How a battle resolves without you

This is the part that surprises people. When two armies meet, you are not there. Battles are fought while the turn is being resolved, with every soldier, mage and priest acting on its own equipment and abilities, and you see the result afterwards: a message says there was a battle, and “View battle” plays it back.

What you set before a fight

What you control happens before the fight. A squad is a group of units led by a commander, and you place your squads on a small battle map. Then you give each commander battle orders: hold back, attack, fire on a target, cast a particular spell. A commander can have up to five specific orders scripted, one for each of the first rounds of the fight, and a main order that guides it for the rest. A commander you give no orders is run by the game.

The main orders on that screen are: stay behind troops, attack, cast spells, advance and cast spells, and retreat. Each can be given a target: the closest enemy, enemy archers, cavalry or fliers, large monsters, or the enemy at the rear. The tick box at the bottom, conservative magic gem usage, tells a mage to spend gems carefully, which matters once your mages carry them. The orders of your mages and priests are the ones to think about first, because what they cast is the part of a fight that you chose.

So a battle is a bet you placed last turn, and the replay tells you whether the bet was a good one. Losing an army because a mage was scripted to cast the wrong spell is normal, and more instructive than it feels at the time.

What to read in the replay

The replay shows both armies fighting, and you can pause it and step through. Four numbers explain most of what you see:

• Hit points say how much damage a unit takes before it dies.
• Protection says how much of a blow its armour stops. Combat explains how a blow is settled.
• Morale says how well a unit holds when things go badly. For a morale check the game compares the unit’s morale with 12 plus a random roll, so a unit with morale 10 passes three times in ten.
• Fatigue builds up as a unit fights and casts, and it makes the unit worse at both.

Units also have an attack skill and a defence skill, and these decide whether a blow lands at all.

The dice underneath

Underneath, every attack is a small dice roll. The attacker’s attack skill is compared with the defender’s defence skill, and each side adds a DRN, a Dominions Random Number: two six-sided dice, where any die that shows a 6 counts as 5 and is rolled again and added. The attack has to beat the defence; a tie misses.

Because a die can keep rolling, nothing in this game is ever quite safe.

You do not need any of the arithmetic to play. When you want it, the rules are on DRN: the dice behind most rolls and Combat, and the units tables list the numbers of every soldier you might meet.

Next, step four is about the nation whose soldiers these are.