughest battle of the game so far: the titans are capable of devastating missile damage at long ranges, and they had a horde of demon allies with tough magic. Shooting at them from a distance didn't work because of poor visibility between my units and the city itself. I lost three heroes in the invasion. My reward was the Sceptre of the Eastrealm and 60 points.

The bloody battle for Dersh.

8. I next headed for Lucedia. There had been constant rumors of fighting between Lucedia and Dersh, and I'd hoped my recent victory would create an ally. Instead, a group of Lucedians met me on the road and demanded the Sceptre. After I slaughtered them for their impertinence, the city offered itself to me without a struggle, and I got 20 more points.

I'd just defeated hundreds of titans and demons. Why they thought 200 cavalry would intimidate me is anyone's guess.

Throughout these activities, I got continued intelligence about Lucinian and Tetrada. I learned that he has been greatly expanding his military, that he installed his uncle as Earl of Estrallah (another city on the east coast) after the previous ruler was assassinated, and that he invaded and captured Sothold.

Well played, Lucinian.

When I'd finished conquering the north, west, and south, I turned my attention to these cities in the east, of which Tetrada would be the culmination. I started by conquering Sothold with the help of the exiled armies of the former leader, Baron Strumberg. North of Sothold, I met a force from Estallah, who became my ally in exchange for my agreement to attack Lucinian.

With the potential end of the game in sight, I moved my armies up the coast and pounced on Tetrada, but just before I did, I got word from a random wanderer that I'd been betrayed by Estallah; that the leader was none other than Pitlag, who I'd sent packing from Paritan, and that the Estallans actually planned to join the battle against me.

He was "true to his word" that he SENT the troops; they just joined the enemy instead of me.

After defeating an advance guard outside the walls of Tetrada, I attacked the city itself and got my butt handed to me hard. My forces were no match for the thousands of combined Tetradans and Estallans. Their infantry and cavalry units were capable of absorbing ridiculous hit points in damage. Heroes and units that had effortlessly breezed over stacks of titans were dispersed or eliminated by single companies of Tetradan infantry--and there were dozens of them.

Part of the massive defense force at Tetrada.

I had some success hanging back and using bows--my default strategy--but there were too many enemy units, and they were too well-defended. The game automatically stops combat at 24 turns (the attacker "loses" at this point), and I'd only brought the enemy down to 70% by then and had lost more than half my own forces.

I assume taking Tetrada will end the game, but I haven't conquered everything else on the map. I skipped Xafanta, the city of dwarves, hoping they'd eventually offer some kind of alliance, since we had a mutual enemy in the orcs. There's also an elven city off in the woods that I'm not sure if I need to deal with. Finally, I haven't done anything with Pudawala, another city on the coast. I honestly don't know why. It just hasn't been a bother yet.

You'd think Xafanta would be grateful that I conquered Zarnix.

More on Tetrada at the end, but let's talk about a few other things that have been happening.

The conquered monsters don't let me rest easy.

While I was conquering the land and finding treasures: monsters began attacking my cities almost every turn, desperately trying to reclaim them. I had to fight off goblins in Gernak, orcs in Zarnix, titans in Dersh, and giants at Char. They attacked in the thousands, throwing wave after wave at my entrenched defenders, pillaging and slaughtering townsfolk when they could. Since recruitment in these cities was so pathetic (2 or 3 recruits a turn), I had to form units of conscripted infantry (damaging morale) and bring in defenders from other cities. I lost a lot of units and heroes.

Hordes of goblins breach the walls of Gernok.

Late in the process, I began to wonder why I was spending so much time defending the conquered cities of monsters. Why did I even care if they took their cities back? I'd already looted them for tens of thousands of gold pieces, their magic items, and the associated points. Continuing to occupy them was costing as much as I'd won--in poor commerce in trade and in dead soldiers. I'd been assuming that winning the game would involve holding--as a conquest, vassal, or ally--every city on the map, but nothing in the documentation said that, and even if it turned out to be true, it would be easier to re-conquer the cities after dealing with the major foes than to hold on to them for months and months until then.

This made me think of a key paragraph from Stephen Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, which I highly recommend for its prose, even though serious historians tend not to like popular historians like Ambrose.

At the beginning of 1944, Nazi Germany's fundamental problem was that she had conquered more territory than she could defend, but Hitler had a conqueror's mentality and he insisted on defending every inch of occupied soil. To carry out such orders, the Wehrmacht relied on improvisations, of which the most important were conscripted foreign troops, school-age German youths and old men, and fixed defensive positions. It also changed its tactical doctrine and weapons design, transforming itself from the highly mobile blitzkrieg army of 1940-41 that had featured light, fast tanks and hard-marching infantry into the ponderous, all-but-immobile army of 1944 that featured heavy, slow tanks and dug-in infantry.

Everything about this--the mentality, the conscriptions, the change in unit design, the loss of momentum--rang true in my present scenario. No one wants to find out he's been role-playing Hitler. Thus, towards the end of these events, I began to withdraw troops from the monster cities, leaving only a few token forces, with the idea that they could retake them if they wanted.

Although it sounds like the game has been encouraging me to think strategically, the analogy doesn't hold up beyond what I've already described. If the allied invasion on D-Day had failed, it would have been devastating to the war effort, and Germany might have held France permanently. (Or, more likely, two million Berliners would have died on a single day in 1945.) In Sword of Aragon, goblins, orcs, giants, trolls, and titans are free to send thousands of soldiers against my cities every few rounds; no number of defeats will deter them, and they never run out.

Aragon thus really isn't much of a strategy game, despite my misgivings in my first posting. I'm not a strategy game addict, so I don't feel qualified developing a list of "core criteria" for strategy games the way I did for RPGs--but if I did feel qualified, I'm sure that one of the criteria would be that every player, human and machine, plays by the same rules. Every player in Warlords has to spend money and time developing units, has the same considerations in their finances, and--most importantly--has to actually move units across the map to make attacks. This isn't the case here, where enemy attacks and defenses are scripted. (There's some randomness to when they appear, but the events themselves are still scripted.) That means that Tetrada can maintain thousands of soldiers in its single city without going bankrupt from the costs. They can send units down the coast to conquer Sothold without encountering any of my units along the road. Hordes of goblins can attack my cities in between turns, but I can't raise some companies of cavalry and go rout them in the foothills before they attack, because until they launch their attacks, they don't really "exist." This is par-for-the-course for RPGs, but it breaks the basic rules of pure strategy games, and it's yet another reason that I'm not sure strategy game lovers would love Aragon.

A few other notes on the game:

• As my units increase in levels, it's fun to see what additional equipment options become available to them. Most important are the compound bows which become available to archers at Level 5 and have a very long range and enormous firepower. I have six units of 50 with them and have been trying to develop more. 

Somewhere along the way, Wiggins got the ability to use a two-handed sword, as long as I don't assign him a shield.

• NOTHING in this game is more annoying than repeated messages that the line of fire for my archers is blocked. I can't seem to reconcile such messages with information about the height of the hexes or the number of obstacles in between. Sometimes, they just appear for seemingly no reason.

AAARGH! By WHAT?!

• I'm not sure I made this clear earlier, but even when you lose a combat, you don't necessarily lose all the soldiers in the units. Units "eliminated" during combat are simply rendered unable to continue in that battle; they might still have as much as half their strength when you regroup after battle.

• Unlike some strategy games, there's no way to "vector" forces from one city to another; you have to physically move them. Taking advantage of the plentiful recruits in some of the earlier cities means spending half a year moving them across the continent later.

My main army retreats from Tetrada to lick its wounds.

Okay, so I definitely need to build up my armies to a much stronger position before I attack Tetrada again. I'm going to spend about a year developing cavalry, bowmen, and mounted bowmen in the various cities, training them as much as possible before sending them to join the forces in front of Tetrada. I understand that magic can make all the difference in the final battle, and I only have one mage left, and he's only Level 6, so perhaps I need to hire some more and spend more time developing their levels.

I'm next going to find out what happens if I conquer the traitorous Estallans before attacking Tetrada. I'll also probably conquer Pudawala just because it's there. My next posting will either be a "won!" or a (temporarily) different game.