[Baalz]

One more page in the Baalz Drop playbook is to do another kind of switcharoo and leave your opponent (hamstrung and bleeding) forced to go on the ‘offensive’. You can do this by putting up a couple fortresses inside ‘his’ territory. This is expensive, but can be well worth it as you consider the choices your opponent is faced with. Ignore the fort? Troops and maybe dominion are being pumped out of it while he’s trying to stop attacks from happening all over the place. Storm it? That ties up his forces for several turns while you burn the countryside, culminating with the joy of storming the fort after you’ve had a couple turns to prepare a warm welcome vs whatever he is specifically fielding. Leave just a holding force to maintain the siege? The holding force needs to be big enough to stop your raiders from killing them, so he’s splitting his forces up significantly. This can be a *great* way to bleed his forces. This type of tactic works really well when you can combine it with gateway and/or stealthy troops who you can pile into the fort after its sieged, or just teleport in some mages to summon stuff otherwise not mobile enough to come to the party while the walls are chipped down. Look to some of the less commonly used units like watchers, crushers and hamadryads to bottle up your gate and pummel the crap out of the attackers. How to get a fort up in ‘the hot zone’? Well, one option is to drop one of the remote fort creation spells like wizards tower or three red seconds (expensive – but again, you’re pulling out the stops to save yourself gems in the long run). Another is just to start building it a couple provinces away from an enemy fort you just sieged. Remember how I mentioned tying them up in that fort for just a single turn can be mission accomplished?

This is how this looks like when you manage to bring it all together. Turn 1 you siege his capital along with another fort holding most of his forces and conquer a third of his provinces out of the clear blue sky – all by just fighting PD. You’ve targetted all his highest income territories not protected by a large force, and lump a couple income reducing spells on top so you’ve dropped his income by more that 50%. Turn 2 he does *anything other than break the sieges* (probing to see if you have an earthquake waiting for him when he comes out, summoning stuff to kill the thugs/mages, waiting for reinforcements…. whatever), while his other forces drop whatever they’re doing and try to counterattack all the raiders. His counter raiders run into hit and run mage abuse and significantly pumped up PD and take large casualties, while he has no income to pump up his own PD nor time to spread around mages so the attacking raiders gobble up another big chunk of his empire. The attacking raiders do take their largest amount of casualties this round as the defending player does get some mages out to support the PD he just pumped up by alchemizing gems and sets a few ambushes with troops who happened to be in the right place, but they’re still relatively light casualties because the attacking player had a pretty good idea of where most of his troops were before Baalz Drop-day and focused his attacks away from them. Turn 3 he breaks the sieges but a second smaller wave of thugs/mages drops out of the sky, kitted to kill those few of his counter-raiders which are actually having some success – a few succeed, a few fail but the net effect is a significant blunting of his ability to counter raid. Turn 4 he attacks several province around his capital with the large forces that he’d had in his castles running into the same thunderstrikes from behind the flaming arrows PD, only to find that on top of the casualties he’s taken the territories have 200+ unrest from being pillaged and there are 3 enemy castles up within 2 provinces of his capital (2 started construction on Baalz Drop-day, one is a wizard’s tower). Meanwhile all his enchantresses and lizard shamen have been slain, and 10 enemy temples have gone up everywhere his armies are not (constructed turns 2 & 3 with the income from all the conquering). He has had no net income since turn1 and no prospect of getting any, there are no decisive battles to be won even if he could come up with a way to do it, taking any province back is a crap shoot as to if it’s gonna be a couple gifts of heaven in the face (with, of course, almost no chance of actually killing the mages causing the pain), his dominion has started an alarming plunge (those temples also have been recruiting priests to preach), and now he’s got forts to contemplate sieging for several turns? This is how you get away with never having to fight his “main armies” in a fair fight: you’ve severed an artery and he goes into shock and bleeds out.

Now, of course it’s rarely going to come off that smoothly, and unless your opponent switches AI there’s still a lot of killing to do, or a pretty good pull to actually close the dominion kill…but you’ve got him by the throat and it’s your fight to lose. Next, I’d like to talk about when *not* to apply this doctrine.

Never fight a land war in Asia. This blitzkrieg strategy is all about speed and momentum, you really have to hit critical mass for this to work. That means it’s a poor choice if your opponent has strong inherent defenses in place. EA Abysia, for instance is pretty tough to raid economically in this fashion for many nations due to it’s PD. LA TC might be difficult for others for the same reason. MA Arco by the time they’re likely to have mind hunts is quite an uphill fight if what you’ve got available is average MR thugs with no astral cover. Basically, you’ve got to have “superior armaments”, you want to make sure you’re not applying your weakness to your opponent’s strength.

If he can break your momentum you can find yourself quickly overextended and outgunned so attacking a nation who has been at peace and building up his forces for some time is also a big red flag. That critical tying up of forces for just a turn or two can be a double edged sword, for if he can effectively fend off what *you’re* doing for just a turn or two it gives him the time to adjust to what you’re doing and bring his strength to bear, exposing that your forces are very thinly spread out.

This type of strategy can also have a lot of trouble if, for whatever reason, there’s a fort you really need to take quickly, or even a particular well defended area that you have to take. At the point your opponent can dictate the terms of engagement you’ve lost much of your advantage.

You can also find yourself in a sticky diplomatic situation as your neighbors get quite nervous about the second time they see you eat one of your neighbors alive. This can unfortunately manifest itself just as you’ve “pulled out the stops” in an offensive action, and suddenly find two (or more!) of your other nations dogpiling up on you. This is obviously not what you want….but it’s gonna happen so it’s a good idea to plan for it. No mistake about it, it’s a bad situation that you want to avoid if possible, but the price of being a rapidly rising star is this sort of attention. The good news is that you have tooled yourself for massive mobility where your attackers are *reacting* to what you did. How this can play out if you’re expecting it and play your cards right is: You attack nation A. Cool, he’s gobbled. You quickly redeploy all your fast raider to gobble up your new neighbor, nation B. At this point nations C & D (your other neighbors) decide that you’re both a threat because you’re so aggressive and hopefully overextended because you just started a new war, so they make plans to gang up on you. They start moving their armies over to your border and a few turns later…surprise attack! But were you surprised? Nope. Because you were expecting it you’ve turned your intel (now not needed in nation B) to the most likely culprits. You’re now 4 or 5 turns into your conquest of nation B and your second string team has taken over keeping up the chokehold on them so your fast moving raiders are ready to deploy wherever they’re needed – handily retooled to deal with whatever your scrying/spying/etc. revealed was going to shortly be attacking you. The beauty of this is you’ve been tightly focused on speed, speed, speed so you’re ready for a new dance by the time your aggressors have reacted to your new war. Your attackers are finding to their dismay that far from being overextended, your vanguard is right back to fight them – and quite capably taking territories from them almost as fast as they’re advancing on you. Using the same type of hit and run tactics you slow your attackers advance while you finish digesting nation B (time is now on your side, so stalling is the name of the game), once that’s done you then turn and deploy all your strength at them. The great thing is you can afford to slowly lose territories because of the massive amount you gained over a short period, and you’ve got lots of resources to fight that defensive war even while devoting part of it to keeping nation B’s head under the water. If all the nations in this example started out at the same size – you’re bigger than both your attackers together.

So, just like any good strategy sometimes it’ll work astoundingly well, sometimes you shoot your foot off, and sometimes your opponent out anticipates you. No warranty implied, use at your own risk, etc.