Cathode Raymond posted:Yay! It's another Ramc webcomic! Normally you need to be the Dwarf Fortress Arena Thread when it is in season.
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 02:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 23:52 |
|
|
Hey, we'll take all the webcomics we can get. Turn 12  An auspicious turn to kick off year 2! 3 site searches, 2 of which turned up nothing. One of those was our free sage so now I don’t know what to do with him. He can’t move out of that province so I guess he’ll just patrol. Let’s see what the successful site search found.  gently caress yeah, free kelp fortress! That saved us a cool 800 gold. I’m real glad I searched with my mage instead of moving on or building a fort. This is also because Pelagia has a decent sized force right next door so it’s nice to have a fort to hide in. I’m building a lab this turn so I can start building capricorns. Capricorns have great nature and can go on land so I want to start building them now since they’re slow to recruit.  You can see the location of our fort here, nice and close to Pelagia. Next message is that dormant pretender gods are awakening!  The one after that shows that my god is awakening, right on schedule. He must've known I got that kelp fort.  We get an event in one of our provinces, it’s not too great. Less unrest is good but we already have 3 order from our dominion anyway.  We also catch an Atlantis scout, maybe he should be scouting our enemy instead of me eh?  Now for troop movements. We have a sizeable force in our capital that is moving out to take the adjacent farmland.  You can see I arranged the squads so that the lovely troops are in front to catch lances with the good cavalry behind. Our god is moving out as well, not real sure what I should do with him actually. Probably just site search since Pelagia is so weak right now. His battle magic is pretty weak still and while he is tough, I don’t want to throw him into battle and possibly gain some afflictions. Being nearby will spread our dominion though. Our prophet is reinforcing the fortress with his army. Our troops in the south move out to attack the Pelagian army. It’s mostly shamblers so we should do well but we’ll see. That province has enough PD to be fairly safe.  We can see Atlantis’ army, mostly war lobsters and shield bearers. Shield bearers are kinda crappy but war lobsters are a bit scary.  These guys are bruisers. With the dude on top, they don't have very good prot or hitpoints but the lobster claw still does 20 damage. That's more than enough to kill most size 2 dudes. Not only that, but the guy riding the lobster dies and leaves the lobster behind. THAT lobster gets 20 prot, 34 hitpoints but also goes crazy and attacks whoever. That's good cause sometimes it takes a lobster to kill a lobster. Oh and both versions trample just to make them even better.  We put a bid in for the wet ones, going decently higher over the base price because last time we bid, Atlantis stole the troops. He even picked up some heavy cavalry so he must be expanding on land. I don't expect that to last, most land nations don't take kindly to water nations getting a foothold on dry ground near them. Anyway, the wet ones also get a siege bonus which will be great when we’re sieging Pelagia. Join us next turn for some good magic, maybe!
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 05:47
|
|
|
Now I know why Ramc wanted you to post your pretender before this turn. That's quite the coincidence. Did you have an agreement with Atlantis how to divide Pelagia's lands at that point?
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 08:24
|
|
|
What happens if you only have water provinces and you recruit non-water-breathing mercenaries?  Do they just show up and then drown immediately?
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 08:36
|
|
|
I was Atlantis in this game. I Made the mistake of focusing on expanding onto land, instead of joining in on the underwater Thunderdome. You can't hire non water breathers underwater, so no drowning mercenaries
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 09:19
|
|
|
Don't mess with giant lobsters, they are crazy fuckers.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 09:53
|
|
|
Trampling is really good for expansion
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 16:37
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:Now I know why Ramc wanted you to post your pretender before this turn. That's quite the coincidence. No, no agreement. I wanted to wait until I had a better idea of what Pelagia and Atlantis had. I wish I had taken some large scale screenshots! It's hard to see from what I posted but the ocean in this map is basically a cross, wrapping around vertically and horizontally. Atlantis and I are on the horizontal axis while Pelagia is on the vertical, north of us. I got lucky in that my cap is at the crossroads so I can expand in all four directions, which I'm currently doing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 21:52
|
|
|
How far in the past is each turn from when it's posted, roughly?
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 21:56
|
|
|
50~ turns behind when I started so probably a month and a half later?
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2017 22:10
|
|
|
Turn 13 A few messages this turn, research in conjuration is completed.  We can summon a few different things but the main thing is the water elementals. Even the lesser ones are decent and gives us a reason to use up some water gems. I think instead of going to conj5 for the big elementals we’ll switch to alteration since it has some good underwater spells that match the paths of our mages.  Our army fought on land this turn, winning pretty handily.  You can see the layout with the heavy cavalry there  Our satyrs do an excellent job of catching lances.  The heavy cavalry have high protection and defense skill so the battle goes pretty slowly but we were never in danger of losing. Our cavalry, the ichthycentaurs, are pretty drat good.  Next was our battle against Pelagia.  You can see he boosted his PD pretty high and has a lot of units. I turned on unit colors to help make sense of the battle. Now you can see why I lost so many satyrs, besides them being garbage. Fortunately none of Pelagia’s units were very good, just basic indies and atlantian militia. I didn’t see any actual Pelagian unique units at all so I’m curious where his army is. The most dangerous ones are shamblers since they have two attacks that do decent damage.  Fortunately, my satyrs have good defense skill and a much longer weapon. You can see the shamblers get repelled like crazy.  I actually came close to losing this battle but my redesign of my forces kept me in it. All my squads with satyrs routed but my squads with centaurs and satyr soldiers stayed behind until the whole Pelagian force routed.   A couple of positive events, nice for us. I really like having luck! Too bad Oceania doesn’t have any heroes and I don’t think this game is running the worthy heroes mod.  Also we won our bid for the mercenaries so I will push hard to get them sieging Pelagia. As I said last update, the wet ones get a siege bonus of +2. This doesn’t sound like a lot but a unit’s siege strength is it’s strength squared and divided by 100. So a 10 strength unit (pretty average for your basic unit) has 1 siege strength. Flying units also get a bonus of 1 and wet ones get 2 for some reason so they’re three times as effective as most of my units. Our large army moves towards Pelagia with the mercs, my mage stays behind to build a temple while my pretender catches up. Depending on what’s in Pelagia, I might wait for them both to help the battle with some elementals.  North of Pelagia, my mage is building another temple, our indie shambler is continuing the fortress, the other indie commander picks up the routed units from this turn’s battle and the last commander moves on another Pelagian province. If he builds any pd or adds any more units, this fight will probably fail but fortune favors the bold. The fortress will be done in a few turns anyway to reinforce if we need it. At this rate, we’ll be sieging Pelagia before Atlantis gets here which is good, we want Pelagia. Owning a cap is a huge income and gem boost.  One cause for concern is that Caelum has taken that island next to our cap right as we grab the farmland province. I will talk to him in IRC and hopefully get him to relenquish it. Generally players avoid taking provinces in the cap circle of another player unless they’re at war.  Also take a look at the land province I captured. It’s giving us a cool 245 gold per turn so I think I made the right choice in prioritizing it. Vanarus looks to be taking that island next to Pelagia, they might be our first war target but perhaps Abysia would be easier. They also have 2 thrones near them which would be a nice bonus. We also agreed to a NAP with TC and with Nazca, agreed to leave each other alone. That’s fine by me, we have no plans for major land incursions at this point. After Pelagia is done, I’ll be gearing up for the war with Atlantis and then I’ll consider going on land. If I feel like I can easily handle Atlantis then maybe I would start a small land war.  He does have at least one additional fort that I can see though. It’d help if I could find a land nation being attacked already so I’m pumping out scouts on every province that can build them to get more info. I only have the one aquatic scout because commander builds are too precious to waste on a scout. Unfortunately, afaik there are no indie provinces underwater that can build scouts. Join us next turn for another actual battle against a player!
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2017 06:46
|
|
|
I'm on the edge of my seat
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2017 17:47
|
|
|
Seems like playing an underwater race wouldn't be bad for dipping your toe into online play, so to speak. You're hard to rush from land and there's little benefit in provinces or useful gems in doing so. With 3 underwater nations there will likely be a 2 on 3 fight that's over quickly, and even if not you're playing a minigame with 1 or 2 other players. Seems hard to win but gives you a good chance of surviving until the surface world is covered in either skeletons or dying virgins. Is this helpful in learning online play or does it only teach you how to play an underwater nation? In this case, with a couple early NAPs securing you a foothold on land and letting you focus on Pelagia, it feels like you'll be able to develop your own strategy instead of having to figure out how to counter what the 3-5 people around you are doing. With magic paths/income being limited underwater your opponent also has a more predictable arsenal to deal with.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2017 22:22
|
|
|
Underwater nations are TERRIBLE for learning the game, online play or otherwise. A lot of commonly used spells don't work underwater so you get no experience in facing or using them, movement is so limited it teaches you nothing about preparing rapid response forces, and nations on land are going to tend to ignore you in the diplomacy game because there's little you can do to affect them for a long time, and vice versa. Aside from the few that actually can get on land vaguely effectively, water nations are mainly just for gimmicky builds and/or just setting up dickish globals that no one else can effectively respond to.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2017 22:32
|
|
|
Turn 14 Here are our messages.  Alteration 1 complete which doesn’t do anything for us.  Some nature self-buffs but nothing in water. Really we need alteration 3 for anything good which is numbness. Our researchers are pretty crap but level 3 doesn’t take too long. edit: numbness is not actually good but it can be cast underwater Pissbitch playing Marignon has capped a throne.  It’s not great but level 1 thrones usually aren’t. I wouldn’t turn down 2 nature gems but I don’t know if Marignon has any use for them. Then we took Baan Kaal or whatever. Caelum ceded it to us with no PD since it was in our cap circle. So far Caelum has been very friendly and available on IRC. Compare that to Abysia who hasn’t said anything at all and hasn’t even responded to our ingame message. Still, he hasn’t take the two adjacent farm provinces so I assume he isn’t hostile but I’m much more inclined to attack someone like that than someone who’s willing to communicate.  It's in our cap circle but it also has really nice connections to both sides of the continent.  Next we have our two battles in Pelagian territory. Green sea was just 4 shamblers, not worth showing. Broken ocean actually had a decent sized force with actual Pelagian units! Let’s see how they were arrayed for battle. These are our forces.   And the enemy. My lines are much more pleasing but that’s just one man’s opinion. His prophet is in this battle as you can see.  Turns out, it is poorly scripted since he doesn’t cast divine blessing and his sacreds don’t receive the blesses. I figured he had a beastly bless since his scales were trash and I was right. His prophet is blessed and it turns out to be s9d9 which gives magic resistance, undying, twist fate and death weapons. Those would be scary on his sacreds but he only has 4 in this battle and they’re not even blessed.   The first clash. My infantry take the first hits, some of them are mermidons so they can shrug off any low damage attacks.  His mermen toss out nets which is annoying but we can break out of them.  His sacreds get surrounded and the ichtyids get to the front. He would’ve been better off having them at the sides and holding attack or just putting his chaff infantry in front. Getting hit multiple times a turn lowers their defense skill although I don’t know if centaurs get the mounted bonus for that or not.  Our front lines struggle against each other but I eventually kill more of his chaff and surround the rest. The ichtyid warriors finally route en mass leaving behind the poor sacred knights to get hosed on retreat.  The final result, pretty good win for us.   A few events here, one good, one bad. I mean come on, no poo poo there's war.  Now for our movements. Our shambler continues construction, now he’s 1 turn away and we have a temple there. Our army moves off of the tiny island to move towards Pelagia and help in the war effort. Our two armies are now adjacent to Pelagia so they’ll just move in and siege it. Our mages and pretender will follow up with a hefty amount of water gems to spawn some elementals.  Having troops adjacent to Pelagia means we can see what he has there which appears to be 40 units and his pretender, a floating mind. 40 units is not much, even if it’s a low scouting report. It doesn’t even mention any knights of the deep which are the only units to be scared of. I doubt he can even build many by next turn given his bad scales. At this point, I'm not very scared of Pelagia. His scales are bad and he has no provinces so I doubt he can do anything to even remotely hurt us. You can see in a screenshot further up that Atlantis is also expanding slowly, at least in water, and won't reach any Pelagian territory before we gobble it up. Tune in next turn as we attempt to siege our very first capital!
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2017 23:23
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:Underwater nations are TERRIBLE for learning the game, online play or otherwise. A lot of commonly used spells don't work underwater so you get no experience in facing or using them, movement is so limited it teaches you nothing about preparing rapid response forces, and nations on land are going to tend to ignore you in the diplomacy game because there's little you can do to affect them for a long time, and vice versa. gently caress the ocean, basically.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 03:24
|
|
|
Veloxyll posted:gently caress the ocean, basically. Oddly enough, you will see that exact sentiment expressed later in the game!
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 05:08
|
|
|
I woulda loved the idea of all the three water nations teaming together to gently caress the dry world. Seems like an amusing way to play, pretend to be fighting each other when really you're gathering power to drown the world
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 05:36
|
|
|
Deceitful Penguin posted:I woulda loved the idea of all the three water nations teaming together to gently caress the dry world. Seems like an amusing way to play, pretend to be fighting each other when really you're gathering power to drown the world Unfortunately this will generally just lead to all three of the underwater nations being extremely weak and ineffectual.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 08:09
|
|
|
Araganzar posted:Seems like playing an underwater race wouldn't be bad for dipping your toe into online play, so to speak. You're hard to rush from land and there's little benefit in provinces or useful gems in doing so. With 3 underwater nations there will likely be a 2 on 3 fight that's over quickly, and even if not you're playing a minigame with 1 or 2 other players. What Lord Koth said w/r/t being new and playing UW. Also just to follow up your statement of "covered in either skeletons or dying virgins." -> If the surface world IS covered in that, you're likely hosed anyway. Skeletons and friends are typically amphibious and demons often either don't give a toss about water either or are easily able to be given amphibious with out too much sweet.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 08:16
|
|
|
Defeatist Elitist posted:Unfortunately this will generally just lead to all three of the underwater nations being extremely weak and ineffectual. There was a game in which five of us, as water nations, did exactly that. We still couldn't get a solid foothold on land.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2017 08:25
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 02:12
|
|
|
Prawn Spicer has always been a huge piece of poo poo and I am not surprised that he would forget about Ma Ermor's popkill.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 02:20
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 02:57
|
|
|
A goddamned masterpiece.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 03:13
|
|
|
Cathode Raymond posted:Prawn Spicer has always been a huge piece of poo poo and I am not surprised that he would forget about Ma Ermor's popkill. That's not Prawn Spicer, that's Molluska McCarthy doing him on PNL.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 04:23
|
|
|
Beautiful.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 05:06
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 09:50
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 12:14
|
|
|
Dammit Ramc you did it again.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 13:44
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2017 22:56
|
|
|
Defeatist Elitist posted:Unfortunately this will generally just lead to all three of the underwater nations being extremely weak and ineffectual. Corbeau posted:There was a game in which five of us, as water nations, did exactly that. Why the heck are they weak? Are they just that bad or what? Also never did thank you Corbeau for getting me into STALKER with that ole LP of yours. What a great series.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2017 01:30
|
|
|
Water nations either have troops that are weaker on land or can't go on land at all. Mages can wear air breathing items but there's nothing that lets a regular aquatic unit on land. Pelagia has great sacreds but they're aquatic only. This makes it a lot harder for them to fight a land nation. My dudes generally lose a few stats on land but it's not a huge loss. The bigger problem is that my best units can only be built underwater. Underwater being map move 1 means that it takes a lot longer for my guys to get to the front lines. Also 5 nations are weaker than a single nation with the same territory since the research and gems are spread out.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2017 06:53
|
|
|
Sorry for the slow updates, I was travelling but now I'm back with another turn! Turn 15  Should be an interesting turn this time, did we beat the forces in Pelagia? Well, it’s kinda spoiled by that last message but we’ll go through them anyway. Alteration 2 is done, just some buffs which aren’t terribly useful on a non-thug.  Vanarus declares another prophet, their first must have died at some point. The prophet is actually a scout, maybe Vanarus intends to do some stealthy preaching?  We took the Pelagian province, just four shamblers so not worth showing.  We fought in Pelagia which just had PD, you can see we took some losses but not a huge amount.  An interesting but good event and then a bad event! Villains took our land province, what assholes. Our kelp fortress is complete! Hooray. Now we have two extra forts which is pretty good for this early, they will make good staging areas to assault Atlantis.  Our armies are breaking down Pelagia’s walls as is to be expected. My other army, mage and pretender move in to assist.   Our fort in Mu begins pumping out centaurs, the fort is right next to a throne so hopefully we can take it but it looks like just a level 1 throne. Our other fort is also producing some dudes but I’m focusing on mages for now.  I started building a fort in that waste because it has really good connections so that ate up a chunk of my income. That lovely sage is finally good for something, I’ll have him build a lab at some point too.  We can also see Marignon’s pretender, Pissbitch the Virtue.  Air and fire are decent paths but Marignon already gets those from their regular mages and summons. I guess A4 is good to have since the air boosters require such high paths. Since she’s leading an army that just took a throne, I assume she’s awake but who knows. Abysia finally responded accepting our NAP so Marignon is high on my list to attack. They’ve expanded like crazy so hopefully that means they are overextended. With luck they will attack Abysia and we can snatch up some Marignon territory while they’re distracted. Tune in next turn to see some amazing summons!
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2017 18:21
|
|
|
Yeah, for a while I was only on Discord, and a lot of folks were on IRC, so at the start, I was not a very responsive guy.
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2017 18:26
|
|
|
This is about when I went "wait wtf is happening in the water" as Vanarus. Seeing Pelagia get blitzed by Oceania isn't really a thing that should happen afaik.
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2017 18:35
|
|
Corbeau posted:This is about when I went "wait wtf is happening in the water" as Vanarus. Seeing Pelagia get blitzed by Oceania isn't really a thing that should happen afaik. Oceania is very good at blitzing its UW neighbors because cheap satyrs
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2017 18:51
|
|
|
Nice blitz. Can you really live it up in the ocean without a lot of interference? Pull a breakout-from-Australia strategy with giant stacks of underwater doom?
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2017 03:41
|
|
|
Glazius posted:Nice blitz. Can you really live it up in the ocean without a lot of interference? Pull a breakout-from-Australia strategy with giant stacks of underwater doom? Yes and... No. Being underwater really sucks and it's usually a first-class ticket to watching the game happen around you while you can't accomplish anything. Mainly because all the good spells/gem sites are on land. Didn't nuclearmonkee play a game where he cast burden of time on year 1 as R'leh? That sounds like a pretty funny troll strat.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2017 04:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 23:52 |
|
|
How did he do that? D6 good research pretender high magic scales?
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2017 06:07
|
|
