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Banemaster posted:Some common magic sites are always visible, as are thrones. It is also possible to trade gems with other players or alchemize gems from other gem types. Also, while a majority of gem income from any given magic type will be that type of magic gems there's allways a scattering of sites that produce another gem type. (or a mix of different gems)
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# ? Mar 6, 2017 18:59 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 16:33 |
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Turn 67 Turn 67 begins with hitting level 6 in Conjuration. Conj 6 gives us access to fun summons of various types, but what we are mainly interested is one of our national summons at this level. When we build up enough of a cushion of Pearls to guarantee that our Nexus can’t be brought down we will have a little bit of fun summoning and thugging out these guys. I hadn’t given them a second thought until somebody in IRC mentioned that they were great raiding thugs, and when I took a closer look I found I agreed. We’ll see how they fare sometime in the future. We see that Bogarus has claimed the Throne he took from that Monolith + Watcher province: It isn’t one of the best Thrones for Bogarus, he actually wants Turmoil and Luck maxed out, but he’s claimed it anyway, maybe just for the dom-spread. Oh great, another Dire Portent. Looks like Bogarus -really- wants his Gift of Health back because he recast it hard enough to overwrite Pangaea’s Haunted Forests. That’s interesting, and it leads me to believe that Bogarus is probably running a Tartarian factory. Tartarians are Conjuration 9 summons that are basically former Pretender Gods banished to hell. Gift of Health is necessary to heal them of the many afflictions they start with when initially summoned. They’re…OK I guess, but personally I prefer to use other things in the end-game. Also, we lost our Eyes of God. Somebody cast a spell that rarely ever gets used in games: It’s kind of hilarious but somebody spent 75 Fire gems to remove our 51 Pearl cast of Eyes of God. Additionally, Sabba our S8 global caster got her eyes burned out in the process. I can’t really be angry because it’s pretty funny that somebody spent a whole butt-load of Fire gems (even in mo money 75 is a lot of gems) just to remove our Eyes. Since we pulled in 123 Pearls from the Nexus this turn and since I rather enjoyed having Eyes up I am going to recast it with 51 Pearls and see if we can get it back. There’s an empty global slot now, so maybe we’ll get lucky! An empty global slot is opportunity knocking! We also summon our first (and perhaps last) Heliophagus: [Edit: I just realized that this message is referencing a -different- Heliophagus being summoned into the world! Somebody else is summoning the generals of the Abyss as well! What a cool dude! I love how badass some of the high level Blood summons are. He’s gets equipped with some boosters and is flying over to join the siege of Man. There were a couple of scouted battles this turn. Pan put Ragha’s capitol to siege while Bogarus stormed an AI Mictlan fort and just murdered the defenders wholesale with a massive communion: AI Ragha is still kicking. We get a rare glimpse of Mictlan, also AI. Exotic troops and monsters unseen by Gathite eyes! Our army that moved onto Noranthion last turn killed the meagre PD defenders and blew through the fort’s defense in one turn. Noranthion is directly adjacent to Cacevic Highlands and the Throne that is located there, so we are going to be reckless and dumb and storm it blind. I am -pretty- sure that our army is robust enough to survive anything that Man could have waiting in there, so fingers crossed. We are moving something like a dozen more Vampire Lords onto Man’s capitol province to join in the siege there. Our sieging army has been unable to even scratch the walls because Man has so much crap inside defending. Since we now have 5 candles of Dominion on the province I figure we will just stack a huge number of Lords there to siege and constantly summon more lesser Vampires while they’re at it. Our sieging force will grow stronger every turn. Take a look at how many god-drat Vengeful Waters attacks we ate this turn: UGH gently caress! This is getting supremely annoying and I cannot wait to finish Man off and be rid of this awful spell. We lost an Abba and three (!) Kohen to little water elementals this turn There was an interesting unexpected event that occurred in Scytha, the province that holds the Throne of the Pantokrator. The Demon Gate magic site that is also in the province apparently has some special events that can trigger: We are moving our most powerful Blood mage to Scytha to see what will happen. The Might of Zionism himself is going to investigate the the Demon Gate. Hopefully we get something cool! We’re also moving another one of our big, unoccupied doom stack armies into another of Man’s provinces. The scouts show that there’s hardly even any troops in the province of Pantokrator’s Bounty, so it should be a walk in the park. Next turn: storming blind. How are u fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Mar 12, 2017 |
# ? Mar 12, 2017 02:46 |
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Storming blind is bad, ask me how that turns out.
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 05:27 |
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Looking forward to seeing what crazy poo poo the Might of Zionism ends up doing in there.
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 07:24 |
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Tagichatn posted:Storming blind is bad, ask me how that turns out. It probably turns out better if you're attacking with a giant army of vampires.
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 08:18 |
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wiegieman posted:It probably turns out better if you're attacking with a giant army of vampires. Until a massive wave of counter-preaching temporarily eliminates your dominion prior to temple checks re-establishing it, apparently.
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 17:30 |
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Caelum News Network Presents Caelum Turn 66 Progress against Mictlan is made. Also, if you like to see someone endlessly shuffle units and orders around, this video was made for you. Besides that, you will be amused to learn my (second) giant pile of Pale Ones tried to win their second underwater-battle. Tried Let's go back a step
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 17:33 |
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It is endlessly amusing to me that you're still trying to Make Pale Ones Work
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 18:14 |
HAU, question for you, we're you in the Gabe Pope Lp as Man and orchestrated the Bard Spy incident?
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# ? Mar 12, 2017 22:17 |
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Donkringel posted:HAU, question for you, we're you in the Gabe Pope Lp as Man and orchestrated the Bard Spy incident? I was not, and I don't remember quite what that was! Sounds funny, tho!
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 03:44 |
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Turn 68 Turn 68 begins with Ragha (!?) claiming the Throne of the Sun. It looks like AI Ragha has been fighting the good fight against Pangaea, even if they are destined to lose. Pan is trying to siege down Ragha’s capitol province so I guess that gave Ragha the opportunity to retake its Throne. We cast a bunch of spells, as normal. We started remote-searching some of the new provinces we’ve stolen from Man. Some people don’t like to waste the time or gems searching provinces they’ve taken from other players, assuming (correctly) that another player will have done as much searching as possible themselves. There are a couple of magic paths that we have that Man does not, however, so we cast some spells. We found +1W and +1D in Solam, so that’s great! We also cast Bind Heliophagi for the second time: Yep, Bogarus has the other three Heliophagi. Well, I’m glad we at least got the one! We had a chat with Bogarus that I’ll get into a little later. We also got the Eyes of God back! Take a look at the global screen: Interesting! Eyes of God went back up at the same time that Man’s Enchanted Forests went down. I am guessing that Pangaea stormed a Mannish fort that held the caster and slew him, dispelling the global. If only it had been Vengeful Waters instead! There were a couple of battles this turn. We see AI Ragha slam an army into Pan’s sieging force on Ragha’s cap: It's a meat-grinder in Ragha-land. And one of our grand armies strolls over to Man’s province of Pantokrator’s Bounty and effortlessly deals with the PD. There are only 22 units inside the fortress in Pantokrator’s Bounty so we’ll be storming it blind next turn. Glorious holy warriors! The real meat of the turn came from the battle for Man’s fort in Noranthion. Remember that we stormed this fort blind because we are racing Pangaea to Man’s final Throne. Noranthion had far more than 22 scattered units inside of its walls, however. Here’s our grand army: A for-real-serious army of sacreds. We're not playing around. We can see a couple of things. First, Man has nearly 40 Magisters, which could lead to all kinds of grief. He also has a Troll King equipped for casting Earthquake or some other high level Earth battlefield spells. Hello, Earthquake caster. He -also- has two of these: Rarely seen, rarely summoned. Juggernauts are a level 9 Construction summon. They’re big, tough, and spread Dominion like a Prophet. Man was summoning these guys to try and halt our powerful blood saccing, clever! They’re not particularly dangerous, though. The Lantern Shields carried by several of the commanders in our army auto-summon several of these Corpse Candles at the beginning of the battle: They appear around the edges of the field and those that spawn on Man’s side of the fortress walls immediately screw up the priorities of his longbows and Magisters. They fire arrows and arcane bolts at the little Corpse Candles while our sacred infantry begins to march through the gates. We also employ some army-wide buffs: Fire Fend (for flaming arrows that never materialize), Arrow Fend (air shield for every unit, amazingly good spell), and then Mass Regeneration to give every unit Limited Regeneration. Limited Regeneration and the Regeneration that our sacreds get from our N9 Bless actually -stack-, giving a total of 20% regen. This is pretty fantastic! Man’s Troll King casts Summon Earthpower and I wonder if he’s still scripted to cast Earthquake the next round. Earthquake is great for setting traps, but will easily gently caress up your own forces if you use it in pitched battle… The Troll King does cast Earthquake and immediately disappears in a cloud of blood because he got it by the reflected damage of every single blessed unit that took damage. Our forces took a pounding, but the Mass Regeneration + Arrow Fend mean that even our non-sacred wounded units have the chance to regenerate all of their HP in short order. It still hurt. Man’s Magisters appear to have been unscripted, and they default to trying to rain lightning down upon their enemies. This works poorly for them, and many Magisters follow their Troll King in poofing into blood clouds as their lightning attacks are reflected back at themselves. You can see Magisters poofing into little red number clouds as they hurl lightning into our B9 Bless. The Juggernauts slowly roll into battle at the end but as I said earlier they’re not exactly -dangerous-, just tough, and they are slowly chipped to pieces. Hard to hurt, and slow going. Final tally: Victory! Our victorious army is moving directly onto Cacevic Highlands to take the Throne therein. I spoke with Pan on IRC and he said he was moving into Stinging Swamps next turn, so we’ll just settle for the Throne. We have more than 30 Vampire Lords sitting on Man’s capitol province. Some are leading over 100 lesser Vampires sieging the walls while all of the other Lords summon more. The army will sit and siege and grow more powerful every turn, wonderful! Diplomatic update: When we put up the Arcane Nexus Pangaea got salty about it and insinuated that he wasn’t sure if he was interested in going after Bogarus once we finished off Man anymore. So, this turn I spoke with Bogarus on IRC and we came to an agreement. We will have 12 turns of peace as well as a mutual defense pact against Pangaea. We’ll see how this plays out, but my very highest priority is to not get tag-teamed by the two largest, most powerful nations in the game. If I have to temporarily ally with a massive Blood power to do it then I will. Maybe we’ll go eat Caelum in the meantime. Speaking of Blood, we got an update regarding the Demon Gate we sent The Might of Zionism to go investigate last turn: Finally, it looks like the poor, aquatic remnants of AI Jomon were dom-killed this turn. RIP, you wonderful guerilla shark warriors. Next turn we’ll take another fort, and put Cacevic Highlands to siege!
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 04:13 |
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Excited for when man is finally finished for good. Do you have a plan about when to take the throne of the Pantokrator or is it just a panic button?
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 06:41 |
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Apocron posted:Excited for when man is finally finished for good. Do you have a plan about when to take the throne of the Pantokrator or is it just a panic button? You always want to keep at least the last few thrones under control but not claimed, since everyone knows when you claim a throne and if they keep seeing "so-and-so claimed whichever throne" they'll try to stop you from winning. It's better to grab them all at once.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 07:12 |
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What are those weird black and purple things all over the battlefield in the Ragha meatgrinder? Summons? Spell projectiles? Weird terrain features?
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 08:54 |
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I think they're supposed to be flowering cacti.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 09:13 |
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IMJack posted:I think they're supposed to be flowering cacti. In Dominions that wouldn't necessarily rule out them being a spell or a weird national summon unit.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 09:49 |
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What are Curse of Blood and Bowl of Blood again? What are the other spells we keep casting?
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 17:37 |
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curse of blood turns a whole lot of blood slaves into a vampire lord. bowl of blood searches one province for blood sites. They're rare, but useful when you find them. several more of the spells you're seeing cast routinely are site searching. For example, Dark Knowledge searches one province for Death sites, Arcane Probing searches for Astral sites, Gnome Lore searches for Earth sites, and I think Augury is Air sites. Pack of Wolves makes a pack of wolves. It's good because it's a very cheap summon spell and you can use wolves as troops for patrolling, which you need to do in any province you're blood hunting to quell the unrest that blood hunting causes.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 17:49 |
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Curse of Blood is the ritual spell that summons Vampire Lords, which is why it's being cast so much. Bowl of Blood is the sitesearch spell for Blood sites, and it's honestly not cast much because there are normally much better things to be doing with the mages - specifically there are not that many Blood sites to begin with, and many start revealed anyways, so it's not a terribly efficient thing to be wasting mage turns and slaves on. There ARE some hidden Blood sites that are good, but as opposed to (especially in a More Magic game) generally finding at least 1 site every 2-3 casts with other sitesearch spells, and many times more (currently have 4 Fire sites in a single province in one game), you might find 1 or 2 across your whole territory. ^efb I'll note that Augury is the name for both the Air and Fire sitesearch spells though. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 13, 2017 |
# ? Mar 13, 2017 17:54 |
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Apocron posted:Excited for when man is finally finished for good. Do you have a plan about when to take the throne of the Pantokrator or is it just a panic button? It's a Panic Button. We'll claim it when we need to push our Dominion to the absolute limit. I don't know what scenario that will be, but I'm sure it will come.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 19:19 |
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Lord Koth posted:I'll note that Augury is the name for both the Air and Fire sitesearch spells though.
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 19:29 |
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Caelum Turn 67 My armies are fast approaching Mictlan itself, but Bogarus finally finished that huge siege going on in Mictlan's north. It looks like Bogarus is coming too late to prevent me from taking Mictlan's capital, though... Go back
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# ? Mar 13, 2017 19:30 |
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Re: Blood sites, my knowledge is, once again, mostly from Dom3, but it doesn't sound like much has changed with regards to blood sites. Blood has FAR fewer magical sites than other disciplines, they're much more rare, they're most commonly level 0 sites that start revealed, and most excel at being mediocre. They're usually things like slave caravans or bloodsport colosseums which give you a trickle of gold or blood slaves, which are at least positive effects albeit not very strong ones. Searching for blood sites might make a little more sense in a game where the number of sites has been cranked up (like this one), simply because there's a slightly better chance of finding one of the better sites. Looking it up on the mod viewer, there ARE several discount sites for Blood; Discount sites are often game-changing, because they effectively add to your gem income in their field relative to your existing gem income/gem use. A %10 discount site may not sound like much, but the difference between 10 vampires and 11 vampires in a battle could change the course of a war, and the effect is multiplied the more you invest in that field of magic (since you can often summon discounted magical creatures to then cast discounted magical searching spells to gain even MORE gems, or in the case of blood, you can more rapidly produce quality blood-hunters). A discount site offering %20 or more discount (of which Blood apparently has a few!) is a game-winning McGuffin that should be protected at all costs and exploited to its maximum potential. E: Noodling around in the mod viewer, it looks like Blood only has about as many magical sites as Holy, which are fairly rare...unless you add in Thrones, in which case even Holy, amusingly, has more magic sites than Blood. E2: Wow, holy sites are loving weird, it's a shame that you don't typically see Holy or Blood sites in a game. There's Holy sites that reveal score graphs, and one which...lets you summon flying monkeys. Huh. E3: Haha, holy poo poo. H3 site 'The Records of Mankind', reveals ALL SCORE GRAPHS, and allows you to recruit Lore Masters, 300 gold mages with 3 magic picks from all fields except Holy and a whopping 26 research power each. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Mar 13, 2017 |
# ? Mar 13, 2017 21:14 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:E3: Haha, holy poo poo. H3 site 'The Records of Mankind', reveals ALL SCORE GRAPHS, and allows you to recruit Lore Masters, 300 gold mages with 3 magic picks from all fields except Holy and a whopping 26 research power each. Is that worth 300 gold each?
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 02:10 |
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Teledahn posted:Is that worth 300 gold each? Not really, but if you have the gold, why not? e: By comparison, Bogarus' elite mage is the Starets, which is 2Frie 1Air 2aStral 1Blood with a random from Air/Astral/Death/Blood and a 10% from Fire/Air/Astral/Blood and 25 research, for 255 gold. This mage is considered one of Bogarus great strengths, having both astral and blood, high research, and good power otherwise. wiegieman fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Mar 14, 2017 |
# ? Mar 14, 2017 02:34 |
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Teledahn posted:Is that worth 300 gold each? Possibly. Those are very random paths, but if you get lucky you can end up with a combination that can break you into previously unavailable schools of magic.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 02:35 |
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Unless I'm terribly mistaken, that's a reasonable rate for quite good researchers, gives you a nice chance of breaking into any paths you're still missing, and is a nice cherry on the cake of having a free Eyes of God. I mean, I guess what's amusing to me is that it's a really good holy site, but who's going around site-searching with H3 priests? Or priests at all, for that matter?
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 03:12 |
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Turn 69 Turn 69 begins with a message from Bogarus to the rest of the world: I think what Bogarus is referencing is the attacks from sea dogs and werewolves that we’ve seen popping up around the world for the past few turns. Remember how one of our Sybls with the Fortune Telling ability predicted that there would be wolf attacks? My guess is that Bogarus got a similar message but regarding demons. We do have that event chain occurring in our province that houses The Demon Gate… We’ll see in a few turns! We hit Conjuration 7, which gives us a whole bunch of cool spells: We’re particularly interested in this National Spell: The Arel is a N3 mage in addition to being a Healer and a H3 Priest. With a few boosters she’ll be able to cast all of the big army-buffing Nature spells. We are now going to split our research, putting 75% of it into Alteration and the rest into the last level of Blood. We are sitting at Alteration 1, having ignored it pretty much the whole game. I think it would be wise just to get 5 or 6 levels in Alt so we can have options should we need them, plus, Wish lies at Alteration 9 and we will definitely want that sooner or later. I may have forgotten to mention it last turn but I had Sabba cast Stellar Focus again, and it worked! It is a minimum cast so honestly any global attempt that challenges it will knock it right off, but I figured that it’s better to have up than an empty global slot that somebody else will try to fill! Plus, the fact that the global slots are all full means that any new global attempts may have to challenge a beefy global like our Arcane Nexus and fail. Nothing in the rule-book says you need to have eyes to cast globals. There were a couple of uninteresting battles this turn. Ragha slammed into Pan again on Ragha’s capitol, but Pan holds out. We effortlessly eliminated the PD on Cacevic Highlands, the final province we will take from Man. We will storm the fort next turn, thus securing our latest Throne! Pangaea is still gnawing away at Man, in addition to AI Ragha. We also stormed the fort in Pantokrator’s Bounty and took the province. We’ll build a temple and search for sites. Man had discovered a +3F site, which is pretty good!\ No defenders, effortless. We are still sieging Man’s forts in his capitol and in Thorn Woods, but they’ll crack eventually. Unfortunately Man’s player won’t be around for it because he went AI this turn! I can’t blame him for it, he is utterly doomed and he told me that his Pretender died due to a disease it caught from one of our Rain of Toads spells! I have to hand it to Man’s player, though, he fought a long and hard war and fought it pretty well! My hat off to him for a good game played. The event chain that had been happening in Alluvia finished off this turn: We ended up with a couple of items and a handful of gems, kind of fun and flavorful! Right now our strategy is basically to consolidate the last couple of Mannish provinces and then sit and see what happens next. Will Pan go to war with us? Maybe we’ll end up at war with Caelum? We have a massive amount of Pearls pouring in via the Nexus (128 this turn) and we will start to leverage them into an engine of death soon enough. We might just get a half dozen or so turns of breathing room with which to hit research goals and get to blood hunting virtually every province!
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 03:25 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Unless I'm terribly mistaken, that's a reasonable rate for quite good researchers, gives you a nice chance of breaking into any paths you're still missing, and is a nice cherry on the cake of having a free Eyes of God. That is the real issue with the hidden holy sites - there aren't many, and more than a few nations don't even have access to recruitable H3 priests, only their prophet who usually has better things to do. And there's no sitesearch spell other than the incredibly expensive Akashic Knowledge (which reveals ALL sites, but costs 25 pearls) that hits holy sites. As you mentioned, even those nations that do have recruitable H3s normally also have far better things to do with them - any H sites found will normally be incidental.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 03:51 |
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It doesn't help that it looks like there's a trend of holy sites that provide small reductions to unrest, or minor improvements to order. You can sometimes spot a province that has a hidden blood or death site polluting its unrest or scales, but how often are you going to even have the opportunity to notice that 'oh, this province naturally loses unrest quicker'? Even the minor clues that can sometimes tell you something's up with a province's magic sites don't seem to help for Holy.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 04:06 |
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Lord Koth posted:That is the real issue with the hidden holy sites - there aren't many, and more than a few nations don't even have access to recruitable H3 priests, only their prophet who usually has better things to do. And there's no sitesearch spell other than the incredibly expensive Akashic Knowledge (which reveals ALL sites, but costs 25 pearls) that hits holy sites. As you mentioned, even those nations that do have recruitable H3s normally also have far better things to do with them - any H sites found will normally be incidental. This makes me wonder if now that How are u is getting basically all the pearls if casting Akashic Knowledge wouldn't be a bad idea from time to time.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 06:47 |
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The cost is huge even if you find a site with every casting (and even in a game like this, you probably won't). In terms of gem income, it's not remotely worth it. You could gamble on finding a discount site somewhere though, which would probably pay off.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 07:13 |
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If you have the pearls to cast akashic knowledge in worthwhile amounts, it's because you already have the gems to do the big stuff on your major paths.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 07:48 |
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That was a surprisingly peaceful turn.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 08:11 |
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Man's god died from a disease it caught from a dead toad? drat.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 19:40 |
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Cathode Raymond posted:Man's god died from a disease it caught from a dead toad? drat. Yeah pretender gods typically have high Magic Resistance, but I don't think that helps prevent you from catching diseases. And in this game if you catch a disease and don't have a magic or holy cure of some kind, your unit will lose HP every month until they die, period. I don't think there's any mechanism for a diseased unit to naturally get over the disease.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 20:06 |
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Gift of Health is the classic, plus a few commanders with healing, and a few over priced items. If you can cast regen on them in battle they go back to full health and you can get another 9 months outta them.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 20:13 |
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I really wish there were more ways to heal afflictions in general, it's an interesting mechanic but it can get majorly annoying / extremely funny a bit too often. They could just make healer commanders a bit more available. (Blinding and giving a chest wound to a dragon pretender with PD archers in the first round of a tiny little raid is the best thing.)
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 20:42 |
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SIGSEGV posted:I really wish there were more ways to heal afflictions in general, it's an interesting mechanic but it can get majorly annoying / extremely funny a bit too often. They could just make healer commanders a bit more available. It would make more sense if afflictions weren't all treated the same, as far as healing goes. It'd be cool if you have a natural ability to recover (partially or fully) to something like a disease or a limp, but obviously most units should not recover from having an arm cut off.
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 21:26 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 16:33 |
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Leperflesh posted:having an arm cut off. No it isn't!
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# ? Mar 14, 2017 21:40 |