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I ride bikes all day posted:The mircomanagement is absurd, but the interface really fights you too. If you misclick selecting a commander, the commander you just gave move orders to will likely now be set to defend. Also there's no way to ask a commander to move multiple provinces over multiple turns in one order. You have to remember each and every turn to move that commander and you have to remember what your plans were from turn to turn.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:15
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Dirk the Average posted:Also there's no way to ask a commander to move multiple provinces over multiple turns in one order. You have to remember each and every turn to move that commander and you have to remember what your plans were from turn to turn. At least there's a shortcut for moving all commanders at once. The fun times of course immediately start again when you have several armies in the same province. Which commander belongs to which army? Well, good luck.  In this game, Late Age Caelum fights me even harder then normal on this, because my main mage has basically a lot of randomness to his magic paths. So instead of looking at the commander-icon and immediately knowing what that mage can do, I had to come up with a hosed-up and convoluted naming scheme to keep up with all the possible (and possibly useless) combinations.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:34
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You can use ctrl to group commanders, hth
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Apr 13, 2017 20:31
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Also when you're on the map screen, click the army (all the dudes you've multiselected) so they're highlighted. Switch to the orders screen, and those guys are still highlighted, so you can give orders just to them and not to the dudes not selected.
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Apr 13, 2017 21:31
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Speleothing posted:You can use ctrl to group commanders, hth  Could you do this in Dom3 too?
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Apr 13, 2017 22:59
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Deadmeat5150 posted:
Yes.
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Apr 14, 2017 00:14
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My favorite scripting screwup back when I played was accidentally making my S mages cast Blink, because I assumed it was like the D&D Blink (make mage harder to hit due to illusions/blinking in and out of existence rapidly), rather than the "teleport forward semi-randomly" kind of Blink. It cost me quite a few mages, especially since they were in a communion. So most of my mages ended up teleporting forward closer to enemy lines and I lost a bunch of them to the enemy. At least I'm pretty sure that's what happened, it's been ages. Edit: In retrospect, it's not so much a scripting accident as it was being an idiot and not reading the spell descriptions properly before assigning them.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:35
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How are u posted:It's A Lot. If I were to have tried to describe in detail all of the minutia that goes into taking each turn of this game at this point it would be...a lot of reading. The write-ups for most turns right now are 2+ single spaced pages, and I'm sure it would be more like 10 pages if I tried to comprehensively cover every little decision. wiegieman posted:Dominions isn't a game where you fight other players, it's a game where the interface fights players and you fight the interface.
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Apr 14, 2017 04:41
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Speleothing posted:You can use ctrl to group commanders, hth Leperflesh posted:Also when you're on the map screen, click the army (all the dudes you've multiselected) so they're highlighted. Switch to the orders screen, and those guys are still highlighted, so you can give orders just to them and not to the dudes not selected. It still gets super-confusing really fast if you have to deal with hundreds of commanders. There are always some guys ending up where they don't belong. A lot of my scouts for example, keep showing up on the middle of a battlefiled looking confused before the spells come raining down to punt them from this world. The most probable reason for this is my habit of selecting all commanders, then using ctrl to deselect the ones not supposed to be in the army. (Because that's a lot faster if you have let's say 77 commanders in a province, and only 3-4 of them are not supposed to go with them.) Anyway, sometimes I gently caress up and guys just get dragged along for the ride.
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Apr 14, 2017 10:35
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Turn 83 Turn 83 begins with researching the final level of Alteration, level 9! Alt 9 gives us access to a couple of very beefy battlefield buff spells, an incredibly damaging Death global, and most importantly Wish. Wish is one of the most iconic spells in Dominions, and possibly the most powerful. For 100(!) Astral Pearls you get to Wish for just about anything you want. Money, gems, blood slaves, Dominion candles, specific units, specific items, are all common Wishes. You can Wish for physical power and turn your caster into a beefy monster, or you can Wish for magical power and gain +1 to every magic path. You can wish for Armageddon, and massively kill the population of every province in the world. The only drawback to Wish is its insane cost, but our Arcane Nexus should pull in enough Pearls to easily fuel a Wish each turn if we so desire. Four of our Horror Seed cannon Kohen Gadol successfully seeded targets in Pangaea’s province of Mark. The province is full of Vampires, Wind Masters, Draconians, and a Queen of Thunder so it seems like a good target. They’ll now begin to seed every stack of Pangaean mages or troops I can find within range. This effort may or may not pay off in like 15 turns, we’ll see! Two Astral random Kohen Gadol were told to Teleport from our Capitol to the Western front, where I want to use them to throw Horrors at Bogarus. It didn’t go as planned:  Wait, what?  Oh jesus christ! I am learning a lot about Domes! It turns out that our Dome of Arcane Warding in Bahguloth won’t even allow us to teleport our own units! The Kohen Gadol are going to have to teleport to an adjacent province and then spend a turn walking in, what a goofy system! We get a special report from Mushwood, where our giant army of Levites and Gibborim are sieging that Bogarus fort:  That's treason! Ha! Bogarus cast the spell Beckoning on us! I’ve never actually seen that spell used before, but it doesn’t seem very effective. Twenty Nature gems to ultimately kill 6 of our troops is not a great trade off!  Never used this spell, and I don't plan on ever using it after this wet fart of a result. We also get a report from Fas Dir:  Looks like Bogarus also cast the spell Melancholia, another first for me! Here’s the spell:  Interesting, and fun fluff, but these spells don't get the blood pumping. It seems like the Yeddeoni that deserted was one of our Earthquake casters, but honestly it isn’t a great loss. I think Ramc wanted to test out those spells, and in this game he can afford to. Still, a waste of gems. We summon all of the normal lovely things this turn: Vampires, Golems, goats, and various demons. The Bane Lord leading 160 Se’irim from the extreme East of our Empire to the far West to fight Bogarus continues his long trudge. There were several battles this turn, we scouted some interesting stuff! First, we sent three Vampires to attack Bogarus’ province of Banded Hills and put it to siege. The province had already been under siege by a Mind Slime Horror. If a Horror is sent to a province and doesn’t engage in a fight (in this case there was zero PD), it’ll stick around until it can engage in a battle. Our skelespam easily overwhelmed the Mind Slime, and now we are sieging the province.  Even Greater Horrors are vulnerable to skelespam. Caelum continues his blitzkrieg invasion of Bogarus in a couple of battles in Nydian Range and Wise Spring Grove this turn:  Birds attack!  And here's another army. Wow, what a big army! We can take a moment to peek at a few of the interesting things Caelum is including in his invasion force. Here’s one of Caelum’s national summons, heavily kitted out with boosters:  We can also see that the army has a Seraph holding a Staff of Storms (instant Storm effect on the battlefield), and a Mound Fiend that I’m sure is meant to do something specific but I don’t know what:   Pangaea attempted to storm the Ragha fort in Eaglereach Mountains once again, and once again was repelled:  Minotaur sent once more into the breach.  ... Afrosquirrel(Pangaea's player) is still in the game, but I’m a little bit worried that he’s fatigued and doesn’t feel like putting in the time to play well. To be honest, if that is so it won’t be the end of the world, just having Pangaea in the Triumvirate and applying pressure to Bogarus is helpful. We’ll see how things shake out. We ‘pinged’ two of the Bogarus forts we’ve been sieging this turn. In the Throne province of Gryphon Rock we see that the fort defenders are very weak:  A skeleton crew. Barely any mages, extremely good luck here. There is even one of Bogarus’ national heroes inside!  Holy 4 commanders are extremely rare in Dominions. Also there are a handful of Khlysts, an interesting Bogarussian national version of the famous Flagellant unit. They’re also interesting in that they are stealthy and cause unrest to grow in the province they’re in.  Theoretically you could build a national strategy around these guys. The final battle of the turn was a scouted report of Caelum storming a Bogarussian fort in the province of Obalshin. Caelum sent a fraction of his truly massive army into the breach, which still numbered over 350 bird men!  A tremendous flock! Bogarus’ defense is meagre, they’ll get swarmed to death immedia- what’s this?  !! Oh jeez    This item auto-casts Power of the Spheres on round 1. Yep, it’s our friendly Master Enslave casting Golem, now upgraded with a Crystal Shield to boost it to Astral 8, allowing it to cast Master Enslave on round 1 of battle! Zap!  Bogarus dominates a good quarter of Caelum’s army, which immediately turn upon their brothers and a massive, messy melee ensues:  Caelum's flock rips itself to shreds.   Caelum’s forces rout, and now Bogarus has a couple dozen bird-men to use as chaff. This Golem is really The Nexus absorbs about 120 Pearls this turn, and the Wrath of God blasts 358 of our units but only kills 16 of them! Gift of Health is really helping here! Over the past couple turns we’ve had another one of those “Adventurer” special event chains firing in Walnut Woods. This turn there was a special battle where the independent Bloodhenge Druids emerged from the forest to attack!  It’s just a footnote at this point in the game, but I really do love the little fun things like this that happen in Dominions They’re torn apart by our patrolling wolves. There are a couple of interesting bits of information our scouts have brought us this turn. Firstly, take a look at this Bogarus province of Durland:   Firebirds, and lots of them. Firebirds are the secret of Bogarus’ power, they’re the engine powering his Unholy Nation. Firebirds are one of Bogarus’ many national summons, take a look at their entry in the mod inspector:  They come with the Bringer of Fortune ability, which influences random events within a province and basically makes it more likely that an event will be positive. That’s not crazy, plenty of nations have units that can do that. Firebirds also “cause events 2%”, which means that each Firebird in a province adds a 2% chance that an event will happen. The astute reader can see how this could be problematic. Bogarus has certainly been summoning Firebirds for the entire game, and is probably getting tons of good random events every turn. Who even needs global spells when you have dozens of events throwing money, gems, mages, and more at you each turn? As soon as we can equip a couple more Horror Seed casters we are going to Seed the gently caress out of any Firebird province we can find. Kill the Firebirds, neuter Bogarus. Here’s an interesting scout report, in the province of Utevania, adjacent to Mushwood, we see there’s a King of Flames hanging out:  That’s the guy who roasted our Vampire army in Fas Dir the other turn, definitely. I’m not sure if he was in that province before, but he doesn’t exactly need to be next-door in order to hurl Flames From the Sky, so I am guessing that he is going to be involved in an attempt to attack our sieging army in Mushwoods again. He’ll probably be casting Fire Storm, an extremely boss high level battlefield Fire spell that does fire damage every round of the battle. We’re dispatching our Golems to Mushwoods, along with some other fun surprises. I’ve also noticed that Pangaea -appears- to be moving some regiments of beast-men and Hoburg crossbows closer to our border in the East:  Treachery?!? I fully expect to go to war with Pangaea right after we defeat Bogarus, if not earlier, and I’ve already started to Horror Seed him so I’m not exactly innocent here, and we’d better be ready to fight. We’re summoning a Vampire a turn in the East, we have our Se’irim army, and we have the Horror Seed cannons as well. I think we are OK for now, but I must remain vigilant. We are going to try storming the forts in Gryphon Rock and Falgoth next turn. Gryphon Rock should be a walk in the park unless the Enslave Golem shows up. Falgoth will be a lot more hairy, but if Ramc keeps the piss-poor scripting on the 40+ Astrapelagists (like he did in Fas Dir) we should triumph, again excepting the loving Enslave Golem. It’s possible we may get hit in Mushwoods again next turn, so keep your fingers crossed for that.  We're trying for the Throne in Gryphon Rock. Also, note how Caelum has moved a huge army onto The Cracked Earth. We really want that province!  Falgoth could be slightly more difficult. Oh, one last thing. Let’s cast Wish.  Notice how Sabba has healed her poor, exploded eyes? 
How are u fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 00:24
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Hahaha I would love if the armor was stolen right as the golem got into a hairy battle
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Apr 16, 2017 00:35
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What will that do? That golem has that, right? Is that a unique thing that you can wish into your possession and thereby swipe it from the Enslavement Golem, or does it just make a new one and give you your own copy?
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Apr 16, 2017 00:38
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When you Wish for a unique item (or unit), it gets taken from whoever has it. Yoink! Also yes, magic rituals (which Wish is) happen fairly early in the turn resolution, before any battles take place. So if you steal a unique item that an opponent is relying on for their scripting, right before a battle with that guy, he is going to not be able to cast his spell. However. You can cast a spell one level higher than you are by spending an extra gem.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:39
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Akratic Method posted:What will that do? That golem has that, right? Is that a unique thing that you can wish into your possession and thereby swipe it from the Enslavement Golem, or does it just make a new one and give you your own copy? Yoink. e: thanks friend vvvv How are u fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 00:41
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That golem is scary as poo poo. Also I think you forgot to post a pic of the firebird from the inspector.
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Apr 16, 2017 01:24
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I wonder if Ramc is having some pearl issues, or is just trying to make multiple enslaving golems, because replacing the Crystal Coin with a Ring of Sorcery and/or empowering it in Astral once more in order to replace the Dimensional Rod with a Rune Smasher would make it even more effective. For those just watching who don't have the game, those items, along with the Ring of Wizardry it's already wearing, have an interesting trait called Magic penetration (1 in the case of the rings, 2 in the case of a Rune Smasher... and the values do stack). Magic penetration is a value which directly affects a spell's ability to affect a target through its magic resistance, something Master Enslave checks against, so an additional +3 to that value would reap horrifying returns in numbers of enslaved targets. Also a Ring of Sorcery is actually cheaper to forge than a Ring of Wizardry, along with requiring less of the exact same path and less gems, so I'm idly curious why the golem is wearing the more expensive one and not the other.
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Apr 16, 2017 01:29
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What's the Golem scripted to do after mass enslave?
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Apr 16, 2017 01:38
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How are u posted:Yoink. Clever. Will Ramc get any kind of notification that this happened, or will the Dominions UI just sort of be like "yeah, your guy doesn't do the thing" next time the golem's in a battle, and then Ramc has to comb through the scripts, stats and equipment screens to figure out why?
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Apr 16, 2017 01:41
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He's targeting the Armor of Virtue so that the golem can't retreat. It doesn't increase the golem's ability to master enslave, it makes the golem impossible to kill after it has.
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Apr 16, 2017 02:12
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goatface posted:What's the Golem scripted to do after mass enslave? It doesn't matter. Master Enslave is a spell that costs 8 Pearls and 800 Fatigue to cast. Any single mage that casts it is going to sleep immediately afterwards for a dozen rounds, and after it wakes up battlefield scripting will have long expired. Basically: the golem will cast Master Enslave, fall asleep for a long time, and when it wakes up the AI just casts whatever it wants (probably poo poo like Soul Slay, Star Fires, and Enslave Mind).
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Apr 16, 2017 03:16
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Unless it's the master of a communion large enough to pass off all that fatigue. Which is the normal way of getting enough astral to cast it in the first place, of course. But it takes a round to set up the communion. Unless you use items to do it.
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Apr 16, 2017 03:29
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Akratic Method posted:Clever. Will Ramc get any kind of notification that this happened, or will the Dominions UI just sort of be like "yeah, your guy doesn't do the thing" next time the golem's in a battle, and then Ramc has to comb through the scripts, stats and equipment screens to figure out why? You get some sort of '[item] disappears in a puff of smoke' notice. Lord Koth posted:I wonder if Ramc is having some pearl issues, or is just trying to make multiple enslaving golems, because replacing the Crystal Coin with a Ring of Sorcery and/or empowering it in Astral once more in order to replace the Dimensional Rod with a Rune Smasher would make it even more effective. It isn't a pearl issue. Morrow had an obscene number of gems lying around in general and I never wanted for them. The only real limiting factor was the attention I could give the game without going insane. The issue here was Mage Turns. Empowering the golem in S would have been easy, but it would have taken a turn, and I needed him destroying sieges asap. The Sorcery Ring I just had lying around in my lab. I had to make the golem from scratch. Other random thoughts- Beckoning isn't great but has some corner case uses. If your enemy is relying on communicants it can mess them up. Melancholia also is good because it reduces candles in the province. It's expensive to cast, but if you are trying to domkill a dude or mitigate dom spread it is an option. Usually too expensive to be worth it to be fair. As for the firebirds, while there were a lot of them in a few provinces, Morrow had not gone hog wild like I probably would have.
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Apr 16, 2017 03:59
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Losing the armor of Virtue is going to be pretty dicey. With it the Golem can basically just suicide bomb and kill 1/4th of an army every turn without being in real danger, but if it gets the armor of virtue stolen in the middle of a turn it will likely die for good.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:06
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Are you not allowed to wish for the unit itself?
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Apr 16, 2017 04:12
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Bo-Pepper posted:Are you not allowed to wish for the unit itself? The unit isn't unique, IIRC, so you'd just get a new golem. The armour is an artifact and there's only one.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:15
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Prism posted:The unit isn't unique, IIRC, so you'd just get a new golem. The armour is an artifact and there's only one. To add onto this, if the unit were unique, then yes, you could potentially wish for it directly.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:17
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Voyager I posted:Losing the armor of Virtue is going to be pretty dicey. With it the Golem can basically just suicide bomb and kill 1/4th of an army every turn without being in real danger, but if it gets the armor of virtue stolen in the middle of a turn it will likely die for good. If you do not have the Armor of Virtue but want to make your own Mass Enslave Golem you can sort of hack it by having the golem cast Ritual of Returning. But that adds another precious turn to prime the escape route.
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Apr 16, 2017 05:53
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How are u posted:but if Ramc keeps the piss-poor scripting on the 40+ Astrapelagists (like he did in Fas Dir) we should triumph, again excepting the loving Enslave Golem. It’s possible we may get hit in Mushwoods again next turn, so keep your fingers crossed for that. So I've played like 2 games of Dom3, but here's what it looked like happened in Fas Dir to me: There's a limit to the minimum number of troops required for scripting to actually fire, to prevent Mass Enslave/Earthquake traps from being sprung by single scouts. You lost all your lesser vampires, and attacked with what, 8 vampire lords? That failed to break over the minimum for scripting to kick in, so the Astrapelagists all went off script.
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Apr 16, 2017 07:13
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Tulip posted:So I've played like 2 games of Dom3, but here's what it looked like happened in Fas Dir to me: I don't think that's quite right. From what I understand, the check will stop gems from being used, but scripts will still fire. That does mean that if you're casting something like Flaming Arrows that takes a gem that that slot in the order will be filled with something random, but the script as a whole should fire.
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Apr 16, 2017 08:02
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Going back a few posts: I've not tested this personally, but I believe that mages will resume their script after waking up. So the golem could Master Enslave, sleep it off while the enemy army chops itself to pieces, then cast Returning when it wakes up.
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Apr 16, 2017 14:34
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Tulip posted:So I've played like 2 games of Dom3, but here's what it looked like happened in Fas Dir to me: Yeah they will communion up regardless. I probably just forgot to script the research stack. There are so many piles of wizards in every province. If I was scripting anything it would have been a thunder strike communion or air elemental spam.
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Apr 16, 2017 15:12
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I find it funny how you are supposedly still in a coalition with Pangaea and are already planting horror seeds in his lands. You can even blame it on Bogarus when they start popping!
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Apr 16, 2017 16:08
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My understanding is that if you're too much of a git, the community will remember it and you will find your life to be hell in future Dominions games. However, a little bit of backstabbing and asshattery seems to be par for the course, especially if there's no formal NAP in effect. Non-Aggression Pacts, along with trade deals, are considered sacrosanct by most Dominions players, although it's also still pretty normal to have spies running around in your allies' country and to be preparing to turbohellfuck someone the TURN the NAP ends. Without an NAP, a coalition is basically accepting the possibility of falling into infighting at any given moment, and has a non-zero chance to at some point just because that means everyone in the coalition is gearing up to body each other at the first opportunity. Usually simple greed will be enough to keep a coalition together until its target(s) are destroyed simply because that's the advantageous goal that makes people form coalitions in the first place, and most players want to gather all the resources they can before committing against their other neighbors. If a coalition of three or four people is taking the world but doesn't have any NAPs, you can bet they're jockeying between one another to decide who's next on the chopping block.
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Apr 16, 2017 16:55
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This is absolute endgame, you should have plans in place to kill everybody even if you share no borders.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:02
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Ramc posted:If you do not have the Armor of Virtue but want to make your own Mass Enslave Golem you can sort of hack it by having the golem cast Ritual of Returning. But that adds another precious turn to prime the escape route. The catching point in this case is that you won't know the armor has been stolen until after the turn resolves. Hope he managed to pull off another win!
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Apr 16, 2017 17:39
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Voyager I posted:The catching point in this case is that you won't know the armor has been stolen until after the turn resolves. Hope he managed to pull off another win! 
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Apr 16, 2017 17:58
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Applebee123 posted:I find it funny how you are supposedly still in a coalition with Pangaea and are already planting horror seeds in his lands. You can even blame it on Bogarus when they start popping! I don't think there are any sort of "formal NAPs" in effect at this point, it truly is the end-game. There is an invisible, ill-defined line that discerns between Bogarus being a powerful, game-winning power and Bogarus being a broken rump-state. When that line is crossed we all know that we'll be at each other's throats. All those Pangaean troops marching towards our Eastern borders and the occasional Dryad caught sneaking in border provinces are, I figure, just precursors to what we all understand is inevitable war. There can be only one.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:56
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Turn 84 Turn 84 does not begin with any messages, Throne claims, global announcements, or anything else like that. It is, however, a very important turn. We cast all the usual spells: goats, Vampires, demons, and a Dome of Flaming Death to round it all out. We successfully planted 3 Horror Seeds into Pangaean units across the map. Oh right, and we also cast Wish:  100 Pearls well spent? The stupefying power of the ultimate arcane snatched the Armor of Virtue off of Bogarus’ Master Enslave casting Golem and gave it to us. Sabba now has a lovely suit of armor to protect her. Let’s take a look at the battles for this turn. We get a scouted report of a Caelan army smashing PD:  Not a great time to be a Bogarussian province defense grunt. Pangaea attempts, again, to storm the Ragha fort in Eaglereach Mountains. This time Pan sent about 40 Grove Guard and a single Dryad to lead them:   The Dryad gets hit in the face by two arrows fired from the castle’s towers on round one. She dies, the army routs, and Ragha kills the half of the Grove Guard that didn’t rout because they took damage and went Berserk. Pretty bad and weak poo poo here. Alright, let’s look at our own battles. First, we stormed the fort in Falgoth!  An army of the dead, led by horrifying Heliophagus! Our Vampire Lords cast Rigor Mortis and Blood Rain while our hundred odd lesser Vampires fly straight over the walls and begin to attack the ~40 Astrapelagists and their City Guard defenders. Bogarus’ scripting wasn’t changed, the mages repeated the same spell script we’ve seen before and started buffing themselves and their infantry.  Vampires fly effortlessly over the castle walls and engage Bogarus' shame-cube. That doesn’t mean they were not dangerous! Lightning rained down upon our Vampires, killing scores. Vampires aren’t Sacred so the evocations were brutally effective, but who cares? The battle is taking place in our Dominion, the lesser Vampires just take a trip to our Capitol. Eventually moral breaks and we win the fight:  The very close-range Evocation spells don't often see use, but they can be extraordinarily devastating.  Run away! We finally got a scout down to Mushwoods to check inside the fort in that province to see what’s inside waiting for us:   Hilarious. A Kohen Gadol and ~50 Levites and Gibborim are storming next turn, and shouldn’t have any issues as long as Bogarus doesn’t teleport in some surprises. If he does, the force I’m sending is small enough that we can lose it and not feel particularly bad. We also successfully stormed the fort in Gryphon Rock, the Throne Province. The near absence of defending mages meant it was a pretty one-sided battle. However, the handful of priests present (including Bogarus’ Holy 4 national hero) managed to banish to death some Vampires:  Banishment is one of the most effective scaling spells in the game. High level priests can chew through undead like weeds. Not enough to avoid meeting their end:  RIP Alexaj the Patriarch. In addition to the Throne of Eternal Suffering (jeez), the province of Gryphon Rock contains a handful of magic sites including this one:   Illusionists aren’t amazing, but we currently only have Air access through the random paths we get on our Enchantresses, so we’ll be building Illusionists in this province from now on. The total gems we’ll get from Gryphon Rock come out to +2 Air, +2 Water, and +1 Astral, not a bad haul! Last battle of the turn, and it’s a bad one. Caelum attempts to storm Bogarus’ fort in Wise Spring Grove:  A host of winged-warriors, mighty War Mammoths, and terrifying, decaying Ziz! You guessed it:   Note, however, that “Of Course I Have Construction 8” the Golem has an empty chest slot thanks to our Wish. Ramc will now have to have the Golem cast Ritual of Returning every other turn in order to keep using the Golem the way he had been when it was wearing the armor. That’s a 50% reduction in effectiveness right there! Also, note the last little icon on the Golem’s ability line. That’s Insanity, and it is the unfortunate (for him) byproduct of the artifact weapon the Golem is carrying. Insanity is basically a chance each turn that the insane unit will decide not to follow orders. The Dimensional Rod, the artifact that’s giving the Insanity, will keep adding levels of Insanity until the unit will be completely unusable. None of this is going to save Caelum, though! Master Enslave goes off on round one:  Bigger bird army = better Enslave results. The massive force immediately begins ripping itself apart:  I think the Golem successfully dominated almost all of the loving Mammoths, which I just discovered have a base MR of (  ) 5! The Mammoths, nestled right in the middle of the huge force, just stomp all over Caelum’s mages and soldiers in the most horrifying way. The final results are really bad for our birdly allies: There weren’t many interesting events to cover this turn other than that our “Adventurer” event series finished up:  Most of the time the random magic items you get from events are pulled from the low-level item pools, here’s the Duskdagger:  Our scout hiding in Bogarus' capitol province shows us that there's a whole lot of nasty hombres piling up in there.  Alright, so that was what happened in-game this turn. However, the most important part of this turn is what happened outside in Diplomacy. Remember those blobs of Hoburgs Pan was moving towards our shared border in the East?  Them's some loving large stacks. Yep, those are armies. I contacted Pan’s player, Afrosquirrel, to chat about this. He’s cagy, and while he won’t straight out admit that he’s going to attack me he says that he’s upset about our Dominion pressing over our border. He’s complained about that in the past, but I’ll be honest, I think it’s pretty much a crap pretext to go to war. Take a look at the candles on our Eastern border:  Not a legitimate complaint!! Yeah, he’s not hurting at all over there. This is a big goddamn mistake for Pangaea to make, and I’m a little ticked off about it. The war with Bogarus is going really well, we’re winning! Obviously we would probably have immediately gone to war as soon as Bogarus was mostly dead, but this seems way too soon to me. I tried my best to persuade Afrosquirrel to reconsider this dumb move, but he eventually went silent on me. Dominions is a game that encourages paranoia, so when somebody with whom you've had good communication suddenly stops talking to you, well… Anyway, the reason doesn’t matter, he’s coming for us and that means it’s time to act. His two biggest armies are adjacent to Xibalba and Gemer, so we’re moving defensive forces there to welcome him:  These friendly dudes are en-rout to Xibalba.  And  to Gemer.I must admit I’m a little bit excited to see how our Se’irim fare against the Pangaean beast-men. We move a less complicated force of Vampires to defend Urd. The fort in Urd was originally built by Xibalba, and it is a wooden palisade. It has like 100 Defense and Pan’s nearby army would crack it in one turn, so we don’t want to give him the chance to put it to siege. Our provinces of Pirenna and Copper Woods won’t get any special defense this turn, but if they get attacked by something the forts in those provinces are strong and built up. They’ll last until we can bring reinforcements. Most of our military might was already in the West, plus our border with Pangaea is smaller over there so I am not as worried about attacks in that area. We do move some troops to reinforce Noranthion, which is the least defended province on the Western border:  Vampire mobility is an incredible strategic advantage. Additionally, next turn instead of planting Horror Seeds we will be hurling the real deal at a couple of Pangaea’s provinces. I found two provinces just within our border in the East that have small and medium sized armies stationed there this turn. They’re probably moving towards the border, but the important thing is that Nashen and Hubbarton do not have forts. This means those troops will be fully exposed to whatever Horrors drop in. If the Horrors win we’ll get the added bonus of Pan losing two provinces and two Temples too.  Special delivery! Finally, I remembered that we should take a look at the score graphs. Recall that in one of the provinces we took from Bogarus there’s a site that reveals the mundane score graphs. So, let’s look! First up is Provinces:  You can immediately see that Bogarus is hurting hard here. He’s lost maybe about 30% of his Empire since the war began.  We’re actually larger than Bogarus now, but we’re still in 3rd place, and -way- smaller than Pangaea. Next graph is Income:  Yep, our income is still dogshit. We should actually get a boost soon, we’re moving The Might of Zionism over to claim the Throne in Gryphon rock. The Throne of Eternal Suffering gives +1 Order, +1 Production, and +1 Misfortune scales. Since we still have Luck 1 that’ll put us down to neutral Luck/Misfortune and the others will help mitigate our terrible income maluses. Finally, we’ll look at army size, for fun:  You can clearly see where Pan lost tons of troops to Bogarus (and Ragha lol), and where Caelum has recently lost to Bogarus as well. We are still #1! Hooray us! I really wish we could see the Dominion graph, but so it goes. Next turn: The World at War.
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Apr 16, 2017 23:27
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It's kind of fascinating to see me having 2nd highest income and, for a short time, the largest army. I assume me eating two other capitals and a ton of good provinces down in the south had something to do with my income skyrocketing. Having to organize all those birds became rather stressfull over time, though. In the end, I started to feel relief every time a bird army got toasted, because it meant less work for me.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:02
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A shame that the grand alliance fell apart over something so paltry as unrestricted exporting of Vampire Religion.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:04
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