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sullat posted:Bogarus has decent cheap mages and with a more money game hopefully has a lot more of them than otherwise. He can communion up air, astral, blood, death and fire and lay waste once he hits 5 in many fields, and with his master of names getting a research bonus, that shouldn't take too long. His demonologists and alchemists may never handle huge death/earth rituals, but on the battlefield they should be able to handle most stuff with a communion. Of course, but it still takes time to get that up and running. Bogarus doesn't have recruit anywhere mages, and thus needs to both take territory and get additional forts up first. And both Ragha and Mictlan have easy access to communions and good attack magic as well. It's certainly one of Bogarus' strong points, but it's generally not as much of a big deal in the early game as the late. Zereth posted:The what? Bogarus has a summon that adds a chance for an extra event to a province - per bird. With good luck scales, this can result in large gains once it's up and running - though still RNG based.
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Jan 14, 2017 03:20
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Lord Koth posted:Bogarus has a summon that adds a chance for an extra event to a province - per bird. With good luck scales, this can result in large gains once it's up and running - though still RNG based. The what?
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Jan 14, 2017 04:19
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Birdonomics. It's super obnoxious to disrupt if they're all hiding in a fort.
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Jan 14, 2017 04:21
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Cathode Raymond posted:The what? Bogarus has a cheap, easily-cast national spell that summon a Firebird. The bird both increases luck and increases the odds of events happening in its province, and this even stacks for each bird. If they spam enough of them they can make it rain positive events for free money, free gems, and other cool stuff. Vanarus gets access to the same national magic as Bogarus but no S mages.
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Jan 14, 2017 04:29
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...Does it work?
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Jan 14, 2017 05:41
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Teledahn posted:...Does it work? Like most things in Dom4, I'm guessing the answer is yes* *significant drawbacks or complications may apply. Void where prohibited by enemy dominion. Do not attempt to hug Firebirds. May cause serious side effects including dry mouth, hives, bird flu, invasions by demons from beyond the veil of sanity, or immediate reprisal by every other player in the game as soon as they realize what you've done. No refunds. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 07:32
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Dom4 apparently still has a soft limit for how many events you can get in a turn, so unless the birds significantly overcome that issue there's limitations to the strategy, but it sounds like a decent way to get some nice bonus income if you're in a position to take advantage of it. Dominions is pretty big on taking advantage of as many small optimizations as you can to build up to huge advantages in the long run, which is part of what makes the game intimidating and difficult to get into for new players. On the other hand, if the increased event odds can significantly increase the number of events you get in a turn, that could turn into a HUGE boon over time if a player is allowed to mass the birds. My understanding from what I last read was that while Dom4 is less restrictive than Dom3 (which had a more-or-less hard cap of 4 or so random events in a turn), you're still not going to see much more than that on any normal turn. E: Corbeau posted:Birdonomics. It's super obnoxious to disrupt if they're all hiding in a fort. Wait, are you implying that normal Luck event rules apply, so invading armies are going to get hit by Misfortune 3 events every single turn while trying to siege a firebird fort? Because if so  
Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 09:07
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We don't have great scouting on the interior of Bogarus' empire right now, but if I were playing the nation I sure as hell would have been spending every Fire gem I could scrounge up on Firebirds as quickly as possible for as long as possible. This is why I get a bit of a pit in my stomach when I look at how big Bogarus has become. Some people really hosed up in letting that happen.
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Jan 14, 2017 11:42
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Boy. I've got a lot to learn about birds and blood and luck before I can hope to be a pro Dom 4 player.
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Jan 14, 2017 15:59
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Yeah, I mean at this point it's a problem, because they've grown incredibly large and have now had years to amass forts, mages and firebirds. I was more referring to them getting that large in the first place, since for the first two or so years any of their neighbors should have been able to trample them, before they really brought their advantages online, given who those neighbors are.Shady Amish Terror posted:
...What? Pretty sure the whole "they act like Misfortune scales for others" was a myth, and Luck scales are Luck scales regardless of who gains an advantage from them..
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Jan 14, 2017 16:01
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Reading around a bit, I couldn't find a conclusive statement on the matter with regards to Dom 3 (which is where most of my limited Dominions knowledge stems from), and it looks like it's almost certainly not the case for Dom 4. I phrased that a bit poorly, because I thought you were suggesting that the 'enemy luck is misfortune' thing was conclusively proven with firebirds, which would be amazing, but apparently isn't the case. I thought that it WAS the case for Dom 3 (or that at least Luck scales became neutral in the event of enemy dominion), and that, again, you were suggesting that Firebirds proved the link in Dom 4. My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood what you were saying slightly.
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Jan 14, 2017 16:32
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 Obligatory Birdmen Turn Caelum Turn 45 This turn we clear out the AI-rebels from our fortress in Redbud Grove, get a strange message from Man, start scouting out Mictlan ...and meanwhile, Jomon has build up enough forces underwater to Blitzkrieg back some coastal provinces. Motherfuckers  Back to the Past
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Jan 14, 2017 16:57
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Libluini posted:
Ha! You used one of the +/- army size items! That's great, it's fun to see somebody actually use one of those.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:44
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Turn 46 Turn 46 begins with reaching level 5 in Enchantment. We now have access to the supremely useful and dangerous Death spell Horde of Skeletons:   I love Horde of Skeletons, it is one of my favorite spells. There are just so many problems that can be solved by applying lots of undead. If you have enough D2+ mages casting Horde of Skeletons in a battle you will reach a point where you can poo poo out virtually unlimited skeletons, eventually winning because the enemy army will fatigue out no matter how many skeletons they kill. Our D4 Vampire Lords will be able to spam skeletons for dozens of battlefield turns, meaning that 5 or 6 equipped Vampire Lords will basically be a mobile army in and of themselves. It looks like Man claimed his third Throne:  A Good Throne. Any Throne that offers a discount to a School of Magic is good, and there are some Thaumaturgy spells that could make very good use of that 20% discount. I’d love to steal this Throne, but I doubt that our armies will reach far enough into Man's territory to grab it. Our remote site-searching turns up a single Air site for +1 Air. More importantly, we’ve cast a whole bunch of one of the spells I was really excited about trying when I chose to play Gath: Scapegoats.  As it is with many national spells, Scapegoats has some cool flavor text. The real fun part is what it summons:  These are the Se’irim, and I have been told that they are murder monsters. Three attacks, Berserker 4 (!), reasonable Attack and Defense scores. They’re size 3, so can fit two to a battlefield square. They have fairly low Protection, but Protection is one of the scores that is boosted when a unit goes berserk. With our Bless they’ll have the extra HP and Regeneration, Blood Vengeance, and most importantly +4 strength. Blessed and Berserk their three attacks should hit like god drat freight trains. The Se’irim that we’ve summoned are going to be used to put Xibalba back into its bottle. We captured a fair number of blood slaves this turn, enough to summon two more Vampire Lords. Not enough, however, to summon more Se’irim. That’s ok, we are marching on Xibalba’s cap this turn anyway. The first battles of our invasion of Man go as expected:  Stomp PD every day. We smash PD, nothing more. Now three of Man’s forts are under siege by our forces, and one of the gates has even been cracked. We are sending a scout to storm the fort in Knobville. Remember, never blind-storm a fort! This turn Pangaea experienced Man’s first real counter-punch, and it was a wallop. Pan’s horde:  Man’s tremendous mass of longbows and magisters:  Man casts Flaming Arrows:   500 Longbows pour arrows into the charging horde:   Pangaea reaches Man’s longbows but too late to win the battle. The berserk minotaurs trample dozens of archers but eventually the lightning bolts and flaming arrows kill every one of them:   So, it looks like Man can put up a serious defense, and I'm certain that he'll respond to our invasion next turn. I don't expect this war to be a walk in the park. I am cautiously optimistic for several reasons. First, our infantry carry shields, regenerate, and have Blood Vengeance. This means that Flaming Arrows should be deflected more often by shields, the damage that does get through should be mitigated somewhat be regeneration, and that damage will also be reflected back at the archers at the same time. Second, from what our scouting tells me, the bulk of Man’s forces are far to the West, closer to Pangaea. Man will be recruiting heavily in the East to try and defeat us, but he doesn’t have as many ready-made mega-armies over on our front. Third, in a couple of turns we will have enough Vampire Lords and lesser Vampires to comfortably begin using them in battle. I am confident that Man won’t be able to handle a protracted push of Dominion followed by Vampires. Especially when we hit Enchantment 6 and get the spell Rigor Mortis, a real army killer. In underwater news, Xibalba attacked our undersea expedition again in White Water:   We beat them off, but then an unexpected event occurred and our team got hit by a bunch of independent tritons! We lose a Kohen Gadol, and I decide that rather than risk two more expensive cap-only mages we will have them retreat to Javal Kish, back on the land. Our underwater adventure was a kind of a failure, so maybe we’ll focus on taking Xibalba proper and then dom-killing the sea.  Retreating from the Sea, and re-taking Xibalba! Rounding out the turn: We move on Xibalba in a pincer attack, hoping to bottle them up and take care of them once and for all. In the West we are waiting for Man’s counterstroke…  Three forts under siege. Knights, Longbows, and mages directly next door. Man won't take this sitting down. Finally, it appears that Ulm has been dom-killed. That probably means that Bogarus has become monstrously huge, and we’d better hope to kill Man quickly if we want a shot at ever beating them.   Next turn: Counterstroke. How are u fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 19:08
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goatfuckers
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Jan 15, 2017 19:17
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Any strategy that relies mainly on skeletons is a good strategy.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:20
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Dom4 apparently still has a soft limit for how many events you can get in a turn, so unless the birds significantly overcome that issue there's limitations to the strategy, but it sounds like a decent way to get some nice bonus income if you're in a position to take advantage of it. Dominions is pretty big on taking advantage of as many small optimizations as you can to build up to huge advantages in the long run, which is part of what makes the game intimidating and difficult to get into for new players. Apparently each bird has a separate chance to cause a positive event. Here's what a normal turn looks for a Bogarus who has summoned a lot of birds: 
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Jan 15, 2017 19:56
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Caelum Turn 46 This turn is rather boaring, nothing of note happens. The status so far: Bogarus has eaten Ulm, Mictlan finally takes that lonely Jomon-fort they had been sieging for a while and I'm preparing to throw Jomon's clown army back into the water where it belongs. Past Caelum Turns
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Jan 15, 2017 20:35
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Culka posted:Apparently each bird has a separate chance to cause a positive event. Here's what a normal turn looks for a Bogarus who has summoned a lot of birds: Holy fuuuuuck. Gem-gens were wisely removed to cut down on the sheer amount of economic tedium, as I understand, so instead there are birds. All hail birds.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:38
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Very few nations can get birds, and they have a rough start. This is why you should kill them before they reach the bird singularity.
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Jan 15, 2017 22:10
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At what point does the unexpected become expected? 
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Jan 15, 2017 22:43
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Go Birdteams tbh
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Jan 16, 2017 04:13
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Culka posted:Apparently each bird has a separate chance to cause a positive event. Here's what a normal turn looks for a Bogarus who has summoned a lot of birds: Isn't there some kind of limit on random events per province or per nation? Anything beyond that being an enemy attack spell that's presented as an "unexpected event"? Or is that Dom 3 rules?
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Jan 16, 2017 09:01
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IMJack posted:Isn't there some kind of limit on random events per province or per nation? Anything beyond that being an enemy attack spell that's presented as an "unexpected event"? Or is that Dom 3 rules? If I remember right, there's only a limit on displaying events. You can still feel the effect of events happening which aren't displayed if you hit the limit: This means random events hitting the limit still happen, even if you can't see them.
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Jan 16, 2017 10:10
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Libluini posted:If I remember right, there's only a limit on displaying events. You can still feel the effect of events happening which aren't displayed if you hit the limit: This means random events hitting the limit still happen, even if you can't see them. That sounds like the worst of the possible choices you could go with so I assume it's what dominions does
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Jan 16, 2017 10:12
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Summoning firebirds is one of the few cases where alchemy might be worthwhile, since the events you can get with them are so crazy.
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Jan 16, 2017 10:45
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Do they get their own unique events, or is it just the really, really rare events all landing simply due to sheer number of flamechickens?
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Jan 16, 2017 13:50
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King Doom posted:Do they get their own unique events, or is it just the really, really rare events all landing simply due to sheer number of flamechickens? No unique events that I can remember, but you can design your pretender to fit the qualifications for things like events that give you a trio of free mages.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:10
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AfroSquirrel posted:No unique events that I can remember, but you can design your pretender to fit the qualifications for things like events that give you a trio of free mages. Likewise, can bird events also be the ones that create a new magic site like the Deepest Cave? If so, can a province end up with a dozen gem sites?
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Jan 16, 2017 15:15
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IMJack posted:Isn't there some kind of limit on random events per province or per nation? Anything beyond that being an enemy attack spell that's presented as an "unexpected event"? Or is that Dom 3 rules? From what I recall, there's a limit on the number of events a nation can get through random chance. The good event generation ability is completely outside of this. Each firebird rolls independently to generate an event and while there is a limit, it's very high.
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Jan 16, 2017 17:40
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Each bird is 2% so you want around 50 to start seeing good returns. That amounts to 100 fire gems. Still compared to the 10+ Flame Spirit army (300+ gems) it is quite cheap.
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Jan 16, 2017 22:46
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Turn 47 Turn 47 begins with reaching Conjuration 5, excellent, we will be using one of our newly unlocked spells next turn. We summon two new Vampire Lords, more wolves for patrol duty, and cast a handful of remote site-searching spells. Only one site is uncovered, a Water site in Javal Kish:   I’m happy to have the +1 Water gem, but the ability to recruit Markata is kind of a joke. Markata are tiny, size one, undisciplined monkies (think Macaques) that are situationally useful in a handful of -highly- specific circumstances, but are otherwise more of a joke. Hooray! AI Jomon declares a new Prophet, which is only somewhat interesting in that they have declared a Crab General as such.  Aside from sounding totally badass, Crab Generals are basic Jomonese commander units, but ones that can only be recruited from underwater forts. One of Jomon’s national abilities is to be able to build forts underwater, something that very few land-based nations are able to do. Xibalba is able to as well, which is why Xibalba has three forts in that drat lake! If Jomon has underwater forts it is possible that they could have a significant chunk of the game map’s Southern sea. From beneath the waves they can recruit beefy Shark Soldier heavy infantry, Shrimp Soldiers, Crab Generals, and extremely strong but extremely expensive Ryujin dragon-mages. It’d be pretty hilarious if AI Jomon is still causing problems from under the sea, with land neighbors unable to dislodge them. I really hope this is the case! We catch a whole bunch of slaves this turn which are used to summon two Vampire Lords and a another handful of Se’irim. Now for battles! Man counter-attacks in Knobville:  …or not. Man decided to just ping our sieging army with a few useless dudes. I guess he wanted to get an idea of what we’re packing. This ping attack also unfortunately caused the Scout we’d set to Storm Fort to run away (the Scout was scripted to Retreat, the idea being that the Scout catches a glimpse of what's inside the fort and then high-tails it out of there ASAP), so we still don’t know what specifically is in there. The two other Man specific battles of the turn are just Man armies advancing against Pangaea. Man puts two forts that Pan had stolen from him under siege. The only fighting is between Man’s massive armies of longbows and Magisters and Pan PD, but we do see that Man has started communioning his Magisters, wisely deciding that letting half of his mages go dormant so the other half can cast even larger and more dangerous lightning spells is a good deal. We file this information away.  Man figures out how to use Communions. There are two battles involving Xibalba this turn. First we see that Xibalba’s Pretender God, his big loving blue Dragon, decided to go take our province of Gemer, adjacent to Xibalba proper.  Adios, bad Province Defense. This is fantastic, the Dragon has basically removed itself from the new Siege of Xibalba, and now has three options: One, to reverse direction and attack Xibalba the province, likely running solo into our massive army. Two, to go and put Javal Kish under siege, maybe solo, maybe with backup from lake-based frog men. Three, to gently caress off and invade Pan, something I’d frankly be 100% A-OK with. Not likely, however. Either way, the Dragon without the massive army of chaff and backup mages is a lot less dangerous, so this is good news. We can always take Gemer back when everything is dead. Oh, and the second Xibalba battle of the turn was our great big army just clowning the poo poo out of the hodge-podge of summoned troops patrolling their cap:  Sweeping away the chaff and renewing the siege of Xibalba. To wrap the turn for the East: we are beginning to siege down Xibalba’s capitol fort once again. We are hoping that the Dragon decides to attack our great big army all alone so we can murder it. We continue to summon Se’irim.  Look at our larger, better, stronger army sitting on Xibalba. The next time around their fort will fall. The West is a little bit more complicated. Man did not counterattack us last turn, which leads me to think that it -must- be coming next turn. He’s pinged our army in Knobville and moved a lot of Magisters, Wardens, and Longbows into the provinces surrounding Knobville. If he doesn’t attack our army there next turn I am going to be scratching my head.  Waiting for the hammer-blow to fall... Our armies sieging the forts in Ashenton and Walnut Woods have each cracked the gates. Because we want to secure these provinces ASAP and have the opportunity to move those armies North, we are going to break the cardinal rule of forts and storm them blind. I recall that scouts showed that Walnut Woods had only ~10 Magisters in the province, and Ashenton had some longbows and probably a few more Magisters. I’m hoping that we can overwhelm the unprepared defense with sheer numbers. This is probably an idiot gamble, and we may be very sad next turn! The fort in Knobville is also cracked, but we’re not storming. We are instead setting a trap for Man’s counterpunch. Three Vampire Lords leading 18 lesser Vamps are flying to join the army there this turn (Vampire mobility is so, so useful!).  The ability to Fly is insanely useful. One of the best things about Vampires is that they can appear seemingly from nowhere. The lesser Vampires are scripted to immediately Attack Archers, which hopefully will send them flying to the rear of Man’s lines where they’ll cause a ruckus for a while. They’ll likely all die, but Knobville is under our Dominion now, so they will respawn in our Capitol. Two of the Lords are going to cast 5 rounds of Shadow Blast:  Great battlefield Evocation. High damage, great AoE (8 for our Lords), and what it doesn’t kill it will often paralyze for a few turns. This spell should “blast” some holes in Man’s front lines while our sacred infantry march across the field. The other Lord is casting 5 rounds of Agony:  This is a very low damage, high AoE Fear causing spell. It would be great to cause some of Man’s regiments to rout within the first few rounds of battle. If it is possible this spell should do it. The third special surprise we’ll have waiting is an Abba mage, holding a +1 N Thistle Mace, ready to cast Howl:  This is such a fun and useful spell. While it is active on the battlefield wolves will continually spawn from every battlefield edge and rush to attack the nearest enemy. This is supremely helpful when the wolves spawn behind the enemy battle line. They can harry enemy archers and kill vulnerable generals and mages. If all goes well, next turn we should take two Mannish forts and crush an army. Of course, things never go as well as you hope… How are u fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 01:31
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Are you still pushing communion with blood slave sacrifices? Or is the Gath dominion just "naturally" pushing back Man's enough to invade Knobville?
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Jan 18, 2017 02:52
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PurpleXVI posted:Are you still pushing communion with blood slave sacrifices? Or is the Gath dominion just "naturally" pushing back Man's enough to invade Knobville? Oh we haven't stopped sacrificing at all. Vampires are currently our Ace in the Hole, but in order to leverage them effectively we must have friendly Dominion on every battlefield. I don't intent to lose this war, so we're going to continue to push our Dominion in a robust manner. If our other neighbors complain then we will find a way to diplomance our way out of it.
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Jan 18, 2017 04:26
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Excited for some bigger battles.
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Jan 18, 2017 06:02
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I'm incredibly hype for you to get owned in the blind storm 
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Jan 18, 2017 14:41
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Caelum Returns Caelum Turn 46 We see Mictlan taking Jomon's last fort outside the water, Ulm dies forever and other boaring stuff. Caelum Turn 47 My second research goal has been reached! Time to forge. In other news: AI-Jomon is still besieging Jomon and has absolutely slaughtered the trash force I threw at them out of spite. Turns out scorn and contempt can't replace sensible planning! This forces me to send an actual army against them next turn. Also since I'm getting tired of swatting down Jomon's garbage all the time, I decide to simply lay siege to the entire southern ocean. With the first siege army reaching the coast next turn, Operation Ocean Siege can begin. Let's step back a moment, how did we get to this point?
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Jan 18, 2017 15:45
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Libluini posted:Caelum Returns It's fun to see this from your perspective. I don't think I even had scouts on the Southern coast at this point, or if I did they were spotty indeed. Having played Jomon in Mo'Money 1 I know how annoying they can be if you get into the Ocean.
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Jan 18, 2017 17:39
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Turn 48 Turn 48 begins with hitting Enchantment 6. Enchantment 5 and 6 are two of my favorite research levels in the game, as they pack the one-two punch that is Horde of Skeletons (which we got a couple turns ago) and now Rigor Mortis. I’ll detail what is so awesome about Rigor Mortis when we get the chance to use it in battle.  We see that the second Global spell of the game has been cast: Bogarus cast “Gift of Health”. Gift of Health (GoH) does many things, all of them fantastic. It gives a +HP bonus dependent upon the strength of your Dominion, it causes -all- afflictions to heal over time within your Dominion, and I’m pretty sure it provides a small general gold income boost as well. Bogarus continues to look like the most dangerous nation in the game right now. Our remote site-searching turns up a single site, a +1W +1N that I’m happy to take. We summon two more Vampire Lords (Lamech & Noah), summon a bunch of Se’irim in Javal Kish, and harvest scores of blood slaves. The first battle report for the turn is another Pangaea / Man clash:  Did -not- go well for Pan. The second Pan / Man battle is another loss for Pan:  Communioned Magisters can call on much bigger lightning bolts. Man lost some stuff in this battle, which is good. It looks like the 16 dead Magisters were communion slaves that got used so hard they died. Communions are very tricky to manage well, and slave deaths, I have found, are common. Man also lost 150+ longbows, which are easily replaceable. Pangaea seriously needs to adjust his tactics for this War. With better troop placement (screening regiments, regiments spread more across the battlefield rather than blobbed up, skirmish formations to reduce attrition from evocations and arrows) I think he’d be killing a lot more of Man’s units. What he really needs, though, is battlefield magic. Man is committing a -lot- of his mages to the field and the heavy losses Pan is suffering demonstrate the importance of battle magic. Speaking of battle magic, Man attacked us in Knobville this turn, just as I’d expected. Here’s our glorious sieging army:  A mighty host of Gibborim, Levite Zealots, crossbowmen, and mages. See how we've deployed a regiment of Zealots in the very rear, set to guard our mages and commanders.  Vampire Lords, Lesser Vampires, and Blood Slaves have arrived. And here’s Man’s siege-breaking force:  Interesting. Man’s force is heavy on mages and light on troops. He’s placed small blobs of longbows up in front of his main lines, hoping to absorb crossbow bolts from our crossbowmen that I have scripted to “Fire Archers”. He brings 50+ Magisters and about 10 Lizard Shaman (N1S1 indie mages, very useful as communion slaves, in my experience). Since Man is attacking we get the first round. We Divine Bless all of our sacred units, our one Abba casts Howl, and our Vampire Lords cast some Shadow Blasts and Agony:  It's very satisfying to watch bolts of shadow magic blow holes in troop formations. Our 18 lesser Vampires that we brought also fly directly into Man’s lines and start attacking some longbows:  Man’s first round of casting shows what his strategy is for this fight. He casts Light of the Northern Star, a battlefield enchantment that gives +1 Astral to every Astral mage on the field, friend and foe. Then his Magisters, who are all by default at least S1, begin to spam Stellar Cascades. Stellar Cascades is a large AoE Fatigue damage spell. It doesn’t do direct damage but rather tires out units that it hits, generally allowing you to mop them up once they’ve fallen unconscious.  Rays of Solar energy that drain energy from your body. A classic giant-killer spell. Now I know that Man’s player is not an idiot. He’s seen what type of bless we’re packing, and knows that evocations like Thunder Strike, Lightning Bolt, and others will kill his own mages just as fast as they kill our sacred infantry. Man realizes that his only real way to beat us is to do indirect damage, thus Stellar Cascades. This is reinforced when all of his Lizard Shaman begin to cast Swarm, a spell that summons dozens of tiny, size one insects and frogs.  Bugs. I hate bugs. They’re far from deadly individually, but will easily take down any unconscious unit given enough time. Man also has one of his own mages cast Howl, so now we have dueling Howl enchantments on the field. Our screening lesser Vampires do their job brilliantly and all of the bugs that Man summoned spend several turns fighting them instead of flying across the field to gum up the advancement of our giants and Levites.  Stellar Cascades fall like rain upon our troops, fatiguing them out and slowing our movement to a crawl. The two Vampire Lords casting Shadow Blast punch holes in Man’s line of longbows and Wardens, sometimes catching a mage or two as well. Hilariously, there appear to be only a certain set of predetermined points around the edges of the battlefield map where wolves will spawn when Howl is active. Thus, the wolves that spawn for -our- Howl end up immediately locked in combat with the wolves from Man’s Howl. They kind of cancel each other out. The battle continues as such for many rounds. Man’s problem, however, is that he can slow our forces down but doesn’t have the means to take advantage of that and kill them. Slowly, but surely, our sacred infantry march through the Stellar Cascades, kill the bugs, shrug off some flaming arrows, and reach Man’s lines. Just as they get close, though, Man’s army-wide morale breaks and all of his units start to flee the field. We win, but not decisively:  Giants are terrible at handling tons of small, high-defense enemies. A Gibbor can kill one insect per battle round, which won't cut it when there are 30 bugs swarming him.  Morale breaks!  Results. Man loses 16 Magisters, 9 Shaman, and 1 Daughter of Avalon (his Howl Caster, with a Thistle Mace too), plus all of the misc. Wardens and longbows. Considering he put 53 Magisters on the field I’m a little bit sad we couldn’t get more. I am worried that Man will soon discover that his most effective strategy is to basically do the same thing he did in this battle, but also to cast Storm and summon dozens of Air Elementals. Air Eles would be able to do the damage to our infantry that Man desperately needed this battle, and I don’t have much of a counter to them at the moment. Here’s hoping Man won’t realize this in time. We also stormed two forts this turn, blind. First the battle in Ashenton:  A clogged fort gate quickly becomes a killing ground.  We won, but took heavy casualties. Mostly Levites, though, and their job really is simply to die for the cause. I consider it a reasonable victory. Then the fort in Walnut Wood:  No gate-clogging chaff this time!  This one went great! Man’s mages behind the walls of the fort didn’t have much to screen themselves with, so on round one they got peppered with crossbow bolts and the Magister who cast Light of the Northern Star ate it. Without that spell all of Man’s Magisters were unable to cast Stellar Cascades, went off-script, and cast damaging evocations instead. They killed themselves throwing lightning at our troops.  A study in Evocation damage being reflected back upon mages. All the way on the opposite side of our kingdom in the East Xibalba’s Dragon decided to do nothing this turn, and instead recruited a bunch of crossbows in Gemer. We’re reinforcing our siege of Xibalba’s cap fort. The standoff remains in effect. All in all I think this turn went very well. We deftly fended off Man’s counterattack in Knobville and took two forts to boot. The army in Walnut Woods is moving to join with the army in Ashenton, after which they’ll be ready to invade the next Mannish province. We continue to set Earthquake traps in some of our other border provinces, crossing our fingers that Man will try to invade us and end up ground into pulp. When we total up Man’s mage losses across all of our battles this turn he lost 51 Magisters. That’s not insignificant. We continue to push our Dominion, and if we can get candles in a few more border provinces we’ll be able to field Vampires. We also get the spoils of war for capturing Man’s forts: gems! The provinces of Ashenton and Walnut Woods give us a total of +2S +2N +2E +1F +1W +1A gems, love it! We reinforce Knobville with more skelespamming Yeddeoni, a fresh Howl caster, and more Levites. Man may try a second attack next turn or may wait for us to move, but we’d better be ready. 
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Jan 18, 2017 18:42
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| # ? May 10, 2024 18:42 |
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Looks like Man hasn't learned that putting down multiple thin lines with some distance between them is better than all those lumps I see there. But I have to commend him for leaving so many easy holes in his frontline for the vampires to walk through, top strategy! Also Magisters have Air 2, so with that communion running he really should have invested in Storm + Air Elementals. If you have the gems, Air Elementals can mow down entire armies effortless. Using them is expensive, but hilarious. How Are U is completely right here. (The advanced strategy would have been to let half his 50 Magisters tire out the giants and the other half spamming elementals. This battle could have been an one-sided massacre for How Are U's army if Man had used air gems, better scripting and better troop placement.) That said, I can already give you Caelum Turn 48:  -No recording has been made because Libluini is an idiot- In this turn I won against the sharkwarriors squatting on my coast and Operation Ocean Siege went into full swing. And that's all that I remember from that turn, you will have to wait until turn 49 for the next video. Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 19:08
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