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-====== Cybertron2's Guide to Expansion - Part 1 - Types of Units ======
+====== Cybertron2's Guide to Expansion ======
-This is a heavy introduction to expansion. It is not comprehensive, but it’s designed to be fairly in depth – so if a player wonders ‘huh, does that work’, the concept has been addressed. For the most part – we will be addressing concepts of expansion and the strengths and weaknesses of independents rather than individual nations. Since we need a nation for examples, we will use Late Age Gath – since they are very good at illustrating a range of expansion concepts, whilst simultaneously not being too good at expanding unless said concepts are used.
+[[dom6:guides_and_player_improvement:cybertron2-s_guide_to_expansion:part1_types_of_units|Cybertron2's Guide to Expansion - Part 1 - Types of Units]]
-=== An aside - LA Gath is a good nation to practice these tricks on ===
+[[dom6:guides_and_player_improvement:cybertron2-s_guide_to_expansion:part2_independents_difficulty_and_tactics|Cybertron2's Guide to Expansion - Part 2 - Independents – List, Difficulty and Tactics]]
-Gath has bad infantry – medocire infantry – good infantry – weak giants, strong giants, good sacreds, bad sacreds, high damage low armor units, javelins, spears, swords and mages, and it has some troops with the same move speed, and a bunch with different move speeds. In terms of early expansion – they are one of the broadest nations in the amount of effective strategies they can use and techniques that can be practiced.
-They lack cavalry, thug and assasain expansion – but aside from that – they can use most ordinary expansion techniques – making them good for testing. Their infantry is also sufficiently lackluster for its cost that the nation rewards experimentation – basically one unit type parties are usually superseded by more complex parties.
-If I had to pick a single nation to teach ‘tricks’ on, it would be LA Gath. Although they don’t have the easiest time expanding, they have a broad expansion-viable roster where almost every unit (sans the horn blower) is optimal at some kind of start or other. Furthermore, many of the units have crippling weaknesses that can only be addressed by play more sophisticated than putting them all in a blob/line. They’re good enough to be usable blobbed, but they’re bad enough that you can really feel the improvement when the formations are changed up.
-===== Basic Expansion Troop Types =====
-====Fliers====
-This could get an entire article of its own, so I’m limiting myself to a few paragraphs. Also my research into fliers is relatively limited – so it may be erroneous. Use at your own risk.
-Broadly – fliers want to snipe commanders most of the time, but suffer in prolonged combat. The fact that attack rear is unreliable at the best of times makes them risky. There’s a way to make them waddle forwards without flying (Attack Closest). When commander sniping, high weapon damage and attack skills are extremely valuable.
-The way targeting works – every unit is given a ‘backiness score’ (thanks loggy), and that is used to determine attack rear targets alongside basically whether an allied unit has landed there (allies/enemies 3x3 square rule -> Loggy to the rescue again). Then enemies redirect onto squads (albeit less so on squads of under 5 members). Big blobs of fliers in 1 squad are more likely to ‘blob up’ on a single enemy unit. This is great when you hit the commanders, not so great when you don’t. Small squads tend to find the target better, but you need a lot of them and they’re high attrition.
-Finally – when expanding with fliers – expect heavy attrition. Even if you snipe the commanders, the way morale works your remaining units will engage – and then suffer hits as they block the retreating enemy.
-** Extra **
-//There is a formation near and dear to my heart now. It works very well and is my new goto. It requires a high damage weapon on a flier. I use the sword recruit anywheres on Xibalba (15 damage) but the basic principle works on a lot of fliers.//
-//The formation is 2 commanders, 3 groups of 4 troops, each on attack rear. Basically, this rolls 6 random checks and is very likely to have at least one or two blobs land on the commanders and kill them (especially on cave indies which have more offset commanders). It’s high attrition but much more reliable that regular flying expansion and doesn’t require near as many troops. There’s quite a lot of mechanical things going on in this, but as a reader all you need to know is it works quite well – at least compared to most techniques. //
-====Archers====
-Broadly there are three basic ‘types’ of archer expansion.
-  *  The first relies entirely on the bowman. This is a critical mass sort of expansion – and typically uses crossbows. If it works, it will kill the enemy forces before they arrive in melee. This means if you have too few – your enemies are likely to chew through your archers, but if you have enough, it’s likely to be essentially lossless. Certain provinces are much easier with this type of expansion. Lizardfolk, Barbarians, and Bone Tribe can all be heavily problematic for ordinary expansion, but relatively easy with archer expansion.
-  *  The second also relies entirely (or heavily) on the bowman, but has a melee aspect. Essentially, some archers have halfway decent armor and swords. Without overcomplicating things – there can be reasons to have them fire their bows and positioned in such a way that they melee contact. These reasons usually stem from a relatively small number of troops, and ‘frontage’ – a concept we cover later. Essentially, it stops your other troops getting surrounded and gives a small DPS burst by using the bowmans HP pool as a resource – albeit a costly one.
-  *  The third and simplest type of archer expansion is when you have archers behind other troops, boosting your damage. This is fairly self explanatory.
-Archers tend to be best in expansion against unshielded troops. They’re usually relatively ineffective against shields. Crossbows fare better against shields (and cavalry), but as a rule of thumb, bows should be used predominantly for the provinces they specialize against (unshielded tribe, unshielded militia, lizardfolk, barbarians, bone tribe), or sort of middle of the road archer provinces with a shielded infantry buffer (light cavalry, horse tribe). Crossbows massively outperform bows due to being armour piercing. They are slow – which can be an issue ironically against the provinces bows are best against, but they perform far better against both general infantry – and player armies.
-====Bad Infantry====
-Bad infantry expansion is to me at least some of the most fun expansion in dominions. It typically is only relevant in the first few turns, and often uses your starting army troops in creative ways – although some nations will be using bad infantry all through expansion. As a rough guide – bad infantry as defined here is about as strong as light infantry. Most of the time they have low attack scores, and spears, although there is some level of variation. A reasonable number have javelins which are a fairly big deal on these as they help deal with easy independents – which are the provinces you’ll prefer anyways.
-The core of the issue is these troops can’t deal with heavy infantry or harder troops, – and will die rapidly to a cavalry charge or substantial crossbow fire. Typically they both struggle to damage heavy infantry – and die rapidly to it if engaged in melee. As such – when they’re bad, they tend to be awful – with large numbers of troops dying rapidly.
-The good thing about these troops is they’re typically resource and RP cheap, and can hold a line /trade against weak enemy units. Now on their own – that’s not usually going to be enough – but the cheapness of them invites creative play – as the strengths are non-trivial – and their weaknesses are manageable in weaker independent provinces. In the first few turns, a player may be able to recruit a lot of bad infantry, or only a few good units – and when expanding, volume is often important to avoid being surrounded.
-On their own – they can usually take very small provinces, but they benefit massively from some sort of ‘damage hammer’. Now this is often tricky to set up – and there’s a balancing act between having the cheap infantry protect the hammer units – and getting the hammer units stuck in (and exactly how many/few one can get away with), but broadly – bad infantry needs damage support to expand well. A prophet can serve as a weak hammer in a pinch.
-Even if successfully expanding with these units – one has to expect fairly high attrition. The value of these troops is not their longevity, nor gold efficiency – but the sheer number of slightly defensive bodies you can get for Resources/RP. In the early turns before a player unlocks their cap circle, this can be very important – especially if a player wants to rapidly expand.
-All the above needs to have the caveat added that bad infantry expansion is hard and requires testing. It usually needs quite exacting unit placements and a basic knowledge of how to position them well against the independents. Otherwise they just get slaughtered. I would say the higher the skill level / volume of testing – the more useful bad infantry becomes.
-====Mediocre Infantry====
-Mediocre infantry usually is around the strength of heavy infantry. There are quite a few variants, but the essence of these is they’re marginally stronger than heavy infantry, but only marginally. Their draw is that they’re cheaper than good infantry in resources and RP, and can deal with units the lineholders can’t. A simple example is if a player needs to pad an initial expansion party with some better infantry, good infantry may cost 30+ resources whilst mediocre infantry may cost 18+ (numbers made up). As such, if you need a density, for damage and frontage reasons, mediocre infantry is very useful.
-These are often sprinkled in with light infantry as the damage dealers of a formation. In a barely good enough party – aka a small expansion party, medium infantry often does most of the killing, whilst the light infantry ‘hold off’ opposing millita, tribe and light infantry and stop the player army beign surrounded.
-These units are often the ‘best’ expansion troops as standalones, as you can make lots of them, and they do well against independents. Regardless, due to resource and RP restrictions before the cap circle is cleared, it is usually cleaner to have a mix of light and mediocre infantry than just mediocre infantry for expansion. Often, these cost twice as many resources than ligther infantry (or worse), so its important to have mixed formations that sort of ‘shield’ the better troops. Conceptually, this is best visualized with the goal being a rout, not a kill. A full line of medium infantry will be much better at ‘clearing’, but a line mixed with light infantry just ‘holds on’ until it does enough damage to rout.
-====Good Infantry====
-These usually cost a lot of resources, have a lot of armor and have highly damaging weapons. Most independents will struggle to damage them unless heavily surrounded. These units when they operate well – expand fairly losslessly. They are typically the most expensive infantry on a nations roster – but many nations never get infantry to the point of ‘good’, only ok. Conversely some nations (ulm cough cough) get a lot of good infantry. Often, there’s a critical mass threshold with good infantry in expansion – and it’s not always wise to produce them until some or all of a capital circle has been unlocked – otherwise it can take many turns to send out a party. However when that threshold is met – they expand very well, for relatively low gold and attrition, and often outperform the rest of the roster (that said there’s always room for optimizations and tricks).
-Since these units are so good at expanding once the resources are available – and are usually a good choice when available in reasonable numbers, it’s better to focus on their weaknesses than strengths. They tend to be heavily armored and have slow movement speed – making crossbows especially dangerous to them. They typically cost a tonne of resources so they’re slow to produce. This means it takes a while to make an expansion party out of them – and if you use small parties – although the infantry may do fine, there’s the risk the independents run past the infantry and kill the commander. Since there’s relatively few of them compared to weaker infantry – they can take a long time to clear chaff  (due to their relatively smaller volume) – which can complicate things with harass penalties and morale (especially when compared to lighter infantry). Finally – they really – really hate high damage enemies like barbarians – since the high damage attacks kill them quickly – and essentially ignore all the resources you spent on armour as opposed to damage or other troops.
-====Cavalry====
-I lump elephants and chariots into cavalry for the purposes of this section
-Ignoring sacred cavalry – cavalry typically has two main roles – as a damage hammer to an army or as an attack rear unit. The reason they rarely make the body of an army is because they’re expensive, and it’s typically far better to lose a few line infantry than a cavalry unit – and sending in the whole squad often results in some attrition (well when the squad is small anyways – large heavy cavalry squads can expand pretty well).
-In terms of survivability – cavalry tends to be ok but not great for its cost. Light cavalry is often surprisingly vulnerable without a bless or the like. Again – focusing on non-sacreds, heavy cavalry tends to perform quite well, but it’s not invincible, and if independents surround it, they will kill it – especially if there’s a few heavy infantry.
-The greatest value from cavalry is either commander sniping or the impact from their lance charge. They can ‘shock’ a unit between their lance, regular and horse attacks, and deal a lot damage all at once – causing a quick rout (and a short prolonged engagement means they receive less attacks). There are fancy ways to do this to make the cavalry hit around the same time as infantry – or from the side, but the basic concept is the same.
-Finally – cavalry have one more interesting but rarely used mode – attack archers. They can zip around the enemy formation and just run into the lightly defended archers. This can cause a quick morale shock and is generally more reliable than attack rear for complicated targeting reasons involving backness scores and dice (don’t ask). On the other hand, attack rear can be more effective.
-As an aside – I ‘think’ I found a RNG exploit with cavalry – but its so finnicky I can’t be certain. Basically – the theory goes
-  *  The last action in a turn before end of turn is triggered effects the games RNG roll,
-  *  One can select such an action sequence that the cavalry do a true attack rear – or at least with far greater frequency than regular RNG.
-As far as testing goes, I got to the ‘it probably is a thing’ phase, but never got full technical confirmation. For anyone whose feeling brave – this is a rabbit hole waiting to be explored.
-====High Damage Low Defence Units====
-These come in a few flavours, from dual wielders, cavemen, greatswords and basically anything that hits really hard but dies really fast. Although this section is fairly short – I consider it one of the more useful concepts in this article, particularly if using ‘small’ or ‘razors-edge’ expansion parties.
-These units perform best when attacking and not getting attacked. To maximize this – they need to not ‘fill’ a line but be scattered behind it, trickling in when other units are absorbing enemy attacks. This is hard to time, but massively rewarding – as it substantially lessens the problems of the units – meaning you get a cheap – high damage section in your infantry line. Often with early parties – the lack of high damage parts is what prevents expanding into certain provinces – as small quantities of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry would otherwise cut apart the formation.  Conversely though – if these units are used without such a buffer they will die in droves due to their weak defensive stats.
-In a similar fashion, you can have them hit a flank (much like cavalry), or strengthen one part of the line (to trigger faster routs). There’s quite a lot of variation in what you can do with these units – but the basic principle of having something defensive in front to absorb the first hit remains true.
-====Sacreds====
-Sacreds get a block of their own – because many nations have very good sacreds. There are countless tricks and blesses – but broadly – some sacreds are going to essentially be indestructible if used properly (defence stacking elves), whilst others just have really good stats and are like superunits in expansion that can both tank and deal high damage (rainbow blesses). As a rule of thumb, sacreds cost marginally less per-point for stats than their non-sacred counterparts – so even unblessed they tend to be passible expanders. Sacred expansion can vary significantly - from absolutely fantastic with nigh indestructible units – to small statted upgrades or unique advantages – such as feeding a few hard-hitting giants into an infantry line to add damage to a party.
-A few common blesses that affect expansion
-  * an elf or cavalry bless raises the stats of a unit and usually makes it very hard for infantry to hit them. Notably – these can also go on good infantry. These are typically ‘rainbow blesses’.
-  * a regeneration bless means big units become hard to kill unless facing down hardhitting opponents (heavy infantry +)
-  * a protection or invulnerability bless serves a similar role to an elf bless (in expansion) but goes on different units
-  * a damage/berserker bless goes on units that need to be protected by weaker units.
-  * Of the four described blesses- this is the hardest to use effectively – as the others compensate for a units weaknesses – whilst this style of bless often leaves the unit with huge strengths – but huge weaknesses. As such – used poorly – it can be high attrition
-====Giants====
-Giants are great at expanding. They usually have high hp, armour and gold cost per unit. Their biggest risk tends to be numerical, since you often get less of them than comparative units of other nations, they have a bad habit of being surrounded and struggling to deal with enemies that need high volumes of archer fire. Overall they perform pretty well all around, but are susceptible to being surrounded. They generally expand better than their non-giant counterparts, perform ok against even the heaviest cavalry, and have a passable lineup into most troops. The biggest issues tend to be their low volume – and the fact that the weakest giant infantry has terrible attack stats. Also, if a nation has a few giant troops (see LA Gath for example) they serve as a fantastic, recruitable hammer against cavalry.
-Finally, the biggest of giants can serve as thugs, small squads of Jotunheim or Niefelhiems sacred giants can expand very well into weaker provinces even unblessed.
-====Mages====
-Evocation magic got improved in dominions 6. As such – there is a place for some limited mage support in expansion. Broadly – magic can do a few things well – the specifics are addressed in the addendum regarding lucids magic mod. What is important to know at a conceptual level is mages generally provide either a ‘buffer’ wall of units – an AOE debuff , a defensive buff– or an AOE damaging spell.
-The buffer wall is equivalent to adding a bunch of bad infantry. It’s especially useful in the early turns, where you can afford a mage but not necessarily as much infantry as one might like. The debuffs are exactly what they sound like, usually stuns on groups of enemies. Finally, the damaging spells tend to have crippling weaknesses (astral fires being the exception and all around good). As such, they’re best against specific units – some spells do well vs armor, whilst others are only good against unarmored units. Finally the buffs can make units much more survivable.
-Sending a mage with an army isn’t without risk. Archers can kill the mage, the mage obviously isn’t resrarching, and they’re rarely a hail mary. What they do best is provide some damage to otherwise weak infantry (with lucids mod there are specific, more optimal compositions). This allows the expansion parties from the first few turns to expand into harder provinces, and with less attrition than otherwise.
-====Thugs====
-Thugs are basically big commanders (usually blessed) that can take on a province in numbers between 1-3 with potentially a few guards. The basic concept is these are highly statted units that independents will struggle to kill, with some means of dealing enough damage to the independents to rout/kill them. Regenerating Giants, Hellblessed Elves, Ultra-High Armor commanders with Fire shield all fit the bill, but the specifics aren’t what defines these so much as what they do. It’s worth noting that thug expansion is notorious for being either ‘really good’ or ‘really bad’. Usually, a nations thugs are either good enough or they aren’t - aka it’s not common for thug expansion to be much of a judgement call if its available.
-Typical thug expansion is blessed. There are atypical examples, but ordinarily, thug expansion will use a bless. An exception would be sending 5 big unblessed sacred giants (aka EA Niefelheim or Musphelheim) – which probably fits ‘thug’ better than ‘good infantry’ or ‘sacred’ – since they’re operating unblessed. A blessed commander or two (or three) – or those same 5 units blessed would be more typical. The classic thug expansion bless is fire shield stacked with defensive stats/spells - or awe/fear.
-Thug units still have limitations – and generally avoid high damage provinces. They can vary quite widely in power – from the ultra-tanky black knights of ulm, to giant commanders that can be lackluster without armour or an additional way to boost protection, to some weird mage tricks where the mage is armored and casting burning hands or something similar. I never mastered the best attack commands for these units – so unfortunately it’s not something I would advise on. However at a theoretical level – high armor and high defence thugs would probably want to kill crossbows first, as in an enemy army, that’s going to be the most dangerous unit to them most of the time.
-Oftentimes, a regular formation can combine with thugs to make a strong army. This is quite an important aspect of thugs – as they generally have low to no attrition (if working as intended), so it’s useful to merge and unmerge them with other parties as the situation demands. For bumps and hard provinces, this can be invaluable.
-Finally, some strategies use buff mages and thugs. They send out a mage to cast some spell to make the thug scarier – usually enlarge or body ethereal (but there are other options), before retreating. This is usually pretty slow as it requires a mage, and the research, and the thug, but it can come up in the later phases of expansion. The latter particularly can significantly increase the survivability of a unit, and allow it to take more complex squares.
-====Assassins====
-As I am relatively inexperienced at assassin expanding, a lot of this knowledge is second hand so take it with a grain of salt.
-Assassins expansion is very random. It’s either great or terrible. In my opinion, that makes it bad. Essentially a player sends units with the assasain tag to kill the commanders of a province – then walks in and auto-rout them, meaning the province is taken without fighting the main infantry blob. The advantage – a few commanders serve as an expansion party, freeing up gold and other resources, and potentially taking on provinces with otherwise very scary troops. It expands quickly if it ‘works’.
-The disadvantage is that this is moderately consistent at the best of times, and utterly catastrophic if you get unlucky. As the size of independent provinces got bigger in the shift from Dominions 5 to 6, the relative power of assasains went down – as it takes a while to assassinate all the commanders. Assasain expansion varies wildly in power and consistency depending on the quality of the assasain.
-If you see the earlier notes – specific commands (attack*5) marginally increase the odds of success by essentially playing with the tick timer to ensure a first attack.
-A final trick - at least in my testing the attack orders in the commander screen take precedence over the generic attack orders (aka the 5 you queue up). Essentially this means you can 'bit-hack' to attack very marginally sooner in the turn tick order (at least I think this works - but who knows - it could be confirmation bias).
-===== Independent Supplements =====
-//This is a broad section, so rather than hammer down on specific indies – I’ll focus on the main points //
-Independent supplemented expansion loosely comes in four forms. Each has a time and place. Before going into each form, it is worth mentioning that for most nations – independent supplements will be less efficient than national troops. This is worst on gold cost – but they also tend to be poorly statted and have mediocre morale. Regardless, they are generally useful,
-====Independent Commanders====
-These are often invaluable as they allow you to spend your capital turns not building commanders. They have 50-75 leadership, only allow box formations and can’t fight to save their lives. However these essentially represent two things. 1) A command point in the capital and 2), a unit that can ‘gather’ up troops from non-capital provinces, be it routs, or independent recruitment. If a player is optimizing expansion, they probably want some number of these at some point in the expansion phase – varying widely based on how expansion has gone and the nation played.
-Occasionally relevant – some cavalry commanders have high map move – especially the light cavalry ones. This can allow for long distance expansion – sometimes outside of what a nation could ordinarily do, as they can lead cavalry troops from the capital.
-====Line Holders (light infantry etc)====
-Broadly – line holder troops will lose a prolonged fight. Their job is to stop you collecting harassment penalties, when some other aspect of the army wins the battle. Units like light infantry are cheap enough to be recruited as indies, and tough enough to not immediately fold to weaker indie types. 10-20 of these can really help an army not get surrounded.
-==== Lighter Heavy infantry (e.g. heavy infantry)====
-Broadly – these units are usually pretty good, and are often similar to some of the intermediate to even the better units in a players roster. The problem is that without a fort – you generally don’t have enough resources to make a meaningful amount of them (and they don’t all have the same prot). These can be a respectable supplement to an army – but you really need them on a tile with high resources first.
-====Archers====
-Archers and crossbows can help supplement an army vs indies. They fare best into tribe and barbarian type unshielded units.
-====Lance Catchers====
-These are cheap independents put in front of the main force to absorb heavy cavalry charges and reduce losses to your best units.
-====Heavy Cavalry (rare)====
-The reason this is rare is a province needs heavy cavalry – and enough resources to make around 5 or more before expansion is over. Given heavy cavalry provinces tend to be hard to take (and are often taken late in expansion), and the best heavy cavalry is very resource heavy – the result is this is rarely good. On the occasions this is good – heavy cavalry recruitment feels a lot like capital recruitment in terms of unit power – and they are an excellent supplement to an expansion party. It’s unlikely a player will ever get the requisite tile combination of sites, resources and heavy cavalry for this to play a major role in expansion however.
-====The Rest====
-I’m sure there’s a lot I’ve missed, since there’s so many troops in dominions. As such – this section is left open – for the countless strategies I have no doubt overlooked.
+[[dom6:guides_and_player_improvement:cybertron2-s_guide_to_expansion:part_3_assorted_concepts|Cybertron2's Guide to Expansion - Part 3 - Assorted Concepts]]

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