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Orcs are simultaneously really good and really bad, they struggle in MP just because they don't have any real racial tools to work around the hideously vulnerable to magic thing. Being melee focused and weak against spells/ranged attacks is kind of an incredibly rough combo of weaknesses against people who will exploit that fact ruthlessly. The thing is, individually, nearly all the Orc Racial units are kickass. Spearmen, Greatswords, Black Knights, Priests, Shock Troopers are all fantastic units. And a lot of their class units are also crazy powerful, but still... Which is why in MP you mostly see Orc Theocrat (Nigh Perfect Synergy, rival Dwarves as best Theo race) or Warlord (Basically compensating their magic weakness with raw numbers. Not my favorite combo though personally) Oh and Orc Necromancer is definitely a thing, you get +1 Res for all units through Lich Aura and native immunity to most mind affecting spells combined with life stealing everywhere and truckloads of melee power. I...I need to go make me an Orc Necro leader, seriously. Most other classes Orcs aren't super great but they get by, Dreads and Summoning classes give you plenty of not-Orcs to mix in So I would say Orcs are probably the worst race overall but actually still Top Tier for certain builds. Consider taking Air Mastery for Haste and Wind Ward and go nuts.
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Jun 30, 2015 21:38
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Currently some of the strongest units in the game for their cost are elemental damage based, such as almost every support. This means that even if your opponent doesn't try to exploit Orc Weakness, they just might anyway.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:01
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Pretty much. The overall MP meta has never been Orc friendly, which is why they get limited to a few class builds that can work around it even though they have always been crushingly powerful in melee combat. Note that Orc Military 5 gives +1 res, negating their racial weakness on top of pumping up their melee damage and physical protection even higher.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:29
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How often do games get to X5 in MP? I only really play singleplayer and almost never get to it before I've won on Small or Medium sized maps (and don't play Large so couldn't speak for that).
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Jun 30, 2015 22:32
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madmac posted:Pretty much. The overall MP meta has never been Orc friendly, which is why they get limited to a few class builds that can work around it even though they have always been crushingly powerful in melee combat. If you can get to RG 5. But it's probably already too late at this stage of the game.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:33
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Also ranged units in general are murderous, running at them waving sticks with no armor or shields works about as well as it sounds. Even without exploiting their magic weakness regular archers can gently caress up pikes and greatswords. If you can get them in melee, sure, you'll crush them, but you have to get there.
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Jun 30, 2015 22:33
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jBrereton posted:How often do games get to X5 in MP? Very rarely, though it's not unheard of either. Pretty much any game that doesn't end early tends to drag on for a bit. I just threw that in as an interesting factoid, not as a reliable MP strat. quote:Also ranged units in general are murderous, running at them waving sticks with no armor or shields works about as well as it sounds. Even without exploiting their magic weakness regular archers can gently caress up pikes and greatswords. If you can get them in melee, sure, you'll crush them, but you have to get there. Orcs in a nutshell, yes. Figuring out how you will get there is the first step in creating a viable Orc build. madmac fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 22:35
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Here's my AAR for my last match against Ninjew. I'm sure you gathered from the other posts about it that Thoroughbred, Martial Arts, Volunteer Big Beetles for -25% gold are pure ownage. Against Dreadnought they're kind of unfair. Against Goblin Dreadnought they're just... Blight Immune... Demolisher x2.... yeah that's a hard counter. Not to mention Overwhelm if you think about building Butchers, and well, Martial Arts again. He was pretty much hosed. Let me drive that home with a screenshot.  Yeah, I was one-turning these fuckers from around Turn 20. The turn count didn't show up in that screenshot but here's the map at the same time.  You know it was around turn 20 because of where my armies are, as in they're nowhere near near the Sekhemkhet boneyard that murdered the gently caress out of 10 guys on Turn 26.  Right after that happened, Ninjew showed himself at Sekhemkhet with his Goblineer rush army- 3 stacks of about half Goblineers, 4 heroes, and...well here, let me show you our eventual battle.  I kind of suicide attacked him in a city siege (no walls though). He was taking poo poo left and right so I decided to try and take some units and kill his momentum. I lost a lot of units for sure, but my economy was strong as gently caress and I was close to Thoroughbred Mounts at that point so I didn't really care. He was still harassing my 2 outskirt towns with the leftovers, but before long I had a shitload of Beetle Riders chasing him down. I caught him eventually and just snowballed from there. I had 3/4 of the map in vassals and all I needed to do was cross it with what was already 5 stacks of Hero+Beetle Riders. I split that army into two groups and found two huge armies in two cities. I put Dread Siege on both of them, then started bee-lining for his Throne with one group. It sounds like a lot of units deserted, and that his Throne was vulnerable. He tried to intercept me on the way to the throne, abandoning one of the big cities. Only 2 of his 3 stacks covered enough ground to intercept, and that battle went very poorly for him. It would have gone bad either way IMO, but I started practically on top of his cannons and well, 100 HP Martial Arts Demolisher x2 Beetle Riders. Coldstone Cream-my-pants fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 23:32
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Carnalfex posted:Also ranged units in general are murderous, running at them waving sticks with no armor or shields works about as well as it sounds. Even without exploiting their magic weakness regular archers can gently caress up pikes and greatswords. If you can get them in melee, sure, you'll crush them, but you have to get there. I feel like Orcs in general could do alright against a ranged army. They have decent raw durability against physical damage (Greatswords etc are armored) and arrow range is close enough for a counter-charge. The problem they have is that a gold medal Longbow that lives into the midgame can still hang out safely in back and clean up light units in the enemy formation or throw damage onto a T3 without committing suicide, while a gold Greatsword in the same situation will almost certainly get gibbed trying to contribute to fights against bigger units.
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Jun 30, 2015 23:34
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Btw, a reminder why our tourney is the superior tourney:quote:
quote:I conceded mostly because my god was that a boring match. 45 turns with out battles, at 3 minute turn timer, which took the full timer from turn 1 onward. Also, I can’t bring myself to settle cities without even a single structure in their domain, and he settled 13 clustered cities, so there is that… quote:Yeah, known about from.the first matches. Certain people didn’t want to report their matches in any detail because they were afraid this strategy would become known.
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Jun 30, 2015 23:45
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Let me get this right. They're using ICS? And it's working?
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Jul 1, 2015 00:05
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Taliesyn posted:Let me get this right. Keep in mind they have different settings. Few Cities/Dwellings, and medium maps with UG on. Also random map type, and a lot of them will try to talk their opponent into settler start or no city games. So there's a lot of empty space to spam settlers into (or just hide UG to stall for time) and comparatively little for an aggressive player to work with. Necromancers, needless to say, are getting even less play there then they have with us. They're also not just farting out cities but specifically aiming for the 8 cities and whatever number same race cities Empire Quests so they can the permanent happiness bonus and a bunch of free units (Including T3s, apparently?) relatively early. I'm sure it's effective, just the complete antithesis of fun on every possible level. madmac fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 00:10
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So ICS is a good strategy mostly because it's too boring to fight against it and people would rather forfeit than deal with it?
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Jul 1, 2015 00:17
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madmac posted:Keep in mind they have different settings. Few Cities/Dwellings, and medium maps with UG on. Also random map type, and a lot of them will try to talk their opponent into settler start or no city games. So there's a lot of empty space to spam settlers into (or just hide UG to stall for time) and comparatively little for an aggressive player to work with. Necromancers, needless to say, are getting even less play there then they have with us. I just figured that a solid, aggressive start would bury them, but this makes sense.
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Jul 1, 2015 00:20
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Poil posted:So ICS is a good strategy mostly because it's too boring to fight against it and people would rather forfeit than deal with it? Well, if you tried it in a goon game with our map settings you would be murdered by early pressure by turn 30. Settlers are very pricey!
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Jul 1, 2015 00:25
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Smiling Knight posted:Well, if you tried it in a goon game with our map settings you would be murdered by early pressure by turn 30. Settlers are very pricey!
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Jul 1, 2015 00:30
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Yeah, not having many (any?) indies around really slows the game down. If you're trying to rush, it takes too long to find your opponent (underground!) and move your rushing stack to his throne. If you do nothing but start out building settlers, your opponent could have a half-dozen towns to your one by the time you can contact him, and at that point you've already lost. Even if you nab a town or two, the rest of his poo poo can just switch to units and annihilate your rush, then his per-turn income will grind you into dust. Settler starts make it worse, because it's literally impossible to rush in that scenario, the best you can do is summon an army which is still too expensive to do before you've popped a couple city levels and invested in some infrastructure. No indies means much, much less reward for exploring (since exploration no longer equals map control), and if you're smart you simply release the majority of your backline towns as vassals to defend themselves from minor probes. In other words, stalemate engaged. gently caress that poo poo. edit: how the gently caress did they manage to push the few cities/dwellings into that tourney? It's so obviously a stupid thing to do. Is it solely because they whined about not having space to settle towns?
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Jul 1, 2015 00:38
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Yeah everything mac says about the OF tourney is spot on, it really felt custom built to surgically remove the fun from the game. Part of that was the people playing it but...I suppose those same people probably helped set up the rules, so it's kind of all the same. I joined it because I was enjoying this one so much and man, it is a whole world of difference.Poil posted:So ICS is a good strategy mostly because it's too boring to fight against it and people would rather forfeit than deal with it? Also this, victory by boredom was an actual strategy used. After 5 1/2 hours in one game I realized I would rather be doing anything else than continuing in that tourney. Carnalfex fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 01:54
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I am kinda bummed that one of my wins didn't count because the guy from our bracket dropped out. ah well. I had a great time.
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Jul 1, 2015 01:56
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orangelex44 posted:edit: how the gently caress did they manage to push the few cities/dwellings into that tourney? It's so obviously a stupid thing to do. Is it solely because they whined about not having space to settle towns? Basically BBB played a few games and liked few cities the most so now everyone plays with few cities. It's one of the most complained about default settings, but he's very clearly not changing his mind on it so i don't think people bother much anymore. Probably the only thing that gets complained about more is the no rules governing split stacking.
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Jul 1, 2015 02:05
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Poil posted:If I entered a goon game I'd lose by turn 3, I'm mindbogglingly terrible at the game. No you wouldn't. Also get into a goon game. 
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Jul 1, 2015 02:15
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stopgap1 posted:I am kinda bummed that one of my wins didn't count because the guy from our bracket dropped out. ah well. I had a great time. You're still up for our dumb gimmick game this weekend right?
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Jul 1, 2015 02:28
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Yeah, poil, just jump into the steam group chat and ask for one once, it's fun.
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Jul 1, 2015 02:30
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Should I know what ICS and UG are?
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Jul 1, 2015 03:02
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PFlats posted:Should I know what ICS and UG are? Infinite City Sprawl from Civ and Underground
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Jul 1, 2015 03:06
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PFlats posted:Should I know what ICS and UG are? Yeah I didn't know what ICS was either  So no
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Jul 1, 2015 03:17
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Poil posted:If I entered a goon game I'd lose by turn 3, I'm mindbogglingly terrible at the game. I think the record in the tournament was someone losing on like Turn 10 because they lost their throne to a luckily-timed scout the turn after their leader died to autoresolve at a gold mine. I also saw Madmac lose the game entirely to NPCs on a similar timing in a showgame against NINJEW the same way, with the lucky scout replaced by a roaming neutral stack.
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Jul 1, 2015 04:06
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Poil posted:If I entered a goon game I'd lose by turn 3, I'm mindbogglingly terrible at the game. Despite a couple wins, I am bad and you should fight me. Heck, even losing to a goblin rush is more fun than solo imo. Knowing that you won't lose is boring.
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Jul 1, 2015 04:14
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quote:On turn 23, near the end of our tournament game, Abed had on the ready 2 production resources he could not have gotten that turn. Because of the “time limit” implemented, not choosing the result of awards enabled him to have at the ready unscoutable upgrades – like stone walls.
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Jul 1, 2015 05:53
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But I thought the pop-up you got from running over a free production treasure was not dismissible - i.e. it froze the UI except for the choice, so you couldn't do anything else. Does timing out the turn free that up? Interesting exploit then.
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Jul 1, 2015 06:04
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I alternately enjoy reading this thread for AoW3 discussion, strategy discussion, mp reports annnnd... hilarious OF mp nonsense, because jesus christ 
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Jul 1, 2015 11:05
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lurksion posted:But I thought the pop-up you got from running over a free production treasure was not dismissible - i.e. it froze the UI except for the choice, so you couldn't do anything else. Does timing out the turn free that up? Interesting exploit then. Also, why would you delay an upgrade? An advantage immediately is way better than denying your opponent scouting. Voyager and I completed our round 1 match. I'll post a writeup later.
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Jul 1, 2015 12:40
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Round 1, Group A: Smiling Knight vs Voyager One of the most fun parts of Age of Wonders III is combining powerful magic in creative ways. Swap positions on the cheap chaff from summon animal I! Ice elementals advancing under the cover of wind ward! Draconic ancestry and hellfire! So let's ignore all that malarkey. For this match, I've chosen to do battle in true Conan fashion. Meet NO MAGES NO MASTERS, my chosen champion:  Halfling Warlord. Partisan. Explorer. Expander. No magic. No elemental damage other than fireworks. Let's roll! Our intrepid hero's starting location is fine. The eagle rider is a huge boon; it means I won't have to waste time building scouts early. I might have a bit of trouble with clearing, considering much of my starting gold will be tied up in a very expensive explorer, but I thought it worth the trade. I started research on training regimen because it's great, and rushed a builders' hall.  My eagle zooms across the map and quickly meets Voyager's lovingly crafted leader, Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson.  Dwayne is a dwarven druid. This is honestly as good as I could hope for; pretty much the only thing my warlord is good at is pumping out lots of explorer-buffed adventurers and firework-carrying monster hunters. This works darn well against a druid's animals. So maybe NO MAGES has a chance! I had my eagle rider circle around the Rock's expansion army and find his capital. I decided to take a gamble and charge in. Unfortunately for Voyager, he had just recruited a new hero, which was the city's only garrison. Even worse, he hadn't even spent the xp yet when, 25 seconds into the turn (sorry 'bout that) I attacked.  For a t3 vs an unupgraded, goblin hero, it was awfully close. The winter terrain translated into fumbles on two whole rounds of attacks. But the rider managed to pull out the win in the end, giving me temporary control over the Rock's throne. I dispatched the lone hunter Voyager sent to retake it, then got the hell out of Dodge. Good thing too, as a party of independent spiders grabbed the city next turn. Karma immediately came back to get me, as I lost my Leader to a group of civic guards from a quest. That's how it goes.  Here is a map of the overall situation. With my mad stacks of warlord cash and partisan, I've been grabbing cities in the western half of the map. You can see the Rock's trio of towns in the southeast. He managed not only to reclaim his capital, but killed my eagle rider due to inattention on my part. I shouldn't have treated mountains as a safe haven when fighting dwarves!  Around turn 23, the Rock launched his attack. Either through excellent scouting or chance, he grabbed by draconian vassal at the perfect time to split my forces in half, as my leader stack had gone off to kill a bandit camp at an awkward location. His armies are right in the fog in this picture:  You can also see me taking advantage of Partisan to grab a cheap-ish Ice Queen from the Inn. Voyager decided to use his advantage to take my northern human vassal. I reclaimed the draconian town, merged my armies, and pursued. Around this time, Voyager says that an independent stack split-stacked attacked him! Ouch, that's annoying. Here is a picture, showing my forces passing through the bridge chokepoint:  Here, Voyager made what I think was a major blunder. Seeing that my monster hunter and adventurer-heavy stacks could defeat his army, he decided to make a play for my capital instead of retreating. Taking advantage of his shipbuilding research, he embarked his whole army and headed west through the large lake beside my human vassal. However, I had been producing 1 monster hunter a turn and drafting an adventurer as well, and my main army's monster hunters were able to use their swimming and mountaineering (thanks explorer!) to zip back and forth between my leader stack and my capital. As a result, the Rock was trapped between two formidable forces:   Eventually, Voyager chose to engage my capital defense army:  As you can see, I had a significant numbers advantage, along with lots of bonus damage vs his animals. The Rock did have the edge in quality, though. Here is me killing a forge priest with lots and lots of chip damage. Also, Voyager did an odd thing with his formation, keeping his panthers waaaaaaay at the back. I understand he was worried about getting them panicked, but they could't get the the front lines in a single turn.  Here is the Murderbear, which I was very worried about :  In the end, I decided that it was worth using all my leader's CP to dispel those buffs. 23 phys + 3 other channels was just too much to deal with. Unwilling to sit still and be chipped to death by fireworks, the Rock charged his soldiers forward. While they inflicted some casualties, they were just too outnumbered and eventually succumbed to many, many weak attacks. Even Firstborn fail their fireworks save eventually!  I had managed to take down Voyager's main stacks with acceptable losses:  I gathered all my stacks together once again and marched them straight towards the Rock's throne. He counterattacked, and manage to retake my draconian and human vassals, but that couldn't stop my armies surrounding his throne. By pure chance, I completed the Prime Good quest the turn before I planned to attack, and was able to add a couple griffins to my force. So here it is: the Rock's last stand. A lot of axeman, trying to hold the walls so that the crossbows (why not hunters?) and shattering hammer could do their work:  I just mobbed the middle gate, berserking some crossbows and chipping others to death with many, many fireworks and a single horse archer I had forgotten I even had. Voyager conceded his right flank and a naga, the griffins, two adventurers, and NO MAGES himself charged into the city.  NO MAGES NO MASTERS delivered the final blow:    It nice to play a game that didn't matter! After that major victory I had against his main stack, Voyager began wondering what a druid could do to counter a halfling warlord's stacks of adventurers and monster hunters. Looking back, I think that he should have spammed hunters while avoiding confrontation in the field. My early armies had no real ability to take walled cities, and while conceding map control is no fun, it might have let him get Dwarven Supertank Shaman out. But I'd like to hear what resident Druid Guru Madmac as to say about the matchup.
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Jul 1, 2015 15:42
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Good writeup, and good game! I actually did talk to Madmac about the matchup after the game, and his summary was essentially "Fireworks MH counter everything you can make early game, Dwarf Shamans are good but you'll be dead before they get out". In a matchup where animals get countered that hard you have to lean really hard on your Hunters to make up the difference...but while Dwarves have the most expensive hunters in the game (I was building Crossbows at the end of the game because my Throne still couldn't 1-turn them) they aren't particularly good and certainly won't stand up to the Best Monster Hunters in a fight over map control, especially if they also have Explorer buffs and can follow over Mountains. Druid relies on map control to survive, and against Warlord Production is utterly reliant on keeping the pressure up on the enemy to avoid just getting deathballed by a conventional army it can't match. You also played your end of the game very well from the very beginning and definitely did a good job leveraging the advantages you had and capitalizing on any openings I showed you, which took an already brutal matchup and put it completely out of reach. You knew what your advantage was with the Monster Hunters, you went very hard on it, and you never let up the pressure once I started trying to make aggressive moves. Mostly though, I'm jealous that despite deliberately clogging the gently caress out of your Empire Upgrades you still got Training Regimen on turn 1.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:17
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Voyager I posted:Good writeup, and good game! I actually did talk to Madmac about the matchup after the game, and his summary was essentially "Fireworks MH counter everything you can make early game, Dwarf Shamans are good but you'll be dead before they get out". In a matchup where animals get countered that hard you have to lean really hard on your Hunters to make up the difference...but while Dwarves have the most expensive hunters in the game (I was building Crossbows at the end of the game because my Throne still couldn't 1-turn them) they aren't particularly good and certainly won't stand up to the Best Monster Hunters in a fight over map control, especially if they also have Explorer buffs and can follow over Mountains. Druid relies on map control to survive, and against Warlord Production is utterly reliant on keeping the pressure up on the enemy to avoid just getting deathballed by a conventional army it can't match. Yikes, I had no idea dwarf hunters were so overpriced. I was worried about empire upgrade clogging, so I started a couple random map games to test. Stated with regimen both times. Weighting thing?
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Jul 1, 2015 16:25
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The only thing I would add to that is having bulk Hunters was probably your best of bad options early game, but not able able to 1 turn them explains a lot about how things fell apart. Personally, I've been known to drop a Masters Guild on my throne before turn 10 in order to 1 turn Hunters, I consider it that important for Druids. Though you're not hitting 90 production regardless without at least one magma forge and decent happiness, I believe. Still though, that looked like a fun game with two very non-standard builds, which I'm always a sucker for. Also rest assured that I'm adding these results to my compiled list of matchup results. Warlord is by the most played goon class at this point. quote:Mostly though, I'm jealous that despite deliberately clogging the gently caress out of your Empire Upgrades you still got Training Regimen on turn 1. Miracles do come true. quote:Yikes, I had no idea dwarf hunters were so overpriced. Base 80+10% for being Dwarves, I believe. I discovered this myself in a test game a few days ago and it's a real kick in the teeth to realize they cost more then Elf Hunters despite being totally outclassed by them. madmac fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 16:26
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Thinking on it a little more, rushing Shamans would have been good in general as Entangle is a huge kick in the balls against Halfling physical weakness. This doesn't really answer the question of how you get that far into the game without already being miles behind, though I suspect a Druid with real Hunters, probably under the command of a Druid player better than me could have made a game of it. I think my biggest mistake was not seeing the MH coming or really appreciating just how mobile they were. I was counting on being able to outmaneuver your forces between AD and embark shenanigans, but that was never going to be a practical option, so I needed to take better advantage of concealment scouting to find places where you were truly vulnerable. It still would have been a struggle against Partisan Explorer Fireworks Monster Hunters, but letting myself get dragged into a standup battle against Warlord is never going to work for AD and I need to find a way to avoid it while still applying pressure. Again, I'm not sure how feasible that is against a good opponent when the units you need to avoid have 32 mp, swimming, and everything walking, but that's what you gotta do. Oh, regarding my animal positioning in our battle: Fireworks Monster Hunters have high MP and no ranged penalties to damage, so their threat range is loving huge and I don't want my animals anywhere near them. Similarly, my Panthers had high MP and pounce, so their threat range was also loving huge and they could safely hide way in back while still being in a position to jump on things as soon as you moved in on the Firstborn. Against mass Fireworks MH those animals could have been easily nuked or panicked if they weren't incredibly defensive with their positioning. Finally, let us not forget the final insult, which is that his goddamned summoned irregular also has Animal Slayer, attached to a three-shot attack no less.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:53
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My God, a Halfling game where the complains aren't about Lucky. Somehow, despite winning, SK still misplayed them if Voyager isn't rageposting about 50% lucky chance and quadruple missed attacks. 
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Jul 1, 2015 18:20
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orangelex44 posted:My God, a Halfling game where the complains aren't about Lucky. Somehow, despite winning, SK still misplayed them if Voyager isn't rageposting about 50% lucky chance and quadruple missed attacks. Maybe is his entire domain weren't a snow-covered hell scape he could have more lucky dodges to complain about.
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Jul 1, 2015 19:23
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I've always wanted to try Frostling Warlord, Rogue, or Druid just because their native terrain fucks people up. too bad the AI isn't good enough to really test it out on.
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Jul 1, 2015 21:12
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