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 What is this? The Conquest of Elysium series is the sister series of perennial goon favorite Dominions, the flagship products of the lovable pair of misfit Swedes known as Illwinter Game Design. It may not look like much, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for by being annoying, arbitrary, and unbalanced. Honestly it's not so much a game so much as it is a random bullshit generator. If it took itself seriously it would probably just be obnoxious and not worth anyone's time, but Illwinter is fully aware that this is the dumb game where deer randomly murder your militia and lean into the goofiness of it all. It's still very much an acquired taste, but can be amusing to gently caress around in. Any other questions you may have about the game will definitely not be answered by the breathtaking trailer. What's new in CoE 5?  The previous game literally expanded the CoE universe by adding several extra dimensions that you could travel to. CoE5 fleshes out some of the existing planes and adds several new ones, most of which are largely pointless except as places for various summons to hang around until they're brought into play. This time around there are boats, allowing factions that don't have naturally amphibious units to explore the oceans (and possibly beyond.) Also, you can now occasionally buy random magic items, making it much easier to get your hands on special equipment. Mercenary troop offers are also more common and scale with the number of towns you control. The UI has also been rearranged and slightly improved, with new features like autorecruit and a "battle reports" option that gives you a Dominions-style start-of-turn summary that lets you view battles at your leisure. There are also three new factions: Kobolds (D&D-style), Cloud Lord (Caelum knockoffs), and Scourge Lord (Dark Sun defilers with... unique fluff.) How will this LP be run? I will be showing off screenshot summaries of several playthroughs to show off a good portion of the game. I do ask that readers please avoid spoiling content that has not shown up yet. If you want to talk about random cool stuff in the game, there's an active thread in Games. List of updates Senator Bernicus Sanderius Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Epilogue Sidebar: Combat mechanics God's Perfect Himbo Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Epilogue Pun-Pun Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Dec 30, 2021 |
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Sep 9, 2021 19:59
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 1 For this run, I'll be playing the Senator. It's not new or flashy or complicated, just a strong straightforward faction to bludgeon my way through the game with. Most factions are based around spellcasters harvesting special resources to fuel their magic. The Senator doesn't really use any of that, just buying armies with gold. Lots and lots of gold. (Note that I recorded this a couple of versions ago, there have been a few new features for the Senator since then. Nothing terribly earth-shattering, but there are a couple goodies I'm missing out on here.)  I'm playing on a Huge map, during the Empire era for thematic reasons, with a decent population of AI factions that have been cranked up to moderately high difficulty. At Marquis, every AI gets 233% as much income as a human player; the AI is quite bad, so this is not actually much of a challenge. It turns out that the AI income bonuses have been ratcheted down since CoE4 and in retrospect I probably should have bumped it up another notch or two. Marquis is still plenty enough to pressure weaker factions, of which the Senator is definitely not.  Speaking of which, let's meet our Senator, the lovable populist Bernicus Sanderius. He is not a physically imposing figure but his enlightened economic policies will reform the hidebound plutocracy of the Empire and bring prosperity to all.  The Senator has a very strong start, holding a fortified outpost and a town. That might not sound very impressive, but Elysium is designed as a gritty dark ages fantasy setting and a real town is a big deal. Even in the heavily settled eras like Empire, most of the settlements on the map are going to be tiny villages. With Bernie's income bonus I'm getting 9 gold/turn from the start, which is many times what most factions would start with. Looking around, there's an island (probably?) off the coast with a few juicy looking mines. Mines supply iron, which is important for recruiting troops of any quality, but I'm probably not going to be able to get over there without finding a port and sinking a lot of resources into building ships (which wasn't even possible in previous Conquest of Elysium titles.) Closer to home, there is an apparently undefended hamlet although it looks like it might be on the tip of this peninsula.  Here's a look at our starting army. Most factions get less than half this many troops, although they also start with 1-2 mages, so it's not a huge edge for Bernie. Still, they're mostly quality troops and the mage factions tend to run out of meatshields a lot faster than the Senator does. I've got two commanders, so I split the army in half, taking an even mix of troops for each (there are 3 different grades of legionary here and I don't want to leave either commander with all the dregs.)  Bernie takes the nearby hamlet without resistance and spies both a full fledged city as well as a port. Looks like I'm not on a peninsula after all, and having port access means I might get to those mines faster than I thought. It's still a fortified location with plenty of defenders, though, so I can't just roll in. I can absolutely roll over these tiny settlements in the way, though, and that income adds up quickly.  Our centurion explores to the south. Not much of interest over here, just another tiny hamlet.  Next turn brings this announcement. Very few factions have the option to buy commanders whenever they want, you generally need to wait for random recruitment opportunities like this one. I could theoretically hire him and set him exploring, but with no troops to back him up he would be liable to die pretty easily and leave me out a big chunk of change.  Speaking of which, let's look at our recruitment options in general. Thanks to the hamlet Bernie liberated last turn we already have enough money to recruit 5 more Velites, our weakest troop. They don't have any armor and they have very average human stats, but they do have shields and javelins. Most factions' basic recruitment is Spearmen that cost 50 gold for 5 with basically the same stats and worse equipment, and also their income is so much worse than ours that it takes most of the first year before they could afford any troops at all. In the long run they more than make up the difference with summons, but the Senator can snowball very quickly compared to most factions. If we had some iron and a tiny bit more gold we could recruit Hastati, who have much better stats with more armor and better shields and are still slightly cheaper than the vastly inferior generic troops that most factions are saddled with. They're going to be the Senator's bread and butter troop for much of the game. Princepes get a slight stat bump in exchange for more gold and iron; they're noticeably less cost effective than Hastati, but at some point we're going to be swimming in money so in the late game there's often no reason not to spam them. Triarii have better stats, better armor, and better weapons, but in addition to the massive iron premium they have the Slow tag and take forever to get anywhere. If you're going to spend a lot of iron on slow troops, ballistas are a better investment. Siege weapons in CoE have a unique mechanic: when fights occur in forts siege weapons get a bunch of devastating but inaccurate free attacks before the fight starts. The default siege engine is the catapult; as with the Senator's other troops, the ballista is superior in a number of respects: -You get twice as many for the same price -Ballista are smaller -Ballista get to keep firing (very slowly) during the battle proper, whereas catapults are too unwieldy to do anything outside of the siege phase They're still slow and cost ridiculous amounts of iron, but they're such a huge force multiplier when attacking or defending a fort that they're worth it. This is especially true for the Senator, who doesn't have a lot of ranged troops.  Case in point: here's a detailed look at that city that Bernie spotted. That's about 30 arrows in my face every turn and other than one javelin shot per legionary I can't really do anything about it until I chop my way through the gates with shortswords. I'm definitely not going to be able to do much about this city until I get some ballistas.  In contrast, here's what the hamlet north of it is defended by. These are about as bad a troop as you're going to see, at least for humans.  They're so weak that Bernie's half of the starting army simply deletes them without a fight. This is a more or less new mechanic for CoE5; previous games had a few scouting-only units that were autodestroyed if any enemies attacked them, which has now been expanded to cover any ridiculously lopsided fight against a couple weak units.  At this point I could move on to the pirate port, but although the defenses aren't as ludicrous as the city it still has crossbows on the walls and I don't have enough troops to batter my way through. So Bernie is just going to continue exploring up the coast.  Meanwhile the centurion attacks the hamlet to the south. This one has real defenders, so I have to actually fight. It's not really much of a fight, though. The opening javelin salvo practically wipes out the defenders and the survivor gets stabbed to death in short order.  The centurion goes on to discover a second hamlet, with no defenders this time. My income is starting to really ramp up.  I still don't have any iron, which it occurs me I should probably do something about. Bernie's starting town gives 1 unit of trade, which lets you effectively reallocate some of your income. It's not much, but trading for 1 iron/turn still means a batch of Hastati every 5 turns which is better than most factions are managing this early.  Next turn Bernie pushes on to attack yet another hamlet, and spots a pirate-free port.  This one's not really any more feasible than the pirates right now, though.  Our centurion spots the first roaming animals we've seen all game. CoE is infamous for populating the world with wandering wildlife that will randomly conquer your villages and murder troops in small numbers; we're pretty fortunate that we started in an area without any, although it helps that the Empire era is a bit less wild than most. The brown savannah to the south also tells me that we're approaching the warmer souther portion of the continent. Warmer climates mean less snow, which is good, and more deserts and jungles, which is bad.  The crows have too much HP for me to overrun them but unsurprisingly a large flock of birds is not a real fight for a loving Roman Legion. I didn't even get a chance to get a mid-battle screenshot before it was over.  Three stout peasants with weapons are also not a real fight for a Roman Legion.  I also got some extremely interesting recruitment offers. The Reveler is a special commander for the Senator faction with some extremely useful abilities; I'm very tempted to pick them up as I don't know how long it will take to get another one, but they're not particularly relevant just yet. More importantly there are two batches of mercenary archers available, one at the standard price of 50 for 5 and another at the extremely good price of 61 for 10. I absolutely can't afford to pass up this sort of firepower at this stage in the game, with some legionaries in front that's probably enough to take one or both of those ports.  The newly recruited archers show up all the way back at the outpost and are going to be stuck there until I can get a commander to pick them up. Having archers on your starting fort is a good way to deter wandering deer or bandits from unceremoniously conquering your faction too, although our starting neighborhood seems pretty safe right now. Bernie seems to have discovered the northern coast and is going to have to double back down south, but I decide that it's important enough to bring the centurion back up to join forces with Bernie. Winter will be falling soon, too, which will gently caress up most of the map with snow and make movement agonizingly slow.  Bernie steamrolls through another coastal hamlet and discovers a minor gold mine. I would have preferred something with iron income, although that's a very decent chunk of change even before Bernie's income bonus.  These guys are tough enough that I don't really want to take them on with Bernie's force anyhow. That's enough damage to oneshot most of my troops, and that sweep attack means overkill damage gets spread around. On an unlucky roll they could kill 2 legionaries a turn.  I try to go around and run into a moose. With more forests come more wild animals.  Moose are pretty tough, but with a 10:1 numerical advantage they go down pretty quickly, and I'd rather not have this wandering around my territory.  I also get some other interesting and highly relevant recruitment offers. Theoretically I could have just bought another centurion and saved myself the turns marching my starting centurion back, but more interesting is the mercenary catapult. While catapults are generally awful I can hire this one with absolutely no iron cost, a huge boost at this stage of the game. With 10 archers and a catapult I can roll those ports easy; the city is still going to be a tough nut to crack but this will definitely give me a leg up towards taking it.  The moose charges into Bernie's line and scatters them with its trample attack, but a dozen javelins take a huge chunk out of it and it gets mopped up quickly.  On his way back home Bernie spots a graveyard haunted by spoopy ghost warriors. Graveyards will poop out wandering undead enemies until you capture them, so I'd definitely like to take care of this, but ghosts can be rough for mundane troops and there may be even nastier defenders that I can't see. Meanwhile the centurion has picked up the ranged troops from the outpost and is ready to head to the port. Theoretically I could have hired some more hastati to bulk up his line but I'd rather save my money for now.  While I work on maneuvering my stacks together I get the first mage offer of the game. Renatae are one of the Senator's special mages and they... kind of suck. There is a special use for them later on, but until then they're stuck as 1st level spellcasters with a weak type of magic.  Instead, for 68 gold I get 10 of these guys. They're definitely worse than my legionaries, but not by much, and the length of their pikes lets them hang out in the 2nd row and still attack in melee. Triarii can do the same thing, but they're vastly more resource intensive and slower and the extra defense they have is not super relevant for guys hanging out in the back of your melee formation. I definitely prefer the mercenary pikes.  It's time.  The catapult does its thing. The targeting could be better, but it does take out two crossbow pirates before they can even move.  After the catapults go another crossbow dies to arrow fire, at which point the defenders say gently caress it and throw open the gates. I'm not 100% sure what triggers this; there are still a few crossbows that can take potshots from the wall, but with Bernie having several times the volume of fire available that's probably a losing battle.  Not that there's anything resembling a winning battle for them either way.  It wasn't a free victory, but all in all pretty cheap.  Bernie is now the proud owner of a port. It's worth a decent chunk of income and adds another point of trade (which Bernie's common-sense trade policices boost even further), and in addition to being another recruiting site I can buy ships here. They're very iron-intensive for a unit that doesn't fight, but with the extra trade I should be racking up a decent amount of iron going forward. For being 1 year into the game this is a pretty fantastic income base in general. (I also have some random gladiator recruits on offer this turn. Gladiators are somewhat better than standard infantry troops and cost like twice as much. They do get around the limit of being able to only recruit 1 batch of standard troops per turn, so they're occasionally useful for squeezing some extra troops out in an emergency, but generally if the situation is dire enough for you to contemplate that then a couple gladiators is not going to unfuck things for you. They feel less attractive than standard mercenary offers, which in CoE5 scale with the number of towns you have and generally seem way more common than they used to be.) the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Sep 10, 2021 |
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Sep 9, 2021 20:00
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One of the upshots of bumping up AI difficulty is that they tend to do a better job of pruning world-ending threats like demon cultists and ants. I've still yet to see a full antpocalypse, at worst I've just seen a cluster of 3-4 hills.
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Sep 10, 2021 05:09
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Slaan posted:Ant storm? Haven't had that yet It's not an official event, just the repercussions of having ants that can multiply indefinitely if left unchecked.
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Sep 10, 2021 05:29
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 2 Next turn another one of the Senator's special mage recruits shows up. The Leo is another low level dead end mage, but their spells tend to be a bit more useful than the Renata (setting your enemies on fire is just a good policy in general.) They're also physically stronger, and having a Leo around gives you access to a new type of recruit:  These guys costs 10% more than standard Principes in return for partial fire resistance. It's not a great deal but it is a good way to cut down on friendly fire from your Leos and other mages, and later in the game you have more money than you know what to do with anyhow.  The new leo picks up some mercs and heads westward while Bernie's combined stack works its way towards the other port.  I get an offer for another one of the Senator's special commanders. Augurs are not mages per se but get a remote scrying ritual that lets you reveal a tiny chunk of the map in exchange for a few coins. It's theoretically useful but it's honestly kind of a hassle and I usually don't bother. I need my money for more important things anyhow.  For example, immediately afterwards I get another offer for a reveler. This time I've got plenty of money for them.  The new leo has reached the more distant farm and found that it's already been claimed by an enemy faction in blue. This may complicate things, but at this stage of the game most factions are walking around with barely more than their starting army, so bumping into them is probably worse news for them than me.  Meanwhile, Bernie has reached Ravenharbor. I get lucky on my javelin rolls and manage to wipe out the archers on the wall before my infantry even reaches the gates, allowing the legion to take the port without losses.  At this point I have no immediate need for my catapult, so I have Bernie advance with the rest of the troops while the centurion drags the catapult back to base by himself. Unfortunately it looks like something has gotten into my territory and stolen a farm. I'm not the only one having issues either: something unflagged the blue faction's farm too. Judging by the proximity to the graveyard some manner of ghost is likely; the problem in my own backyard is probably just bandits.  Next turn I go to get the reveler some troops to deal with it and get a particularly opportune offer. The Senator gets rare offers of 10 Hastati for 65 gold/5 iron. Getting 5 of them for 45 gold/5 iron is already a fantastic deal, 10 for 65 gold is just stupidly good. This offer doesn't come around often but it's a must buy when it does.  As the second winter sets in Bernie moves in on the ogre-occupied mine. The leo spots our first ancient forest, so it's a good thing a reveler showed up when they did. Ancient forests spawn wandering wild animals that will stumble around and mess up your infrastructure (like the farm that's literally right next to it) and most factions cannot capture them so they have no way to shut the spawns down. But that's what our reveler is for.  Bernie's troops badly wound several ogres in their opening salvo, but there's a lot of work to be done still.  The ogres quickly delete most of the legionaries in reach, but we're still getting a few good stabs in and the arrows are piling up.  We went in with a 4:1 numerical advantage and still lost almost as many troops as they did, most of them from our higher grade troops too. Thankfully at this point I'm already earning enough to replace these losses within 2 turns tops.  By the time the reveler is able to recapture the farm whatever is wandering over there has stolen the hamlet next door. I risk an ambush by rushing in to catch it, figuring I can probably take whatever bandits stole it. Bernie is just hanging out next to the graveyard while I bring the leo up, since I don't really want to fight ghosts without some kind of magic support.  Whoops! Looks like the hamlet thieves are ghosts, not bandits. Blundering into a stealthy enemy's ambush fucks with your formation, so my troops are out of position here.  These things are the weakest form of ghost. They're not terribly threatening, but they're ethereal, meaning that nonmagical damage rarely affects them. If you attack them enough eventually something will land, but they can soak a lot more attacks than their 1 HP implies and they're loving you up with their touch attack in the meantime.  gently caress! Since ambushes tend to cluster enemies against the "back" of your marching line, the shiny new reveler got sniped by a spirit. That sucked, but it does go to show why I really want magic support to take on the graveyard.  Just the ghost we can see is noticeably stronger than those spirits. And as we've seen (or didn't see) with the dispossed spirits, a lot of ghostly undead are stealthy.  Sure enough, the real boss of the graveyard was hidden from view. This could get ugly.  Luckily, it doesn't! The leo's sun spells do a lot of bonus damage against undead and can also blind enemies, which prevents the wraith from loving up our formation by zombifying legionaries. Between the chip damage from the sheer volume of missile fire and the big chunks of damage the leo is doing, the wraith goes down before the melee starts.  Looting the graveyard actually turns up a couple magic items. You don't always get bonus stuff from graverobbing, but it's nice when you do. As a human faction I don't have a ton of use for a magic weapon since individual infantrymen won't live long against real enemies, but it doesn't hurt.  I also grab this which I have even less use for, since its main effect is specific to Iron Wizards and I have exactly zero of those. It's possible we might be able to recruit one at some point, but unlike Dominions there is no handy universal magic item storage; if you want to transfer magic items you need to walk across the goddamn map and hand it over in person.  Next turn an Old Wizard shows up as a recruitment offer. gently caress! This is our very first generic wizard offer and it's the best one by a mile. Most factions need to capture magic libraries to even have a chance for these to show up, but Bernie's aggressive pro-education platform attracts extra mages above and beyond what we'd normally get for libraries. These guys are absolutely amazing and are vital to the Senator's late game, but way too expensive to buy at this stage. That will change soon enough, but even with the Senator bonus they're very rare and who knows when the next one will show up. In better news, at least I'm ready for a ship now.  The Leo manages to track down the stealth enemy over by the forest, which turns out to be a lone brigand who immediately gets owned. This is more of what I was expecting when I sent the reveler to investigate the stealth attacks on our turf.  There turn out to be even more of them next door in the ancient forest itself, who also immediately get owned. Through some weird quirk the pikes wound up in "behind" the archers, putting them in place to stab the ambushers right away while the archers provide support fire from safety.  Oh thank christ another reveler showed up. I'd rather have bought another round of pikes, but I really want to do something about that forest.  While the new reveler slowly works his way over there, Bernie finally sets sail and crosses the strait to the island.  There's limited room on the boat, so I can't take all my troops and definitely not the catapult (not that it would be able to do anything, since siege weapons are only able to attack if fortifications are in play.) Still, this should be plenty against a handful of wild bakemono.  The small goblins die instantly. The big ones have real weapons and armor and are quite a bit tougher, but they're still not as dangerous as the ogres we faced and there aren't nearly as many of them.  This thing is hanging out in back. Getting cursed isn't great for the long-term health of the legion, but it can't really hurt us right now.  The other mine has another batch of bakemono. Just like before, the big ones chop down a couple of legionaries and then get swarmed.  That's two mines in the bag, and now we finally have a native source of iron. It's still dwarfed by what we're getting from trade, but it doesn't drain our gold income. As an added bonus, the gold output of mines is not affected by weather so this gives us a steadier supply of income during winter (when farms & towns suffer.) Bernie also spots a guard tower! These don't contribute any resources, but they're fortified recruitment sites and having a source of reinforcements on this side of the channel that doesn't require ferrying troops over would be handy. Unfortunately there are enough crossbows that it might get more expensive than I'd like, so Bernie will need to spend several turns sailing back to pick up more firepower.  Meanwhile, the leo takes his troops and incinerates the roving pack of ghouls hanging around the forest. Ghouls aren't particularly threatening, but you don't want them wandering around killing things as they can create more ghouls that way. Hopefully there aren't any other wandering undead left over from the graveyard.  That clears the area for the reveler to come in and get his party on. By spending 25 gold to throw a massive rager, the reveler can convert the ancient forest to the power of partying. Now instead of spawning hostile wild animals, the ancient forest will produce our own freespawn. Terrible and useless freespawn, but occasionally they might kill a deer for us or something. Between this and securing the graveyard our home turf should be pretty secure, barring amphibious critters wandering ashore.
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Sep 10, 2021 20:08
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Oh hell, I never realized they did that, I just thought they were there for the ritual. Oh well! It's not like the Senator needs the help. e: I still don't know if I would have shelled out the money for them at this point in the game. Maybe that's a bad habit left over from earlier CoEs, since ambushes are a lot more dangerous this time around (in CoE4 ambushes just scrambled positions at random, so outcomes like that reveler were less common.) e x2: really, even if they weren't super-scouts it would be worth it later on to shell out an extra 40 or so gold for a scout that hid in the back instead of the middle where they get themselves sniped the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Sep 11, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 23:59
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tankfish posted:Question about the reveler I see that there is now two rituals. One creates the frat party what's the other one do? It will be shown off next update, but basically: summons a house spirit that defends/improves a farm
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Sep 11, 2021 18:06
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Pharohman777 posted:The Senator faction is hilarious because they are basically incompetent romans straight out of Asterix comics. They're not the most outrageous descriptions that CoE has to offer, but they do have a certain droll quality.   
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Sep 12, 2021 14:08
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 3 I really don't feel like backtracking with Bernie, so I decide to push on and see if there are any softer targets to grab. There's another port, but it's definitely not a soft target.  Not only does it have way more crossbows than the two ports I knocked down already, it has its own catapult backing it up. That's ~7 very lethal shots at my forces before I can do anything.  The reveler has a second ritual, which I believe may be new from CoE4? It can only be cast in farms.  It spawns this guy as a stationary defender, who also doubles the farm's income. Thanks to Bernie's income boost they break even on investment in about a year and a half... not great, but it's something, and the Lar is a decent spellcaster who is also moderately beefy and ethereal. Making these is not exactly going to be a cornerstone of Bernie's strategy but why not, I guess.  I'm up to 50 iron in the bank, so it's ballista time! They do slightly less damage than catapults, but in return you get twice as many of them for the same price and they get to keep firing slowly (once every 4 turns) even outside siege phases. More crucially, unlike catapults they only occupy a single space which means they fit on boats.  Scouting ahead, my leo goes to cull some hostile deer and spots yet another port. I also see that the ancient forest has given us a new friend.  Satyrs are some of the better freespawn that come out of ancient forest revels. They'd actually be sort of OK except that they have the Stupid tag, meaning they just wander about randomly and cannot be controlled. They're basically indies that fight on your side, which are much preferable to indies that don't.  I go ahead and buy another mercenary catapult. Even if I can't take it on a boat there are good targets for it on the mainland.  My leo continues to clean up wandering indies, finding these guys hanging around. Interestingly they've already lost some HP; different types of indies can actually bump each other and fight, so these guys must have run into some undead or big animals or something.  This is good news for us, because these guys are extremely tough. Despite having a 5-to-1 numerical advantage this would probably go very badly for us.  Or at least it would, if we didn't have magic on our side. We lose one pikeman but no more.  Bernie's back in port to pick up the ballistas, although there's not enough room on the boat for any real reinforcements. I probably should have left more troops on the island and picked them back up later, but it's not a real big deal; I've got more than enough firepower to roll the guard tower and then I can buy all the infantry I want. This time I also bring the centurion along, which means I'll have someone around to drive the boat even after Bernie disembarks.  The leo finds a watch tower, which is like the guard tower's lovely little brother. For most factions they're pretty worthless, but the Senator (and only the Senator) gets to use them as recruitment sites just like proper guard towers. Only Bernie has the plan to reinvest in the empire's crumbling infrastructure!  Beyond that are a few smaller settlements and another town. It will take a while to get enough firepower to crack it, even with the leo's magic his dwindling force is going to have a hard time on hardened targets.  Serpent Priests are another one of the Senator's unique mage recruits. They're ok; they're 2nd level casters (and there are only 3 "real" levels of magic in CoE), which is nice, although I'm not entirely in love with their spell pool. Unfortunately I get distracted by the shiny troop offers and miscalculate my ability to buy all the special offers, so I get a ton of reinforcements and no serpent priest.  A trio of giant ants wander into my farm, which is bad news for the lar. Ants are very tough units in general, but also most of the lar's survivability is based on being ethereal. The ants' acid spray attack does not count as mundane damage so they just completely gently caress up ethereal troops (and also mundane troops, but those are usually numerous and expendable so it's not a big deal.)  Spellcasters start with a couple random spells of each magic level they know. The lar's Forest Magic list has like half a dozen ways to charm animals and this one didn't know a single one of them. He summons a wolf on the far edge of the battlefield which completely fails to accomplish anything before the ants take him down. Poor lar etc. etc.  Bernie slowly advances on the guard tower while the centurion picks up some more troops in port and sets off to explore the north. There was a pearl bed just sitting in view offshore all game and now that I have a spare ship it's free money for the taking. From here I figure I can sail into the western bay and drop off some troops for the leo to expand westwards with.  The ants continue their reign of terror, killing the satyr freespawn and reconquering the ancient forest. Dammit.  Bernie takes the guard tower. The ballistas' aim leaves something to be desired and fail to soften the defenders up as much as I would have liked, but I still have the numbers to win the archer duel even with the defense bonus the ramparts give the defenders.  Coincidentally, I'm back at 50 iron and can pop out another pair of ballistae to immediately reinforce Bernie.  Now Bernie has a 4:1 siege engine advantage against the island port. The catapult does take out two archers, but the ballistae handily win the siege battle; those walls were packed with crossbowmen to start with, and several of the footmen got taken out too. Since the catapult stops firing after the siege phase I clean up the rest of the fight without additional casualties.  I get a scout offer, which I use to supplement Bernie's army in the newly taken port. Unlike Dominions scouts are not commanders, instead they're specialist troops that you bring with your armies to spot stealthy units and avoid ambushes.  The centurion's ship gets ambushed at sea as it rounds the northern point. Positioning is a bit weird for sea ambushes, but it does mean that all my archers are on the front of the ship, and these kelp men have 20 HP apiece and a resistance to piercing damage, so...  We win, but ouch. I had been hoping to join this force up with the leo, but without any ranged troops there's not much point; 9 hastati are not going to beat the watch tower. And another sea attack is likely to wipe us out.  The reveler heads back to the ancient forest with reinforcements to put an end to the giant ants' reign of terror. Several legionaries are lost, but the ants are dead and the forest secured. The leo begins trudging back towards the forest to take some of these troops further west.  Bernie expores a little further and discovers the lost imperial capital, less than a screen from his starting outpost. I guess you can't blame him, Illwinter only invented boats a couple months ago. This does beg the question of how Bernie got across the strait to begin with. The capital takes the form of a giant city spread across four tiles. Despite the various graphical upgrades CoE has received with each iteration the capital is still just a lovely 90s rear end pixel sprite that's been upscaled to cover four tiles and then chopped up.  The trade district has a few gladiators and exotic animals from the coliseum, but is otherwise a fairly standard city. Bernie could probably take it right now, except I dropped off the ballistas at the port.  The temple district next door is much tougher. Those paladins are bad news and there's several high ranking priests who can potentially have some nasty spells. This is to say nothing of the Old Wizard hanging out on the wall; with a city wall and several dozen arrow catchers to keep him safe, he probably has enough firepower to mulch an army.  Since Bernie is going to have to return to port to pick up his siege weapons, I go ahead and start pumping out as many reinforcements there as I can. To some extent it's probably redundant; fighting my way into the capital is going to be ballista work, there's no real number of footsoldiers that can realistically take something defended that well. There's likely to be some attrition though and I'd rather not run out of meatshields halfway through.
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Sep 12, 2021 14:47
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 4 Bernie gathers his forces, even going so far as to pick up some gladiators to have some extra bodies on hand. Even with the ballistae this isn't going to be nearly enough to take the whole capital but it should at least get us a foothold.  The reveler gets his party on, summons the lar back, and meets up with the returning leo to shuffle troops around.  Step one is to secure the neighboring port before moving on the capital proper. Not every section of the capital acts as a recruitment point and I will want a closer source of reinforcements for the siege.  Four ballistae is kind of overkill for these chumps, Bernie rolls the port without losses.  One iron short of another pair of ballistae  I opt to pause for a turn and go ahead and hire some hastati while I wait. Meanwhile, the passive vision from my holdings in the west get the first glimpse of the enemy. Looks like the dark blue faction is an illusionist. I don't actually have a lot of experience with illusionists, but they seem... kind of bad? Their main gimmick is enchanting magic mirrors to "store" spells or summons, which is what we're looking at here. They've got a few very cool tricks but they seem to have some holes in their toolkit and I'm not sure the rest of it is strong enough to compensate. On the other hand, with the senator's reliance on mundane human troops we're vulnerable to most of their tricks.  Next turn brings some more archers in addition to the iron for the two new ballistae.  The artillery barrage kills most of the crossbowmen on the walls, prompting the defenders to immediately open the gates.  The gladiators are kind of tough and take out several legionaries, which is more damage than I expected to take. But that's why I decided to play it safe.  New to CoE5, you can now get random offers to buy magic items in addition to troop offers. Like mercenaries, the more and bigger towns you have the more offers you get--and we just took a slice of the biggest town there is. This armor adds a decent chunk of HP and armor and also makes the wearer berserk, which is not great for longevity but at least magic items always get recovered if you win.  With the trade district in hand Bernie has a ridiculous 16 points of trade, all of which goes straight into iron every turn. I also have eyes on the other two districts, the Capitolium proper and the slums.  #NotMyEmperor The reigning Emperor comes with a surprisingly wimpy retinue. He has a level 2 white wizard and a couple siege engines, but hardly any ranged troops. He's got some magical loot on him but nothing that would change the outcome of a melee. Still, I didn't get this far by being reckless.  Nah gently caress it WE'RE DOING THIS One of my ballistas goes down during the siege phase but in return I manage to snipe both of the emperor's, leaving him only with a catapult that is now useless. The High Lord manages to limp away from a ballista shot but he's not long for this world.  The white wizard demonstrates why higher level spellcasters are such a big deal. This is like a dozen archers' worth of damage all at once, plus it stuns most of what it hits. And this guy is only level 2. I wasn't really expecting him to be packing this kind of firepower since white wizards mostly have protective and support type spells.  More Storm Wind spells tear up the back line, but the fighting at the gates is going our way.  Once the wizard goes down, the rest of the fight is an afterthought.  This is almost as many losses as the rest of the game so far put together, but it's worth it.  Bernie decks himself out in the assorted loot from the empire and his entourage. In addition to the flail and (mostly useless) crown from the graveyard he now has a vest that gives him HP, armor, and poison resistance, plus a charm for even more HP and strength, and a necklace that gives cold resistance and retaliates melee attacks with cold damage. He's actually not too shabby as a melee combatant now, although he'd still be equivalent to like... one heavy cavalry troop, tops. Suffice to say I'm not planning on doing any fighting with him.  The senator has a special interaction with the capital, although it costs a whopping 600 gold. Buying iron is turning into a significant drain on our income so I turn off trading for now, I'll be able to get another ballista pair soon anyhow.  In less exciting news, the leo takes on the watchtower to the far west. I don't have as many archers as I would like and lose a couple troops, but the leo's solar magic carries the day again.  I spot this guy wandering around outside the capital. These merchants occasionally spawn at ports and other similar locations; they're programmed to head to the other side of the map but I guess being stuck on an island there's nowhere for him to really go. They're usually escorted by a dozen or so troops and maybe a mage.  This one has no mage so I'm able to take them out easily, netting some extra contributions to Bernie's campaign fund.  The capital slums put up surprisingly stiff resistance, Bernie's front line is getting a little bit thin.  Although Bernie could really use more firepower for the eventual assault on the temple district, now that I have a watchtower to recruit from I allocate my iron to getting some siege weaponry for the leo to take on some of the harder targets. This area of the map is not very secure, so I leave a couple archers behind to man the watchtower; this gives me some passive vision over the region, and should be enough to keep the riffraff out.  The town's defenders are almost all archers, and even with the ballistae backing him up the leo loses 10 troops. Ouch.  Once winter is over, money starts pouring in from Bernie's holdings. Between the capital and the recently seized towns and ports our income is starting to get silly and the price tag on coronation doesn't look so daunting.  Having seized the capital, Bernie orders an investigation into the previous administration and discovered that due to unprecedented voter suppression measures, such as being installed by the Praetorian Guard without a vote, his predecessor was declared Imperator with a shocking 0% of the popular vote. Organizing a free and fair election is an expensive undertaking, but once that is arranged the outcome is obvious:   Hail Emperor Bernie! Promoting to Emperor doesn't actually do a lot. His stats have improved slightly but mostly that's due to picking up an extra experience level from recent fighting. He does get a few extra rituals, which we'll see in due time.  Bernie does have the option to recruit these guys now. Theoretically you could get a line or two of Praetorian Guards backed up by a line or two of Triarii and have the best human heavy infantry formation in the game, just in time to get rendered irrelevant by everyone else's endgame summons. I'd rather spend my iron on more ballistae with lighter meatshields.  I've got what I want from the capital, so I hire an expendable centurion and throw the remainder of Bernie's forces at the holdout temple district. I figure even if I don't win, my odds are better attacking in waves to successively thin out the defenders as opposed to building up and going in with everything all at once. If I came in with twice as many ballistae now they would all go in the same siege phase, but hopefully by throwing in the foot soldiers I can get some extra kills in for the next batch of ballistae to work off of.  This guy is the main reason that I'm not optimistic about my odds. He can literally set my entire army on fire every turn. Also, that Invulnerability spell is not loving around: this is not Dominions "oh you have good armor vs. nonmagical weapons", when it says invulnerable it drat well means invulnerable.. Magic weapons still pierce it but short of that you're not going to get around invulnerability by hitting people really hard or getting lucky damage rolls. A quick note on how spellcasters work: mages typically come with 2 spells of each spell level they know (this guy has a few more than most), and are required to have at least 1 more spell memorized than their current level, which the AI will choose among semi-randomly (although it won't deliberately cast useless spells.) So higher level mages are usually going to be forced into equipping some of their lower level spells, although that can work out OK; higher level casters get extra castings of spells below their maximum level, so this guy could get two Poison Mist castings instead of a single Flame Storm. That's usually a pretty decent consolation, and depending on what spells you roll sometimes it can be preferable to spam lower level spells.  Bernie only knows one spell, and it's Power Word: Ballista. Save vs. having a tree trunk shoved through your skull, nerd.  The ballistae manage to snipe both of the bishops, although their spell rolls weren't particularly threatening. Their spell list includes charm effects but I got lucky and neither of them rolled their conversion spell.  I still have to deal with these guys, this time without mage support.  It's pretty rough going. The only thing that reliably gets through their armor is ballista fire but they only get to shoot once every four rounds and their attack is inherently inaccurate.  I gradually whittle them down, but it's a very close fight. This attack probably wasn't really a great idea, if I did this badly after killing all the mages I doubt I would have done any real damage before getting wiped out by wizard spells. If I hadn't gotten lucky and immediately sniped the old wizard I would have thrown away like 40 troops for nothing.  But I did and I won! The temple district gives another very decent chunk of gold and trade, plus it counts as both a temple and a library. Being a temple will increase the number of offers for our faction-specific casters like renatae and serpent priests, being a library will increase the number of offers for generic mercenary mages. Mages can also pay here to unlock additional spells of levels that they know, although this one only has level 1 spell access. It's usually not really worth it outside of very specific key mages.  Bernie celebrates the occasion by erecting a statue of himself in a stunning likeness. For 100 gold and a turn's worth of action points the emperor can build these in any settlement larger than a farm. It's basically the big boy version of the lar, increasing income by +1 and giving you an extremely beefy stationary spellcaster to defend the town. The upfront cost makes it fairly useless as an economic booster, although it does help defray the expense. Unlike the lar this thing will easily solo even the nastiest wandering monsters and even some decent size armies, so it has some use as a pop-up garrison. The risk and opportunity cost of having your emperor on the frontier building statues probably relegates them to a gimmick, but later patches let your emperor appoint governors that can do the statue-building for him (and can also raise small stationary militias to defend for free.) Which would be a nice perk, but I'm not too disappointed to miss out on. You don't need to plant defenses on your holdings if you annihilate every threat before it reaches them.
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Sep 13, 2021 18:25
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 5 Now that the coronation is over I start buying iron again. At this point I'm getting enough iron that I'm basically averaging 1 ballista/turn.  I may need it in the near future. Another AI faction shows up and very rudely starts stealing some of my smaller settlements.  Balance in Conquest of Elysium corresponds in many ways to balance in Dominions. Here, as there, centaurs are extremely busted (or at least the centaurides are; the centaurs are just broken.) Thankfully they have a fairly low spawn rate; this is a squad of 5 upgraded centaurs backed up by a mage, which is still a noticeable investment at this stage of the game.  One other neat feature of the Senator: your guard towers and watch towers gradually freespawn Velites. They're not very good, but it's hard to beat free, and unlike your ritual-summoned garrisons you can move them around and use them however you see fit. I hire a centurion at the imperial guard tower to pick up the velite and clean up some of the remaining settlements on the island.  There's an unclaimed graveyard out west that I haven't had a chance to capture yet, and some of the wandering undead popping out of it are colliding with the reveler freespawn from our ancient forest. The satyrs may not be good for much, but punching zombies is right up their alley.  Part of CoE5 having more distinct indie factions is that some of them will be a bit more active. Towers and castles will actually send out troops that will attempt to reconquer nearby settlements. Since I'm already hunkering down from the roving centaurs, this attempt goes rather poorly for them.  The leo seizes the guard tower they presumably came from, revealing more centaur-infested forests. Since the senator has no special use for forests we can't claim them ourselves, but moving over them will unclaim them from the dryads and cut off their income.  Their stack seems to have picked up several more centaurs from somewhere, although they're the unarmored type. I can get reinforcements from the guard tower too, so I decide to nip them in the bud.  It goes... worse than I would have hoped. RIP to the leo, he was the MVP of my westward expansion.  Really I should have been diverting more reinforcements to the frontier, but I've been building up a stack to take the unconquered city that's been sitting next to our starting outpost all game.  This message appeared and briefly made me panic that I'd hosed up. Leaving troops sitting in the mushroom circles you periodically see on the map can occasionally get them teleported to random (usually hostile) ancient forests and I was worried that I just got one of my armies dumped halfway across the map, but of course this is just some random reveler freespawn.  Maenads are a bit worse than satyrs, and also worse than most other things, but I guess they're not quite as bad as I'd remembered. They still manage to get massacred by 5 bandits, which considering how weak bandits are is pretty bad.  On to the city. The walls were literally packed full of archers at the start, so the siege weapons did a decent job thinning them out.  I still lose half my frontline troops fighting my way in, but I'll take it.  The first AI faction is eliminated. I'm a little surprised it took this long, even at moderately high difficulties the AI is very capable of stupidly getting itself killed, usually by indies wandering into an undefended citadel. There are two loss conditions: if you have no commanders left or no recruitment sites left, you lose instantly. Warlocks are a pretty scary magic-heavy lategame faction, so this is good news for us. Unfortunately, so are demonologists.  I hire all those mercenaries and the centurion to the frontier guard tower so that I can pick up the troops stranded by the death of my leo. They're sitting ducks right now and more centaurs are approaching.  Some random spirits managed to wander their way into the watch tower. Thankfully my freespawn velites are enough to take care of them.  More freespawn vs. freespawn battles. I really ought to do something about that graveyard, but my hands are a bit full right now.  With the city finally secured and my home turf completely under control, I finally get around to sending a force southwards to explore the savannah. The tropical region of the map is home to various vaguely problematic tribes, who tend to be fairly tough due to having spellcasters around.  The centaurs are back in force. There are even more armored centaurs this time, plus a bunch of other dryad spawn. The harpies and unarmed satyrs are basically worthless, but satyr spearmen are probably a match for velites.  That's a hell of a list of offers. I definitely need the extra troops against the centaur menace, and I also have the opportunity to trade 66 useless gold for an extremely valuable magic bean!  It does exactly what you might expect.  Welcome to the sky! It's a bit tough to get around up here if you don't fly, but you can walk around on some of the more stable clouds. That storm demon is a pretty nasty customer so I'm just going to try to walk past and hope I find something easier to kill.  I decide I probably have the numbers to take on the new centaur stack. Our front line is no match for theirs, but we have vastly more firepower to concentrate on them.  The rocky outcroppings keep the center at a near stalemate, but the flanks turn bloody quickly. The satyr fodder dies almost instantly, but the merc swordsmen can't hold up against the centaurs either.  Still, as tough as they are the centaurs don't have the defense of armored knights and our massed archer fire wears them down at a decent rate. We lose almost all of our front line, but that's cheap compared to the stack they just killed.  After picking up some replacement troops it's time to reclaim what was stolen from us. The ballistae stay behind to hold the tower.  It looks like the clouds above the capital might actually go somewhere after all. Some of the clouds aren't exactly stable, though, so units that don't fly need to watch their step; it is entirely possible to have them give way and dump you to the ground below.  Meanwhile, down south the centurion continues to mop up the native villages.
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Sep 14, 2021 16:50
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Arcvasti posted:The thing that stands out to me about CoE centaurs is that, while there's a lot of unit overlap between Dominions and CoE, most units have had their hp halved. A normal human has 5 hp instead of 10, for example. It's a little fuzzier than that since CoE has no defense stat and is very stingy with armor, so a lot of stuff that would have increased defense/prot in Dominions show up here with HP boosts. Heavy cavalry units have like 12-15 HP here, which corresponds closely to what they have in Dominions where some of that bulk would be modeled with def/prot scores. But the centaurs' extra HP definitely seems excessive since Dominion's centaurs generally don't quite have the defensive stats as heavy cav to begin with.
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Sep 14, 2021 22:07
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 6 Now that we're wandering around in the clouds it's long past time to get some real mage support, a lot of ethereal monsters live up there. The Renatus is the big brother of the Renata, with 2nd level spells that are a huge improvement over Mysticism's mediocre 1st level spells. They're also pseudo-immortal, and if slain they have an opportunity to navigate their way back to the world through Hades (they can also visit Hades voluntarily, but if they die there they're dead for real so it's pretty risky.)  Out west, our new centurion picks up a free watchtower and discovers some of the illusionist's holdings undefended.  Further south in the tropics, the centurion finds a castle and a port.  Castles actually have bigger walls and tougher gates than cities or towers, which gives their archers enough of an advantage to do some damage. We still give better than we take, but it's not free.  Taking the port proves similarly painful. Our lack of a front line is starting to show, those shields are really good at blocking arrows.  I don't have time to finish mopping up the illusionist's villages before another centaur stack appears.  This one looks pretty scary, but it's 90% wild animals. The dryad queen has some extremely scary stuff but thankfully the AI does stupid stuff like pissing all their resources away summoning trash.  I pick up a handy item on the market. Increased map movement is extremely valuable, and this fits in a miscellaneous item slot.  The southernmost peninsula is secured, and I move in to take care of the wandering knights.  Taking on knights without a front line turns out to be a bad idea. I'm definitely getting sloppy down here now that I know that it's mostly safe and I have troops to burn. We still win, sort of.  The dryad stack has enough magic on its side that I'd really like to consolidate forces some before taking them on, and if I can arrange a decisive battle in a fort for the sake of my siege engines all the better. The AI is more interested in grabbing settlements than forcing a battle, which suits me fine.  With the Renatus on my side I decide to take on the storm demon that's wandering around the clouds. He's a pretty mean customer, ethereal with a natural AoE attack and 2nd level casting in a pretty good school. Luckily, it rolled pretty poorly on spell selection and the AI inexplicably decided not to equip its only attack spell.  It proceeds to own itself with an insanely high exploding roll using its gust of wind AoE in melee.  Sadly, there's nothing up here for us after all. Theoretically the shifting clouds might eventually give us a bridge to those other clouds off the edge, but odds are they're just a few stray squares that don't go anywhere either.  Back in centaur country I've collected the reinforced troops from the guard tower and am back on the offensive, obliterating the tiny garrison that was left behind in the town.  The dryad stack had wandered off for reasons that are unclear, but I meet back up with them just west of the town.  I lose some troops, mostly to poison, but the dryad lines just dissolve. Their heavily armored centaur commander is holding the line more or less by himself, which is impressive, but won't last forever.  These things are pretty much literal tanks. We're lucky it's just the commander; if a dryad queen gets her hands on a ton of metal and the right recruitment sites she can produce these as line troops. Half a dozen templar knights in the capital nearly killed a 50-man army and took several ballistae to put down, and these guys are substantially tougher than that.  The dryad queen knows charm spells, but I get lucky and none of them land. It wouldn't be devastating if they did, but it's still effectively at least one death if it goes off.  The reinforcements I pulled in were probably overkill, but it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with real mages.  Shortly afterwards, I get a hell of an offer. I can easily afford to buy out the whole list here (although I skip the reveler because I only really need the one.)  When you recruit mercenary wizards (but not your special faction-specific casters) they frequently come with a magic item or maybe even two. Since magic item offers often cost about as much as a wizard anyhow, this is a pretty great deal. In this case, the Old Wizard comes with this bonkers staff that makes any spellcaster cast as if they were 1 level higher. He's already a level 3 caster and there's no such thing as level 4 spells, but this does mean that he can now doublecast level 3 spells. As an added bonus it has spirit sight, so now the wizard also has built in scouting.  The green enchantress came with a magic hat that has an HP boost, which I immediately transfer to the much more valuable old wizard (hence the HP discrepency.) She rolled some fantastic spells, though, with multiple charms and a hostile polymorph.  The hits keep rolling in with another great slate of offers. The serpent priest I could take or leave, but I grab the dark wizard; again, it's probably a free magic item. And I know I bashed the renata before, but...  It's high time that Bernie took an empress.  Marrying a renata upgrades them to level 2 spells. They're still worse than Renati, and Livinia definitely rolled worse on her spell selection than the Renatus we already had, but the empress opens up new ritual possibilities for later.  That dark wizard is no slouch either. It's not the most impressive school of magic but Lashes of Darkness is a high precision barrage of nonelemental damage; it allows a magic resistance roll, but a very difficult one. He comes with a Crown of Golden Mastery (just like our iron booster crown, and equally useless at present) and a Gem of True Seeing, giving me another built-in scout.  The old wizard leads the anti-centaur army forth and discovers one of their forward bases. Sacred groves are the dryad queen's spawning grounds, which accounts for the rapid reinforcements on their earlier stacks  They've got a small handful of high quality troops there, but they're badly outnumbered.  With the old wizard in tow that's basically irrelevant though. A double casting of acid rain devastates their front line; the centaurs are beefy enough to survive it, but just barely.  I think I may have some friendly fire issues, though.  Beyond the sacred grove, the wizard discovers an iron mine for the taking and a mountain so tall it extends into the clouds above.  Checking in on our southern explorations there are a couple of hamlets across the bay and a few more mines, although I spy a giant spider stealing some of the jungle villages.  The mines aren't quite as free for the taking, but the legion still makes short work of the single troll.  Back north the wizard ascends into the heavens and is immediately greeted by a terrifying trio of rocs.  They are less terrifying than an old wizard with a magic staff. Triple-cast poison mist stacks up a lot of poison very quickly and just shreds the rocs, although they have no defenses other than lots of HP so the legionaries are able to put in some decent work themselves.  Next door to the mountain peak is this very formidable cloud giant castle. Something tells me I'm not going to win this one in a couple furious volleys of spells.  Some of the illusionists' troops show up to reclaim his town down south.  Between them and that yellow minotaur-led stack wandering around I decide to leave the clouds to the birds for now and head back down to earth to pick up another mine from the dryads. In the process I spot another illusionist stack wandering around the dryads' backcountry.
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Sep 15, 2021 16:47
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Senator Bernicus Sanderius, part 7 In addition to wizards, you will occasionally get recruitment offers for heroes, fairly buff front line commanders who also tend to come with random magic items. They're cheaper than most wizards, so if nothing else they're a great source of magic items although there is a gacha element involved since you don't get to see what you're buying until after the fact. This one just comes with a crown that boosts morale for their troops, which is not terribly impressive. By default fights in CoE are to the death and morale only exists to resist specific fear abilities which are relatively rare. It's not bad to have, but it's irrelevant for the majority of fights.  The minotaur's stack is a massive step down, so it's possible the dryad queen is running out of troops. The fight doesn't even last long enough for the old wizard to frag any of our front line.  Our centurion secures a guard tower way down south, giving us another recruitment site in our backfield. It's a good opportunity to top up after attrition from these indies.  The illusionist is getting saucy. With the dryad queen on the back hoof, I decide to focus on blue for a while.  Their magic mirrors release several illusionary beasts before the battle is joined.  These are about as scary as disposessed spirits. They do have more and harder-hitting attacks, but they have a magic resistance roll to negate the damage--you have to be really stupid to believe in the illusion hard enough that it can actually hurt you.  Guess what doesn't care about etherealness? The illusionist does have a mid-level caster with some wide area sleep spells, which is annoying, but they're definitely outgunned here.  The mirrors keep churning out illusory troops, and they even have some upgraded illusions. Phantasms have real stats and their attacks are much harder to resist, but they're still ethereal, so they're actually kind of a threat.  The illusionist does get some good spells in--the odd legionary here and there gets flipped by confusion spells, a few of them flee due to fear spells. Still, the illusionist gets stomped.  Take away the mages on both sides and this would have been a pretty even fight; each of those mirrors is worth several illusory soldiers, who are actually decent against my human troops. But with me having a level 3 caster up on them, it's not even close. That guy's easily worth more than 350 gold worth of troops would have been here.  Floating eyes are scout-only units that illusionists can make. They're stupid and uncontrollable, they're non-combatants so they can't actually participate in fights and automatically get overrun by enemies, they just wander around the map giving you expanded vision. I mostly just think they're funny because illwinter just took one of the vision-related status icons and made it their map sprite.  Two guard towers side by side. This is a pretty nice find, it will make it very easy to quickly recruit a lot of troops to the front.  I crush the harpy scout sitting in the tower and spot several more incoming stacks. Ancient forests act as bases for the dryad queen, but the AI hasn't upgraded this one to a sacred grove yet.  I drop the ballistae off to hold the tower and charge in the larger stack. I've got the numbers, but this is the scariest front line we've seen yet, with multiple upgraded minotaurs and white centaurs. Worse, the dryad queen in back rolled a mass confusion spell. Confusion in CoE is no joke--confused units can actually go neutral and start fighting both sides, or even switch teams outright. Note that this doesn't actually end the confusion, so a beefy but stupid unit can wind up switching back and forth more than once in a single combat.  Upgraded minotaurs get more HP and a point of armor, which is a huge multiplier on their meaty HP pool. They're still probably less scary than the better types of knights, but way scarier than something like generic ogres.  White centaurs aren't terribly much better than regular centaur warriors; they get a little extra HP and damage, and they get out-of-combat healing (unlike Dominions wounded troops only recover like 10-20% of their HP per turn normally, so this is a nice perk), but nothing that's a real gamechanger. The Big Deal here is that the dryad queen can summon them en masse relatively cheaply. This looks like a single summon of them at 400 herbs, which sounds like a lot, but herbs are a lot more common than gold or iron so this compares favorably to recruitable cavalry IMO--and spending herbs doesn't interfere with the dryad queen also spending money & gold on regular centaur warriors. While the ritual that summons them has several other outcomes 1) white centaurs are the most common result and 2) most of the other results are high-value mages. If the AI had skipped the animal summoning ritual and spent its herbs on these guys this war might be going very differently.  The first row dies with only light damage to the enemy heavies. If this was a head to head battle between conventional forces I'd be straight hosed; even double the troops would have had a hairy battle here.  Thankfully, this is not a head to head battle between conventional forces.  It's still an expensive battle. Our entire front line is obliterated, and an entire rank of archers behind them as well. Those are cheap compared to what the other side lost, though. The green enchantress does actually manage to bag a minotaur with a charm spell, at least.  I hire a leo to bring up some reinforcements (including the dark wizard I bought some time ago) and spot a stack of phase spiders. These things are bad news; they're nasty enough on their own, but when you see them around it probably means that other horrors from the void are probably going to be dropping into the neighborhood periodically. If you start near stonehenge or some other similarly mystical site you can wind up with a million of these assholes stumbling around your home turf and they loving hurt.  They eat a hero and 10 hastati before they go down, and that's with the mages doing most of the heavy lifting. I'm pretty sure I still could have won regardless, but it would have been extremely close for a wandering freespawn indie fight.  Backpedaling from the action a bit, I just hit 1000 gold a few turns ago. This means that I can do something very interesting with the emperor & empress. What is better than Emperor Bernie?  God-Emperor Bernie, of course! Granted, he will have to wait his turn since I only have enough money for one and the empress goes first. Despite slanderous reports of misogynistic Bernici fratres, Bernie supports women in their efforts to break the ultimate glass ceiling.  The God-Empress upgrade is not loving around. The empress doesn't just get level 3 spells, she gets an entire second school of magic at level 3 and gets to cast from both of them at once. Also she's a giant size titan with twenty times as much HP as before. She can make herself invincible to nonmagical attacks, make every enemy on the battlefield save vs. sleep, confuse multiple clusters of enemies, cast two save-or-dies at once, and hit 7 enemies with long-lasting hard-to-resist paralyzation. This is what a proper endgame unit looks like, and while the senator only gets 2 (and then only in specific empire-friendly eras) they are a loving steal at 1000 gold (or even 3000 for the pair, if you throw in the costs of coronation & wedding.) This does mean that she can no longer use most human-size equipment, but I slap the dream crystal on her for a 4th point of movement so she can get around faster.  Also, she flies.  Most flying units aren't capable of indefinite flight--if you end your turn in midair you get "tired" and have to find a spot to rest next turn or you'll go crashing to earth (or water, instakilling anyone who doesn't breathe water.) The AI doesn't cope with this well, nor do inexperienced players who don't realize how airborne endurance works since the only indication of tiredness is the commander's name turning slightly pinkish. This is a problem, since one of the new factions is built entirely around flying units. Rather than fix the AI or institute guardrails to make it harder for human players to accidentally crash their flyers, Illwinter wrote the bird peoples' fluff that they are canonically so stupid they constantly get themselves killed in boneheaded flying accidents. Problem solved!  Despite my depleted forces, I press in to take the ancient forest. An animal-heavy stack has appeared in the north and is threatening to retake the sacred grove, but I can pump out more troops from the guard tower over there.  I easily kill the two (2) dryad units holding the grove, but the illusionist is raiding my undefended frontier with a random hero. I was angling to take the port and don't feel like turning around with these ballistae slowing me down, so blue will have free reign in this neighborhood for a few turns.  Lavinia finds another chain of clouds across the strait.  The ancient forest is way too far away to get the reveler over here anytime soon, but the old wizard has his own way of dealing with it.  The battle for the port goes pretty much as expected now that I can just casually pop out half a dozen ballistae or so.  More dryad fodder shows up as reinforcements, but the ancient forest is already torched.  The moose stack up north has started wandering back this way, probably to consolidate with the newcomers--the AI isn't capable of much, but it does know how to combine all its troops into a big old death ball. Rather than give them the opportunity I stomp them while they're isolated.  My Dominions instincts kick in and I buy a pair of earth boots off the market before I realize that I have no access to Geomancy and there are no recruitable earth mages in the mercenary wizard pool.  I decide to disregard the wandering minotaur and head onwards to the next ancient forest. If I can eliminate the dryad's bases then I won't have to play whack-a-mole with these little stacks.  The forest's defenders make a heroic but brief last stand.   Victory! I guess that sacred grove we found was their starting point. The AI doesn't really seem to be smart enough to understand saving up for infrastructure rituals or we would have seen more groves and more dryad spawn. Although that still would have been easier than if they just dumped everything in white centaur summoning.
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Sep 16, 2021 17:57
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Voting time! I'm probably getting close to the halfway point writing up this run and would like to get a head start on the next one, so I'm putting it to a vote. A) Cloud Lord - equivalent to Caelum from Dominions minus the cultural themes, so just generic bird people with storm/ice magic. B) Kobold King - D&D tiny dragon people, the ultimate expendable fodder faction plus sorcerers and dragons. C) Scourge Lord - D&D Dark Sun defilers: wizards who drain the planet's lifeforce to fuel their magic, leaving barren wasteland behind. D) Barbarians - an older faction who recently got a few new updates but still aren't very good, more of a challenge run. E) Something else - write-ins welcome! If anyone is curious as to which of these Bernie might run into later and would like to take that into account: Kobolds and Scourge Lord both show up in this run.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:06
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habituallyred posted:A Cloudlord I think so. I tried, but it wouldn't let me marry a second empress either before or after Lavinia ascended. Not sure if you can replace her if she dies, but I would assume so.
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Sep 16, 2021 21:13
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 8 I've finally reached the end of the southern peninsula, but I've lost most of the stuff behind me to wandering indies, so I start crawling back to reclaim them.  These guys randomly show up from time to time in villages you own; blue already has one that's been wandering around in some screenshots. You can order them around freely as commanders but they can't actually lead troops. They can be handy for capturing stuff in your backfield that gets unflagged by wandering indies, and they can probably murder a couple deer or bandits, but even most indies are too tough for them to solo.  The illusionist's stack wandered back away and I didn't feel like blundering around after them in the snow, so I go to finally take care of the graveyard and what do you know, there they are.  No mage support. My big wizard isn't in the neighborhood, but some mage support is better than none.  I hire a Moon Mage, who turns out to be much less interesting than he sounded. He's got a sleep spell that's worse than most sleep spells at this level and a fear spell.  Lavinia has made her way over across the clouds and is now close to the front.  I'm not finding anything interesting in the sky, so I decide to fly south and divebomb a watch tower behind the front lines.  When the weather is cold enough, certain bodies of water can freeze solid enough to allow land units to walk across them. It's the third month of winter, so I decide to gamble on the AI being dumb enough to get their hero drowned in the spring thaw and send my wizard stack south.  I've been engaged in a low-speed chase with this stack all winter through rough snowy terrain, which is irritating, but on the plus side this gives the empress time to meet up with the leo's stack.  We're technically outnumbered here, but this is the stack with no mage support and I've got a goddess in reserve.  Between the empress and the dark wizard the opening salvo sees a number of enemies confused and terrified, and she hasn't even brought out the big guns yet.  Once she does the enemy army spends most of the rest of the fight asleep.  Disappointingly I actually take semi-real losses, although the army's big enough to absorb them. I don't even manage to keep any confused troops since they all got killed too quickly.  I buy another magic boosting item that I have no conceivable use for, I just find this one hilarious.  It came alongside a new mage recruit. These guys are weak, but if you find a sufficiently high enough level library you can pay to promote them to an Adept of the Iron/Silver/Gold Order which might actually let me get some use out of the magic crowns.  If nothing else, a commander is a commander and I have stuff to claim up here.  Making headway securing the south.  The wizard recaptures Lorborough and the outlying villages, and discovers a mystical column guarded by some nasty void monsters. You may have noticed some odd weather patterns in some screenshots: the mystical column reverses weather in a circular radius around it, so it will be temperate during winter and snowy during summer.  The column is an interesting novelty, but it's mostly noteworthy for occasionally spawning horrible void monsters like this thing. It's 44 HP and ethereal, and even has a little damage resistance from its 1 armor. And it will aboslutely mess up anything that tries to melee it.  Its backups are squishier, but have a built in confuse attack.  If I didn't have a very powerful spellcaster to deal with it I would stay well away. This won't stop phase spiders and other nasty stuff from periodically popping up in the vicinity, though.  I spot yet another graveyard as the illusionist sends another stack by. It's summer and I'm stuck in frozen hell so I just go ahead and capture it, I have other forces to deal with these schmucks.  Lavinia duels a wraith for one of the other graveyards closer to the heartland. It doesn't really stand a chance, although it takes a while for her to fatally pierce its magic resistance.  Awww. I was hoping this guy drowned last spring.  These guys don't have any mage support either, and I have a god-queen who can make herself invulnerable at will.  It takes a long time for her to pick everything off with her single target death spell, but there was literally only one possible outcome. She even picked up a friend along the way!  Now that the dryad queen is dead I can explore the north at my leisure. This is another big "what if"; had the dryad queen bothered picking up this mine right in her backcourt she might have been able to make some of the even more heavily armored centaurs. Or maybe not, I'm not entirely sure the AI understands how the dryad queen's troop upgrade system works.  Floating eyes are showing up all over the goddamn place all of a sudden. Not entirely sure where these are coming from, I haven't been seeing them lately.  The moon mage takes a handful of troops to hunt down the unexpected hero wandering around.  Ah! He has a summoning item that pops out a killer mushroom as backup. These types of items are fairly common in CoE, even moreso than Dominions.  The mushroom itself isn't a big deal; there are a few very deadly mushroom enemies, but this one just spreads a modest amount of poison around. It's definitely not enough. He falls, ending the blue side once and for all. I'm surprised we didn't see more illusionists proper; either the AI got unlucky with recruitment offers or they lost a bunch to attrition before we saw them. We haven't seen their starting citadel yet but it seems like they had a fairly central location, so it's entirely possible they got chewed up by other AIs.  I'm feeling reasonably secure in the central region here, so I push onwards to fill the void the illusionist left behind before someone else can.
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Sep 17, 2021 16:39
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By my count cloud lord is leading kobold by 3. I'm going to be busy this weekend so I won't actually start playing the next run until next week, but barring a surge in kobold support it looks like the next playthrough will be birbs.
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Sep 17, 2021 16:45
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Looks like Cloud Lord is officially it for the next run, sorry kobold fans!
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Sep 20, 2021 15:02
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 9 The moon mage goes exploring to the north and finds this unusual formation of stones. Like the mystical column this has some strange effects on the weather, and more importantly, shits out horrors.  Soultorns are the Little League of horrors. They've got some resistances and regeneration, but they're basically just slightly tougher infantry troops.  I'm racking up absolutely silly amounts of iron due to the amount of trade Bernie's generating, so I start slapping down ballistae on any fort that doesn't already have them just in case deer or fishmen wander in.  The southern peninsula is all but secured.  Looks like we found the illusionist's now-deserted home. Guess they had a secure base the whole time, although they probably would have had a slow start; there's a distinct lack of income sites around and a lot of rough terrain for them to slog through to get anywhere.  The soultorn wandering around the ship stones had an invisible buddy backing him up. It's ethereal and has a paralyzing ranged attack, but it's not too scary. I lose four hastati, which is still cheap for wandering horrors.  I was hoping to have some more savannah down here to explore during winter, but guess not. Adding insult to injury, the only additional property in the illusionist's starting turf is a guard tower. So they had to deal with a hardened fort that marches out troops to reclaim villages, but doesn't actually provide any income.  The ship stones work a little differently from the mystic column; instead of a passive weather effect, you can interact with them to gently caress with the seasons. More autumn means less winter, so this is a plus in my book.  The metal initiates takes some troops and starts exploring westward, spotting this big boy stomping around the forest. It's an 80 or so HP giant plant monster with armor and damage resistance, so taking it out would be a tall order without magic backup. I think these guys stick to forests, though.  Oh poo poo, I've been completely overlooking this. Spider thickets are nasty monster spawners but they can blend into regular forests pretty easily, especially when there are some regular dead forests nearby. I'm pretty sure the dryad queen had this one flagged, because otherwise there would be dozens and dozens of spiders everywhere.  The spiders are no match for a legion backed up with archers and mages, but if the spider thicket remained unclaimed then it would start spitting out stacks of these at a pretty good rate.  The southern strip of savannah does have at least one more settlement, and it's a good thing I found it when I did.  These guys are bad news. Not only are they unusually nasty compared to most hamlet defenders, if they get left alone too long they tend to open world-ending portals to hell.  My economy is starting to get quite silly and the gold is piling up, but I can never have too many ballistae so I crank up my trade. Buying at overprice lets you pay 4 times as much gold for 2 times as many resources. It's a bad deal, but I'm made of money.  The map generator is perfectly happy to generate ports on inland lakes. I'm not about to complain about having more recruiting sites on the front lines.  I guess I should probably start spending some of this money. I set the capital to start autorecruiting princepes solaris, because why not.  With the illusionist's territory basically secure (and no, there were no other settlements on their starting peninsula) the empress goes to explore the clouds some more. They're a bit monotonous but there are villages up here to conquer.  Looks like the southern swath of savannah actually might lead somewhere after all.  More horrors  Even more horrors  The cloud people have magical damage and the Champion of Storms has wind and lightning spells, so the empress isn't invincible up here. When you can cast multiple sleep & paralyze spells per round it's close enough, though.  While I'm exploring new frontiers I decide to pop a boat out from the southern peninsula to see about taking some of those offshore resource deposits.  Ah! A new AI faction appears.  The empress takes a sky village held by some mesoamerican themed units. Again, nothing that poses any real threat.  The new purple faction isn't limited to the far south. Looks like we've got kobolds.  Kobolds are a freespawn faction built around being the ultimate fodder. There are almost 300 units here and I don't see any mages, so I'm pretty sure like 50 real troops would be more than enough to wipe them out.  Undines are intelligent elemental beings that can cast weak magic. That's a little bit scary, but there's only one and I'm bringing a literal boatload of troops to the fight.  Fighting aquatic enemies with a boat has its disadvantages; I can't really bring a front line to bear, and although I brought plenty of archers the ones in back aren't really going to have the range to hit anything directly in front of the ship. Still, it's enough.  There are some things I'm steering well clear of, though.  I'm getting a little tired of the friendly fire from the old wizard. Since I've just been mopping up indie villages basically all my casualties are self-inflicted. I do keep a couple smaller AoEs on hand but the bread and butter here will be Call Lightning.  I push further on into kobold territory and find an occupied mine. For us they're just a source of gold and iron, but for kobolds they're fortresses and spawning grounds.  Higher level kobolds can also summon dragons to their nests. Dragons are stupid and do not follow kobold orders, but they have their own unique AI behavior instead of wandering around randomly. Generally they'll just sit around and help defend the nest, but periodically they'll briefly fly off to attack any unowned villages within range before returning to home base. IMO this makes them substantially less useful than stationary defenders; they're big and scary but not "solo a real army" scary, so they're a garrison that periodically abandons its backup and leaves both itself and your vitally important base vulnerable. With the old wizard leading I could probably take on the whole mine right now, but I think for now the plan is to bide my time and wait for it to gently caress off. I don't know what they might have lurking offscreen and if my meatshields are depleted I don't have a good way to replenish them. And while the kobolds get fortifications I'm pretty sure that once I clear them out it reverts to being a regular mine where I'm a sitting duck.
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Sep 20, 2021 16:10
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Bernie will be ascending by and by, but there are a couple issues that make me hesitant to pull the trigger at this point. For one, AFAIK if the empress dies the emperor can take a new empress. But the God-Emperor will not marry a mortal woman, so if Lavinia dies after Bernie ascends then I'm down a god-empress.
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Sep 20, 2021 16:22
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Zengetsu posted:You seem to be getting a lot of horror spawns compared to my usual games. Honestly, it feels like most games I have to put up with worse. Not only does the spawn rate feel higher than in CoE4, it feels like there are more locations that attract horrors, and also I think phase spiders might be new? At any rate I don't really remember them from 4, and they're worse than a lot of minor horror spawns.
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Sep 21, 2021 00:05
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titty_baby_ posted:So is it sort of like dwarf fortress with world generation then? I think stuff like that is more coincidence than anything. You can select different world gen parameters for different "societies"/eras/levels of development, and there are a few special versions of most of the more interesting societies, but I'm not sure that it actually takes which factions are present into account for selecting which version of a society is in play. Maybe it does??? I guess there are some strong associations between most of the sub-societies and different factions. I mostly play on Agricultural which is very generic and doesn't really have specific sub-societies, so maybe I just haven't had the chance to see it in action.
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Sep 21, 2021 04:05
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 10 Magic library spotted. Libraries mean more wizard recruits and also would let me promote my metal initiate, so this is an important find.  They tend to be fortified and have wizards backing them up, but I have a goddess backing me up so they're basically hosed.  The sorceress has some decent spells, some archer-centric support buffs backed up by an okayish blasting spell, and is packing a magic ice sword and acorns that summon some vine men.  It doesn't help. Amusingly, spells tend to do damage to whatever the target is standing on so Syllable of Death winds up blowing holes in the fortifications, although it won't target the front of the wall.  I spot another, different purple faction in a darker color.  Now that I've made contact with the next enemies the empress will definitely be needed on the ground, so I send the moon mage up the mountain to explore the sky further in her stead.  My naval expedition has collected several coral and gem sites for a bit of extra money. I don't think I'm going to take this one, though.  Yeah I'm probably just going to leave this well alone.  Dark purple has a citadel and a ruined castle. So far I'm just seeing generic human troops, so I'm not sure what faction I'm looking at here but they're definitely no match for an army with a goddess in tow.  Back down south, the wizard stack finds a couple watch towers which will be handy for reinforcements against the kobolds. This one has an odd assortment of defenders; I think this is two separate groups of indies that wandered in, but I wouldn't have expected them to be on the same side? Regardless, the bishop fish has a few loot items, including another magic bean and a ring of invisibility. There's also a level 1 spell scroll, which... I guess is nice, but I have a really hard time caring what level 1 spells my mages know at this stage of the game. Or most stages of the game, really; there are a few factions that live and die by their starting spell rolls, but you pretty quickly get past the point where 1st level spell rolls will be the deciding factor in anything.  A "small" kobold stack wanders up. This isn't even going to be remotely close.  I launch an assault on dark purple's citadel. They have the siege advantage this time: 15 of the 21 casualties we took happened before the fight started (there are some discrepencies in the kill vs. death counts due to troops getting confused and killed by their own side.)  You can see the holes left by the catapults, but now that they're done shooting it's my turn. Unfortunately the empress decides to gently caress around with her lower level spells at first.  That's better.  The dark wizard can buff troops with ethereal, rendering the walls irrelevant. With the entire enemy army mostly stunlocked this doesn't really change the outcome even a little bit, but it does speed things up.  Elsewhere, the old wizard murders half of the kobold front line before they can move.  The AI did at least have the good sense to pack this army with slingers, who manage to do enough chip damage to bring down a couple of troops.  The kobolds must be doing something right in general. Another unmet AI faction bites the dust.  They're on the advance in the center too, encroaching in dark purple's territory.  Up in the clouds the moon mage spots some indie kobolds occupying a valuable city. Their chief even carries a magical cloak of displacement, which isn't particularly great defense but it's decent ballista insurance if nothing else.  Cloud cities have some unique recruitment options. They're expensive, but cloud people are ethereal troops with magic weapons--closer in strength to the illusionist's phantasms than the plain 1-HP illusions. For some factions (like the senator) just having guaranteed archer recruits is probably worthwhile.  It's not a good turn to be a kobold. This stack is about three times the size of the one in the desert, and it does manage to do about three times the casualties. That's still a 20:1 loss ratio, and while kobolds are expendable they're not that expendable.  Our naval expedition ends in ignominious defeat. I guess it's accurate to the Roman theme?  Wow, I just completely underestimated these guys. In Dominions ichtyids are basically trash troops outside of the utility value of the nets they sometimes have, but these things are swole as hell. Honestly I'm impressed it was as close as it was between their superior stats and home turf advantage, although I guess all those archers are good for something.  The old wizard takes a city off the kobolds. I didn't get a screencap of the combat summary but I didn't lose more than 1-2 troops.  The dragon finally flies out to nab a measly farm. It doesn't have quite enough movement to get back home, so it's exposed now.  It does some damage, but it's spreading the hurt around while getting focus fired by 60 troops and a max level wizard.  Another dragon immediately appears to grab the city!  Second verse, same as the first.  The Ring of Evasion it was carrying has a 25% chance of canceling any given attack (possibly physical only? Unclear.) I stick it on my old wizard for added insurance.  The kobolds are actually outflanking me (and dark purple) to the north. Just a reminder that the hundreds of casualties they're taking are basically nothing to the kobolds. Speaking of which, dark purple's real commander finally shows up: looks like they're the Demonologist that wiped out the warlocks earlier. I probably could have guessed just based on the looks of their citadel but I'm a little shaky on what some of the home fortresses look like and I haven't played demonologist in forever (demonologists are one of the factions that have to deal with summons turning hostile and attacking you, which I'm not a fan of and put up with enough on other more interesting factions.) Regardless, they're pretty scary so I can't do much but hunker down in the citadel and let the kobolds run amok for now; at a minimum I need to join up the empress with my main armies in the area.
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Sep 21, 2021 16:42
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Zengetsu posted:I'm honestly surprised the demonologist has made it this far. They nearly always die off to indies or themselves for me. That seems to be a function of the uncontrolled chance on their summons; even for human players, whiffing critical summons early on can leave you dead in the water even if it doesn't outright kill you. But those summons tend to be really good to compensate for the failure chance, so when the AI gets lucky long enough to reach critical mass they can just be brutal.
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Sep 21, 2021 17:56
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scavy131 posted:The difficulty setting giving them over 200% more resources probably helps with reaching that critical summoning mass where they aren't in danger of dying to passing deer. Oh, I mean critical mass for not dying/taking irrecoverable losses from their own failed summons. If you fail the control roll on your first summon of a given tier, or you fail the control roll on the second one and it kills the first one, it's a pretty huge setback. Higher AI handicaps do help them bounce back out of the "murdered by deer" danger zone but they're still going to be easy pickings for other AIs that were able to snowball from the start.
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Sep 21, 2021 18:11
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 11 With the dragon out of the way I get a move on evicting the kobolds from the mine. Note that every little pentagram on the ground is a hidden magical trap, one of the features of kobold strongholds and a big reason I didn't want to take on the dragon here.  In this case they're decay traps, which are all but guaranteed death over time. The wizard easily clears the kobolds, but I lose half my army to the goddamn traps.  Offended that we're squatting on his house, the demonologist rolls up with his entire goddamn army. This, uh, might get bad.  These things are built like tanks and just casually throw out confusion attacks, and they're far from the worst thing here. There are multiple rows of mostly mages standing off to the left side of this pic.  The ballistae open a couple holes, but most of these things are beefy enough to shrug off a ballista hit.  A lot of the non-humanoid devils have AoE breath attacks. So on top of bringing 100+ human troops and several dozen mages, they also brought a couple dozen troops with mage-equivalent firepower.  I BROUGHT GOD, MOTHERFUCKERS  Devils tend to have good MR, so sleep mostly knocks out the useless human troops while the demon barrage continues.  Lavinia is also packing a mass banish spell, but again: devils tend to have good MR. This handily shuts down whatever summoned undead trash they summon, but each cast might only get 1-2 odd devils.  There are a lot of fliers out there who can simply ignore the walls. Whatever survived the initial barrage gets cut down pretty quickly.  Slowly but surely, the demonic horde gets pushed back by the banish spam. Most of our troops are dead, but the gates still hold for now.  Gradually elementals start filtering through to the front, summons from the backline devils with elemental magic. Since they can't be banished or put to sleep, they're winding up doing most of the fighting. The cloud elementals are picking off wall troops with their ranged lightning, but they're going down easily enough.  So, uhhhh. Several disease demons have worked their way up and they're packing AoE decay spells, and as it turns out iron gates are not immune to decay. It's only a matter of time for the gates, as well as the remaining wall defenders. Only the inner keep holds.  Even without gates, Lavinia's magic holds the demonologist's hordes at bay. Slumbering troops pile up around the chokepoint.  CoE's battlefield is a two-dimensional plane, and in order to represent flyers passing overhead they are allowed to displace other units in their movement. Typically this causes a minor disruption at most but at one point she actually manages to nudge the dark wizard off the tower altogether.  From his new vantage point he is able to lob his spells much more effectively, projecting fear and damage into the middle of the enemy's diminished formation. Slowly he begins to carve out a clearing in the upper corner.  But in doing so, he has put himself in the range of the demonologist himself. The dark wizard holds out for a few rounds, but soon is bested.  The gates open. I do not know if this is a reaction to the dwindling number of ranged troops left on our side, the loss of all the threatening demons, or a Dominions-style stalemate timer after 200 (!) rounds of combat. Regardless, Lavinia is able to work much more quickly now that she can throw melee attacks and Syllable of Death around.  In the process of mopping up she actually picks up several replacement troops from confusion.  That battle was so big it doesn't fit in a single page of results. By my count, that is 36 spellcasters on the enemy side, almost half of them level 2s.  Besides the empress I have a total of 6 troops standing after the battle, and they're not necessarily 6 of the ones I started with.  Still, I definitely came out ahead of the other guy. It looks like their other stack got wiped out by kobolds this same turn. I was going to write something about how this attack demonstrates how bad the AI is at evaluating things like fortifications, siege engines, and wizards, all of which is true. But I went back to my old save and reran the battle a few times and... honestly, I got lucky. My odds of winning were maybe 3 or 4 out of 10. Decay is brutal and there's decent odds the disease demons hold out against the barrage of sleep+banish long enough to tag the empress and then it's GG. At the time I was too lazy to watch the entire battle (it's quite long) so I didn't realize just how closely I had come to losing. Irritatingly, this created a discrepancy in the screenshots above since when I went back to grab screenshots from the second half of the fight I was running a newer version of the game and it hosed with the battle playback. I swear I didn't scum this fight, though; I just took it for granted that hey, God-Empress wins big fight. The AI still made several critical mistakes: there was little point risking their demonologist himself and gambling their entire existence on the attack's success, and the sheer mass of human troops contributed nothing except slowing down the devils advancing from the rear. Better play could have given them even better odds and kept them alive for a few more turns even if they lost. Overall, the AI made the right call in attacking, their luck just came up short.  I spot another cloud city, so I gather some cloud archer reinforcements and head in. Tengu are very nasty: every single guy on their wall has a ranged AoE wind attack. But I have the numbers and a level 2 mage backing me up.  Oops. I did not look very closely and they have a level 3 mage backing them up.  So much for conquering the sky.  Back on the ground I move in on the other kobold stronghold, which turns out to be their starting fort. It goes much the same as the first one, although I'm rapidly running out of meatshields.  I retreat to the city and get some ballistae in to help defend, but the kobolds are moving in to retaliate and I'm spread awfully thin here.  The upshot is that without any troops, I have no worries about friendly fire, especially when I'm sitting behind a wall and all the kobolds are outside.  BWAHAHAHAHAHA  This fight is basically the best case scenario for a wizard sitting on a castle wall and nuking everything. The wall gives cover bonuses vs. projectiles which render those slings pretty harmless where something with better weapons might have been able to plink the wizard to death, and kobolds have something like 3 HP so they die very quickly to AoE spells. So now I can talk about how bad the AI is about evaluating things like assaulting wizard-held fortifications. Theoretically if they ran an all-ranged army they might have had a chance of getting a lucky shot in, but the wizard's big spells badly outrange their tiny slings and bows and having several rows of useless kobold infantry meant that by the time they had a shot at the wizard they'd already been standing around getting blasted for a while.  OK, that was fun. I've spent long enough faffing about.  "...Emperor. Though this might be a good opportunity to study a transition into godhood, the Department of Divine Studies has been reluctant to send a request for some of the Divine Imperial flesh." Like the Empress, the God-Emperor is a double level 3 caster with triple digit HP. Storm Magic and Solar Magic are both fantastic spell schools; while Godflesh does not make him literally invulnerable to nonmagical damage, it does give half damage from fire/slash/pierce/bludgeoning damage and extra armor. He also gets a ton of wide area damage, including multiple ways to hit the entire battlefield. Unlike the Empress, Bernie's divine form does not fly. Which is a problem, since he's too big to fit on a boat and not big enough to wade. This is the main reason I've been holding off on transforming; until I can get a flying/swimming item (that fits in a miscellaneous item slot, or perhaps a weapon if such a thing exists) he's stuck on the imperial isle.
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Sep 22, 2021 22:44
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Yeah, I was very surprised in a pleasant way when I saw this go down. Most fights tend to be very one-sided; the AI is written with the understanding that it's known to be bad at evaluating magic, fortifications, special abilities etc. so it seems to be programmed to only attack when it thinks it has overwhelming force. I had just enough advantages that it misread a modest advantage as an overwhelming one, but not enough to just meatgrinder the whole army like the old wizard did.
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Sep 23, 2021 00:06
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scavy131 posted:You were incredibly lucky in the fight against the demonologist, not just because the God-Empress' spell rolls were good enough to keep a demon horde at bay, but one of the issues that Ritual Summon based factions seem to struggle with is that they have a hard time delegating summoned troops, there were two different Demonologist summoner commanders in that stack that attacked you, only one needed to actually lead the attack but I'm not really sure if the AI ever leaves behind summoned troops or gives summons from one commander to another. I don't really know that the AI will bother to shuffle troops between commanders, short of a commander dying and leaving its troops behind. They will coordinate stacks together to make combined attacks, after which they either seem to have the original stacks go their separate ways or else permanently absorb them together into their deathball. They do sometimes leave leaderless troops (particularly ranged and/or slow ones) behind to garrison fortified sites but as far as trading troops off and leaving the commander behind, I haven't seen it. I did forget to mention: I checked the name on the demonologist and it's not the named leader of the faction. So at some point they already lost their original demonologist and had to replace them, which is probably why they never got to the 3rd tier caster or summons. This was against a demonologist that already suffered a serious early game setback (demonologists are prone to experience those on their own, but the fact that they started smack in the middle of the continent probably did not help matters any. For that matter, they're positioned behind the dryad queen and illusionist and may have weakened both with their skirmishing.)
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Sep 23, 2021 15:31
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 12 So our new God-Emperor has one little problem: he doesn't fly. I could wait to try to scrounge up a magic item that gives flight or waterbreathing...  Or I could do something unbelievably reckless!  Welcome to the Void. It sucks here. This is where all the horrors live, which is the least bad part of this place.  You also tend to randomly warp around every turn, and the map gets blanked at the start of every turn so you have no frame of reference for where you're at, making exploration practically impossible for most factions. Even if you hung around long enough to get a good idea for some of the local landmarks, the terrain itself changes periodically. Wandering through an unmappable, mostly featureless void would be annoying enough, but every turn you spend in the Void also gives you a decent chunk of insanity. Like Dominions, this gives your commanders a random chance to refuse orders for a turn, and it ramps up quickly enough in here that after ~10 turns they're just perma-insane, unusable and immobile, sitting around drooling on themselves as they drift through the Void waiting for a doom horror to eat them.  Or you could get lucky and find one of the few ways out after 2 random warps. I did have a Plan B sitting in my pocket in the form of another planar travel scroll. If I didn't find an exit within a few turns I was going to have Bernie scroll out to Kokytos; this would still leave Bernie irreparably insane half the time and also trapped in Hell, but this would theoretically be preferable to being stuck in the Void.  The pillar is a gateway that dumps us out in the Nexus, the center of the Elemental Planes. There are other gates that can just dump you back on Elysium, generally in one of the horror-attuned structures. In some ways that would have been better, or at least made for a much quicker game, since I'd have been able to get Bernie back into the fight immediately. Nexus has a lot of goodies for us, but doesn't put us appreciably any closer to getting home.  We're immediately thrust into a fight against a magic citadel, which all things considered is a much better place to be than the Void.  There's a high level enchanter here leading a bunch of low-mid level enchanter creations. These things are fairly tough for how many they have, but they're still not that much more powerful than elite human troops.  The big statues are more of a problem. That's a lot of durability and a very nasty ranged attack.  Enchanters can have some tough crowd control spells, but mostly they're buffs and it looks like that's all this guy rolled for higher level spells. This one comes with a bunch of magic items but they're mostly irrelevant; there's a crystal that gives him a mirror images effect, which might soak a couple extra hits for him but not enough to swing the fight.  We've definitely got the edge in magical firepower, although the armors take half damage from lightning so this might take a while.  Fortunately, once the animated bows are all dead the enemy obligingly opens the gates. This is a good news, since the legionaries were killing themselves trying to stab the electrified magic doors.  The principes hit hard enough to chip their way through the armors between Bernie's lightning volleys. The statues have no lightning resistance, so once Bernie starts focusing on them the battle ends quickly.  Not shabby at all, IMO.  Of course, having recklessly shot my god into the blind void and somehow come through on the other side, I immediately find a ring of water breathing that would have let him cross over to the mainland. There's some really goddamn good armor too, although it's a couple sizes too small for Bernie's new form.  That's not the real prize, though. Nexus is basically the most valuable site in the game, a castle that's also a level 3 library that also gives you a 25% discount to all rituals. If you're playing a ritual class that can get in and out of Nexus easily this gets really, really good. You can also have a commander use Nexus to scry a random spot on any plane (but mostly Elysium proper.) This is not really very helpful; there is a lot of ground to be covered between all the planes and there's no guarantee that you won't hit a spot that you've already seen, plus you go a little bit insane if you randomly look into the Void (including the little bits of void that other planes use as boundaries.)  It's also surrounded by magic portals, although they're pretty heavily guarded. Unfortunately Bernie is currently afflicted by a bout of VOID MADNESS and unable to explore the gates or peruse the library.  Once he snaps out of it I have him work on filling out his spell list. Every single one of these gates is guarded by something with lightning damage, so I'd like to fish for some kind of resistance. The "research the history of Elysium" option just gives you a blurb about the selected era. It's not particularly useful, although if you selected random era I think this will let you see what you're working with should you find a library early enough that you haven't already figured it out.  Nexus can't recruit normal units, but instead it periodically gets these guys as a random offer.  Ether Warriors are buff ethereal giants with magic weapons & armor and are well worth 100 gold a pop, but unfortunately I've blown my cash hiring wizards and can't afford this batch.  So I get this guy instead. He comes with another dream crystal and an affliction-curing elixir of health. Hydromancy is actually a pretty nice school for blasting spells in CoE, although I didn't really get any of the good level 2 AoE damage.  I also grabbed this for a measly 43 gold. The old wizard sure would appreciate having an infinite source of fodder.  Back on Elysium, the final AI emerges while I'm rebuilding my forces and it's the Scourge Lord. They're a new faction and I'm not entirely sure what to expect from them especially in the AI's hands, but if they've survived this long and are contesting the middle of the map they're probably doing pretty well for themselves.  This particular stack isn't anything to be worried about, though. The giant insects are better than most animal summons, but not by much. The row of 6 guys in the back are Scourge Heralds, buff 1st level casters that the Scourge Lord can summon pretty cheaply, backed up by the Scourge King himself.  This, on the other hand, might be something to worry about. This is one of the more notorious features of CoE, and why it's so important to expeditiously clear out hamlets and villages in case any cultists are hiding there, because the demon invasion will absolutely gently caress up the world.  Thankfully, it's on an island some distance from the shore, which is probably why the cultists were able to survive long enough to go off. I don't even think that many devils can fly, and even if they did the AI probably isn't going to be capable of figuring out how to cross the ocean without drowning most of them.  ...maybe I'm not giving Illwinter enough credit.  I would really like to have a flying invulnerable titan with mass banish spells available to address the demon invasion, so Lavinia grabs a couple spearbearers and goes to squish the kobolds' sorceress stack.  The sorceress almost immediately sends most of the legionaries fleeing. So much for my plan to have them stab all the sleeping kobolds to death.  The empress very, very slowly plinks the ~100 kobolds to death.  It turns out the single ballista I mounted on each of the outlying sections of the capital wasn't actually enough to fend off a demon invasion. Who knew? I probably should have built some more statues while I was at it, but I really didn't think it would be relevant.  I round up a few wizard recruits and several dozen infantry. That ought to be enough, especially since the new wizard comes with a magic lamp that summons a giant air elemental in battle (apparently CoE does not have proper genies.)  Well, poo poo. No wonder the ballista didn't do anything; you'd need to shoot one of these suckers about four times to reliably put it down.  That's a lot of poison.  Still, these things don't have any special defenses. The capital is now secure, and now that I know where the demons are headed I can easily build up enough wizards and troops to hold off future waves.  Oh for gently caress's sake!
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Sep 23, 2021 17:01
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Banemaster posted:Or maybe it is just that CoE cares less about balance It's this. There was a big argument about the demon invasion event on the CoE5 steam forum a couple patches back because it can happen as early as year 3 and many players wanted a reprieve. The Swedes refused on the grounds that having the world randomly end when you're barely out of the getting-eaten-by-deer stage of the game was "interesting", although they did make the odds scale down with map size since larger maps take longer to clean cultists out from.
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Sep 23, 2021 18:11
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 13 The three-way front between the remaining players is getting busy. The ominous looking obelisk is a Pillar of Power erected by the Scourge Lord; left alone it will drain the lifeforce of the land and turn surrounding tiles to desert in order to generate magic resources for the Scourge Lord.  My ratio of infantry:archers is not exactly ideal, but I've been funneling archer mercenaries to more important fronts while just autorecruiting a bunch of principes along the northern front.  The scourge lord's flavor has clearly gone through a couple different versions, his description references big evil overlord armor but the icon is still just a vaguely Middle Eastern guy in robes.  The heralds are quite tough. The Scourge Lord is one of the bless factions, which in CoE is a scaling bonus that you can upgrade through magic rituals. These guys start out as beefy heavy guys with ~10 HP and 2 armor, which has been buffed to an extremely tanky 23 HP/4 armor and a couple resists to boot. Other than the armor, they haven't even gotten any of the really good bless upgrades yet (they're random.)  It gets pretty ugly. Sheer weight of numbers carries the day, but it's a long painful slog.  I haven't forgotten about the kobolds, either.  They actually manage to do even more damage than the scourge lord. In my defense, they actually have a large force of green and white archers, which are considerably deadlier than the slingers (and infinitely deadlier than the generic fodder kobolds.) Green archers in particular get poison arrows, which scored 9 indirect kills above and beyond the 10 they're credited with here.  I kick the scourge lord's ghouls off the pillar of power and take it down, I'd rather not have to deal with a desert wasteland on my border.  Meanwhile in Nexus, Bernie has finally filled out his storm magic list (at least for the levels I care about.) I forgot which level Thunder Ward belonged to, so I wound up going through all the level 3 spells as well as the level 2s before I got it.  This is the big reason I wanted it. There's one of these guarding each of the elemental portals leading from Nexus, paired with corresponding Wheel of Frost and Flames. I can't do much about the frost part, but the principes solaris already have fire resistance and thunder ward will take care of lightning resist.  Way down south, we finally see a kobold sorcerer. Now this guy is pretty bad news for our "stand a wizard on the wall and have him rain death on the enemy" strategy, since if he gets close enough he can murder our wizard with poison magic.  I decide that my force has sufficiently recovered to risk facing them in open battle. It works, although they chew up my stack of meatshields again.  On her way to confront the demonic threat the empress acquires a pet spider, who promptly gets left behind because it doesn't fly.  Her husband charges the elemental portal.  The earth/air wheel tramples its way through our front lines and is shrugging off a lot of attacks as it tramples through our archers, but the fire/ice wheel doesn't have the same defenses. I wind up losing another 30 troops, which is a little bit worrisome since I can't get more of them in here; on the other hand, I can (slowly) get ether warriors instead which are theoretically better.  I probably should have reinforced the port with more than one ballista. It gets lucky and takes out the big bone devil in a single shot, though.  Miraculously, the defenders hold. Some imps can be pretty scary, but the bone imps not so much.  The sea father retreats to the former demonologist citadel for reinforcements. Down south, the old wizard does the same.  I buy up some additional reinforcements to protect Bernie's heartland.  A lone fiend of darkness bounces off our home port's defense, but somehow our ship sinks in port? I think this may have been a glitch with boat placement in port battles, since the fiend gets shot down during the siege phase.  That's a pretty scary stack of demons, but thankfully the watch tower is pretty well packed.  uhhhhh Siege phase is almost over and not a single serpent fiend is dead.  OH THE HUMANITY  Poison is a slow death, and point-blank ballista fire actually gets a decent number of the serpents, but the defenders get wiped out.  The kobolds have retaken their original lair, so the old wizard takes his reinforcements to clean them back out before they can properly settle in again. They have no fort, no traps, no archers, no spellcasters, and no dragon, which is to say: they eat poo poo.  Bernie's through the portal and is now on the Elemental Plane of Earth. He finds a crystal forest worth a tiny bit of gold, and a silver deposit worth a not-tiny bit of gold.  Stone Drakes are pretty tough, but I picked up a batch of Ether Warriors before I went in. Ethereal guys with big magic swords don't really care about these things even when they don't literally have god on their side.  Dammit. I was hunkering down in the city and now the bone devils are back out at sea heading southwards.  Lavinia backtracks to deal with the fallen watchtower. The serpents pile a bunch of poison on her, but for the most part they're locked down pretty quickly.  It's slow going trying to get save-or-dies through their MR, but once their initial poison barrage is burned through they don't do any substantial damage.  I left Ravenharbor to the demons for too long and now it's irreparably destroyed. I don't really need it since it's flanked by ports ~5 spaces away to either side, but it's a reminder that I can't really gently caress around here.  The Scourge Lord has come sniffing around my citadel door while I've been busy regrouping.  Huh. This one's got some magic armor from somewhere. That could be a problem, paired with the armor boost from his bless...  The bugs and animals die pretty easily, but the heralds and Scourge Lord are going to be tough to crack. The Scourge Lord's battlemagic is a bit unique; normally mages in CoE get to cast with no resource expenditure whatsoever, but defiler spells actually require literal lifeforce from the area. If there are plants on the battlefield they'll steal HP from them to cast their spells (you can make out some energy beams in this pic from them draining trees), but if the battlefield is barren they wind up draining HP from their own troops.  Eventually the Sea Father and his summoned elementals wear them down. You can see the trees have thinned out considerably; a few of those are on the Leo, but half a dozen scourge casters definitely took their toll.  It's not cheap. On the plus side, I pick up the spiffy armor (with a built-in armor value of 4 on top of a juicy HP boost) and a few other miscellaneous magic items.  I added a couple more ballistae to the port, and they give a good accounting of themselves, but it's not enough.  It doesn't help that every single one of those shadow imps is a spellcaster. A weak one, but that's still a lot.  The cavalry arrives before the demons have the chance to destroy a second port.  Another wave arrives to contest it.  Lavinia is critically wounded  She pulls through, but will definitely need some time to recuperate before pushing back any further. Meanwhile, Bernie continues to plunder the Elemental Plane of Earth. These guys are tough: a whopping 4 armor on something with 41 HP to begin with, two beefy attacks per round and a one-time charge, and even a little bit of magic. They show up as mid-level warlock summons, which makes me glad the warlock got killed in the cradle. On the other hand, the scourge heralds aren't that much behind them and are much more spammable--and they have room for their bless to grow even more. The scourge lord's endgame summons probably don't quite measure up to the warlock's, but they could get pretty scary with a quantity-over-quality approach.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:27
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 14 Dang, that's some range on the demons. I'm not entirely sure how their AI works but hey, at least that's one stack someone else has to deal with.  Of course, the same behavior means I have to chase these assholes down now.  My newly recruited ballistae make a valiant attempt to hold the port, but they wind up a little bit short and the fiend kills them both before they can reload. That's fine, retaking it will give Lavinia an easy fight while she recovers.  I'm not entirely sure what this sphinx does, but there's a nonzero chance it'll summon horrors so I'll leave it well alone for now. Besides, more kobolds are slipping in from the west to reclaim their hidey holes.  Ouch. Those green kobold archers put in some work, and they've got an upgraded caster too.  I start pushing in with reinforcements from the dark citadel and spot another big kobold stack incoming. This one's got a few new tricks.  Dragonspawns are upgraded kobolds available once they tech up to their higher level casters. They get some extra survivability, wings, and a small breath weapon. They cost magic gems, but kobolds don't actually have a lot of rituals to spend gems on, and these guys are surprisingly legit. These ones are relatively unthreatening since their breath doesn't really do anything that their poison bows don't already do, though.  The dragonspawn stack wanders off, so I redirect my forces towards a lightly defended kobold mine.  I spot yet another hatchery mine down south, too.  Whoops. Even with most of my big AoE spells turned off I still manage to lose twice as many troops to friendly fire as I do to the kobolds. Granted they're unupgraded kobolds so that's a low bar to clear, but still.  It could be worse; I lose 12 troops to traps alone against the much weaker stack in the mine (there were about 40 kobolds here to begin with, but after ~60 ballistae shots before the battle not so much.)  A combined wave of devils bounces off the port. I wish these things would slow down already.  A newly recruited mercenary pyromancer takes some troops and reclaims the ruins of Ravenharbor. It looks like we may actually have a little bit of breathing room on the front against the demons, although it's hard to be sure because some of them are stealthy.  I finally manage to get a reveler in to the unburnt ancient forest behind the western front.  My wizard is rapidly running out of troops and these guys have a trap-filled stronghold with a dragon squatting on it, so I bring up some reinforcements while I wait for the dragon to vacate.  Argh, they've already set up shop in the other mine behind me.  You can do it, little fellas   Finally manage to catch up to these assholes camped out in a jungle village.  There are still a few other demon stacks running around the middle of the map, but there's enough of a break in the tide for Lavinia to fly across the channel and reach the gate.  As an advocate for prison reform, Bernie does not approve of the attempt to imprison the entire population of Elysium in Hell. Punishment is swift.  The lingering demon incursion is cleaned up from the imperial isle.  These things have penetrated all the way to the kobold front.  They do a fair bit of damage, but honestly not too shabby. Probably would have been a lot worse without mage & ballista support.  This shows up for sale for only 57 gold. Sure, I'll take free money.  With my forces depleted and the kobolds on the offensive I decide to join up my two wizard stacks.  Meanwhile, the scourge lord has decided to take full advantage of my forces being tied up with kobolds and demons. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 15:44
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Yep, the gate is destroyed and no new demons are coming. It was extremely lucky that the event only fired this late in the game, and on an island, since it meant only fliers really bothered coming through; if the gate had land access to the rest of the continent there would have been more and tougher invaders to deal with and even getting close to the gate would have been tough, even for the God-Empress.
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Sep 27, 2021 16:03
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Zengetsu posted:Thinking about it, it also means that they probably weren't able to drag sinners back to the gate, since I don't think they have either flying or the ability to swim. That's nice because it means you don't have to worry about them reopening it either unless they can do it from the Inferno side? Huh, I suppose so. I've never really concerned myself much with the details of the demons' sinner-harvesting behavior since I've found the event to be so binary; either someone has forces capable of shutting it down (probably the player) or else demons murder everything in short order.
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Sep 28, 2021 04:59
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 15 Bernie has completely explored one wing of the Elemental Plane of Earth and found only the hard border of the Void.  The joint mage stack is ready to tackle the remaining big mine, and runs into this stack in the way. Drakes are elite troops available to kobolds; they're much beefier than kobolds and have AoE breath weapons, but they're nothing especially scary. Particularly when your front line is fireproof and you're facing fire drakes.  Lavinia goes to deal with a wandering phase spider stack and they take out over half her HP before she puts them down.  Her husband takes on a big elemental stack. Earth elementals can burrow underground to pop out behind your lines, which makes things a little bit messy, but sheer numbers overwhelm them and the losses are only a handful of archers.  Ugh. The kobolds are on the attack again and I haven't even made my way back down to the mine yet.  My hastily assembled defenders do some work, but it's not nearly enough. Taking out all 20 of the melee dragon spawn will help, though.  Bernie finds some more gold sites embedded in the walls. The geodes themselves are walkable, but they don't lead anywhere interesting.  Meanwhile in Nexus I get a recruitment offer for the commander version of the Ether Warriors. This guy gets some neat spells including a charm, and more importantly, he's my first non-insane commander in the Elemental Planes.  The wizard stack meets up with the black kobold prophet and his dragon spawns.  His spell rolls are pretty easy for us. Most summons aren't that good, and while wide area weakness has its uses I'm still pretty much going to be killing one kobold per stab even with a strength penalty.  I got another old wizard recruitment offer  No Call Lightning, sadly. I recruit him in the southernmost port and put him on a boat, figuring that it will probably be faster than heading overland and less risky than recruiting him right at the front. It looks like the Plane of Earth is a bust. There's definitely more to it than this, but there's no guarantee that every part of the plane will be connected. On the plus side the Ether Lord has met up with Bernie and takes charge of the whole stack, which means I can now move Bernie around without having to pause every few turns for Bernie to sit and be insane from void sickness.  I finally reach the mine and most of the kobolds have already left on their counteroffensive. That's fine by me, since the dragon is still here and the less backup it has the better.  It gets obliterated by a double volley of Call Lightning. The white kobolds are immune to lightning, but very vulnerable to being stabbed by legionaries.  Burrowing earth elementals actually manage to kill Bernie's Renatus backup. Thankfully, this just means he respawns in Hades and needs to find his way back to Elysium.  Unfortunately, Hades can be a pretty loving scary place. RIP x2.  A giant pack of maenads bumps into a couple bears and tears them apart with their bare hands. Sisters doing it on their own!  As soon as I leave the mine to go take out the next one the kobolds' pet dragon swoops in and recaptures it  My stack of reinforcements moves in to reclaim the city, at least.  Also, the dragon still sees its original mine as its home and on its way back there it helpfully rams itself headlong into my wizards, who kill it with only minor friendly fire casualties.  With the dragon gone, I send the legions in to seize the practically defenseless kobold lairs in the south while the wizards move on to the slightly less defenseless mine.  They don't have any traps up or anything yet, so in wizard terms it's still basically defenseless.  I've finally got all 3 of the big mines under control. Having 2 iron mines and a gem deposit practically within a turn's movement from their home lair would have been a very strong start for the kobolds, it's no wonder they killed one AI by themselves and outlasted many others.  Bernie and the void lords fight their way through the lightning-spitting guardian statues to one of the outer gates in Nexus.  It leads out of the Elemental Planes, but not back to earth. Welcome to the Primal Lands.  They're mostly populated by animals (who get a buff here) and the occasional primordial nature god, but there are some small settlements here populated by fir bolgs.  They're only moderately beefier than human troops (not counting the experience they've accumulated for sitting here all game), but still pretty decent resistance for a mere farm.  Especially since it turns out they have some stealthy backup. Sidhe warriors are considerably beefier than human troops, and they get mirror images too.  Still, they are not much threat for a planewalking god. The void lord even grabs a new recruit for the legion.
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Sep 28, 2021 18:48
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Caracalla did IX/XI solar flame can't melt animated bones
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Sep 29, 2021 04:43
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Bernicus Sanderius, part 16 Lavinia blunders into an ambush in a hamlet.  ...which turns out to be an entire dragon.  God vs. dragon is not a very fair fight, for the dragon. But this does mean there must be yet another kobold stronghold nearby, the dragons don't stray far from home.  Bernie has no trouble knocking over a larger fir bolg settlement, even with more sidhe to contend with.  The kobolds aren't yielding their home turf without a fight.  I mean, it's not much of one. But it is, technically, a fight.  So here's that hidden kobold lair. Ugh, it's all green kobolds.  The god-empress isn't immune to poison, so I'll hold off and let the wizards take care of that. But she can definitely knock over this tower.  Unfortunately we aren't the only ones with this idea. Another scourge lord stack is attacking our northern line.  The ballistae pick off some chaff, but there's not nearly enough firepower for the scourge lord's elites.  The recently taken lake port falls next.  Bernie and the void lord continue to explore the Primal Plane. It follows the same weather pattern as Elysium, but it has some mystic columns with the same temperature inverting properties. They don't seem to attract as many horrors here as the one on the main map does, or else I'd be up to my eyeballs in phase spiders.  Lavinia joins the main army to evict the kobolds from another mine.  Irritatingly, another kobold stack has slipped past so Lavinia has to play whack-a-mole with the cleared mines  Lavinia picks up some reinforcements and chases down the intruders.  The Primal Lands aren't shaping up to be terribly interesting. There aren't that many settlements, mostly just a bunch of super dense forests and snow. Bernie heads back to see what else Nexus has to offer, but a kraken has crawled up onto land and is squatting on the portal.  Animals receive the "Primal" modifier from hanging out here, which gives them some vague sort of buff. It's still not very threatening at all.  The old wizard pushes on into the frontier in the hopes of finding the kobolds' hidey hole, but runs into more scourge troops. That's somewhat alarming; he apparently controls the entire west coast of the map. (I mean, we control something like 2/3 of the continent. But still.)  Beyond the towers he does find some mines, but no kobolds. Not entirely sure what's been going on back here, the kobold-owned properties suggest the scourge lord only recently moved in but the pillar has been there long enough to desertify most of the ring around itself? Although some of that desert was clearly there to begin with, and it does seem like the damage gets more concentrated if there are fewer green and growing spaces to spread out around.  I originally recruited these guys to mop up stray devils, and now they've finally trudged back to the front to retake the port.  Even with the loss of their homeland the kobolds are still on the advance in the north, harassing the border on both sides.  They're even pressuring our holdings, taking the lightly defended castle ruin near the old demonologist citadel.  Ants! These fuckers are almost as notorious as the demon invasion. Anthills are monster spawners, just like graveyards or brigand lairs or spider thickets. But unlike those, anthills spread. Anthills make ant queens; ant queens make anthills. And meanwhile each anthill is pumping out stacks of ants that are relatively dangerous for wandering indies. Left to their own devices they can take over large swathes of the map. Normally capturing an indie anthill just stops it from spawning, but the Scourge Lord actually gets his own unique factional ants. I'm pretty sure these weren't there before, so presumably he plopped down one of his ant queens and the nearby spiders eventually unflagged it.  Bernie breaks through another pair of elemental wheels and finds himself in the Plane of Air.  Almost everything around here is lightning resistant, and most of it is ethereal too. Bernie's Arcane Tempest and sun spells would do a number on them, but they'd chew up my remaining troops pretty quickly.  I'm hoping to find more kobold holdouts behind the scourge lord's lines, and my faith is rewarded. They don't have a mine so there's no freespawn coming, but they can still use the ruined castle to recruit.  Lavinia goes to reclaim the ruined castle on our own turf as well, although really having her there is pretty much overkill. Hell, most of the ballistae are overkill.  My second old wizard finishes his trip and makes landfall at the front.  The scourge lord reclaims the ruined castle in his territory after I clean out the kobolds. I'd just as soon have the fort for myself.  It looks like they've improved their bless since the last time we fought. That's, uh, quite a buff.  So the really dangerous part of regeneration in CoE is that dead units can actually come back if they regenerate long enough, just like D&D trolls.  Call Lightning does its usual thing in the end, but yikes.  The other wizard's assault goes better.  Another scourge lord stack shows up to reinforce his anthills.  Only one scourge herald, but he's got a couple sellsouls in front that also get his bless buffs and are almost as tough as the heralds. No spells, but with stats like these who cares?  It turns out conventional troops with some light mage support can still do work against megablessed scourge troops, given enough numbers. The front line should be stable for now.
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Sep 29, 2021 21:06
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Night10194 posted:So, what is Bernie trying to accomplish in the various planes? It kinda seems like there's a huge hellwar going on where another God might be useful, after all. He's working on it! The only spot that Bernie could ascend to godhood from was on an island that he had no way off of (his god form can't fit on a boat and no swimming/flying items have shown up on the market) so the entire extraplanar adventure is largely one extended detour to try to get back to the mainland back on Elysium.
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Sep 29, 2021 22:15
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 09:53 |
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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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