The Baalz Drop Doctrine

[Baalz]

The blitzkrieg is a maneuver I specialize in and I thought it might be insightful to illustrate the doctrine under which I implement it without being specific to a nation. Some nations are better suited to this type of warfare than others, but with a little bit of cleverness these theories can be applied in some fashion by all nations. You will see strong elements of this doctrine in most of my other guides regardless of nation. That said, other top players emphasize different strategies, so this is just one angle you can focus on. This is also not something which is appropriate to every situation, but rather a template which can be kept in mind for when the right opportunity is there. As with most choices there is an opportunity cost, but applied properly this type of maneuver can be devastating while you minimize it’s downside. Much like my thug guide, I’m not focusing on late game tartarians and angles dropping out of the sky each turn, but the (to me) much more interesting game of trying to squeeze high performance out of lower power options.

So what is a blitzkrieg? According to Wikipedia: “The word, meaning "lightning war", was associated with a deliberate strategy of quick and decisive short wars to deliver a knock out blow to an enemy state before it could fully mobilize. To do this the economy would not be fully mobilised to avoid disruption to civilian life as much as possible. Instead "superior" armaments and communications would achieve victory on the basis of quality rather than quantity. The method of this so-called "Blitzkrieg strategy", was to use fifth columnists behind enemy lines to disrupt enemy communications which would be followed by massive air strikes to paralyze enemy movement and defenses. The next phase of the assault envisaged an attack by a fully motorised and mechanized army which would initiate deep thrusts into the defenders strategic depths with the aim of encircling the main forces and destroying them to achieve a rapid, decisive victory.”

This is actually a pretty good description applied to Dominions and highlights the critical parts I want to discuss. The whole point is to cut your opponent deeply before he can react, and send him into shock. Rather than grappling with him head to head you cut his hamstring and jump back, then wait for him to stumble while trying to catch you or bleed out if he plays it more conservatively. Speed and surprise are the critical factors here, but you need to have your whole nation aligned behind your strike to really see how effective it can be.

This starts with intel. Intel means scouts, right? Well, not necessarily. Sure, scouts are the front line of intel gathering, but there’s a lot more to it than that. The questions you want answered vary, but generally you want to know: What are my neighbors fielding? What are their research levels in specific paths? What are their PD levels? What are their relations with *their* neighbors? Are they engaged in another war? What are they spending their gems on? Where are their high income provinces (gems and gold)? Where is their capital? Where are their forts? What are the resource levels around their forts? Where are their temples? Do they have domes up anywhere? Where are they (apparently) planning to be in the next few turns? Do they have bloodhunters anywhere? Do they have anybody (their pretender?) out manually site searching? Do they have bodyguards or other anti-assassin measures deployed? Some of this information you can gather with scouts. Some of it spies will gain you. Some of it you can get through scrying (stone sphere is a greatly under appreciated item IMO). Some of it you can put together from the score graphs. Some of it from chatter in the game thread. Some you can get directly from other players fighting your potential target. Almost always your picture is going to be less complete than you want, but having a good guess as to the answers to most of those questions is an art form of itself and an important part of a successful blitzkrieg. A turn or two before Baalz Drop-day I often like to cast a lot of scrying spells to fill in the gaps so I can have precision targeting.

There are many reasons that intelligence is so important, but mostly it can be summed up by the fact that you want to avoid a fair fight like the plague. In a broader sense, any good strategy is all about making sure the fight damn sure isn’t fair – apply your strength to your opponent’s weakness and preemptively counter everything he’s doing. The “superior armaments” is not a factor of having greater research, income or a more powerful nation, it’s a matter of bringing exactly the right tool for the job and attacking when your opponent’s attention is elsewhere. In a real sense, the blitzkrieg is often won or lost on the quality of your intel and your ability to tailor your attack to what your opponent has. Obviously the specifics on this are far too vast a topic to cover here, but the idea is that a small amount of force is sufficient if it’s got a large amount of leverage.

Fortunately, this does not mean you have to counter everything your opponent potentially has. The majority of the time, most enemy territory is protected by just PD with possibly light support. You don’t need (or want!) to drop in and face his “main” army, you want to hit everywhere it’s not, rapidly enough that he can’t adjust to what you’re doing. You are coming in with relatively light forces which generally would not be able to stand in a pitched battle, so you need to make sure that never happens. Depending on how it plays out, you may not need any “front line” forces at all.

You’ve got several angles you can use to accomplish this depending on what tools you have available and what your intel reveals. If your opponent has a PD of 1 all over the place (quite common) you can aim to hit most of his high income provinces with remote attack spells (arouse hunger, hoard from hell, call of the wild, etc.) while also hitting him with income reducing spells (locust swarms, blight, etc.), along with unrest increase (spies, rain of toads, raging hearts, etc.) on the high income/well defended provinces (like his cap). Don’t forget about less direct ways to lower his income temporarily like wolven winter or even stealth preaching to reduce low (but nice) dominion. If you do this against an opponent with a large standing army (high upkeep) it’s not that hard to drive him to 0 net income the turn your attack hits….meaning he can’t increase the PD in the rest of his provinces, nor recruit troops out of those empty back field forts nearest to where you’re hitting, nor hire mercenaries, nor recruit troops better suited to fighting the things you’ve prepared specifically to counter what he’s got right now. You don’t need to keep dumping gems into these spells, by the second or third turn of a successful blitzkrieg his economy will be completely eviscerated. This is an important goal to keep in mind, turn three is late into your blitzkrieg strategy and you want to aim to have most of your goals accomplished by the second turn because this is when your opponent will really start adjusting to what you’re doing if he’s still able. If you pull this off though, from the very first turn your opponent’s nation goes into shock and can’t respond. This all compounds with a very real psychological blow of having his nation suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrating around him, and even most motivated players are going to be discouraged to really script every fight and come up with clever maneuvers. If you can knock the wind out of them with sufficient force, many people never really get back up, and once in their own mind their defeated it's all over but the mop up.

When your opponent isn’t considerate enough to leave very light PD all around is when you get to apply some cleverness with regard to your national strengths. PD isn’t really all that hard to kill, and has the added disadvantage of being exactly the same everywhere so you can practice in a test game efficient ways to kill off the specific PD you’re contemplating attacking. Whether its air dropped thugs, stealthy sacreds, flying devils, or teleporting earth elemental summoners figure out what the most economical way you can take out PD past the front line. Economy is crucial because in order to have an overwhelming, stunning attack you need as many attacks as humanly possible (or inhumanly, depending on your nation) all hitting simultaneously. Three attacks with a 90% success rate are immensely better than 1 with a 99% success rate. Remember, the idea is to hit your opponent with enough force to send him into shock so this is not the time to focus on efficiency. Throwing out all the stops on an overwhelming one turn attack can often end the war a dozen turns sooner, thus saving you a huge amount of resources over the long term even if you lose several thugs attacking targets you weren’t entirely sure about. If you haven’t read it, I suggest reading my guide on building thugs with an emphasis on efficiency, boots on the ground on Baalz Drop-day is what makes a successful blitzkrieg work. Now the other consideration you want to make is that despite the fact you want as many guys as possible turn one, it’s a very good idea to leave a couple bullets in your gun for turn 2 of the Blitzkrieg. This is the turn you’re likely to see the battles with whatever your opponent is desperately trying to counterattack you with and you can often see some more juicy opportunities for killing blows provided you’ve reserved a couple thugs ready to slap on the right equipment and air jump in (or whatever). The key here is he hasn’t had a chance yet to change out equipment, or get gems where they need to go – he’s just attacking with whatever he happened to have available when you fell on him like a ton of bricks. Watch for more opportunities to apply moderate force with a whole lot of leverage. Kamikaze runs with mages should be considered where they make sense. Remember that everything friendly sent during the magic phase arrives together so you can do things like sending an arouse hunger to create chaff blockers giving your mage time to drop a couple bloodlettings.

Several nations are very reliant on capital only troops/commanders. If your opponent is such a nation driving the unrest up there can be a fatal blow and folds perfectly into your strategy of sending the nation into shock. It’s also not that uncommon in the earlier parts of the game to be fighting against an opponent with just a handful of forts. If your opponent just has three forts and you can shut them all down with rain of toads…well, you can see where that goes. Remember, if you siege a fort or drive the unrest over 100 nothing new can be recruited out of it until the siege is lifted/unrest comes down, so shutting down a fort without a real fight might be as easy as dropping a thug in on turn one who is immune to everything currently in the fort or dropping 3 rain of toads on a castle with only mages in it. Of course you have to figure in what the mages in there might summon/forge, but that’s where your intel comes in. At any rate, just shutting a fort down for a few turns while the mages summon stuff can often mean mission accomplished.

Now, one of my favorite tricks is the old one-two switcharoo. Hit a castle with a large army in it with something geared to take out it’s PD, sieging the castle (if you’re lucky, inducing instant starvation). Your opponent will come boiling out the next turn like an anthill that’s been stomped on only to find that thug he thought he’d easily squish is no longer there. Instead there’s a guy with a storm staff casting wrathful skies and mists of deception…or whatever variation on that your nation has available. You get the first turn, so you can drop whatever you want before he gets a single spell off. The great thing about this sort of tactic is that even if your opponent anticipates something like this it can lead to a delay of a turn or two while he figures out exactly what you’ve brought to play and negotiates how to get his forces out of the fortress – all the while you’re burning across the countryside (and if you’re lucky letting starvation mount in the fort). Note, particularly if you dropped a lot of stuff in with magic the first turn expect domes to pop up all over the place turn 2. It can be a very good idea to plan your switcharoo turn 1, so that your heavy hitter can just fly in from the place you stuck him rather than teleport.

Another angle you can use to cut off his ability to respond is to cut out the resources around his production centers. For nations reliant on production it’s often not that hard to cut out 80% of their production capacity by taking all the mountains/forests around their capital and any other pivotal forts (looking at the admin value for a fort and the surrounding terrain types you can often get a good idea of how much it can produce). This is obviously not a permanent solution as you’re likely doing it because there’s a big nasty army on the fort in question that you can’t directly deal with, but it can often buy you 2-3 turns which is the name of the game as your opponent bleeds, bleeds, bleeds. Remember, anything you can do to just trip up your opponent for one turn is golden to this strategy.

The first turn of your blitzkrieg is crucial, and you’ve got a couple goals. The next I want to talk about is directly hitting his military capability. The philosophy here is to bring superior armaments to the fight, which is pretty easy when you’re talking about fighting PD. Don’t neglect the benefits of hitting higher effort, higher value targets as well though. Dropping appropriately equipped thugs in to visit any indie mages being recruited outside of a fort should be a high priority as it can often cut off your opponent’s magic diversity just as he needs it. Drop in to cast a rain of stones on the big mass of undead horsemen he’s got sitting outside a castle. Cut off large armies so they’re unexpectedly out of supply (sieged castles don’t supply them) and starving. Basically, you want to do whatever you can to blunt your opponent’s ability to counterattack and adjust - *before the war starts*

But, you have to fight his not so easily countered forces at some point, right? Well, yes and no. Successfully implemented you’ve cut off his ability to respond, so you can comfortably move your front line forces in to deal with what he’s got if that’s appropriate. Again relatively a small force can be sufficient with the right leverage because you’ve stunned his flexibility and demoralized him. You also have the luxury to harass him with rituals and assassins which he can’t effectively adjust to, or hit and run type tactics to just bleed off the troops he’s now not able to replace. Sure, you can do fire and retreat from archers, but I’m thinking more like thunderstrikes or gifts from heaven or earthquake from behind PD as he tries to recapture the territories you’ve snatched from him. You can also pump up your own PD and help with weapons of sharpness, mass protection, flaming arrows, etc. Use whatever national advantages you have and just bleed him, bleed him, bleed him for every step he takes. You’ve got the advantage of having a pretty good idea of what he’s using at this point and his losses are mostly not being replaced.

Another option available is to go for a dominion kill. If your raiders are also priests (not that uncommon) you can put up temples all over his territories (and ideally blood sacrifice). Even if all his temples are protected by forts he’s got no way to respond to this push by building more forts (supported by you recruiting priests to preach out of those territories), so with a bit of patience you can often avoid that whole “storming the castle with the big army in it” mess. You’ve just got a huge income boost from not only capturing large swaths of his highest income territories, you’ve also been cranking everything up to 200% taxes (for now) and also pillaging areas you don’t expect to hold (ghouls, black hawks etc. are great for this) so you’ve got a big spike in your income to plop up temples everywhere. Remember, on top of hitting everywhere you’re also focusing on tying up his forces, bottling them up temporarily in forts and using hit and run tactics to keep him from moving very fast, so it’s often not as easy as it might seem for him to destroy those temples sprouting up like mushrooms.

[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.

[LumenPlacidum]

Shock and awe.

Good translation from military doctrine to dominions. I really like the establishment of beachhead fortresses where the opponent has to make the choice of whether or not to deal with them but all choices are bad.

[Jarkko]

In the Lapis game I have been the "B" nation, I guess

If I had just figured out a bit earlier Baalz' Agartha is not allied with Kuritza's apes, and I would have pulled the troops back from the southern campaign way earlier (and could have saved some of my own SC's, which Kuritza took out with great efficiency). However, the C'tis Miasma dom has been really nice defence against the blitz of Agartha, as Baalz has been very reluctant to bring in troops to siege the forts.


So, as far as I can see the counter to the drop doctrine is to ensure you have something to kill large armies, and some way to survive the sieges, until you can send out the hunting parties to grab the blitzers. In the case of MA C'tis the dominion itself is enough, but mages with access to some weapons of mass-destruction will do fine; just be sure you don't fit on stuff that is too expensive, and send them on a kamikaze with the purpose to kill as much as possible before they croak; say Wrathfull skies and Blink, or Earthquake, or Wind of Death, or Creeping Doom + Foul Vapours, etc. The point is to have most of the opposing blitzers tied down around your forts where they will accomplish nothing (except preventing your freedom of movement, which is important too), instead of their armies sieging (and taking) your forts. You need time to get send out spesific SC hunter teams (and hope your diplomacy will save you with others attacking the blitzing nation too).

It becomes actually a sort of Vietnam war, with small scale engagement going on everywhere, while each side is quite reluctant to throw in the big armies (as losing a big army might well mean the end).

[Gandalf Parker]

I like to sneak-force an attack behind front lines, boost PD, purchase as many locals as possible, and fade my army back into the forests to attack somewhere else. An important feature is that I also try to cast search spells where there is a possibility of getting a free castle suddenly appearing. Particularly irritating to the enemy if you managed to do it close enough to steal resources from his castle

[Executor]

While I am a big fan of blitzkrieg wars and try to implement them whenever possible, it is a very slippery road to take.
These kinds of wars demand an enormous amount of resources if they are to work, of course time to organize and test everything out to perfection, diplomacy to secure your borders before entering a high risk war like this and most importantly like you said to gather intel, which, like you said is never gonna be accurate as you'll want it to be, as better players will most probably always have something in their arsenal that they are hiding and waiting for the right moment to unleash.

The most important thing IMO is to watch for the counter tactics the enemy will use. Test out if your thugs/raiders can survive GR's, manifestations, infernal disease, earth attacks, and watch that the war is efficient in a gem to gem ratio, you aren't exactly winning the war if you're loosing/wasting gems rapidly.

Also, I'm not too fond of pillaging provinces, as the best course in war is to take over enemy lands unharmed, but once you raze your enemies lands you can raise an undead army with carrion reanimation to bring down badly defended forts.
Poping domes all over the place is not always a good thing either as you can gateway in an army next to a cut off fort and the enemy won't be able to teleport any reinforcements in, so that's another thing to consider, it can also be a nice way to sneak capture the enemies capital. Leave it be for the first few turns and when he vacates it to recapture his lands you take a province next to it, gateway in troops, send more thugs, and move in for the kill if possible.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Executor

Also, I'm not too fond of pillaging provinces, as the best course in war is to take over enemy lands unharmed, but once you raze your enemies lands you can raise an undead army with carrion reanimation to bring down badly defended forts.
Poping domes all over the place is not always a good thing either as you can gateway in an army next to a cut off fort and the enemy won't be able to teleport any reinforcements in, so that's another thing to consider, it can also be a nice way to sneak capture the enemies capital. Leave it be for the first few turns and when he vacates it to recapture his lands you take a province next to it, gateway in troops, send more thugs, and move in for the kill if possible.

I think most people are too slow to pillage. If you're raiding a territory that you expect to be reconquered in a couple turns (say a territory right next to his capitol you just sieged) pillaging is an excellent option. The income you lose over the long term is more than compensated by ending the war faster - a long drawn out war costs *a lot* of resources. When your opponent feels like he's not only got no money, but no prospect of getting any the fight tends to go right out of him.

[Micah]

I'm not so convinced about the pillaging. If the war is close enough for it to make a significant difference it's also likely to be close enough for your opponent to return the favor.

While demoralizing your opponent is a great technique against some players, keeping your opponent thinking he has a chance to recover is usually the best way to win a war against ANYONE, as he'll be taking risks that you can exploit to kill his forces off bit by bit, as opposed to either completely turtling up in his cap or throwing everything he has at you in an attempt to get revenge, especially if you start playing dirty with pillaging. The last thing you want is for those 100D gems he was saving for his tart factory to suddenly go into spamming black death on all your high-pop provinces.

[Baalz]

Heh, Micah was actually who I specifically had in mind when I mentioned other top players play differently, he's the best player I know and he consistently goes in a different direction than I do. Pillaging is certainly something that you don't always want to do, but I find that if you have the right opportunity then it changes a close war to a one sided one. I actually have a specific game which convinced me of that. As Sauro I got attacked by a Hinnom who was about the same size just as I was finishing another war and a bit strung out (Yikes!). In conjunction with a major battle that went my way and gave me temporary locational supremacy I dropped arouse hunger on all his farmlands and a few rain of toads on his cap. The ghouls had 1-2 turns to pillage, and despite me being the marginally smaller nation at that point that was the last real major battle we fought. This wasn't really a Blitzkreig deployment as neither one of us really had heavy raiders, but it does illustrate a good example of when you would want to use pillaging. If you've got a reasonable guess that most/all of the fighting in the short term is going to be in "his" territory then the chance of reciprocity should hopefully be fairly low.

[Micah]

Heh, thanks for the complement. I actually think I haven't played any of the nations you've had a guide out for, so maybe some day I'll give things a go your way and see how it treats me.

You certainly have plenty of valid ideas though, I basically employed this overall blitz strategy verbatim with Fomoria in the original RAND...I crushed Marverni early just by applying my giant foot to his face, but then my second war was won on the first turn by sneaking a group of Nemedians to Mictlan's cap, attacking the cap with them the same time I used a site-searching Fomorian King to take out the 1 PD next door, and moving my army to our former border. This allowed me to friendly-move my entire thunderstrike force to Mictlan's cap.

If I had had to face his army plus a screen of PD I would have lost horribly, since jags cut right through fomorian giants if they can close to melee, but by denying him access to his PD I was able to blast his elite infantry to pieces before they could close to melee. I then followed this up with a massive Fomorian King airstrike on Ulm, taking out about half of his provinces in a turn.

All in all that was one of the easiest games I've won, taking into account the strength of the other players. (I also got shadow seers very early, which helped a lot.)

Anyhow, strategy anecdote aside and back to your pillage story, my initial reaction to your account is that you were able to outplay the Hinnom player, which would have a lot more to do with your win than the pillaging. I'm also not really equating what you did there with the blitz strategy in general since you were the one being attacked. In a true blitz situation I think it's better to choose your target and your opening moves so that the war is never close enough to need to pillage. Obviously in your specific situation you did what needed to be done in order to win given your initial disadvantage.

That being said, if you think you can seal the war by doing it then go right ahead. In fact, due to the stupidly large unrest spike of FAILED pillaging you can use your scouts to pillage, which does very little population damage but spikes the unrest into the stratosphere, effectively taking the province out of play for the duration of the war but leaving the victor the spoils. Using scouts also means that your real troops aren't tied down for the turn, which is one of the major drawbacks of the command.