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Philthy posted:Picked this up on Steam from the half off sale, along with Dominions whatever. I'm really enjoying it! The thread title totally nails it. It feels like an old Empire game I played on my Amiga in the 90s. I had no idea the battles were all automated, which makes this even better because I usually suck rear end at that part. I do wish I could arrange the formations, though. If the hell gate's on an island surrounded by ocean, it shouldn't be too much of a problem - though you might want to give it a very wide berth during winter, if the ice forms a bridge to the mainland. Only some demons can swim or fly, and if a demon army has even a single unit that can't do either of those, it'll just hang around on the island forever (until the aforementioned ice-bridge forms, at which point, well, all hell breaks loose  ).While Dominions has spells and items that allow commanders to safely escape from combat, CoE does not. If you won that fight, that specific dryad queen is dead. However, you haven't actually defeated that AI until you either capture every one of its strongholds/recruitment spots or kill all of its commanders. Dryad Queen is kind of notorious for having tons of commanders and freespawn troops after a certain point, so that'll be a bit of a grind, I'm afraid. On the bright side, you do immediately win the game when all rival players/AIs are eliminated - so if the demon horde pours onto the mainland in the winter, you might be able to just hunker down in your strongholds while they and the Dryad Queen's forces thin one another out. The inferno portal is essentially a Doomsday event - those demon armies really don't gently caress around. If you can't close the gate (which tends to be REALLY hard unless you do it very promptly, as the demons in Inferno are constantly rushing towards the gate and will thus come pouring into Elysium almost every turn), "just bulk up the garrisons and outlive everyone else" is often a perfectly viable strategy. Baron is particularly good at that, with his longbowmen, tower guards, and big batches of free troops. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 18:17
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Philthy posted:Also, I was fighting the Dryad queen, she is the last AI I need to defeat and she was losing and then disappeared from the fight? I won the battle, but she was no where to be found. Now her army is coming out of the woodwork. Do they have an ability to teleport all over the freaking map and is this going to be an endless game of whack-a-mole? Forest stealth and free spawn means it will be an endless game of whack a mole. As the baron faction, you’ll kind of be reliant on independent mages and wizards. Keep an eye out for pyromancers or anything that sounds fire related and you might be able to permanently raze forests and ancient forests. Thing to keep in mind is burning stuff is tied to specific spells, so if your obvious fire mage can’t burn forests, just buy a few level one spells from the library or hope to buy something like an ever burning torch.
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Aug 31, 2023 19:26
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Ah, yah, I did pick up a mage that allows me to burn forests. Should I just be burning all the forest spots I claim, or just the ancient forests? Also, I basically just need to take the Dryad main fortress and that's the end of it, even if they have armies all over? I have a feeling I know where that might be and I'll work my way over that direction once I'm done with work. Yeah, I'm playing the Baron of Baron faction and I mostly load up on mounts and a crap ton of ranged behind them. Seems to work pretty well. I did run into some big rear end stealthed demon thing with a fire whip. It ate 1/4 screen full of knights before it fell. I got the whip now, tho. Philthy fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 19:55
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Philthy posted:Ah, yah, I did pick up a mage that allows me to burn forests. Should I just be burning all the forest spots I claim, or just the ancient forests? You either need to kill all commanders or capture all recruitment sites they own. For dryads that's going to be the usual castles etc. but also ancient forests. Burning ancient forests/dryad groves is going to be your main objective. Burning up regular forests will hurt their economy but that's more of a long term strategy if you find yourself deadlocked and unable to make progress against them, if you're winning fights then you probably just want to focus your efforts on getting fire mages to their ancient forests.
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Aug 31, 2023 19:59
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For what it's worth, the Dryad Queen gets several expensive upgrade options for their regular troops if they capture the right kind of human citadel like the capitol. And if you can't burn their ancient forests, let alone -hold and capture- them because whatever faction you're playing doesn't use them, it may be more useful to roll on through and kick them out than hold the tile and let the other ancient forests go un harassed. Send some useless hero or extra captain with a small force to walk around the woods after the fact just to liberate a few normal forests. While they do have an almost unlimited supply of herbs, there's a pretty large investment in magical infrastructure for each of them... and if you take out whatever leaders they have there that can be a huge decrease in spawn variety and quantity until they shuffle from other duties/buy some new commanders into the area, even if the AI's got some difficulty level finances going on the Dryad Queen is still a typical 'wait for offer' type of faction.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:08
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Sweet. I burned the ancient forests and planted guards on the ones on the other end of the map, found a few towers and filled them with archers while my main commanders ended up finding the sacred grove and wiped them off the map and winning the game. The portal to hell was on a 2 space island in the middle of nowhere. No real demons on the map except the super tough one I killed that gave me a kickass flame whip. Anyway, fun game! I'll probably try a pile of factions and then start sliding the difficulty up a bit.
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Sep 1, 2023 04:08
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Last time I played Baron, I really wanted to hang onto Ancient Forests for those special conscription units. I imagine that is a lot harder playing against enemies who want to grab herb income, though. Dryad has lots of tools for putting up fast/efficient defenders in those tiles once they claim them, so you're probably not exchanging resources at a favorable rate if you garrison it.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:35
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Yeah unless you're playing an herb/fungus faction, from the moment you first see a Dryad Queen army, you pretty much want to start burning down ancient forests (or turning them into oak golems I guess) at the earliest opportunity. If you can do so during summer and let forest fires wipe out some of the surrounding forest tiles, so much the better. Trying to win a give-and-take war of attrition against lategame DQ is a nightmare unless you outright destroy the nodes she needs.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:41
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Scourge Lords can surround an ancient forest with obelisks, since it won't get turned to desert
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Sep 2, 2023 18:23
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The baron is one of the best factions in the game. If you get bored and decide to take the fight to Hell, go capture every cloud town/citadel you can. You'll get phantasmal units in the yearly conscription. Useful for a lot of things, but really useful because all of their weapons are magical, which fucks up a lot of the endgame stuff and demons in particular IIRC IMO you also can't go wrong with blood. High Priestess has really good archers and very good (although sorta pricey) summons from start to finish. Priest King has a lot of different ways to get rolling, and the mid-tier/endgame summons are wrecking machines. Also check out the Troll King. One  and gets really powerful when Mom shows up
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Sep 2, 2023 18:45
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The funniest part of troll is his hilariously small MR, making him easy to charm. Playing IIRC Priestess and charming him during the starting turns gave me nice powerboost.
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Sep 2, 2023 19:07
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My tip if you don't have a way to burn forests yet, I leave behind some injured or a small weak contingent of units on the great trees that spawn mooses and stuff, keeps me from having to track down wildlife. Anyone know of any nice mods? I use QuickStart, Quiet Summon Sounds, the conquest of Elysium total overhaul, The total overhaul makes all the factions a bit more interesting while keeping the theme
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Sep 2, 2023 19:18
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I used to play Quickstart but I played with a goon one time and they said not to use it so I stopped. Tbh it does what it says, but I dont know that it makes any specific game more fun/winnable. It just sorta pushes problems around.
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Sep 2, 2023 21:35
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This game really needs a "PvE" mode, fighting the other factions is the worst part of it. Or maybe it already has one I just never found.
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Sep 2, 2023 21:41
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There's a mod called "The Bystander" that basically adds a dud AI player with only a bunch of immobile extremely powerful defensive units that just exists so you can invade hell and die to the antpocalypse. It will also die to the antpocalypse but that's a general game problem.
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Sep 2, 2023 21:44
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Ah yes, the antpocalypse is truly horrifying if you need actual settlements. Had a game where I had a defensive line keeping everything behind it safe and the rest of Elysium was just ants.
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Sep 2, 2023 22:17
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Seeing this pop up in my bookmarks with a bunch of new posts inspired me to play some more. I've been messing around with the dwarf queen, and once I resigned myself to slow armies and learned to, if at all possible, only do siege battles, she owns. Nothing like a truly fearsome army just melting away before they can even do anything under the withering fire of a dozen+ enchanted ballistae. And heck, the enchanted armor guards are chunky enough that even field barriers tend to work out OK. The show armies of course sucks, but unslowed winter travel + near-instantaneous travel between mines helps a lot. A "bite and hold" strategy of taking one fortified settlement/mine at a time stubs effective against even the strongest enemies. A small dumb thing that screwed me once was having ~200 workers present for a defensive siege - my ballistae could reach anything during the siege rounds... I didn't expect to like the faction, but once I figured it out, it's very satisfying. A shame the magic support is so random, though.
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Sep 7, 2023 16:16
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The trick to Dwarf Queen is that she's really really good at constantly scouting around and opportunistically snagging vulnerable nodes, because she can spit out expendable little patrol squads both cheaply and often. As soon as you to catch on to the idea of only ever fielding a) those expendable harassment squads or b) massive invincible siege-and-conquer doomstacks (rarely bothering with anything in between), her style of play suddenly feels a lot more intuitive. This also helps with your "too many workers" issue - just make more captains and send your workers out five or ten at a time to bully levies or whatever. What's especially neat about her is that her lategame strategy is basically just to keep doing the same thing, but with the ability to offset almost anything that could hard-counter it. Physical-immune enemies? Throw a doomstack full of enchanted ranged units at them; nothing is immune to the magical dwarven gun line. Great warlock of fire? Bulk up your defensive siege doomstack (you can always benefit from more Really Big Crossbows) and then, if necessary, chase him around with a large harassment force featuring a bunch of fire-enchanted guards; either he attacks you at home and gets eradicated by 20,000 siege-phase bolts before he gets to take a single action, or he eventually has to contend with a mobile gunline covering behind lots of angry fire-resistant superheavy infantry. Meanwhile, you're taking more mines and gaining more iron and more gems and more dwarves. There's almost no problem that Dwarf Queen can't solve by either throwing a really good siege force at it, or doing some gem rituals and then throwing a really good magic siege force at it. Now, if you ever want to try a faction that also likes to take and upgrade mines but in a much more complicated, drastically more micromanagement-heavy, and significantly harder-to-win-with way, I heartily recommend Enchanter
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Sep 7, 2023 17:06
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I tried out enchanter last time I was in a CoE mood, and it was really cool+fun, but I struggled to do well.
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Sep 7, 2023 22:53
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My personal favourite is Illusionist. Early-game, Illusion creatures are cheap and plentiful for how many you can get, and they can climb over walls, though they are fragile and rely on getting past magic resistance to deal damage. Mid-game, you have near-unparalleled mobility thanks to being able to teleport between mirrors, and late-game you can just mirror clone your top illusionist over and over again, and in between being able to teleport your armies anywhere and nigh-infinite commanders, it's exceptionally hard for enemy armies to finish you off. Plus, there's always the small but notable chance of flipping a powerful enemy unit early-game with your confusion spells. Their main weakness late-game is the dependence on mirrors, which can really screw you over once other factions start loading up on armies of artillery or battlefield-wide wrecking spells, which can destroy all your mirrors before they get their spells or creatures off.
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Sep 8, 2023 04:01
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This thread convinced me to pick this up and I have been enjoying it so far. I love dominion, but honestly cannot commit myself to a game I need to play daily for a month. I was a bit surprised by how short the ritual list is compared to dominion, but slowly getting a sense for things.
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Sep 14, 2023 19:59
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The Moon Monster posted:This game really needs a "PvE" mode, fighting the other factions is the worst part of it. Or maybe it already has one I just never found. I wrote about this somewhere a pair of times... I guess it was in the Dominions thread. I agree, the game would be better as strategy RPG/roguelike game, maybe a bit inspired in King's Bounty, with your army roaming around the map, of leveling it up, instead of the faction vs faction that just serve to show the problems in AI, pathfinding, and fighting for territory with the current movement and tile system is an pain in the rear end.
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Sep 14, 2023 20:29
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Have been messing around with a couple nations and man does it take a while to get a sense for what you need to do. Like for the Pale Ones I didn't realize you need to summon till you get a grub if you actually want to explore Agatha. I have been enjoying the races that give you armies that do their own poo poo, Kobolds and El. I was curious, is there any race built around beaters earlier on outside trolls? Single stacks that cap alone and that you try to kit out?
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Sep 19, 2023 21:25
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Turin Turambar posted:I wrote about this somewhere a pair of times... I guess it was in the Dominions thread. I agree, the game would be better as strategy RPG/roguelike game, maybe a bit inspired in King's Bounty, with your army roaming around the map, of leveling it up, instead of the faction vs faction that just serve to show the problems in AI, pathfinding, and fighting for territory with the current movement and tile system is an pain in the rear end. Yeah, the whole system isn't perfect but the (very) slow movement is the most painful.
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Sep 19, 2023 22:14
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ShimmyGuy posted:Have been messing around with a couple nations and man does it take a while to get a sense for what you need to do. Like for the Pale Ones I didn't realize you need to summon till you get a grub if you actually want to explore Agatha. I have been enjoying the races that give you armies that do their own poo poo, Kobolds and El. I was curious, is there any race built around beaters earlier on outside trolls? Single stacks that cap alone and that you try to kit out? How do you feel about mods? Because the Dynast mod fits right into that. Even if it does take a while for equipment slots to unlock. Pale Ones and Trolls are the main beater races. Necromancers and the Warlock can eventually summon solo combatants but it takes a while.
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Sep 20, 2023 04:36
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Enchanter can eventually field some pretty solid big chungus assbeaters, but they're all ultimately expendable. Except clay golems. Those guys are good as hell
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Sep 20, 2023 05:22
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There are factions where armies can be built around single superpowered units, though you tend not to get those early on for balance reasons. The High Priestess can do a pretty good job of getting early-game doomstacks up and running, because they have rituals that allow them to permanently degrade settlements in exchange for cannibal giants, which are very strong and cheap for their cost and can steamroll over most opposition at the time you get them, though they tend to fall off against proper mid-game units.
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Sep 20, 2023 06:51
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Okay, rereading the post you like stupid armies. Ironically the best stupid army was the 40k tyranids one. Yes the entire mod was an ill conceived mess. Yes all the different resistances made no sense. Yes the balance was totally borked for everyone but the tyranids. It was still rad to play a herb/fungus/corpse faction where herbs summon controlled units and fungus summons stupid versions. Or vise versa its been a while. The instinctive sticking to forests meant there was a real sense of slowly overtaking the planet, especially in competition to the neutral tyranids.
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Sep 20, 2023 19:06
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I kind of like Enchanters because it always feels like I'm playing as a Captain Planet villain when I'm playing one. For some reason, permanently destroying the environment left and right is really fun!
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Oct 11, 2023 19:10
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habituallyred posted:How do you feel about mods? Because the Dynast mod fits right into that. Even if it does take a while for equipment slots to unlock. That sounds cool, but...where is it?
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Mar 26, 2024 03:24
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c5XboDI9R6eXmkktm57UEEOV0OC2Uw3l/view My bad, its never made the jump from 4 to 5. And the change from battle lines to the open map nerfed most units compared to the 3 version.
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Mar 26, 2024 06:20
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I hope we get a conquest of Elysium 6 shortly, they usually drop one like a year after the new dominions right? I bought dominions 4 and never really played it, and keep getting tempted by new ones, but I probably won't play those either. Elysium 3-5 is dope
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Mar 26, 2024 12:41
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Being a weirdo that has put hundreds of hours of single player on dominions/coe, it seems to me that coe needs more work to make a jump to a new version. Something along the lines of more flexible movement and the real-time combat changed they made for dominion's 5? Maybe more of a late game potential for more classes? I really like the idea of playing coe. Then I'm many turns in and feeling off about it, so I restart.
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Mar 26, 2024 17:15
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habituallyred posted:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c5XboDI9R6eXmkktm57UEEOV0OC2Uw3l/view Well, I still have CoE4 installed on my laptop so let's go
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Mar 26, 2024 17:30
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I’m only three quarters joking here, but revolutionary feature for CoE6: gamepad support. Not steam deck support but actually built from the ground up game pad and steam deck support.
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Mar 27, 2024 07:36
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Definitely would move more units, There was a mobile version (coe2?) but I don't think it ever updated to run on modern android.
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Mar 27, 2024 11:41
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Quaint Quail Quilt posted:Definitely would move more units, i think mobile got up to coe3? to add - coe6 needs more interaction with the world. Make spells/items that change more tilesets, make an auto-boat item, have better/longer interactive quests, better ways to purchase items/maybe smith them yourself? also some balance to the world-loving endgame. Having a meteor drop across the map or a doorway to hell opening shouldn't be the nearly-automatic loss they are now
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Mar 28, 2024 20:35
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And probably make the ants their own factions so other neutrals actually murder them, and give all classes (and some neutrals probably) various ways to nuke the anthills.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:41
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Next CoE needs a single player mode where it's just you vs. the world and you don't need to bother with AI "players".
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Mar 28, 2024 22:55
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SIGSEGV posted:And probably make the ants their own factions so other neutrals actually murder them, and give all classes (and some neutrals probably) various ways to nuke the anthills. Few things fill me with dread the way spotting an ant quern moving around when hitting end turn. It is a drop everything redirect all forces situation.
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Mar 28, 2024 23:20
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