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Pun-Pun, part 1 It's kobold time!  So, 4 teams of 2 AIs each was not nearly enough to populate a Huge map. I'm going to try doing 6 teams instead, as compared to the Huge map default of 7 individual AIs; that gives slightly more room per team to accommodate the more aggressive expansion that having 2 teammates allows.  Trying to come up with matched colors for 6 teams is a bit of a trial given some of the... interesting choices in the player color palette. Why are there multiple nearly-identical rows of green (that fades into dark red?) and blue?   Meet our kobold tribe. Kobolds come in 4 primary colors of red, blue, green, and white, with black as a sort of auxiliary 5th type. Recruitment of each color is tied to mines of different gem color and the one you start with is random. We wound up with blue, which isn't great but not the worst.  The generic kobolds are identical (and awful) statewise, although each color gets immunity to their corresponding element and a few of them have special abilities. Blue kobolds get snow movement (great) and snow stealth (questionable.)  This is good news, because the ranged kobolds (who do most of the work) are not identical between colors and blue gets very crappy slingers. Being able to scoot around full speed in the winter is at least a decent consolation prize; red kobolds get equally lovely slingers and no payoff for them until much later on. (All kobold slingers' attacks have a listed maximum damage of 1. Theoretically that means that the damage roll explodes infinity times... but Illwinter's exploding dice mechanic subtracts 1 from each additional die, so 1d1 exploding infinitely still only does 1 damage. In order to give weenie units some hope of doing damage against anything with literally any armor whatsoever, CoE has a special rule for 1d1 damage: there's a 50% chance that any given 1d1 roll spontaneously upgrades itself to a 1d2 roll. Given enough slingers, eventually some of them will do some kind of damage, but it's quite slow.)  Kobolds are a magic class, but their starting caster is noticeably weaker than what most of them (e.g. Cloud Lord) get. But this is where blue kobolds' biggest silver lining is, because frost magic is quite badass for combat magic. Frozen Heart can be resisted, but it's excellent range and incredible damage for a 1st level spell. MR rolls are not very kind in CoE, either, so even elite troops will get tagged through resistance rolls very easily. Cold resistance is completely useless to us since all of our troops for the foreseeable future are immune to cold, but on the plus side the combat AI is actually smart enough to avoid casting redundant buffs. So this means Pun-Pun will very reliably spam his excellent single target damage every fight, unless we foolishly bring something that's not cold-immune into a fight.  To make up for the lack of a starting 2nd level caster, kobolds do get some heavy artillery. The drakes are another point of differentiation and Frost Drakes are one of the better ones; that's quite a bit of damage, and they're beefy enough that they're not prone to dying to random fluke. They're not so beefy that they can hold a line solo, so they still want plenty of fodder backing them up, but they're a huge force multiplier to a fledgling kobold force.  Kobolds are a freespawn race, and every turn a couple generic kobolds pop out from our hatchery. You can also recruit them for gold, or you can recruit slingers, which is a much better use for your money. (To their credit, the slingers are cheaper than the bow-wielding archers that some of the other colors get: you get a full 15 slingers for 50 gold, whereas the archer recruits are 10 for 50. Slingers still aren't remotely worth it if you have the option.)  You can also recruit marginally tougher kobold warriors. They're actually... not terrible? Having 2 armor is a lot and makes them almost comparable to generic human troops in survivability, at half the cost, and javelin + shortsword + shield is a decent loadout. But gold and iron are quite precious early on, and "almost as good as generic human troops" doesn't stay relevant for long.  Anyhow, enough of that. Our pet drake immediately obliterates the tiny garrison of the hamlet next door.  Further exploration turns up a few more farms, with similarly anemic defenses. The nearby guard tower on the other hand has a wizard, which means it's probably a no-go for a while. If it starts sending out troops that could get annoying.  The kobolds' secondary starting commander is a chieftan, who has no particular special abilities beyond being a warm body with leadership abilities. I decide he's expendable enough to send him out exploring solo, where he finds a few undefended settlements and a barely-defended mine. Kobolds build their nests in mines, although they only inhabit the bigger mountain type mines and not mere coal mines. Still, it would be a boost to our sapphire income. The adjacent temple is almost certainly guarded by something big and scary and invisible rather than empty, and doesn't have much to offer us anyhow.  Similarly, I'm pretty sure this castle ruin is haunted. The pirate port is definitely a bit beyond our starting army's capabilities too; I do not look forward to figuring out how many slingers it takes to deal damage to wall defenders through their cover bonus, but I have a pretty good idea exactly how many crossbow shots it takes to kill a kobold.  I am racking up a pretty decent income between all these farms and hamlets, so I'm able to recruit the first batch of slingers pretty quickly. Coupled with the freespawn kobolds I've now almost duplicated the starting army, minus the drake (which is to say, the most useful part.)  Next turn I actually get a recruitment offer for another drake... but I can't afford it, having just recruited a batch of slingers  Note that taming drakes requires the expenditure of kobolds. It's not clear if this represents food for the drake, inevitable training accidents, or a bunch of kobolds being Frankensteined into some hideous abomination.  A recent patch drastically increased the amount of water surfaces that freeze over in the winter; outside of the tropics (and sometimes even on their edge) the seas generally get an ice shelf at least one tile wide, making small islands off the coast more accessible. This is pretty great for snow-movey kobolds, since they can scoot along the ice at full speed and avoid any rough terrain on the coast. I'm guessing this particular island probably doesn't really go anywhere in particular, and I'm not wasting an entire turn moving into the swamp just to see.  An ice bridge has actually formed across the bay to the west, although the port on the other side is still a bit much to handle.  With our new recruits the secondary chieftan goes out to take the coal mine. The defenders have no problem picking off a kobold with virtually every attack, but sheer numbers win the day.  Meanwhile Pun-Pun bypasses the port to find a juicy cluster of hamlets on the other side. He may be trapped here once the ice thaws but this area seems lucrative enough to be worth sticking around for a couple seasons.  There's another coal mine adjacent to the first one, but kobolds are decidedly not up to taking on dwarves with a mere 2:1 advantage.  This looks more our speed.  A recruitment offer comes up for our first black kobold leader. Black kobolds aren't tied to any particular color of gem and can be recruited at any hatcheries, but not reliably. Instead of an elemental theme, they're all about stealth. These guys are lovely knockoff assassins: whereas your standard issue assassins target the enemy back line with poisoned weapons that will very reliably finish off a human target before the battle proper starts, the black kobold murderers pick a completely random target and have disease-causing daggers that might (depending on resistance) inflict a debilitating disease that will eventually kill the target in many, many turns. The upshot is, they do have acute vision and work just fine as scouts. But they don't get snow move, so they can't keep up with our blue kobolds in winter. I definitely have better things to spend money on at this point in the game.  Pun-Pun finishes mopping up the coast with minimal resistance.  Up north, the starting chieftan finds the goddamn mother lode. Four gems is a lot   It's manned by indie versions of the Scourge Lord's slave miners. There's a lot of them, but they're among the few troops in the game lovely enough to be taken on more or less equal footing by kobolds. And while the foreman is formidable with a big bless, as an indie unit it's stuck with the crappy default bless of +1 morale.  We're in a pretty village-rich area, which is good, because despite being a gem using class kobolds mostly want money first and foremost as they get a lot of mage offers and don't have much in the way of summons. We get our first spellcaster recruit within a year of starting. The new shaman has another couple of decent attack spells; Frost is weak but has some AoE and ignores armor, and Icicle is basically a souped up version of the Mist Warriors' attack. Nothing mindblowing, but enough to put in some decent work.  He also comes with an intriguing ritual.  Pun-Pun finds some free gems for the taking, and a castle that's decidedly not free for the taking. I can't do anything with the gems until I find a proper ruby mine, but never hurts.  Yet another shaman comes up for hire, and the chieftan brings his stack back home--but parks the slingers just outside. Because...  It's dragon time  Kobold costs are paid indiscriminately using whatever troops you have around (leaders are thankfully exempt, so you don't have to worry about your spellcasters getting eaten), so it behooves you to remove any that you want to keep.I've ragged on the kobold's dragon summons in the past due to their unpredictable AI behavior, but there's a stack of moose wandering around the forest nearby that I'm pretty sure could probably erase my entire army at will; trample is not kind to kobolds. At this stage of the game, this kind of defense is still extremely relevant and worthwhile even if it occasionally flies off to attack something random. Moreover, there's another effect that makes dragons desireable above and beyond their somewhat questionable tactical value: every dragon increases the recruitment chance for casters of that color.  While I'm at it, I might as well show off the other level 2 ritual that Pun-Pun and the new shaman have instead of summon dragon. It's a scrying ability that sacrifices a gem and a few kobolds to reveal a random mountain mine somewhere on the map. Apparently, we managed to nail the Dwarf Queen's home mine on the first go.  ...and it's about 12 spaces away from our starting stronghold. This is not exactly ideal; dwarf strongholds are notoriously hard to break, dwarves excel at spamming small annoyance squads, and they tend to have enough armor to shrug off kobold hits.
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Dec 13, 2021 18:11
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Who needs a hoard of gold when you have a bunch of tasty kobolds around to eat and boss around
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Dec 13, 2021 18:48
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I love the kobold flavor and much like the dragons I find them a fun thing to play with. One of these days I'll actually win a game with them but I refuse to lower my drat settings and I always roll into just TERRIBLE starts with them.
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Dec 13, 2021 21:57
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The key to dragon slaying: Hit them while avoiding their attacks.
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Dec 13, 2021 22:56
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Yeah, the disgruntled academic refusing a draconic connection is good fluff
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Dec 14, 2021 15:39
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Pun-Pun, part 2 We're back, and... wait, I didn't attack any silver mine   Looks like our newly summoned dragon is a real go-getter. You can't really rely on dragons to go after sites, but every once in a while you get lucky.  That'll do, dragon. That'll do.  For a modest chunk of gold and iron our shamans can upgrade the newly taken silver mine with a kobold hatchery. Now it has rudimentary fortifications and will generate freespawn kobolds.  Stone drakes, like black kobolds, are color-agnostic and can be recruited at any appropriate mine regardless of gem type. They don't get breath weapons but they're absolute tanks, something that kobolds are generally lacking in. They cost a ton of iron, though, which makes them a tougher sell early on since you need iron for hatcheries.  Pun-Pun continues exploring the south and picking up properties along the way.  A few turns later we get an offer for a different, more expensive spellcaster. Kobolds really want to keep some money on hand to take advantage of these when they show up, because...  These guys are the real stars of the kobold faction. Sorcerers are an alternate caster line for kobolds with better battlemagic than shamans, but without higher-level ritual access (also, you need to have at least one shaman to be eligible for that color of sorceror to show up.) Falling Frost is a hell of a spell; great range, great AoE, decent damage that ignores armor. Stick a few rows of ablative meatshields in front of this guy and he will murder early game armies easily.  I go to try it out and of course he just spams icicle at everything instead. Oh well, it gets the job done.  With so many commanders hanging around I send some out to do some light scouting and uncover a huge group of deer tribe. These guys would actually be kind of scary for early game kobolds if the sorcerer hadn't shown up, and are still kind of dangerous even with him.  Down south, Pun-Pun spots a ziggurat guarded by this badass.  I'm feeling saucy, so I drop off my pet frost drake for safety and move in.  This thing has enough MR that Frozen Heart can't reliably get through, but he can only kill one kobold a turn, which makes this less threatening than a well-garrisoned village. At 1d20 damage a pop I don't have to beat many MR rolls before it goes down.  The ziggurat isn't of any real value to us; it counts as a temple, which is important to some factions for their spellcasters but kobolds don't actually care about that. It does cough up some loot, which... also isn't of any real value to us. Making a single unit super-stealthy doesn't stop it from getting stepped on by AI stacks or wandering moose, and none of our units are strong enough to fend for themselves.  Our dragon decides to take care of the guard tower, wizard or no wizard.  It looks like "no wizard" wins out in the end.  Traditional forts can recruit any color of kobold that you have access to, but only basic kobolds and chieftans. Apparently having the ruby deposit is enough to qualify us to recruit red kobolds, not that they offer anything useful to us.  The chieftan picks up some of the freespawn and goes to explore around the edge of the bay. Unfortunately, 13 real human troops is way too much for a couple dozen kobolds with no mage or drake support.  Meanwhile the new sorcerer pushes northward and finds a rich cluster of settlements, although it seems like there's some bandit camps in the neighborhood.  I charge into the town. It's a little bit risky since the ballista could conceivably snipe our sorcerer, but there are a lot of targets to attract its attention. As long as that doesn't happen I should be pretty good.  A few Falling Frosts take out the ballista before it has a chance to reload.  He spends longer picking off the archers than I would have liked, but there's no great risk here. I probably should have switched my spell loadout to Falling Frost + the two ice resistance spells so that he'd stop wasting time with Icicle, but I'm paranoid about running into cold immune enemies before I have a chance/remember to switch back (Icicle is physical damage primary.)  Sorcerer #2 comes online shortly after and he's loaded for bear. Blizzard is the blue kobolds' ace in the hole: battle-field wide, armor-negating damage that blue kobolds are completely immune to. This would be extremely valuable as a 3rd level spell, getting it as a 2nd level spell on freshly recruited mages is bonkers--and getting it on a subfaction with 100% cold immunity on all its units is extra super busted. Hail Storm, on the other hand, needs to immediately get turned off as blue kobolds are emphatically not immune to 1d4 physical damage. It's quite powerful in its own way and if you got it on a frost titan or something you could wreck face but when your army is composed of flimsy expendable fodder it will delete your army faster than the enemy.  Pun-Pun finds a juicy diamond mine, and I've just about got enough iron for another hatchery.  Oh.  Hello there.
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Dec 14, 2021 19:21
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Ominous! I don't suppose you can immediately summon a dragon for defense?
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Dec 14, 2021 19:36
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Soon, but not immediately. For one thing, moving into the mountain used up all of Pun-Pun's actions for the turn. For another, he doesn't know the summon dragon ritual and has to spend gems learning rituals until he rolls the right one, which might leave him without enough gems left to cast it. (Due to ridiculously good luck with getting matching mines, it would only take a couple turns to rebuild the gem stockpile, but that's a couple turns longer than it would take for the King of the Deep to attack.)
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Dec 14, 2021 19:51
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Alone the king of the deep goes down like the Rephaite, but he has a squad with him here.
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Dec 14, 2021 20:49
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It's also a King of the Deep without any battle afflictions. The quickest way to make him near useless is the "lost only eye" wound.
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Dec 15, 2021 04:06
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Pun-Pun, part 3 Miraculously, the King of the Deeps wanders off into the fog without a fight.  I blow 25 gems to buy a new ritual on Pun-Pun so that he can summon a dragon. I do need some more sacrificial fodder in here first, though.  I know I said this village was probably too tough for a handful of kobolds to take, but eh, they're freespawn. Why not?  Well, I mean, aside from that.  Working on clearing out the bandits from around the town, our falling frost guy runs into a couple bandits that aren't quite what they seem. Werewolves show up as bandits on the map screen, which can make for a nasty surprise.  Not as nasty as getting nuked in the face by a tiny lizard ice mage, though.  I have to sacrifice most of Pun-Pun's entourage, but now we have a dragon on our front line diamond mine in case the pale ones come back.  While I'm at it, I summon a dragon to the silver mine too.  This may seem somewhat redundant since I've got pretty firm control over our starting neighborhood, but dragons do have a decent chance to show up carrying magic items. Unfortunately, in practice this mostly means scrolls or boosters for schools of magic you don't have. At least this one has rarely-seen acid resistance attached?  The diamond mine down south has white kobolds, who get archers instead of slingers. This is a huge step up; they do 1d2 instead of 1d1 damage and have extra range too, which is particularly important since they're only useful in huge masses and you want as many rows shooting as possible. They come in batches of 10 instead of 15 for the same cost, but they're still hugely worth the loss in recruiting efficiency.  The dragon winds up taking care of our deer tribe problem before we have a chance to do anything about them.  The shaman does have a disease spell, which is unfortunate as it means our dragon will slowly rot to death. He's got a huge HP buffer and isn't in a position to have to do much real fighting, though, and by the time he coughs himself to death I should be able to summon up a replacement on the cheap.  Several bandits attack the town held by a lonely kobold slinger. He proceeds to pelt them to death one by one while they attempt to beat the gates down with sticks, completely ignoring the bows that they carry.  Pun-Pun pokes his nose out exploring and immediately finds the other green player.  It's the High Priestess of Ba'al, which could be a problem. The High Priestess's big gimmick is that she can sacrifice whole towns to summon various flavors of mythical giants (the indie Rephaite guarding the ziggurat is an example of what to expect, although there are a couple of tiers beneath them.) So she simultaneously churns out big stompy things while permanently destroying resources (like the enchanter, but better), and on top of that her conventional summons can be quite strong too. She gets her own unique troops instead of the generic human army, and while they're not anything particularly special they're still a little better than vanilla. It's a nice edge for an already strong mage class.  The priestess wanders off with her stack, but another batch of pale ones rears its head. They've got several coldproof undead summons with them, which could be a problem as they're immune to our best damage sources.  Weirdly, there are some dispossessed spirits wandering around the silver mine. Kobolds are quite effective at ghostbusting as far as mundane troops go; the spirits only have 1 HP, so throw a million weak attacks at them and eventually you'll get lucky on rolls vs. ethereal.  While churning out archers to man the diamond mine I get an offer for a new type of caster.  The black kobold slayer shaman is a bit odd; they have worse ritual access than other shamans and worse magic than sorcerers, although they do get the black kobold murderer's assassination attack for what it's worth (nothing.) They use assorted random gems for their rituals, which is handy since you're not as dependent on map RNG, but to compensate all their costs are doubled compared to the single-gem colors. Even so, their promotion is vastly cheaper than any other kobold casters, although still a bit costly this early on.  The newly summoned dragon hops over to the adjacent mine to say hello.  Dwarves do a lot of damage and they take half damage from cold, so they put a decent dent in our dragon, but the result is never really in doubt.  Closer to home, the dragon in the silver mine picks up another guard tower for us. It's not terribly useful since none of our good recruits can be bought from guard towers, but at least they won't send out indie squads.  A simultaneous offer for both a shaman and a sorcerer comes up at the new hatchery, but unfortunately we can't afford the sorcerer.  The blizzard sorcerer rounds up some troops to take on the dwarf-held coal mine close to home.  At no point does he ever attempt to cast Blizzard.  OK, granted, it was pretty reckless to attack dwarves with only 30 or so kobolds, even with that kind of magical firepower. But he could have at least tried. His lower level spells softened them up enough to pick off half of them, but it's still not worth an entire goddamn sorcerer, and certainly not one with one of the best level 2 spells in the game.  The other sorcerer is still mopping up bandits up north, but he's running low on meatshields.  There's an offer for a storm drake at the diamond mine. I generally find these guys less useful than the frost drakes; as flying troops, they rush out ahead of all your ground fodder and get themselves swarmed and killed very quickly. If you're invading the sky they get a bit more useful, but then you have to deal with a bunch of lightning resistant stuff.  Having a shaman unlocks the upgraded kobold warriors, and for white kobolds it also unlocks something else: winged archers. They come in smaller batches than the regular archers, but they also cost half as much, so the price is the same per head; they merely take longer to mass.  I'm getting a bit nervous about our forward base, so Pun-Pun invests in a few new rituals. Kobolds can create magic traps (we saw some of these in action in the magic citadels of Nexus during Bernie's campaign); most of them aren't great but every little bit helps. There's also a further upgrade to kobold hatcheries that increases the quantity and quality of their freespawn.  One of the spare shamans takes some reinforcements to finish mopping up the dwarven coal mine.  The white kobold shaman summons another dragon in the adjoining mine, and it comes with some nice jewelry. The frost magic boost is very tempting, but while it increases caster level it doesn't actually grant knowledge of higher level spells, so for now I keep it on the dragon for the resistance + cold damage retaliation.  West of our home turf I run into this smiling fellow.  Yeah, I'll be steering clear of that forest for a bit.  The winged archers are cool and all, but they don't really do much without a flying leader. Fortunately, white kobold chieftans come with standard issue wings.  Our brave slinger is now 2 for 2 on successful town defenses.  There's still been no sign of the dwarven faction even as I close in on their home fortress, which is quite unusual--normally they swarm all over the place. I do spot some forests flagged with their teammate's color, so they're some sort of herb or fungus-based class.  The pale ones are wandering back, and they have even more undead summons this time.  Those guys aren't my real concern, though. I only catch a glimpse of them between turns before the fog of war falls, but they've got another stack coming up with one of their higher level oracles. These guys are bad news: giant, super beefy casters with multiple spells per turn. The recruitable ones only get one 2nd level school and one 1st level school, but that's enough to be super dangerous at this stage and you can't even hope to get a lucky snipe on them due to their bulk. Normally they're gated by needing temples and lots of gold, but money is not really a problem for boosted AIs and the temple requirement is largely map dependent.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:45
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Pun-Pun, part 4 I fortify the diamond mine as best I can (not very well.) Each of those pentacles is a frost trap that will pop a small AoE with a decent amount of armor-ignoring cold damage.  The pale ones pile into the adjoining ruby mine.  The fight was one-sided enough that I didn't bothered screencapping but not a bad butcher's bill, all told. I think I technically won this exchange based on unit costs, though it's not really going to do anything to slow them down.  I think I'm seeing the writing on the wall. I start pulling more valuable troops out of the mine. Pun-Pun evacuates with his pet drake while the flying kobolds go clear a nearby graveyard.  I probably would not have bothered, except a large cloud formation over the mountains was keeping them from immediately flying upwards. Past the graveyard I find some clear skies and head upwards.  It doesn't take long before the pale ones arrive at the mine.  Many Pale Ones have siege tunneling, which works similarly to the earth elementals' tunneling ability except only during siege phase. Honestly in most regards it's a drawback, since it usually winds up stranding a couple of them alone behind enemy lines where they immediately get mobbed.  The traps mostly get wasted on their undead. The big ancient guy front and center ate a couple, but he's got so much HP that it doesn't really do much.  The umbrals are ethereal and coldproof, so they can phase right through the walls and there's not much the dragon (or anyone else, really) can do about them. Even if the white shaman tagged them with his lovely level 1 lightning spells they have a life draining attack and could easily heal off the damage.  Even so, lucky rolls are always possible. Amazingly the umbrals all go down   I may have had a little help from this guy.  The slayer shamans may not have a lot of oomph, but Dark Magic has some extremely handy tricks such as ethereal buffs and untyped magic damage. Turns out an ethereal dragon is pretty loving scary. If they didn't have oracles out I might actually have had a chance (probably not), but their acid spam is just too much. Water magic is actually pretty good for offense in CoE.  RIP. I did do some damage on the way out, but not a ton of it.  The important thing is that Pun-Pun got out. The pale ones don't seem terribly interested in pursuit, which is good, since the last thing they need is to pick up another temple and get even more oracle recruits.  I recruit another sorcerer, but he's kind of a dud; Hail Storm is still suicidal and cold resistance is back to being useless now that I'm down to only blue kobold mines. I guess he can cast Freeze twice per round instead of once?  In the frozen north we make contact with another faction. It's the Troll King, or more specifically, it's the Troll King's mom.  The Troll King's schtick is that a huge amount of the faction's power is concentrated in a few specific guaranteed units. The Troll King is a giant starting commander that makes the King of the Deep look like a complete chump (admittedly not that difficult), and a year or two into the game Mum here shows up to bail out her large adult son. She doesn't have the most powerful spell list, but she's a level 2 spellcaster that's also got the sheer physical beef to make the King of the Deep look like a complete chump.  Exploring the clouds above the fallen mines doesn't yield anything of interest, but down below we can see the green team's start merely a couple tiles away. No wonder they threw so much at them, the only real surprise is that they didn't take the mines sooner.  I decide to get cheeky and briefly pop down for a closer look before popping back up.  Back up in the sky I spot a small village with a warlock holding the Shovel of the Mole King. The underground doesn't have a lot of resources but being able to get some money and gems on the side would be hugely valuable to us. He's backed up by swans--normal, mundane swans, which are among the few units in the game weaker than basic kobolds--and a cloud elemental, which the white kobolds are completely immune to. Similarly, most of the spells in Storm Magic are harmless to our flying squad. There is some risk that the warlock rolled one of the "wind" attack spells and could do some real damage, so I'm reluctant to jump into the fray, but I'll definitely want to scoop this up as soon as I can risk it.  With a better idea of the lay of the land, I send the winged kobolds back down to raid some of green's undefended territory.  Meanwhile, after a low speed chase through snowy forests my sorcerer manages to catch up with the troll mum (I have snow move on my side, but giant sized units can walk through rough terrain faster than normal, so it mostly levels out.)  With her regeneration and armor she's tough to kill. On the other hand, she rolled some particularly awful spells for the most part; Summon Frogs is even worse than most summons, Enchanted Sleep is annoying but can't kill anything on its own, and while Plague will kill my army in several months it doesn't really have any immediate effect.  It's extremely slow going; the spear kobolds have less than a 1 in 4 chance to do any damage at all, and mum regens 5 HP a turn. Irritatingly, the forest terrain clogs our lines badly enough that the kobold shaman can't get in range, either. Still, gradually the kobolds are chipping her HP down.  It takes over 60 turns and 40 kobolds, but there goes a powerful one-of-a-kind caster for the trolls. They can buy troll shamans to replace her, but they're rare and not nearly as formidable.  I finally take that one heavily defended village near our start, too.  I spot a merchant wandering around near the village and decide to press my luck. The opening crossbow barrage is devastating, but freeze spells delete the deadly knight right off the bat.  Once the kobolds catch up to the crossbows it's all over. Surprisingly, I managed to give better than I took. I forgot how lovely crossbows are most of the time.  I score a sweet 100 gold and 25 iron, as well as a booster for demonologist-specific spells. Again, I guess at least a resistance booster is better than nothing...  Immediately after killing Mum I get jumped by a trio of stealthy forest trolls who avenge her. Every single one of these guys has a sweeping attack capable of oblitering every kobold within reach on most rolls. Oh well, this whole army was dead kobolds walking due to Mum's disease spell spam.  Pun-Pun doubles back and finds the diamond mine basically open for the taking.  I have no illusions about being able to hold it, but I figure the first time did a pretty good job of bleeding the pale ones so I might as well try another dragon.  While I'm at it, I upgrade the hatchery there to a kobold stronghold. Now it will produce more kobolds per turn, including small numbers of archers and warriors, in order to help rush whatever defense I can.
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Dec 17, 2021 21:46
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We're getting closer to whatever that ritual does.
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Dec 18, 2021 00:59
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Great things. Terrible, but great. Seriously though, Kobolds are an interesting faction where you're both okay and bad in the early game because you've got potentially a LOT of units. Just all lovely. Super reliant on drakes (which are random) and dragons (which cost a fair chunk of change). And then.... there's that grand mastery ritual which is sorta key to the kobold game. Then again most of the grand mastery rituals are pretty good and unlock late game units/magic. Also having freespawn archers and warriors is really, REALLY nice at making your waves of trash units actually have bite unless you run into magic.
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Dec 18, 2021 01:03
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The troll super units have notably low MR. One of the classes is very likely (maybe guaranteed?) to start with charm. This can lead to some hilarity in early turns. 
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Dec 18, 2021 16:23
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Pun-Pun, part 5 They're back. In retrospect, perhaps I should have waited a little longer and not drawn attention back to the area by stealing sites right next door.  I'm not sure if kobolds get fewer mercenaries than normal, but it feels that way even considering that I only have the one town. Regardless, they're pretty handy when they do show up.  I recruit another winged chieftan to explore more of the skies and find a thundercloud free for the taking, along with another one not quite as free for the taking. On the other hand, storm giants have a ranged lightning attack and their AI will not advance if there are enemies within range, even if they are immune to lightning and able to shoot back...  The dragon helpfully decides to fly off to some random farm and leaves the diamond mine wide open. There goes all the investment I blew on the stronghold upgrade.  As a result, when it flies back the next turn instead of fighting from inside a fort with fodder backing it up the dragon gets to fight the pale one army solo with no support or cover.  It kills 4 of the cheapest, shittiest fodder troops and a single cavern wight. A dozen kobolds and a double batch of crossbowmen did better than the dragon did.  I decide to take out my frustration on the storm giant in the thunderhead.  The plan sort of works! The archers pepper the giant to death from a safe distance, but the chieftan has no ranged attack and immediately flies into melee where he gets squashed.  The lone hero defending the town up north finally meets his match.  I can't do anything much about ancient forests at this point but I can clean up some of the wandering animals messing up my turf.  Another sorcerer recruit comes up. No Blizzard, but a decent suite of offense spells all the same. Lots of schools are mostly buffs of varying usefulness, but frost magic is almost all damage.  After taking a bunch of hamlets uncontested my westward expansion finally gets me eyes on the dwarven city. This would be a hell of a prize; two different gem types means two more colors of kobold.  Taking it is another story, though. Kobolds have less to fear from ballistae than a lot of troops do, but giving up 100+ free shots before the start of combat is going to suck regardless.  Looks like the appearance of our stack has stirred up the hornet's nest. Now some dwarves start milling around, along with their allies from the dryad queen. There's also an imp wandering around from the other orange player, who appears to be a demonologist.  Looks like the dryad queen's going on the offensive. That's not a big stack, but armored minotaurs are pretty tough.  Another blizzard caster finally shows up  Pun-Pun gets jumped by some ichtyids while trying to make his way back to friendly territory, but his pet frost drake is more than up to the task.  I've lost the diamond mine, but thanks to the gem income from thunderheads I still have access to flying chieftans from guard towers and other generic citadels.  Even though we took out the troll mum fairly early, the trolls have still made progress converting a few forests to their freespawn-generating troll woods.  They can generate some pretty nasty stuff. They mostly stick to the forests, but will poke out occasionally to take adjacent sites. This thing would be a speedbump for a real army but our ability to field anything resembling a real army is very limited, and it's immune to cold so our casters aren't going to do much.  No sign of any other defense, though, so there's plenty of hamlets for the taking.  Wandering indies actually provide more resistance than either of orange's players.  "More resistance" being relative, of course.  I decide to forge on ahead and see what else I might be able to nab.  Whoops, orange might not be as far away as I'd thought.  The Troll King himself basically defines the whole faction. He's got regeneration and a sweep attack, which solves most of the problems of using a single big beefy unit; this guy would just immediately disintegrate every kobold in reach and shrug off whatever damage they managed to sneak in before dying. He is by no means invincible and his backup options are limited but he's a huge early game threat.  Backup being limited is different from not having backup, mind you. Most of his stacks are goblins which are probably even worse than kobolds, but there are a lot more of them and I don't think my magical firepower is enough to make up the difference. On the plus side their territory mostly seems to be up in the tundra zone, and blue kobolds are stealthy in snow. Unless they blunder into my stack randomly I should be safe.  Looks like we've located orange's base proper. I move out onto the ice shelf to get out of the way of any troops that might blindly plow into my stealthy arctic ranger kobolds.  The troll king is rapidly re-securing his front line, so I grab the tower on our side of the mountains to secure the frontier. I'm not sure how much good it's going to do since I can't recruit anything of actual value there, but I guess the thought counts?  The dwarves are only going to get harder and harder to dig out as the game progresses, so I gather up all of the freespawn fodder I can and go for it.  Thankfully, the narrowness of the dwarf fort forces most of the ballistae back to where they can barely reach my lines. The front two rows get demolished and a few odd hits make it as far as the 4th row, but all my important casters are in back.  The dwarf queen is a pretty decent spellcaster herself. Dwarf Magic is a bit hit or miss; it has a lot of buffs of varying usefulness, plus a few odd attack spells. Both of these are pretty good, although the AI helpfully didn't bother equipping Tremor and my kobolds don't have much to fear from a high damage single target spell.  I can do better anyhow.  The dwarves have fortified their base with a magic electrified gate, which promptly deletes any kobolds stupid enough to poke it. At this point it's doing more damage than the ballistae.  The queen's got enough HP to outlive her subjects, but not by much.  The body count is high, although it's not like I paid anything for any of these. I even keep almost all of the slingers!  And now we have green and white kobold access Interestingly, the dwarf city seems to behave as both a fort (can recruit basic kobolds of any colors we have gem sites for) and a mine (can recruit all kobolds from the colors of gems it supplies.) I can't imagine there would ever be a reason to recruit plain red/blue kobolds here, but it's an option.
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Dec 21, 2021 22:23
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Are we going to try to frozen heart spam the Troll King or go for a more red Kobold oriented plan? Also I am counting down to when your arctic ranger kobolds drown in the ocean.
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Dec 21, 2021 22:48
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habituallyred posted:Are we going to try to frozen heart spam the Troll King or go for a more red Kobold oriented plan? Also I am counting down to when your arctic ranger kobolds drown in the ocean. At least the orange base is in the permafrost zone. With the new ice shelf rules there's a lot of permanent ice up there, although there's still plenty of room to drown on the edges. It's been long enough since I actually recorded this that I don't 100% remember what happens to the Troll King. Our options just expanded considerably with the dwarf city since it can recruit both white & green spellcasters, which are both viable ways of dealing with a beefy armored regenerating troop. I still haven't seen any ruby mines except the one way over by the pale ones, so I don't know that I'll have a source of fire damage anytime soon.
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Dec 21, 2021 23:21
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Iirc path boosts increase how many spells your dudes cast per round. They're good.
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Dec 22, 2021 00:08
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Can I throw out Bakemono as an option for the next faction? Looking forward to seeing what happens next to our Kobolds!
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Dec 22, 2021 05:59
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Iirc path boosts increase how many spells your dudes cast per round. They're good. Yes, but they also force you to memorize more spells which can sometimes be a problem.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:08
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Path boosters are great, it's just that most of them are going to be irrelevant at any given moment. There are plenty of boosters for paths that are locked to specific classes, and even when you can get a path from mercenary wizards there's no guarantee that a given mage shows up in the same game as the booster for them. Things get a little better if you're playing a faction that good access to charm spells, but counting on stealing a specific mage from a faction that may or may not exist in the game is still a stretch.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:14
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Still voting for some enchanter fun times.
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Dec 22, 2021 23:48
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Pun-Pun, part 6 The troll player's base is up here too, naturally, with intriguingly few defenders. I might wait for some of these wandering troops to wander off before I try anything clever though, especially since I know they have some stealthy troops.  I've got more important things to do anyhow. Thanks to some major luck with gem sites, we're up to 200 blue gems, which means we can finally use our ludicrously expensive promotion ritual.  On its own, the promotion is underwhelming. The wings are cool as hell, but it costs 200 gems to take shamans from level 1 magic to level 2 magic, where Cloud Lords could go from level 2 to level 3 for only 150 (and they have an alchemy ritual to funnel gems into the type they actually care about, too.)  However, having an upgraded caster unlocks a new, awesome recruiting option.  Well, for a given value of "awesome." Of all the kobold units, the dragonspawn vary the most by color and blue kind of gets the short end of the stick. All dragonspawn are quite a bit beefier than even kobold warriors and also fly, and the unique power of the blue spawns is... an iceshield ability that hits attackers for a couple points of cold damage. On a unit that still gets pulped in one good hit from a decent weapon. It's something, but pales in comparison to some of the other options... which we won't get access to until we scrape together 200 gems in another, less abundant color. The important thing is, we get something resembling real frontline troops that can fly. They do cost gems, but since our spellcaster promotions are so cost prohibitive and our ritual list lacks spammable summons, there's not a whole lot to do with them except churn out dragonspawn. They're actually quite cheap overall: it costs as much gold and gems to recruit a batch of 10 dragonspawns as it cost the Cloud Lord to recruit 5 of their elite gemrecruit troops. On a 1:1 comparison the blue dragonspawn definitely isn't as good as the Cloud Lord's dawn/dusk guards, but at 2:1 these guys definitely have a leg up. Granted, at this stage of the game the Cloud Lord's gemrecruit guys weren't exactly cutting edge, so the shelf life of these guys is going to be limited. But these guys still fill some real holes in our armies.  In particular, we can churn out sky expansion forces much faster.  Speaking of which, I've finally collected the archers that were stranded in the thundercloud when the chieftan suicided and can now resume picking off sky settlements above green's base.  With a hatchery installed in the dwarven city, it actually produces a full complement of both white and green kobolds. They're susceptible to friendly fire from my big ice spells so I have to be careful with them, but for sheer numbers it's great.  The flying archers go to collect the shovel. Luckily, the warlock rolled only lightning damage spells so they're basically 100% safe.  Evidently the dragonspawn felt insulted by being compared to the airya troops and take their feelings out with bird murder. The casualties are starting to mount up, though, demonstrating the dragonspawns' limitations.  I buy up two more sorcerers. Neither of them knows blizzard, but I'll never say no to a falling frost caster. The sorcerer boost from the dragons is really doing some work, this is a pretty fantastic rate of mage acquisition. Only the Senator can really begin to compete, although admittedly some classes can probably do better via summons.  I was kind of hoping the dragon might take care of this port for me, but I think it may be out of range, so I hire some mercenary crossbows and send them in with some fodder to take it.  For reasons that are unclear they leave the gates wide open, which makes my life a hell of a lot easier.  Oof, green is starting to push into dwarf country. On the plus side, that's a nice looking mine.  A fine opening shot. If I didn't have mage support I'd have no business fighting with these numbers, but I think I've got the firepower to make this work.  Honestly I may have actually overestimated them, I might have pulled this off even without the sorcerers.  Dryad troops have been running amok in the border territory, so I move in to put a stop to that.  I pop down from the clouds to see if I can sneak back the mines next to green's base. It looks like the dwarves are responding to green's intrusion by returning the favor. That needs to get nipped in the bud before they establish another ballista deathtrap, but I think green should be able to do that on their own.  Yeah, that didn't take long. Better you than me, buddy.  After biding my time for a while I see the defenders leave the troll king's base, but it's not as defenseless as it looked. Yeah, I probably should have seen this coming.  A ton of goblins and a living tree are there to greet me.  The goblins have kobold-grade stats, but crucially lack the 1 point of armor that is the kobolds' saving grace. This is a particularly decisive disadvantage in a fight between low-damage fodder.  The tree takes a long time to go down, but the slingers find their way to it first and the spear kobolds have trouble pathing around them, so I get to stand off and slowly shoot it to death from safety (it can attack, but not move around.)  That's two enemy capitals down, although both of them have teammates standing by (and the troll at least has plenty of forts and armies left of his own.)  It does give me a chance to replenish my fodder, although I can't recruit slingers from it.  Pun-Pun grabs some more dragonspawns and goes to take on a storm demon, which promptly annihilates itself with its own AoE wind attack.  I decide to take my chances against a bunch of oozes for a coal mine.  The acid shield effect on the oozes means that the frost drake's meatshields all self-destruct, leaving it to take the brunt of the oozes' attacks. The drake goes down, but its sacrifice was not in vain.  Here's the map as it stands. Green's base is off the southwestern edge of what's visible, and the captured dwarven city is in the center next to the lake. Purple and orange are both contesting the hamlets in the hinterlands but so far the eastern coast remains secure.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:16
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How do spawn flags work? Do the leaders need to be on a recruitable tile or just exist for the player? Basically have I been dumb recruiting and sentrying a minotaur, centaur and harpy on every ancient forest for my dryad run?
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Dec 23, 2021 23:01
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Donkringel posted:How do spawn flags work? Pretty sure the kobold recruitment boost & dryad spawn boost are different and unique mechanics. Dryad queen definitely needs to have her spawn boost commanders in a grove to get any benefit. The dragons increase the frequency of kobold mage offers (which are location-independent) but don't have any effect on freespawn. I think the dragon's recruitment boost stacks, judging on my experiences later on this game; there are already three frost dragons in play and white/green sorcerer recruitment is definitely a lot more sluggish in comparison, even with one dragon from each. (As an aside, Call of Gaia can summon Pans that have across-the-board spawn boosts, freeing up all those random commanders to take some troops and capture every forest and swamp in sight to collect more herbs to summon more stuff. But having spawn boost commanders in every grove does help a lot over the long run.)
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Dec 23, 2021 23:12
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What the heck is a shadow tree? How does it relate to trolls?
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Dec 30, 2021 14:35
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Deceitful Penguin posted:What the heck is a shadow tree? How does it relate to trolls? It's like a zombie treant. Trolls in COE can wither woods to create horrible death places where anything that dies there is brought back to life.
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Dec 30, 2021 15:23
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Yeah, the trolls' ritual casters use magic fungus to turn forests into spooky twisted places full of creepy murder plants/fungi. The main thrust of the faction is big stompy dudes but they just show up and get hired for gold, there are no troll summons or anything (although IIRC there is an upgrade ritual that lets you turn trolls literally impervious to nonmagical weapons.)
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Dec 30, 2021 15:43
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the holy poopacy posted:Yeah, the trolls' ritual casters use magic fungus to turn forests into spooky twisted places full of creepy murder plants/fungi. The main thrust of the faction is big stompy dudes but they just show up and get hired for gold, there are no troll summons or anything (although IIRC there is an upgrade ritual that lets you turn trolls literally impervious to nonmagical weapons.) You can now summon 1, precisely 1 troll, and he SLAPS, like if he was deployed he would pretty much mulch all your kobolds, and his lore is great.
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Dec 30, 2021 20:37
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Pun-Pun, part 7 Most of the south is basically lost to us at this point, so I send some troops into no-man's-land in the hopes of picking off a few properties. The pale ones already have an advance force in the area, but it's not especially scary; it's mostly summoned fire elementals, who are extremely susceptible to ice magic.  I consolidate my forces and set up shop in a convenient iron mine nearby as the pale ones wander off.  Up north I still don't feel comfortable taking on orange's forces head on, so I take advantage of the winter to head westward across the bay. There's an unclaimed coal mine up for grabs, which makes me think that someone else has been here; if this area was undisturbed there would probably be indie defenders.  I get a white kobold shaman, unlocking the winged archers again.  Pun-Pun's flying squad takes on some advanced cloudfolk. Cloudfolk Elders have low level storm magic access and Cloud Ladies have a ranged AoE wind attack, and between the two of them they manage to punch a hole in the dragonspawn before they get chopped down. If you have a recruiting site in the sky you'll see occasionally offers for both, which can conceivably be useful if you lack access to lightning spells. They're pretty expensive for what you get, though, so I generally don't both.  A few turns later we also get a green kobold shaman. I haven't focused on the green kobolds much yet; they're poison-themed, and they get swamp movement and forest stealth as a complement to the snow movement/stealth of the blues. Their magic is kind of hit and miss, these are some especially bad summons.  The green shaman comes with Summon Dragon, so I call one up for the dwarf city. It comes with a Ring of Protection, a rare and valuable source of stacking armor bonus.  I marshall my forces to attack the pale ones' advance town (currently held by a desultory pair of slingers) and spot two other stacks of them, although thankfully I'm still not seeing any big guns in the area.  The trolls show up to take back their home. Most of my force has moved on, but the new recruits manning the fort are unceremoniously mowed down.  The recently evacuated western expedition finds a ruined city, which accounts for the coal mine being empty and unflagged as it sends out a lot of wandering undead.  Every single one of those mushrooms has decay attacks. Yeah, no thanks.  The High Priestess has sent up a small squad to join the border skirmish. I'm feeling spicy so I split up my forces to attack both teams.  Normally these numbers would be suicidal, but I've got a decisive edge in magical firepower.  There's the money shot. I do wind up losing almost all of my troops, but there are more where they came from.  Both the sorcerers I send against the pale ones decide to cast blizzard first thing (although it takes two turns to go off.) It immediately deletes the vast majority of the elementals, and badly wounds the pale ones in front. This time most of the fodder gets to live.  My northern expedition stumbles immediately into blue's base on the other side of the ruined city (sucks to be them.) They've got an enchanter (always good news) and a necromancer (bad news, especially when your casters are largely ice and poison themed so far.) My snow stealth might keep me safe, although it would probably work better if I wasn't sitting in a farm right next to a couple bases that definitely have at least one commander that might try to take the "empty" farm.  Speaking of misjudging "empty" sites, I round up a bunch of green kobolds and send them to attack the dryad queen's base. I forget that most of her troops are forest-stealthy, so I wind up biting off a lot more than I expected.  Fortunately, I have a secret weapon: not only do green kobolds get full fledged archers, they wield poison bows. Normally poison weapons are kind of marginal since the DOT pales in comparison to regular weapon damage, but when your weapon deals 1d2 damage poison is a massive force multiplier. It does require you to penetrate armor to deal damage in the first place, so a lot of elite troops will still shrug off green kobold arrows... but while these guys are formidable, they're mostly bags of HP with only moderate armor.  They're still completely capable of demolishing our poo poo, of course, but the damage starts racking up in a hurry.  The fight comes down to the wire and ends in an actual tie: the beefy minotaur commander tramples every last kobold into the dirt moments before succumbing to poison, leaving a few of the green shaman's lovely summoned frogs to hop off into the forest.  I've brought the magic shovel all the way back to our home and rounded up some troops to start exploring Agartha.  The dryad queen very quickly reestablishes control of her home grove.  Now that I have a convenient source of free archers, I can build aerial exploration teams at the front. I take down a thunderbird without difficulty; it does get a wind attack which might be a problem for a smaller squad, but between kobolds' natural 1 armor and sheer numbers to spread around it's not an issue. It actually goes down fast enough that the chieftan doesn't have a chance to suicide in melee.  The demonologist comes knocking on the dwarf city's doors with a big stack of human troops, which could be a problem if our dragon gets bored.  In the northwest I find activity from the dark yellow player... including what appears to be their base right next door to blue? As far as I know bakemono can't build new mountain strongholds. I finally got around to taking the pirate port across the starting bay.  Making a new entrance to the underground takes my subterranean explorers several turns, but now they're (slowly) moving for real.  The green dragon wrecks one of the dryad queen's raiding squads.  All the thunderheads that I've been finding add up, and I've been supplementing my diamond income with trade as well. So I manage to get to 200 in a reasonable amount of time after all.  Which means now I get white dragonspawn. These guys are vastly stronger than the blue ones, although arguably blue spawns plug a more important hole in our lineup. Still, though... not really. White dragonspawn are actually every bit as durable as blues, being a rare archer troop that gets good armor and shields and just as much HP as the blue spawns (still not great, but usable.) The important part, though, are the bows. Although white dragonspawn don't get any new elemental powers, they get magic dragon bows with good damage and absolutely ridiculous range. Compared to say, mist warriors, they don't have the same obscene damage output that the mist warriors' elemental bows had. On the other hand, 50 gems will get you about 6 times as many of these guys as it will mist warriors, which will more than make up for the extra damage output on the mist bows. (The white spawn would also handily win in a head to head fight even 1:1, since their magic weapons ignore the mist warriors' ethereal defenses while their own armor is still decent against the mist bows, on top of having the edge in range.) As nice as having the blue dragon spawn was, these are the real game changers; the blues were just to tide us over. With enough gems to recruit a squad almost every turn we'll soon have enough firepower to smash most conventional forces head on, although we're far enough into the game that conventional forces are pretty obsolete anyhow--the flip side of the mist warrior comparison is that having 20 mist warriors in year 4 is generally more decisive than having 100 white dragonspawn in year 8. Still, it's a tremendous upgrade to our armies.
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Dec 30, 2021 23:57
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Reading these always makes me want to try the game out and so I check online tutorials and Welp, this is a game meant for screenshot LPs feels like
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Jan 10, 2022 16:25
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Binging the thread actually got me to boot it up again, I love CoE and have played them on and off since 3. Still increadibly bad at them and constantly suicide my poor stacks into horrible engagements. Kobold King is incidently my best class!
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Jan 10, 2022 17:17
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I have to say I'm really liking Scourge Lord because you can just summon new commanders when you need them, and a lot of your troop summons scale walls in sieges.
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Jan 10, 2022 17:47
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