Part 8: Nation Overview: Anglia

Anglia



A large lower class working in the mines and factories for the profit of the landlords and propertied nobles huh, good thing times have changed since then!

The nation of Anglia are based on the British in the Victorian era, so 1880-1900 pretty much. This is when the sherlock holmes novels were written, with wars in the colonies (including soon-to-be colonies like Zululand) abroad and with the prospect of WW1 still many years off. Mass production of rifles is well underway.
All of the nations from this modpack, Firepower, seem a little not-quite-there-yet but the creator Enjoy (who I believe has an account here) has moved on from dominions so I guess we get what we get. Anglia get no national spells or items whatsoever, no summons no nothing.

Anglia's defining unit is the humble Foot Guard. Any nation that can recruit sacred troops from every fort gets a decent boost by default and these guys aren't awful. They're relatively cheap with a 10-ammo rifle that deals piercing damage (although less than many bows???) and has the armour-piercing trait on top of that. Sadly in dominions ranged weapons are in a sorry state since any nation with air mages can cast Arrow Fend to cause 80% of shots to just vanish however these guys still have their piercing bayonets and with formation fighter they're no slouch in melee either. Once arrow fend is involved they usually get more effective when they have fired their 10 shots and then charge into battle.


They also get some okay cavalry both heavy and light but there's not much to say about these guys. They're good for attack-rear surprise squads but in general I would prefer to recruit foot guards if I can. The light cavalry get lances for the charge bonus and also you can get 4 other types of light cavalry without lances if you want. Why are there so many horse rider recruitables again?



There's also some camel cavalry for some reason?? These guys get a camel cavalry officer commander too but I honestly see no reason why you would ever recruit them except maybe if you were somehow on some desert themed map? Who knows.


Finally we get Anglia's last troop that they can recruit at any fort: the Maxim Gun. These are great and are like Foot Guard++ (but not sacred). Their gun is effectively 10 rifles at once and with a longer range. Getting two sword attacks makes them still a presence in melee and although it looks like they have 10 hp they actually have 30 since there's two secondshapes that represent the crew members dying off. If any of the shapes survive until the end of the battle then the crew members get replenished to full. You can only get one of these per turn from forts but they're cheaper than a single enormous clown so definitely worth getting every one of these you can.


Anglia also gets some cap-only sacreds in the Household Cavalry which are heavy cav. Sacred heavy cav are always pretty good in dominions because they get both a hitpoint and defense boost as well as the horse's hoof getting the benefits of whatever thunder/fire weapon bless you pick in addition to the rider's attacks. I'm not sure I'd place too much of a focus on these guys but they're worth recruiting even if you won't be able to mass them due to how expensive they are in recruitment points.


The troops I would say are at the lower end of good in the context of mods games, certainly much better than Fennoscandia's. They've got some neat tricks and the fact that they can mass sacreds makes up for a lot of other shortcomings.

When it comes to mages Anglia have some very solid options with an okay amount of variety. First off the humble Engineer. These guys have 1E with 2.1 picks from FAWE. This means that 1/16 will have their two picks be in the same path and one in 640 will get +3 in a path. Useful crosspaths too with earth/fire, fire/water, probably others idk. Drain researcher and resource bonus on the mage you'll be massing (which these guys certainly are) are both very nice because it lets you take drain 3 for sure and some amount of sloth. Probably you wouldn't want to go all the way to sloth 3 without an expander since it'd mess up your early game but this explains why they've (presumably) been able to afford barkskin, thunder weapons, and money scales.


Your secondary mage is the medium, with 1xS, 1xD, and a 1.1xSD random. These women are nice to have for some diversity (including the protection against mind hunts) but you probably won't mass them due to your drain scales so you won't be skelespamming that often. Sadly there's no earth/astral cross path in the nation so it'll be difficult to forge crystal coins to get them up to astral 4 for mind hunt. It's unlikely you'll hit the 1 in 40 change of astral 3 too often but the astral 2s can get together and with one casting light of the northern star the rest can soul slay pretty well. Even the S1s can join in by spending a pearl on power of the spheres. They would be efficient gold cost researchers without drain and also have fortune teller so maybe there's an Anglia build without drain in there too.


The cap-only mage is a real nice one, he costs only 3 recruitment points and comes with mason which means you can recruit 1 every turn. He has F1A1E1 and then a +2 pick to FAWE (and another 10% of the same). This means that instead of the scattered randoms of the regular engineer, the great engineer will very often hit A3 for thunderstriking or E3 for legions of steel/strength of giants or F3 for, presumably, throwing fire at people better than a lesser fire mage could. They can also bladewind but with your troops that just seems like more of the same and is not that interesting.
He's also less than 200 gold! This guy is definitely undercosted and is what moves the nation from passable to not actually bad.


All the other commanders are just random leaders of your troop types (admittedly with good leadership) except for the detective which seems to mostly be a Sherlock Holmes reference which is weird when there's a hero who is even more of a reference so who knows. I mean victorian brits also had lots of actual spies so I don't know why they made a detective the spy. Whatever.


The only non-mage commander that's interesting is the Light Artillery. These guys are pricey at 200 gold but get an AOE 5 cannon shot (firing every other round) which I believe also ignores arrow fend. They get a secondshape just like the Maxim guns and three melee attacks. For some unknown reason they have full slots so you can even put a shroud on them! I have absolutely no idea how the cannon blasts interact with thunder weapons but probably pretty well. They have 40 leadership, a huge siege bonus of 30, and are only 1 recruitment point to round it all off.


In short Anglia isn't doing any crazy shit but having 1) a recruit anyfort sacred, 2) solid drain mages, 3) a good cap mage means they pass the test that Fennoscandia failed. Not to mention the wacky shit you can get up to with thugging out light artilleries.