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GunnerJ posted:Voting I - Science Dwarves for glorious trains everywhere The Train Dwarves in the Hold of Er-Natvir is not a listed option. Which is probably fortunate, since it's not very fleshed out. Expect abstract trains for the listed holds. The Train Goblins in Railskulker are fairly fleshed out, in contrast, what with their Circus Maximus-but-trains and Capital City-but-a-train. Playing dwarves you may meet them, although probably violently and briefly.
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Mar 1, 2023 16:02
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 06:38 |
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Yeah, Er-Natvir are one of the less interesting dwarven nations in the mod. Not including them was the right choice, same as for the equally skipped mission-less holds like the Sewer Dwarves, Volcano Dwarves and Lovecraftian Astronomy Dwarves. In general in Anbennar you want to check that the tag you're picking has a recent mission tree. Avoid doing what I did the first time I played and get stuck playing Castellyr and wondering what all the fuss about the missions was about. There's a lot of developing going on and I believe the remaining holds are getting stuff in the next update or soon after, for anyone who really wants to play Europa Universalis as a short plumber or have the stars gaze back.
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Mar 1, 2023 16:23
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Sybot posted:
The expeditions are cool and thematic, but man do I dislike the mechanics of them. The planning UI offers very little indication of what reasonable parameter values are for a given expedition. You can guess that you should spend fewer points than the estimated loot value, but what that means in expected morale and supplies has to be learned through trial and error. The actual expeditions are almost entirely made up of smaller blind choices, something EU4 does its best to avoid. One event in a specific expedition is literally "Do you go left or right? Ok, right, *rolls dice*. Rocks fall and kill you.", which is the sort of half-joke a GM handbook might include as an example of what not to do. You can also run out of supplies and lose a max-supply expedition if the duration is Long, and Long expeditions take 5+ years. Failed expeditions just eat all the time, manpower, gold and points you sunk into them, and then have to be restarted from scratch. Early game expedition failures can be crippling. There's some perfectly fine CYOA nonsense in the text and there's a lot of care put in the UI, so I really wish they had come up with something better mechanically.
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Mar 3, 2023 02:34
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Doesn't the Orlgehlovar mission tree have Opinions on what sort of government you should be? I vaguely remember it forcing a particular approach, but I could be confusing it with one of the (multiple) other dwarf holds whose MTs do that. I don't think Expansion in the Dwarovar is necessarily wrong. There's value in painting in more stuff faster early on, especially with the enormous administrative efficiency malus you can get when settling adventurers early. It's definitely an idea group that you will be switching out of in a few decades, and it's more beneficial in regions where there's more to settle than the Serpentsreach, where Orlgehlovar is.
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Mar 5, 2023 23:23
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AtomikKrab posted:I personally feel that having integration of the minorities should be an option for completing the missions instead of just eliminating the populations, its... kinda a sour note. Anbennar's mission trees are often very opinionated. This helps provide a narrative and some badly-needed context for a lot of otherwise unmoored fantasy name soup, but every so often they go "and now you must shoot yourself in the foot and/or do a mild genocide". For the less well-designed trees -- and Orlghelovar is generally one of the better ones -- you need to skim ahead in the missions to make sure your plan for the next century involves doing what the tree expects you to do, in the order it expect you to do it. That also means spoiling yourself on what'll happen in said narrative ahead of time. I have some sympathy for the designers since it's very hard to account for all eventualities in a game as open ended as EU4 and they're volunteers working on an enormous free mod but .... it is in many ways not always great, no.
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Mar 19, 2023 18:00
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Sybot posted:It took a whole update, but the disaster is over. From a meta perspective, it clearly exists to put a brake on the runaway train of the dwarven economy. Even if you do your best to prepare for it, it will completely halt your growth and you will end up with a lot of loans that you will need to spend the next couple of decades paying off. The theming is good, but it does feel kind of boring in that it the solution is just spending money over and over again. If there were more impactful decisions like the Time vs Money decision that had long term effects, or the Hoardcursed fought back more often so there was a threat besides bankruptcy it might be more interesting to play through. Yeah, mechanically I'd say the Hoardcurse is the least interesting of the dwarf-specific disasters. It's main problem is that it's nearly impossible to handle reactively. The only strategy involved is deciding on the order of the reforms, and that's only strategic if you know which reform is tied to which set of maluses. You can infer some of them, but they're not spelled out. There's no way to know how expensive the reforms will be beforehand, and they're very, very expensive. On a blind playthrough the outcome is all but guaranteed to be bankruptcy. Narratively the Hoardcurse is thematic but dissonant since what you do to get through unscathed is hoard really hard. The trigger that starts it is having an income of 150 crowns/month. If you stop investing and start hoarding as that number approaches you can go into the curse with 20k+ crowns in the bank. Not needing to take (many) loans makes the event much easier. It's possible to get even gamier: the base cost used for all the reforms and events is locked in when the curse starts. If you intentionally tank your economy for that one specific month by sending all your merchants off to trade in Antarctica, taking as many temporary production efficiency reductions as you can, etc then every reform in the event will be much cheaper.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:05
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Victoria 3 Anbennar is being worked on, although who knows when that'll be out. Can't imagine they'd feature this guy and not let Goblin Trotsky revolve him permanently.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:42
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Defensive tactics work pretty well for underground nations in Anbennar. The terrain is all chokepoints so you can force attrition on the AI and consistently take very favorable battles with good use of Ramparts. I'm not sure it's necessarily the best choice in this case given how the Obsidian Dwarves have spawned, but baiting them onto holds, attriting the doomstacks, and taking stack-on-stack exchanges with maximum dice bonuses can work well. You really need to play Kobolds for the full bleed-the-opponent-to-death experience, though. Nothing like watching Gawed and Lorent throw away a million troops on sieging a single mountain or cave. Also, Sybot posted:
Defensive pips on infantry lower your opponent's damage in an even fight by more than offensive pips increase yours. Offensive pips are better sy securing stack wipes vs out-teched or outnumbered opponents, which may or may not be more important concerns than performance in even fights depending on who you're fighting. Anbennar also has some weird outlier militaries like centaurs and undead where for various reasons conventional EU wisdom doesn't apply, but the dwarves are pretty standard. All that said: the effect of defensive-vs-offensive unit pips is small, and how much you want to care about mechanically optimal in a narrative LP is a different question.
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Apr 6, 2023 16:30
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Dirk the Average posted:Does attrition work on the AI in Anbennar? From what I understand, it's pretty heavily nerfed or capped for AI nations (or was at one point) in EU4 because otherwise the AI would just lose its entire manpower pool trivially. I'm pretty sure attrition has always worked on the AI, at least in EU4. A lot of stuff would break if they could doomstack willy-nilly. Maybe Very Hard gives the AI some anti-attrition bonuses? I don't really play with that on (or Mythic Conquerors in Anbennar). You can absolutely win wars in Anbennar with an attrition-focused nation and an appropriately placed mountain fort. If you play the Dragon Coast Kobold tribes in Cannor then I'm pretty sure you must do so, since everyone else nearby hates you for being wrong culture Monstrous and the Kobold military's entire schtick is that their combat stats are hot garbage but they get defensiveness and an enormous attrition modifier.
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Apr 6, 2023 17:02
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Sybot posted:The engineering knowledge to create such a warship wasn't there yet, but it opened a new rush to study other potential flying artifice. One of the east Haless nations -- the League of Feiten -- is specifically all about* airships, and being a jerk with airships. They can start going full Victory Through Air Power before 1500 and have some of the cooler missions & mechanics in the game. This being Anbennar they're also a bit jank, but definitely worth a playthrough. Also Maghargma are, surprisingly, not centaurs! They're one of the ogre kingdoms in the western plains. Usually they die early because the centaurs are ridiculous until such time as they explode. Not sure what happened to the horsies in this game, guessing no one ever managed to form the Khuraen? *Okay, Feiten are also a little bit about whales. But mostly airships.
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Apr 8, 2023 13:30
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 06:38 |
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Wait, Ovdal-Az-An formed? That sure is a tag you don't see very often. RIP Dak and the Dakocracy I guess.
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Apr 30, 2023 01:38
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