I guess I could post this? Yeah, I think I will.
OK, so it's time for the second episode of this Gath mini-LP. I won't go into details about early expansion because there isn't any special trick to what I'm doing. Just get a couple of sacred giants and send them off to kill people who don't pay you taxes. But I'll get into the awesomeness of Levite Zealots, don't worry.
Still, I think I should mention that I love discovering sites I've never seen before. It's just so neat. This one didn't require any sitesearching, but there's obviously also a death site there. If you see some odd scales somewhere, you ought to check
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Magic_site to see what it might be.
The Navigator's Guild provides 2 water gems and lets me recruit Navigators. They look nicely synergistic with my current research plans - communions and evocation spam.
So yeah, Levite Zealots. Why are they so good? Well, they're recruit-anywhere sacreds, but they're not top-of-the-line, murder-everything-and-then-some recruit-anywhere sacreds. Still, they have their uses. First of all, they only cost 15 gold to recruit so they have nearly no upkeep cost. Secondly, they have 14 base morale, which becomes 16 with a bless. They've got wasteland survival, which is admittedly a rather minor benefit.
But most importantly(to me) is the fact that they have a patrol bonus. It's an incredibly mundane thing that's surprisingly useful.
For example, here I've set the taxes on my capital to 140%. I've got 10 Levite Zealots patrolling - their patrol bonus means they act like 30 patrollers, which is usually enough to quell the unrest from this level of taxes. The maintenance cost for 10 zealots and a generic commander is 8 gold per turn, by the way. By comparison, 30 independent soldiers and a generic commander would cost 43 gold to maintain, cost twice as much to recruit and wouldn't even be as good in a fight.
Of course, patrolling to reduce unrest kills population. It's not so bad when you've got growth scales, but it does mean less gold later. But that's fine, because you get more gold now, which you can invest in acquiring more provinces to get more gold.
If you get a province with a low population and some good mines, you might even want to yank the taxes up to 200% and kill everyone with patrolling. You still get the income from the mines, which is doubled by your taxes, but you don't have to worry about unrest because everybody is dead! The province I'm using as an example isn't really good enough for that trick, but even 120 is a pretty good income and we'll get plenty of gold while slowly killing the place.
By the way, you can see here how I'm surrounding a couple of provinces but not taking them. That's because I can take them whenever I want, so I focus my forces on taking other provinces that aren't guaranteed to be mine.
Here you can see that despite having less people after all the patrolling, the province's income has actually increased. This is because of the good scales we picked. I put another commander with 10 more Zealots patrolling there to quell all the unrest - 20 Zealots equal 60 normal patrollers. Also, I'm having an indie commander build a fort with a 15% administration bonus, which translates to a 15% income bonus. I'm not sure on how scales and administration bonuses interact, but the bottom line is
loadsamoney. But you know what's impressive?
That Hill Castle is the third fort I'm building, not the second. And it's winter in the first year of the Ascension Wars! That's the income you can get with good scales and Levite Zealots!
And as the new year dawns, we discover our closest neighbor, Ermor. I guess up next is a crash course in Yeddeoni communions against undead. Boy, I bet that would have been handy a while ago. But first, we'll need some Abbas and some construction research or all our troops will starve to death.
I do have a bit more written up, but that's a nice place to end the episode don't you think?
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