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.