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I find the roguelike, constant kicks in the in between, tears of blood nature of the game is amplified by their presence and intellectually I find that I like it. Now, in reality when playing, I really don't.
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Sep 30, 2021 19:37
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Poland Spring posted:Someone just needs to make a mod to remove them, they just seem like a game ruining pain in the rear end that isn't even interesting They're a pretty core component of the Scourge Lord's kit. They can easily provide a really solid force for their early to mid game and they serve a similar function to some of the other dumb units in that they just sort of patrol around and capture stuff back. That said, now that they're such a core component of a class' kit, toning the independent versions down a bit might not be the worst idea.
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Sep 30, 2021 19:59
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Zengetsu posted:A lot of times, I've found it useful to counter invade into the Scourge Lord's territory when the Ants start really going off. As far as I can tell, Scourge Ant Queens won't build new ant mounds on a desert tile, so if he hasn't eaten every single town, diving into the desert is a good way to give yourself some territory that has a buffer between you and the ant spawners. That's not a scourge lord doing that: it's just random ants.
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Sep 30, 2021 20:00
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The anthills themselves are fine IMO (and I could have sworn they existed in CoE4), they provide a decent range of environmental threats at generally appropriate levels of challenge. The real problem is their ability to multiply via ant queens (which definitely did not exist in CoE4), if they weren't exponential they wouldn't be an issue.
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Sep 30, 2021 20:06
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the holy poopacy posted:The anthills themselves are fine IMO (and I could have sworn they existed in CoE4), they provide a decent range of environmental threats at generally appropriate levels of challenge. The real problem is their ability to multiply via ant queens (which definitely did not exist in CoE4), if they weren't exponential they wouldn't be an issue. The only similar thing I can think of from CoE4 was that independent Dwarf Queens would exist and would send out colonizing parties to nearby mines, but nothing that could completely colonize the map like that.
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Sep 30, 2021 20:21
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the holy poopacy posted:The anthills themselves are fine IMO (and I could have sworn they existed in CoE4), they provide a decent range of environmental threats at generally appropriate levels of challenge. The real problem is their ability to multiply via ant queens (which definitely did not exist in CoE4), if they weren't exponential they wouldn't be an issue. They definitely existed in CoE4, they were just pretty rare: you'd generally only see them if you resigned or got splatted on like, the first turn. Or waited around for like a billion years.
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Sep 30, 2021 20:52
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Xarn posted:Could we get a combat/stats mechanics post? I have vague knowledge of Dominion stats, but they don't quite translate to CoE. Sure! It's pretty simple. Sidebar: Combat mechanics  Combat in CoE is a pretty simple affair. Troops typically start lined up on either side of the battlefield, although troops in forts will attempt to deploy themselves sensibly on the walls, and if a stack blunders into a stealthy enemy stack they will be strung out in a long thin line with the ambushers randomly scattered along both sides (starting at the "rear" end.) There is no control over positioning or orders, every unit has a preferred position in the formation that they get assigned to (front, mid, or back, although some troops may have modifications such as "front-" or "front+" to give them specific positions within the block of "front" units.) Every turn, everything moves simultaneously and act in semi-random order based on the Initiative of the attack or spell they're trying to use. Under normal circumstances, every attack automatically hits and does the listed amount of damage. Note that bonuses and penalties only apply to the maximum roll: damage is always a roll between 1 and some number. Like most rolls in Dominions, damage dice are "exploding" rolls: if the maximum damage number is rolled then the damage die gets rolled again and added to the total (minus 1.) Effects that can cause outright misses are relatively rare; ironically, the most common one is etherealness, which is a 75% chance to negate nonmagical physical damage. Relatively mundane abilities like "25% chance to dodge attacks" is vastly rarer by comparison. Armor is a straight 1:1 damage reduction. It's quite common for basic troops to have 0 armor, 1 armor is a big leg up and usually only gets seen on premium troops. Armor of 2 is typically very heavy infantry, the kind that often has map movement penalties. Armor 3 on humans pretty much only shows up with magic armor or heavily armored knights. You will see monsters with 2-3 armor, or 4 in extreme cases, but anything above that is very rare--which is part of why the Scourge Lord's +3 armor bless is a big loving deal. The Scourge Heralds have 2 armor to begin with so at that point most conventional weapons literally need to roll max damage to scratch them, and light weapons may need multiple exploding rolls. Some units also have shields, which add another random layer of damage reduction: 0-1 for small shields (most of them), 0-2 for large shields (slow heavy infantry, although the Senator's legions mostly get large shields without being slow), or 0-3 for magic shields (rare.) The maximum reduction is doubled vs. missile weapons as well. Units sitting on fortified walls get a similar layer of random damage reduction, something like 0-3 per tile of height on the wall (this was somehow bugged during the version that I was playing this run on, whoops.) There is an affliction system that works very similarly to Dominions, although the exact mechanics are not described. But presumably it works more or less like Dominions, which is to say, when a unit takes damage it has a chance of suffering a permanent debilitating affliction based on the proportion of its total HP that got taken out. For conventional battles, that's about it. Strength, Morale, and Magic Resistance don't really do anything until some special effect rolls against them, although modifications to strength also affect weapon damage (this particular Desert Warrior, for example, has an extra point of strength as a result of the XP levels he's earned, so he gets a bonus to his maximum damage.) Fear effects typically check morale vs. 1d7-1d9 depending on the strength of fear--this guy's morale of 4 is very typical, which is to say that units with fear auras will remove basic troops from the fight very efficiently. Typical MR rolls test vs. 2d4, or 2d6 for really difficult rolls; some effects (e.g. stun from wind attacks/spells, or entanglement) are resisted by strength instead of MR, with similar numbers. These dice also use exploding rolls, but they use "soft" exploding dice so the additional dice are halved. MR goes up to 10 or so for powerful magical beings, so you can nail them with conventional 2d4 MR rolls but it's very difficult. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 22:17
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 17 The Plane of Air is actually much easier to get around than the Plane of Earth, the whole thing is carpeted in walkable clouds. It's slow going by foot, but there's no real obstacles. Bernie is able to make his way to the edge of the pocket plane quite quickly.  Lavinia has made her way to the southwestern front and is scoping out the skies for any handy footholds.  Fighting back the ant menace.  Another mercenary mage is ferrying a batch of legionaries to the northern front and promptly runs into the Scourge King, whose icon looks suspiciously like a taller Scourge Lord.  The scourge faction descriptions seem to be hinting at something  The Scourge Lord/King has a unique feature in that nobody is allowed to equal or surpass their current highest ranking leader in rank, so they only get one level 3 Scourge King at a time (and if they have a Scourge Lord but no King then they can't make additional Lords either.) Their higher level summons don't really get them access to additional level 3 casters, either, let alone anything like the doublecasting imperial couple. On the other hand they get to spam buff superblessed units like crazy, and later on they do get to stick that bless on giant summoned monsters too, many of which have some spellcasting abilities.  Their mid-level summons are pretty legit too. The Scourge Flames are probably the cream of the crop, fire elementals that inflict decay.  This stack is definitely looking a bit inadequate, so I pull back for now. A lone pikeman stays behind as a rearguard to keep the scourge lord from running the whole stack down; I'm pretty sure that troops in fortified locations won't get overrun.  We haven't had a good look at the animist that's leading it. Yeah, a couple poison and entangle spells are definitely not going to cut it.  I had sent an ether warrior posse into the Plane of Air to reinforce Bernie, but they get jumped by the mother of all elemental stacks near the gate.  The second old wizard takes out a dusk dragon in a lone mine, but the ambush takes out one of his backup mages.  A guard tower manages to get completely owned by horrors. Soultorns aren't even that tough you guys!  So I have to detail a new mage to go retake it.  poo poo, I really have not been paying attention. At some point one of the scourge lord's minions put up a pillar on our front line and now there's a chunk of desert. These do not normally drain the land so quickly... I wonder if the AI income multiplier also accelerates the degradation the scourge lord causes? Seems likely.  This is now a string of four major mountain mines in a winding diagonal line not all that far from the kobolds' home. drat, that's a hell of a resource cluster for them.  The old wizard immediately pisses his pants in terror and flees.  His backup gets in a couple good meteors.  In the end it's not enough. The dragon's dark magic pool includes etherealness self-buffs, which makes our conventional troops all but useless once the mages are dead or gone. And since we lost the fight, the fleeing wizard doesn't survive either. He wasn't as good as the first old wizard, but it still hurts.  Beefing up the animist with some reinforcements, including another moon mage and an ice druid. I own something like 3 libraries, 2-3 cities, and Nexus on top of the Senator's built-in mage recruitment chance, so I see mage offers pretty frequently and even get multiples some turns.  I send my remaining level 3 wizard at the dusk dragon to show how it's done.  And that's that. It's down to Bernie and the Scourge King now.  I grab some very sweet gauntlets off the market. There really aren't that many glove items, nor are there many items with stackable armor bonuses. I don't really have any human-sized commanders that I particularly need the defense on, but it helps stop a mage get sniped by random arrow shots.  Still, there's not much I can do about the Scourge King just yet.  And here's the defunct witch's citadel. This start would have been completely stacked for some factions with all those mines in the neighborhood, but the witch really wants forests and swamps to collect magic shrooms from. It's no great surprise she fell to the kobolds, they had more of their special resources available and would have been highly motivated to conquer all those mines.  Oh god, the elemental hellstack has wandered through the portal and is close to knocking over Nexus.  I start bringing my former demon-hunting stack back around to meet up with the animist and blunder into the Scourge King in the fog of war.  His spell list is quite nasty. He's got multiple sources of exhaustion (which is like weakness, but also can do minor DoT) and a massive-area magic chip damage spell that also reanimates its victims.  The result is actually net negative casualties for the Scourge King.  The animist moves in to avenge their deaths with an his bigger force.  Naturally, this fails to accomplish anything except giving the Scourge King even more undead troops.  At least the two dead renati get to live a bit longer in Hades.  They have the power to travel back and forth between Elysium and Hades, but only on coastal tiles. Hades is a perfect mirror of Elysium, so theoretically as long as I can get my bearings I can navigate them to the nearest body of water using known landmarks. The first renatus that died got dropped in the middle of Hades and revealed some points of interest for us to navigate with.  On the plus side, while Mysticism is not a great spell list, it has a lot of anti-undead juice. This means a Renatus actually has semi-decent odds of surviving in Hades as long as you don't bump into anything too big or nasty.  I rush out a couple ballistae and mages to hold the citadel after the animist got wiped.  They don't do much, but the Scourge Flame does go down.  A renatus finds the shore of a dead river in Hades, giving him a route back home.  He pops out in an unexplored region of the northwest of Elysium and finds the long-dead warlock's citadel completely deserted.  I was worried it might have stealthy indies camped out, but nope, just a citadel free for the taking. The Scourge King is definitely in the neighborhood, too. I immediately set it cranking out a bunch of troops, since it's not like money is any sort of limit for Bernie at this point.  Our remaining wizard doubles back around towards the twice-stolen demonologist citadel.  Another fortress falls to the Scourge King, but at least one of the heralds went down?  Slowly closing in on a confrontation.  The Scourge King's magic is strong, but mine is stronger.  He still does have battlefield-wide exhaustion.  But really, without any resistance to lightning the only question is how much attrition it takes before the king goes down, and the answer is "not much." This is like... not even a very tough kobold fight's worth of losses. The Scourge King's faction survives and will probably promote a new king soon enough, but for now their closest and scariest stack is gone.
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Sep 30, 2021 22:23
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Yeah, the scourge lord is basically the result of Trump jokes ramming headlong into Dark sun style magic. There are parts where it works well, like lines about how the scourge lord drains away the mind as well as life, turning people into qanon conspiracy-theorist sycophants as their minds start to die. And then there's the more explicit references to trump that feel really loving jarring like in the scourge king description.
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Oct 1, 2021 04:57
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I like that the description is just like "why is the scourge lord bigger now that he's king? he's wearing shoes to make himself look taller, that's why".
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Oct 1, 2021 08:14
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Oct 2, 2021 00:40
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Hi OP, I am really enjoying this LP. CoE is a game I'd love to play myself but I've never gotten the mechanics enough to gel perfectly enough with it to justify the price tag, so this is great. Are you gonna do more games with other factions?
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Oct 2, 2021 01:30
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Gridlocked posted:Are you gonna do more games with other factions? They said they would, yes. The current plan is to do Cloud Lord next, much to the sadness of the kobold people.
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Oct 2, 2021 01:56
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 18 The returned renatus takes a few troops and begins raiding in the vicinity of the warlock tower. Soulless zombies are tough enough that these would not be very favorable odds, except again, the renatus has plenty of anti-undead spells at his disposal.  This, on the other hand, there's not much he can do about.  It's not as impressive or powerful as Bernie's statue, but 10 dudes and a renatus is not going to cut it by any stretch.  A lesser scourge lord emerges before I've even had a chance to start reclaiming territory.  They've got raiders active in the west, too.  A leftover remnant from the demon invasion jumps the renatus. Devils are fairly badass spellcasters, and although the principes solaris are fireproof the renatus is not so lucky.  Oh well, he's already died and come back once, what's another trip through Hades? He's only a couple turns from the river that got him out last time.  I split off a leo with my siege engines to finish retaking my holdings while the wizard presses on.  Sure enough, a new Scourge King has already taken the throne. Again, there can be only one at a time so they've promoted this guy fresh since the last one died. He's got a big stack of troops, too.  He does have a front line of unholy blessed sellsouls, and of course a level 3 spellcaster in back. Most of these aren't anything to be worried about, though.  I've been pouring Bernie's near-infinite income into more ballistae for the border towers. This ought to be enough to retake the lake port guarded by a skeleton crew.  The renatus makes it to the coast only to get caught in an ambush too big for him to handle.  Those raiders in the west have... a little bit more manpower than I'd thought. A lucky ballista shot manages to snipe their leader out of the entire army, though, so at least they may be stuck for a while until a replacement comes up.  Yeah, turns out those ballistae were kind of overkill for the port despite the Scourge King getting a catapult in there. The whole battle is over before siege phase is done.  Bernie has made most of a circuit of the Plane of Air with no sign of any way back to Elysium.  He does spot the first elemental citadel, inhabited by one of the reigning Queens of Air. All the elemental royalty are giant level 3 spellcasters with a built-in boosting item attached, and when they're home they get a fort with a retinue of elemental minions. Other than the queen herself none of these are especially impressive, though; the cloud warriors aren't even ethereal, just lightning resistant, and the thunderbirds get ranged lightning & wind attacks but no real defenses to speak of.  The Scourge King ignores the heavily defended towers and simply walks past towards Bernie's heartland, prompting another low speed winter chase.  Aaaaah! Ant queen! Gotta kill this thing before it starts a new anthill.  By the time I catch up with the Scourge King he's added some more spiders to his front line, but nothing especially scary.  Once the spiders go down I've got a big advantage in the fodder vs. fodder fight, especially since his battlefield-wide exhaustion spell does not differentiate friend from foe. On the other hand, the longer it takes to wade through all the fodder the more time exhaustion has to work.  The resulting losses are catastrophic, but a second Scourge King is down.  The real damage is that fighting the Scourge King bought the ant queen enough time to establish a colony  At least if I grab it right away it shouldn't have a chance to spit out any scourge ants in my backyard. The Scourge King's minions are pushing back on the rear, I may not be able to hold the warlock tower if they push it.  I decide to push onwards myself in the hopes of finding another recruitment site. I do find a second guard tower, but it's defended with multiple catapults.  I take a pile of ballistae to reclaim the guard tower in the southwest.  I have so many siege weapons attached that disappointingly, most of them aren't even in range to fire during the siege phase.  Still, even if they only fire once every 4 rounds during regular combat, it turns out 34 ballistae can do a lot of work.  My troops from the warlock tower have made their way back to known territory.  Desperate for some way home, Bernie attacks one of the cloud citadels in the hopes that there might be a portal in the corner of the plane behind them.  I wouldn't have attacked without reinforcements, naturally. The first batch of ether warriors got eaten by elementals but I did get several squads' worth through.  Lightning bolts don't care about ethereality, so the ether warriors take heavy losses in the opening exchange.  Once Bernie gets a couple Thunder Wards up the rest of the battle is a foregone conclusion, though.  Having the Citadel of Air allows us to recruit elemental troops. As we saw before, these guys aren't anything amazing, but they're resistant to lightning to start with so they should be pretty decent against most of the locals around here.  The Queen's Orb of Air gives Bernie a magic boost for level 4 storm casting, and he now has a way to fly as well. But he's still trapped in the elemental planes.  At this point I remember that I've already seen a gate on the Elysium side, though. So rather than slowly scour the rest of the Plane of Air, I can just send Lavinia in to reunite with Bernie.  The castle is inhabited by a bunch of Bernie lookalikes. They're beefy and hit like trucks, but they have no real AoE capabilities or defenses other than wads of HP.  Knowing that Call Lightning won't do much I reenable the wizard's acid and poison AoEs to do what he does best: immediately murder 20 legionaries.  Still, between Lavinia's sleep, paralyze, and confusion the giants are locked down well enough for the wizards to wear them down.  I even get to keep one for myself! Honestly, this might just about be a wash. The castle is now mine, and with it, the portal it guards as well. Lavinia steps through to join her husband on the Elemental Plane of Air.  This uhhhhh is not the Elemental Plane of Air.  Lavinia finds herself on Aztlan, home dimension of the Mesoamerican gods. The welcoming committee is pretty tough.  These things are beefy demons with a powerful, ultra-long-range magic attack, and they're backed up by a spell-slinging coatl.  Thankfully, none of them are lightningproof.  But when they're throwing 10 magic bolts a turn on top of a lightning and poison caster, they don't need to be.  Aztlan took on the best the Empire had to offer and didn't even flinch. This is an ongoing problem that CoE has yet to find a solution for: it has all these exotic extra dimensions that are just so far beyond anything the actual competitive game has to offer that by the time you are strong enough to even think about taking them on you could have won the game several times over. Lavinia nearly soloed the entire demonologist faction, and Kaskator the old wizard pretty much did the same against the kobolds. They couldn't even put a dent into Aztlan's gate guards. Admittedly, I was foolishly underprepared sending them in with such meager backup. Had I brought a fresh legion to spread the pain around I very likely would have won. But that leads to the next problem: once you do get strong enough to take on the higher planes, there's not actually much point. There are some even harder fights against the various Mesoamerican god figures, for which the reward is like, a city's worth of resources if that. Most of the new planes exist as a place to park summonable gods, and theoretically if you're fighting the faction that uses them you can travel to their home world to permakill them and shut off further summons... but if you're strong enough to do that, you very obviously have the firepower to just murder whatever faction keeps summoning them.
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Oct 2, 2021 17:52
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Aztlan is a bit unique, because it spawns as a set of 6 islands in the shape of a serpent. One is shaped like a serpent's head, and frequently has portals to the sky realm of elysium. Each island is themed after each one of the High Priest classes 5 summoned gods and 1 goddess, and they dwell there when not summoned. Each of the other 5 circular islands is a segment of the serpent, separated from each other by a small gap of void. At the tail is a portal to hades that always appears in every game. 'Serpent that bridges the sky and the underworld' is a pretty good summary.
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Oct 2, 2021 18:38
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Oof. Yeah, it's a bad idea to poke portals with things that aren't 100% expendable.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:24
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Holy poo poo, I've never been to Aztlan yet but that entry party seems tougher than anything in Inferno that isn't the Demon Lords  ; guess I have a new goal on my Warlock playthrough once I conquer the other half of hell.Can you get another Senator for Coronation as God-Emperor or are you basically forced to rely on basic commanders now? Unless you can have another God-Empress
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Oct 2, 2021 23:34
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FrenchBen posted:Holy poo poo, I've never been to Aztlan yet but that entry party seems tougher than anything in Inferno that isn't the Demon Lords Bernie is still very much alive on the Plane of Air! If I killed him then eventually recruitment offers for a replacement Senator would show up, who would then be able to undergo coronation and apotheosis. But the new God-Emperor would still be stuck on the island with the capital as I still don't have any items that would let him cross water. Gods will not marry mortals, so I'm still out an empress unless and until Bernie dies and gets replaced.
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Oct 2, 2021 23:38
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Even replacing Bernie isn't advisable until after he's back in Elysium. Otherwise you'll need to do the big trek back again anyway. Once you get Bernie back to Elysium you can decide of you want to give his items to a pack-wizard to hand off those magic items to the newly ascended god emperor after Bernie goes to die in battle/ascend to double-godhood. Otherwise you'll be largely out dozens of turns of progress and if Bernie dies before you get back to give away his items then his magic items will be lost too when/if he dies, making it even harder for the next god emperor.
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Oct 3, 2021 00:46
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What does having magic level 4 do anyways? Do spells scale by the level like they do in Dominions?
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Oct 3, 2021 09:11
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They don't, they cast more. What magic levels mean is that a level X caster can cast, in one round, (1 + Y) spells of level (X - Y), no more, no less, so that level 4 caster Bernie can double cast level 3 spells, and, indeed, cast in one round a slow to cast level 3. He can also cast 4 level 1 spells, but that's generally less desirable. Also a level X caster can memorize X + 1 spells to actually use from his spell list.
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Oct 3, 2021 11:31
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 19 With nothing better to do, Bernie knocks over another cloud citadel just because he can. That's 2 of the 3 Queens of Air down.  One of the Renati pops out of Hades just in time to scoop up some troops and recapture some of the territory lost to the Scourge King's raiding.  Victory is short lived as the raiders immediately come back.  Just like the Ether Lords from Nexus, the elemental citadels occasionally give you offers for elemental spellcasters. Elemental champions are full fledged (albeit weak) ritual casters, meaning that Bernie can now harvest elemental gems (primarily from mines, although the air citadels provide a lot of air gem income on their own); these are primary resources for quite a few classes, although there's not actually much I can do with them at this point.  For example, actual gem classes would typically be able to spend gems to promote their casters and get new rituals to spend more gems on. This is all this guy will ever be able to do, 17 gems for a couple of weak elementals. As a force multiplier it's OK--since I don't actually have anything else to do with gems they're essentially free to me. Not that I can actually get anywhere with them. (Screenshot is somewhat out of order as I didn't get around to this guy for a couple turns, so this is after several turns of gem income.)  Cleanup continues in the southwest. The ballistae pile is even more ludicrously overkill than before, but with this much iron they're basically free so why not?  The leo that slipped out from behind the scourge lord lines returns with ballistae in tow to seize the towers on his border.  Six catapults will hurt pretty badly--remember, unlike ballistae the catapults don't get to fire at all once siege phase is over. Still, they're pretty heavily outgunned.  Now I've got a rally point right in the midst of the scourge lord's territory.  From Nexus, Bernie takes stock of his options. He can't get anywhere in the Plane of Earth. He's explored the Plane of Air with no signs of a gateway home. He can't swim, so he can't really explore the Plane of Water; he can fly, but not with any of his backup. He's not fireproof, so he can't really explore the Plane of Fire; he can take enough damage to shrug it off, but again his backup can't. To the south, the gate to the Primal Lands holds no promise of anything useful. To the north, the gate stands inert and useless. Neither of the remaining two gates leads out of Nexus, only to small side pockets of space. In short, Bernie is most likely stuck. With nothing better to do, he decides to explore the sub-pocket of Nexus off to the right.  Like Nexus itself, it's a magic citadel held by a bunch of enchanter troops, although these ones are considerably tougher than those defending Nexus: the animated ballistae on the wall are actually better than regular ballistae, and they're being led by this absolute unit. But notably, it is not lightningproof.  The animated ballistae are still shooting mundane bolts, minimizing damage to the ether warriors (who take up so much space that the back line is actually out of ballista range.) Still, even only hitting 25% of the time the ballistae put some decent size holes in them.  The outer walls are defended by a bunch of magic fire & cold traps. At least they're not decay traps, although they still do a number on the ether warriors.  I don't love the Meteor spell: it's slow, inaccurate, and doesn't spread damage around very efficiently. But it's great for fighting a giant magic robot, and in general it can be nice from a diversification standpoint (especially on something like Void Magic, which is mostly MR-negates mental attacks and such.)  Do you know what happens to a giant magic robot when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.  The Eternal Vault coughs up a treasure trove of magic items, appropriately enough... including a Scroll of Returning. It turns out all Bernie had to do to go home was click his heels three times, murder a giant magic robot, and say "There's no place like home." (Of course, the MGM musical changes the giant magic robot from silver to ruby because they wanted to show off their new color film technology.)  Elsewhere in the elemental planes, some rear end in a top hat elementals decide to put my "I guess these cloud warriors should be able to handle the locals" theory to the test. It turns out: they cannot. Being immune to lightning is great and all but AoE wind attacks rip through the cloud warriors who can't effectively fight back.  Bernie's back! He leaves the ether warriors behind to explore the elemental planes more and pops the scroll with a tiny surviving retinue of archers, mostly to carry all the magic loot. He shows up not too far from the front lines, at the edge of kobold country.  Periodically a meteor will land and take out an entire tile, leaving behind a crater that yields gems. Up until now Bernie didn't have any reason to care about craters, and he still doesn't, really, the gems are pretty irrelevant.  The Scourge King's other guard tower falls.  A super rare and super cool item turns up on the market. I haven't seen any openings to the underground on this map, but this lets you make your own. It also lets you dig through solid walls, which is good because like the Plane of Earth that's what most of the underground layer is.  Now that the God-Emperor is around again, I finally decide to see what's up with that sphinx. Not much, apparently.  The Pyramid of Power is the upgraded form of the Pillar of Power. It drains the land for a radius of two tiles around instead of one.  God dammit. How many times have I had to go back and recapture this port now?  Cleaning up the warlock's old backyard. I'm not sure where the Scourge Lord's home citadel actually is.  Judging by the out-of-place deserts, it's probably somewhere this way.  Bernie finally makes contact with the Scourge Lord's forces.   I had turned off all of Bernie's indiscriminate battlefield-wide spells due to friendly fire risk, but now that Bernie's gone solo there is no need for restraint. That's a whole lot of damage numbers.  There. The port is secure once and for all.
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Oct 3, 2021 22:26
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Oct 4, 2021 00:28
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Bernie's revitalizing port cities! What a guy! Also, on the topic of the Elemental Champions. Can they be upgraded at Libraries like some of the mages can to get stronger rituals? Or are they just stuck with whatever level of ritual they have? I haven't gotten access to them and don't really play the classes that can get them more easily.
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Oct 4, 2021 01:48
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Are you going to revitalize infrastructure near the Scourge Lord with a new subway system?
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Oct 4, 2021 07:39
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Medicare for all also means end of life care for all, especially enemies of the God Emperor.
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Oct 4, 2021 17:22
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Zengetsu posted:Also, on the topic of the Elemental Champions. Can they be upgraded at Libraries like some of the mages can to get stronger rituals? Or are they just stuck with whatever level of ritual they have? I haven't gotten access to them and don't really play the classes that can get them more easily. No, elemental champions can't be upgraded. But they're a bit more sturdy than your standard spellcaster. They're also a summon option for the warlock.
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Oct 4, 2021 17:34
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 20 The Scourge Lord has an economy-boosting ritual that summons a slavedriver to boost the output of a mine, and provide it with some built in defenders. A recently hired wizard attempts to liberate one of the Scourge Lord's slave mines without success.  It turns out the slavedriver inherits the Scourge Lord's bless, which makes him basically invincible to basic human troops and gives him an aura of fear.  Fear and retreating is simple: if you win, your retreating troops rejoin your army. If you lose, they all die. Here, they all die.  Bernie obliterates another stack of Scourge Lord trash. These guys didn't even have sacred troops let alone mage support.  I'm not sure where ant queens are still popping out from, but the freespawn maenads do us a solid and take one out.  Goddammit, that's the hill that the scourge lord popped behind our lines. Some of the spiders must have wandered over and unflagged it.  With the magic shovel in hand I can start exploring the underground. Like the Plane of Earth, most of it is solid rock; the shovel can dig through it at will, but it's slow going, taking more than a turn to recover after tunneling a single tile.  When I gave up and had Bernie charge the Eternal Vault I sort of forgot that the ether warriors are amphibious; with the flying power of the Orb of Air I could have had Bernie explore the Plane of Water with them in the hopes of finding a whirlpool back home. Since Bernie is home anyhow, I just have the ether warriors explore the Plane of Water themselves. The Queens of Water are here, but the odds of taking them out with one ether lord and a dozen or so warriors is... not great.  Goddamn ants. I manage to trade them 1:1, but that's a pretty steep cost for an army this size with mage support against indie freespawn.  I've been squatting on the Mystical Column with this token force for most of the game, but it winds up being a fart in a stiff breeze when horrors finally appear.  These things are mid-range horrors, and they are goddamn nasty. Fear, ethereal, half damage from physical types, an AoE attack, and disease magic (including decay.) These schmucks didn't stand half a chance.  Bernie pushes northward and discovers another Pyramid of Power. Pretty sure we're close to the Scourge King's homeland.  Ugh. Now this is just obnoxious: the strange mist event will plunge most of the map into fog of war, even areas that you have eyes on. (The Earth Gnome recruitment offer is actually a bug; it shows up if you have any recruitment sites anywhere in the Elemental Planes, but you can only actually take advantage of it if you have one of the Earth citadels. None of the other elemental recruitment offers do this, just the earth ones.  ) More scourge ants, a guard tower, and... a cloud castle inhabited by tengu??? This seems like it belongs in the sky.  As god of thunder, and also everything else, Bernie nationalizes the cloud castle. Having a rally point in the enemy's backyard may be useful.  The third Scourge King appears and attacks a column of reinforcements trailing after Bernie.  They actually put up a decent accounting of themselves, wiping out virtually all of the Scourge King's conventional troops and even bringing down one of the heralds. In the end, the fear is just too much for them to overcome; the legion flees to the last man and is cut down.  Oh god. As if the mists weren't bad enough, now dispossessed spirits will wander in from Hades en masse. The game actually does keep track of where units died and generates more spirits in that spot on Hades, so areas close to major battles are going to be particularly fraught now. That makes this event unique in that it has a sort of built-in scaling effect going on, something that is painfully absent from events like the Inferno invasion. It also has its own time limit and goes away after a while, although whatever spirits cross over will continue to hang around until destroyed.  Bernie joins up with a smaller column to take revenge on the Scourge King.  With the king dead, there's little risk in Bernie soloing a bunch of scourge minions.  More queens! Where are these coming from?!  One of the Scourge King armies I defeated out west comes back for revenge.  Several other forts fall, since they tend to have had a lot of nearby casualties. Some of the spirit engagements are lopsided enough to fall our way, though.  Bernie finally finds the Scourge King's home base, which actually appears to be the same type of citadel as the Demonologist. It's theoretically possible that the one we've been fighting around for the last 60% of the game was actually the original Scourge King base and the Demonologist started up here, which would explain how the demonologist got the early kill on the warlock. But judging by the pillars and pyramids and ant hills it's probably safe to assume the Scourge King started here.  That's a lot of catapults, which are one of the few things that can seriously threaten Bernie. Siege engines are the big equalizer conventional armies have against mage factions, so the Senator usually finds himself on the other end of this dynamic.  I march up some rock catchers for him, but they get ambushed by yet another Scourge King pretender.  Another column of reinforcements gets ambushed by more vengeful ghosts.  The legion does a remarkable amount of damage before it falls, but it's not enough. If I had picked up a scout on the way I probably would have won this; being put into an ambush meant the Renatus got ganked before he could bring his considerable anti-undead firepower to bear.  My attempts to explore the underground run into a wall of lava, but a short detour finally breaks out into a real cavern.  The ether warriors do discover a magic whirlpool, but it's just a gem source, no connection back home to Elysium.  Bernie catches the Scourge King outside his citadel.  He's got some new toys in tow. These things are pretty nasty, with a very strong and very large AoE wind attack in addition to trampling and disease.  As wind elementals they're immune to lightning. They're not fireproof, though.  Finally I get an army up to support Bernie's assault on the citadel.  The reinforcement column came by way of the cloud city by the ill-fated Aztlan portal, so it's mostly made up of cloudfolk. The catapults are largely harmless to them due to ethereal, so Bernie wins the siege battle by quite a large margin. Once the catapults fall silent a couple dozen troops aren't going to do anything at all to stop Bernie.  The citadel falls easily, but it's not their last stronghold, and there are plenty of Scourge Heralds and Lords to take the fallen king's place.  I am once again asking for you to be obliterated by my divine lightning.  The nearby tower has even more catapults, so Bernie has to wait for his backups to trudge through the sand and snow.  The side tunnel is not as spacious as it first appeared, but it does eventually open up into a proper cavern. It is full of monsters and not riches.  Meanwhile, the Ether Lords decide to explore the last remaining gate in Nexus. It leads to another pocket dimension much like the one with the Eternal Vault.  This one is even more heavily defended; the winged bird-head man is a level 3 multi-caster, and everything else that's not a lightning-throwing guardian statue is also a spellcaster of some stripe.  Hell, why not.  The Apkallu's High Arcana spells includes the same battlefield-wide sleep that Lavinia had. Between the guardian statues, the multiple storm magic casters, and the cloud elementals they summon the sleeping ether warriors get cut down in short order. They do manage to take down one of the weaker casters, but the big guys are largely unscathed.  Clearing the catapult tower reveals another guard tower and a port. Bernie sends the troops on to deal with the forts while he mops up the Scourge King's minions.  The tower and its battery of catapults falls easily enough, but the port is packed with troops.  Siege engines take a heavy toll on both sides. Surprisingly I think the catapults actually come out better here, certainly by proportion.  I do have some mage support here. I'm not normally a huge White Wizard fan but having both air shield (75% chance to negate ranged attacks) is extremely useful here; all of the Scourge King's desert troops carry bows, and he has plenty of generic crossbows and archers too. On top of that, he also carries a mass luck buff (50% chance to negate most types of attacks.)  Once the gates are down I do have to fight through several blessed sellsouls, who are even better blockers than the gates were.  Luckily I have save-or-die spells from my hired mages, because I don't know how I would have gotten through their armor + regen otherwise. (Well, at least without bringing Bernie back up.)  Once I get through the sellsouls my heavily buffed troops have the upper hand. The cloud archers can walk straight through the walls to shoot at the enemy backline, and ethereal + luck + air shield means that the enemy's return fire only has a ~3% chance of hitting them.  There's a reason I split Bernie off from the assault--the new Scourge King is in the neighborhood and has already reclaimed his home citadel. Foolishly, he left it with an absolute token defense.  Bernie would have won. And did.  So that's that. There will be a wrap-up update on Bernie's campaign... soon, and somewhat less soon I'll start posting a new run with the Cloud Lord.
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Oct 4, 2021 22:10
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What a fantastic conclusion as Bernie's ground game clearly overcame the Scourge King's constant replacements. Will you be including some of the scoregraphs and possibly screenshot of the various realms that your game spawned?
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Oct 4, 2021 22:43
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Nationalized. All of Elysium, nationalized.
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Oct 4, 2021 22:44
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Put up Gift of Health and Fata Morgana, Medicare and unions for all!
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Oct 4, 2021 22:56
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Bernicus Sanderius - Epilogue I never did find anything interesting in my underground exploration. It's a shame, as this is still the only time that I've actually gotten my hands on the magic shovel. Sadly, what we've seen is actually an improvement over CoE4's underground, which had an even higher proportion of solid rock : open spaces.  The complete Plane of Earth. There was a gateway out all along, but no tunnel from there to the Nexus portal in the center. Also it would have spat Bernie out underground, which still doesn't seem to have any natural connection to the surface.  I did charge another batch of ether warriors into the Void on the last turns; they are among a very few select units that can exist in the Void without going insane. They're not immune to being eaten by horrors, though.  Level 3 void caster with fear. It can summon additional horrors and has a gigantic confusion spell, plus meteor for direct damage. Also, regen on triple digit HP.  At no point do they manage to get it below 75% HP.  Just like Dominions, CoE gives you endgame graphs so you can get a snapshot of how the game went down. First is army size; the demonologist took an early lead with kobolds gradually overtaking them, only for Bernie to dunk both of them an immediately take a commanding lead. I'm not 100% sure what this graph is measuring--I don't think it can be raw unit count or else kobolds would have blown everyone else out of the water. Probably HP or some other general measure of actual army strength, which would explain the demonologist's rapid rise.  Number of recruitment sites. Bernie absolutely stomped everybody here. Virtually all recruitment sites are fortified (outside of edge cases like the Dryad Queen getting to use ancient forests as recruiting sites), so getting siege engines up and running quickly is a huge advantage. The big drop at the end is definitely the spirits crossing over from Hades and immediately overrunning a bunch of towers.  Income graph is always a bit wobbly due to seasonal effects, but again, Bernie dominates here to an even larger degree. I assume this is before AI modifiers but who knows, Bernie might actually have just been that rich.  The iron production graph is actually pretty competitive, up until Bernie conquered the kobolds' rich heartland he was solidly behind kobolds and scourge.  Most of the class-specific graphs aren't particularly interesting, since they're often unique to one or maybe two factions in any given game. This fungus graph does tell a bit of a story about how much the witch was struggling, since she spent noticeable stretches of the game with no income in her primary magic resource. Considering you get fungus from literally any forest or swamp, and also from the witch's home base, this paints a rather bleak picture!  Funnily enough, she still managed to break into necromancy right before she died. Given a little more time she might have made a comeback, or at least hung around a bit longer. As it is, it's impressive enough that she lasted as long as she did.  I think gems might be the most common magic resource, so the graph for them has a bit more to show. The warlock & illusionist did not do very well here. The illusionist has some excuse since map gen was unkind to him, but the warlock had plenty of mines around. He did die to commander loss and not citadel loss, so apparently he just overextended into everyone else's territory without grabbing the easy resources in his own neighborhood.  I'm not sure why trade really needs a graph, but: lol  Lifeforce, which is unique to the Scourge Lord. Unlike most resources lifeforce comes entirely from the Scourge Lord's ritual buildings; there aren't specific resource-generating sites that they need to find, they just put up pillars anywhere that's not already covered in desert or mountains and reap lifeforce. A big part of the faction's strength is their ability to strip-mine the planet for energy and outcompete most factions for resources, which the AI did not even remotely bother doing. They capped out at something like 7 or 8 times their starting income, which is... really bad. They should have been able to blow past that benchmark in like year 5 at the latest, and realistically much faster given the AI's income bonus. The pillars only cost gold & iron, too, so they don't even compete with the Scourge Lord's summoning rituals for resources. It doesn't help that they took their relatively meager lifeforce income and blew several thousand lifeforce on continually promoting new Scourge Kings. Every Scourge King promotion is equivalent to 8 heralds or 1 of their max level summons. Once Bernie got online it probably wouldn't have made much difference but there would have been a lot more pressure up until then and a longer, tougher slog back.  A look at the final map, with starting positions labeled. I also took the liberty of roughly sketching in where major battle fronts occurred, to help visualize the course of the campaign geographically. That was... a really goddamn lucky start, not gonna lie. Just having an entire peninsula to myself, with very few monster spawners and no borders with other factions, was an absolutely huge leg up especially compared to some of the more crowded factions. If the inlet between me and the illusionist did not exist... well, it probably wouldn't have changed anything to be honest, Bernie would have rolled them. It might have given the dryad queen a little more time to snowball. Definitely an interesting and unusually favorable layout for the continent, though. Usually it's just a shapeless vague oval/rectangle sorta shape with factions spaced fairly evenly around the perimeter. On top of the general oddness of the shape (and the luck it took for me to be the lone faction outside the main cluster), the topography of the center kept my expanding territory neatly isolated from the western factions: very dense forest & mountain ranges kept the demonologist from expanding eastward, the scourge lord was stuck in snowy hell and wasn't able to expand widely until quite late in the game, and the kobolds' route east was a long, barren, resourceless stretch of nothing that never really drew their interest. The two AIs on the opposite end of the continent also had pretty poorly matched start. If the witch and the warlock had had their start positions switched the endgame might have looked very different. This is all to say nothing of having the capital within a single screen of my starting point, on the opposite side of me from every enemy faction. I suppose that was balanced out a bit by having it be on an island with no way for the God-Emperor to jump over to the mainland; if Bernie was in the fight from the start this run would have been over in half the time tops. This also helps put the scope of the Scourge Lord's failure in perspective. Most of the southern deserts are natural, although you can see a not-quite-complete ring in the southwest where he had a pillar. Other than that, there's just not much desertification for how much territory he was contesting for so long. At this point in the game the upper-left corner of the map should be all desert, at a conservative estimate; a human scourge player that started there and didn't immediately get stomped by their neighbors would probably have most of the map well on the way to desert. Looking at how the game ended, I think it's pretty clear what happened. The rate-limiting factor on the pillars is iron, at 75 a pop... which means that before the Scourge Lord has enough iron saved up to buy a pillar, it has enough to buy a catapult or ship. There was easily 1000+ iron worth of catapults and ships sitting around in the Scourge Lord's remote, secure home territory. Had the AI saved up and funneled that iron into pillars they could have had twice as much or more lifeforce to work with, and then Bernie (or at least his armies) might almost have been in real trouble.
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Oct 6, 2021 18:52
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I do love painting maps my color, and enjoy being lazy enough to let the AI do the actual fighting. So this game is extremely my jam. Sadly, the game won't go on long enough for us to witness his Bernicus' ascension into lichdom to prolong his life.
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Oct 6, 2021 20:02
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Drakenel posted:I do love painting maps my color, and enjoy being lazy enough to let the AI do the actual fighting. So this game is extremely my jam. What need does God have for unlife? Immortality is clearly the superior state of being. Thank you for the Post-Game breakdown as well, the holy poopacy, you definitely did find yourself in a really good position to safely expand and a peninsula all to yourself for safe resources. If you hadn't ascended Bernie you could have potentially had a neverending wave of God-Empresses flying from your capital one at a time to stomp the baddies which would have been funny if not particularly creative. That being said, you can really see on the scoregraphs how the Senator's economic bonuses can get insanely large once decent map control is established. Between essentially endless legionnaires being spawned out of anything watchtower sized or larger and enough mages and ballistae to give heavy support it was really only a matter of time. In regards to the Army Strength graph I think you're correct that the graph records something like collective HP instead of numbers, hence why single large summons like say Greater Demons, can move the graph more than a whole horde of kobolds.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:24
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[Bernie] having achieved godhood only thing to achieve is... what exactly? I wonder if the Dominions trope of the true god staring at the void for too long will happen here too.
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Oct 10, 2021 07:30
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Banemaster posted:[Bernie] having achieved godhood only thing to achieve is... what exactly? The senator is unusual for CoE, because he's the only one who can achieve godhood, Dominions style.
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Oct 10, 2021 08:45
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Well to be fair, technically we have some Final Seals Breaking to show that at least someone has done the God, Got Tired of It schtick.
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Oct 11, 2021 09:57
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 And we're back! This time I'm trying something a bit different. In order to reduce the chance of AI suicide Illwinter recommends using partnered AI players with the "Common cause" setting, meaning that they don't die until the entire team is out of commanders or citadels. If one faction loses all their citadels and commanders they're still basically out, but if their teammate is still alive they can theoretically recover from losing all commanders (by recruiting more at citadels) or losing all citadels (by capturing more using their commanders.)  The Cloud Lord's summary is unusually succinct and to the point. It's a magic gem-based faction; while previous gem factions have always had somewhat balanced gem use, Cloud Lords are really focused on air gems (diamonds) above all others. They still collect and have uses for the rest of them, but their preference is a lot more distinct than other gem factions.  Welcome to our new home in the clouds. The Cloud Lord's starting citadel is not guaranteed to be connected to any other clouds of note, which honestly is probably a plus. Terrestrial enemies can still wander up the mountain peak but it's definitely a lot more secure than most classes can expect their start to be.  Cloud Lord recruits are a bit unusual in that they're very cheap in iron and sometimes gold, but they cost gems. On the one hand, this is a pretty bad use for gems compared to a lot of ritual summons; on the other hand, being able to convert gems into better troops at any citadel is quite handy, especially early on.   Our basic troops. The Cloud Lord's descriptions are some of my favorite in the game; some of the Scourge King's flavor text is a bit on the nose for my taste, but these guys strike just the right note for me.   For that matter, here are our starting commanders. The Storm Captain's description was what I had in mind when I picked the leader's name, but oh well. It is a bit odd that the descriptions keep harping about how stupid the Airya are given that they have perfectly normal magic resistance. Illwinter is definitely not above basing descriptions on metagame factors, though, and the Cloud Lord AI is breathtakingly suicidal.  Down on the ground there are plenty of goodies for us right off the bat. While there are some plain gem deposits lying around in certain terrains, most gems come from mines, each of which yields a randomized type and quantity of gem. This unreliability is why gem factions always have some use for all the gem types, since you can very easily wind up starved for one specific type. To the south is a Gold Stream worth 4 gold and 3 emeralds per turn, and there's an iron mine visible just to the east too (it was revealed from above; you get excellent visibility of the ground from the sky layer.) The big mine has 15 dwarves on it though which are likely to be more than a match for our starting army. This iron mine also has 15 defenders, but 1 tough enemy and 14 worthless goblins strikes me as a better prospect. It does look like we are very far north on the map; there are some tiles here that are snowy even in summer, meaning this whole area is probably going to be snowbound the rest of the year. For most classes this would suck pretty badly, but when your whole faction flies you don't need to care.  My storm captain goes flying off to explore more of the sky. He can only hover in open space for one turn before getting tired, but it sure as hell beats slogging through forests for early exploration.  I decide to try my luck on the coal mine. A third of the goblins die right off the bat.  Two turns in most of the goblins are gone, and the troll is already half dead.  The troll has a sweep attack that can cleave through multiple fodder troops in a single attack, but God's Perfect Himbo started with the best storm spell possible for this situation.  Speaking of things that are vulnerable to single high damage spell hits...  The ooze does have half resistance to lightning, but half of a Thunder Strike is a lot of goddamn damage.  The bigger issue is the ooze's acid shield, causing the spearmen to quickly start killing themselves on it.  The shockwave from Thunder Strike finishes the job on a couple of them, as well as splitting the ooze in two. It's a neat gimmick but not terribly impactful; it does mean it gets to attack twice per round instead of once but really the acid shield was doing most of the work anyhow.  Well, there goes the entire front line. On the plus side, 2 fire gems/turn means recruiting a batch of Dawn Guards every 5 turns, which is pretty sweet by the standards of non-Senator factions for this point in the game.  I do some exploring while waiting for reinforcements. Having two Ancient Forests so close to my mountain peak is going to get obnoxious in a hurry.  After sweeping the sky around the home cloud, the Storm Captain drops down to explore this little bay and spots an air gem mine   White kobolds are all lightningproof, which is not a huge issue since a good infantry unit can take on like 5 of them apiece. That stone drake might present a problem; it's not lightningproof, but I'm not sure the combat AI is smart enough to target the one unit that's not immune to lightning spells so it's likely to be painful.  I get to 50 gold before I get to 10 rubies, so our first reinforcements are these guys. At 5 sapphires per batch of 5 they're not cheap, but this is a lot of armor for a mobile unit. As an added bonus they have the Ice Protection trait so in snowy terrain that gets bumped to a whopping 3 armor, although 6 HP still doesn't go as far as you might hope.  That's still not enough troops to tackle any harder fights, so for now I focus on mopping up animals before they steal our precious mines. Unfortunately, one other problem with the iceclads is that they (and the rest of the Cloud Lord's conventional troops) are not lightningproof.  A few more turns gets us our first batch of Dawn Guards. That description is, uh, a thing. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan. They do get magic weapons with a decent damage die and slightly more HP than the iceclads, as well as fire resistance, but 1 armor? Most of the time these guys aren't really going to be noticeably any better than generic human swordsmen. On the other hand, if you don't have any use for rubies they're half-price human swordsmen that fly. Getting 2 batches of premium troops in less than 10 turns is an extremely strong start only made possible by the Cloud Lord's gems-for-recruits mechanic.  With a buffed front line, I decide it's time to take on the dorfs. It may only be an earth gem mine but 3 gems is still a lot, especially on top of a big chunk of gold.  They don't have a lot of arbalests, but they hurt (not as much as my own friendly fire, though.) The upshot is that they reload so slowly they only get to fire one round in three. They barely shoot faster than ballistae, and they sure don't do ballista damage.  Having a flying front line tends to lead to weird battle lines.  It's messy and a lot of birds die, but it works.  While waiting for the Storm Captain to ferry reinforcements I decide that my depleted forces are still good enough to knock over a lightly defended hamlet. I was correct, but the last archer manages to get himself killed by a lucky sling stone.  With reinforcements in tow the Cloud Lord goes to take on the ancient forest to the south.  This will accomplish precisely nothing since I can't capture or burn forests, but it should at least thin out the wildlife temporarily.  I spot this thing wandering around outside the other Ancient Forest. I'm going to employ an advanced strategy of not going anywhere near it and hoping it wanders away. On the plus side, if I wasn't playing the Cloud Lord my starting citadel would be sitting there for this thing to randomly wander into. I guess it still is, but the approach is a lot narrower.  I may have taken a lot of losses on the dwarf mine, but 3 earth gems per turn gets me a lot of ammo for recruiting these guys. They get 2 armor and, for some reason, pierce resistance; they lose the shields that the Dawn Guards have, but an extra point of armor + 50% damage from piercing attacks is almost strictly an upgrade. On top of that, they get two attacks that combine for way more damage than the Dawn Guards' magic sword (except perhaps against very high armor targets.) On top of that, earth gems are almost completely useless to the Cloud Lord otherwise. I will eventually want fire rubies for summons, but Dusk Guards are basically the only thing you have to spend emeralds on so they're guilt-free purchases.  Case in point, here's our starting rituals. Shape Clouds spends 5 air & earth gems to turn a space of open sky into a permanent cloud space. It's theoretically handy for creating safe spots above fluid fronts for armies to retreat to when needed, but considerably less handy than summoning things to win battles with so you don't have to worry about having hiding spots in the sky. This is the only Cloud Lord ritual that uses emeralds... well, sort of. The Cloud Lord's alchemy ritual requires an even spread of rubies/sapphires/emeralds, but since there are other rituals that consume rubies & sapphires the emeralds are rarely going to be the rate limiting factor. At any rate, suffice to say I plan on hiring a lot of Dusk Guards. Lesser Sky Summoning summons some random birds (not, like, magic ones, just birds) or a very small number of air elementals. The elementals are nice, but they cannot heal outside of the Plane of Air so even with ethereal they don't last all that long before fizzling out. I probably should be using sky summoning some to get the ball rolling, but spending air gems is very painful since they have so many more important uses for the Cloud Lord. With such excellent secondary gem production from the start, I'm going to try to get by on gem recruits and save the air gems for better things.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:34
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Some anthropologist at the magic university has her/himself a love for Harlequin novels and
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Oct 12, 2021 17:00
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 21:00 |
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On the other hand, the full-sized Air Elementals at least are perfectly happy to just sit where they start the battle at and spam their lightning strike. So despite the never heals issue they'll generally last a long, long time assuming you have a front line.
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Oct 12, 2021 18:02
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