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          Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night, ladies and gentlegoons. I'm ChickenWing, and I'm writing an LP for the multiplayer Dominions 4 NationDraft game that's currently in progress. I'm awful so I'm probably going to lose, but after watching modpud win nigh-flawlessly, I'm sure everyone is in the mood for a little tragedy. I'm not going to rewrite a description for Dominions 4 because it has been done many times before by people far better at writing than I. If you want more information, check out the Dominions 4 Megathread or Modpud's stellar Lanka LP. Suffice it to say that Dominions is a turn-based strategy game that shoehorns pretty much every recognizable belief system in the world into the guise of a fantasy nation and then attempts to settle the question of whether Jesus or Thor would win in a barfight. Imagine a Total War game, but with magic and without the ability to control your units or real nation management or any semblance of balance whatsoever. Enticing, I know. Despite the silly, obtuse bullshit it's actually a surprisingly fun game. There's just something so satisfying about causing a volcanic eruption that wipes out a third of your enemy's capital population in one fell swoop, or having a single mage cast a spell that kills half an enemy army with a rain of large rocks. This particular game is special because it's not vanilla dominions. Whereas modpud's game was a slightly modded version of the vanilla game with cooler pretender gods, this game is played with 100% custom nations, scavenged from the best (and ocasionally less best) bits and pieces of the Early Age vanilla nations. My fellow players are:  Rotekian, as Rotekia, The Little Jerks Who Could Xanrick as Xanxabar, Lesbian Cloud Cartel ChickenWing (me!) as Fowlland, Bubonic Kitten Flame112 as Uflame, Beat My Cheese Kitfox88 asThe United States of Kitfox88, SNAT (Sensitive New Age Things) Libliuni as Libuico, We're On Bad Acid and We Hate You garth ferengi, better known as modpud, as The Democratic People's Republic of, Liveaction Anime Boy Diabl0658 as Belgium, Belgium Gentleman as The Fatherland, Semi-erect Dudes Nuclearmonkee as Westeros, ...Only Crunchy.Blame JonJoe (the game organizer) for the awful nation names. Blame the players for the flags. I'm not going to be doing the "here is the down and dirty nitty gritty details of every mechanic I ever use" style of LP. I'm probably nowhere near knowledgeable enough for that. Instead, I'll attempt to reason out my decisions well enough for you folks to get a vague sense of what I'm doing, and if you have any questions then you can post them here and someone way better than me will answer. Also, I'd like to put out an all-call to my opponents: if you want to talk about the game, then by all means do so! I'm happy to have others LPing alongside me (I know Nuclearmonkee has saved all his turns just in case), or even providing their own interpretation of events that I've discussed. UPDATES Fowlland 1. Draft 2. Turn One 3. Turn Two 4. Turn Three 5. Turn Four 6. Turn Five 7. Turn Six 8. Turn Seven 9. Turn Eight 10. Turn Nine 11. Turn Ten 12. Turn Eleven 13. Turn Twelve 14. Turn Thirteen 15. Turn Fourteen 16. Turn Fifteen 17. Turn Sixteen 18. Turn Seventeen 19. Turn Eighteen 20. Turn Nineteen 21. Turn Twenty 22. Turn 21 23. Turn 22 24. Turn 23 25. Turn 24: Wherein not much happens but we talk about our neighbours and gossip behind their backs 26. Turn 25: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 27. Turn 26: HOLY poo poo I REMEMBERED THE ARENA 28. Turn 27: Wherein Priorities Begin to Change 29. Turn 28: RIP Memeface 30. Turn 29: Holy poo poo progress 31. Turn 30:  32. Turn 31: Plans Changing 33. Turn 32: A Turn of Fortune 34. Turn 33: ahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahah 35. Turn 34: A Good Turn  36. Turn 35: Castle Crashing 37. Turn 36: poo poo Talking 38. Turn 37: Maniacal Laughter 39. Turn 38: Sneak Peek 40. Turn 39: Contact 41. Turn 40: Regrouping 42. Turn 41: A Breather 43. Turn 42: All Quiet On The Eastern Front 44. Turn 43: A Dire Portent 45. Turn 44: BEEP BOOP gently caress THE FORTRESS 46. Turn 45: I'm running out of titles that imply that nothing interesting happened this turn 47. Turn 46: Opportunism 48. Turn 47: Target Locked 49. Turn 48: Misfire 50. Turn 49: Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies 51. Turn 50:  52. Turn 51: :snypa: 53. Turn 52: out-out-outguessing 54. Turn 53: rain_of_stones.jpg 55. Turn 54: Wanna see a magic trick? 56. Turn 55: Stale Turn/Turn 56: Countermoves 57. Turn 57: Lost and Confused 58. Turn 58: Oh right centaurs have stealth duh 59. Turn 59: Breathing Room! 60. Turn 60: noscope 61. Turn 61: Looking Grim 62. Turn 62: I get knocked down, but I get up again 63. Turn 63: gettin' claustrophobic 64. Turn 64: It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here 65. Turn 65: fuk to scouts 66. Turn 66:  / Turn 67: The Charge of the Light Brigade67. Turn 68: Into the Breach 68. Turn 69: Fin 69. Retrospective Westeros 1. Draft and Turn One 2. Turn Two 3. Turn Three 4. Turn Four 5. Turn Five 6. Turn Six 7. Turn Seven 8. Turn Eight 9. Turns Nine through Fourteen 10. The End Days: Turn 31-41 United States of Kitfox88 1. Draft and Turn One 2. Turn Two 3. Turn Three 4. Turn Four 5. Turn Five 6. Turns Six, Seven and Eight: Kitfox expands some more and puts zero effort into posting about it  7. Turn Nine 8. Turn Eleven? 9. Turn Twelve? 10. Turns Thirteen though Nineteen 11. Turn 20 Uflame 1. Draft Libliuco 1. Draft, Turn One and Turn Two 2. Turn ??? 3. Turn Three 4. Turns Four Through Seven 5. Turn Eight 6. Turn Ten 7. Turn Twelve 8. Turn Nineteen 9. Turn Twenty 10. Turn ??? I don't even know man 11. Turn God dammit Lib I hate you so much 12. Turn 26 maybe who the gently caress knows at this point even lib said he's way off base :cripesduck: 13. Turn 30 14. Turn 31 15. Turn 32 16. Turn 33 17. Turn 34 18. Turn 35/36 19. Turn 37/38/39 20. Turn 40/41 21. Turn 42/43 22. Turn 44/45/46/47 23. Turn 48-52 Xanxabar 1. Huge fukken retrospective ChickenWing fucked around with this message at 03:25 on May 2, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2014 15:31
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THE DRAFT Rules Each player got to draft a Cap-only mage, two recruit-anywhere mages, one cap-only troop, four recruit-anywhere troops (two of which had to be selected from a list of 'simple' units), a commander, a scout, a priest, a single national spell, a race's starting gem income, and a unique national feature, all from the repertoire of Early Age nations. Arising from this comes the most overpowered bullshit strategies that one can possibly mash into a nation. My draft was as follows: Cap-only mage: Nemedian Sorceress  My cap-only strategy was based on three things. One: I wanted a mage that wasn't StR. While the more powerful mages are often StR, they end up being hard enough to replace that you don't ever want to use them. I can recruit one of these gals a turn, meaning that my early game research will be great, plus I can use them in battle without being terrified of accidentally losing them. Two: I wanted death access. Nations that can use skeleton spam are powerful. I wanted it to be an option. With base D2 and the possibility of up to D4, that role is filled. The secondary A opens up another amazing midgame strategy: thunderstrike. With an A3 random sorceress, I can cast storm. Then my a2s can cast storm power and all cast thunderstrike. Thunderstrike spam is /ridiculous/. This will be heavily utilized. Three: A national spell that I was high on the draft for later on wants a/d. We'll talk about that when we get to it. Recruit-anywhere mages: Harab Seraph, Enarie   The enarie was my first pick, again concentrating on skelespam (D2 is pretty much the minimum for skelespam). They have a great little extra feature on top of that - S1. S1 means communions. Communions mean big fuckoff death/astral/nature spells in battles. At the very least, a small enarie communion will be able to cast stuff like relief and mass regeneration, which will help my casters *enormously*. The N1 will be a great buff path. Also, enaries are crossdressers. Not relevant to my strategy, but notable regardless. Harab Seraphs are going to be my "mainline" mage - they come with 1A1D with a guaranteed 1A or 1D random. This means that all of them will be able to either skelespam or thunderstrike. Plus they can fly, meaning that small numbers of them will be able to pick off lightly defended provinces (skelespam is great for this). Overall, I'm very focused in D/A magic. Diversity is for suckers. I've got two great midgame strategies, with the ability to swap between them as necessary. Cap-only troop: Tuatha Warrior  Tuatha are mean. They're sacred, so a bless can be great. They're tough - 14 hp is above average, and their massive (17) defense score means that they're not going to get hit very often. High values in all other fields would make them a good troop regardless - but stats aren't the whole picture. First off, they're stealthy. If I have a stealthy commander, I can sneak these guys around and nab provinces from under peoples' noses. 65 stealth means that they're going to be a bitch to find. Darkvision 50% means that I can fight well where other people would have a disadvantage, and opens up strategies involving the D spell darkness (which is also great with skelespam). A magic weapon means that a number of defensive spells just won't work against them. Finally, glamour is the icing on the cake. It's like an innate mirror image - as if these guys weren't hard enough to hit in the first place, glamour gives a 50% chance that they'll be missed entirely. The whole package combined makes for an amazing early expansion force and lategame line-holder. Recruit-anywhere troop: Sidhe Warror, Triarius   Sidhe are pretty much a copy of Tuatha, with a point or two less in each stat. No magic weapon, but their ability scores are still great, AND they still have all the extra little features like darkvision that make Tuatha great. I'll be recruiting a fuckload of these. Triarii are pretty bad and I picked them because I too am bad. All of my other preferred picks had been taken by this point, and I was scrambling for ideas. I liked the idea of long spears (repel is great) and shields, but neglected to think about how resource-expensive they are. Plus they're old as hell. I'll likely never recruit these, except maybe as arrow catchers (tower shields are amazing for this). The commander/scout/priest/simple troops were all picked at once and I was dead last, and so was left with some pretty garbage choices. Commander: Noble Commander  Overall they're okay at best - they're pretty drat expensive for what they're capable of. However, my key decision in choosing them was not for their leadership capabilities. On their own, Noble commanders actually do a drat decent job of holding off low-effort raiding attempts like skelespammers. I've actually seen one take down a bane lord before. Trample is really handy for that. Province defence puts one of these at the head of every PD army. For one gold, I get a unit that is actually much better than your average commander at repulsing random indy attacks and individual raiders. Scout: Fir Bolg Scout  The sneakiest scout I could find by the time my pick came around. Nothing special. Priest: Quedesim  Nothing special, except that he's a giant and so has decent HP Simple troops: Leve, Berytian Soldier   At this point all my picks had been taken, so I was just looking for the best possible stats. They're not great, but they'll do. These will make up my starting army and most of my province defense. Starting Gem Income: Fomoria - 3A 2D 1W My mage picks were heavy on the A and D, income needs to go along with that. My sorceresses can get up to W2 with randoms, so I'm sure I'll find a use for that 1W at some point National Spell: Summon Morrigan   I'm so goddamn excited for this. Morrigans are probably the single best summonable troop in the game, outside a few edge cases like non-commander tartarians. For 4 death gems, I get a troop that has INSANE defensive stats (20 base defense!!!!), great offensive stats, a magic weapon, stealth, fear, flying and glamour. A couple of these beatuiful bastards mixed in with my armies will make enemies far easier to rout - the value of overlapping fear auras cannot be overstated. If I'm feeling frisky, I can even gift of reason them and use them as thugs (although that would most likely be a waste of gems). Pretender God: Celestial General  I picked the celestial general as a forge bitch/battle caster. I didn't plan on getting any blesses for my nation (although in retrospect w9 might not have been an awful idea) - instead I was looking for the ability to grab some key items around the midgame. First, the e4a4 pick was for elemental staves. These staves boost all elemental paths by 1, which will be handy for bootstrapping my enaries and nemedian sorceresses a bit. Honestly, it's not as useful for the mages I have and I probably shouldn't have gone for it, but I'm Bad At Dominions(tm) and so didn't think of this. (E: I'm really dumb and forgot that A4 means I can forge all the A boosters, which is super goddamn useful as they are the hardest to get to). At least these paths will be good for battlefield spells like earthquake or storm. The astral path is for a couple things. First, I want him to make crystal matrices. A Crystal Matrix, when equipped, turns the equippee into a communion master. This means that my nemedians can use my enaries as magical batteries to empower their thundering/skeletoning, as well as boosting them to cast some of the nastier battlefield enchantments in A and D. A more subtle bonus is that having a Crystal Matrix obviates the need to cast Communion Master at the start of a fight. The obvious bonus to this is that you can start casting stuff right off the hop - the less obvious bonus is that, if the equippee is below the communion slaves in the cast order, by the time they can cast they will already have all the bonuses conferred to them by the communion. This means that they will be able to cast the big, boost-requiring spells on turn one, which can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Having S1 isn't a good idea though - it's easy for a unit with low astral to get killed by magic duels, and a PG with S1 is pretty much a walking target the minute he leaves a fort. Boosting my astral to 5 means that not only is there a far tinier chance that I'll lose a magic duel (I'd have to roll a 1 or 2, they'd have to roll a 5 or 6), but I can also build all the astral boosters, and eventually the biggest magic boosters in the game (ring of sorcery/wizardry). This opens up a number of astral-based endgames for me like arcane nexus and wish, as well as allowing me to kit out my enaries to cast some of the bigger astral spells in a pinch. Unique National Feature: 200g Temples and a Cap-only Recruitable H3 (Arch Bishop of the Sacred Shroud)  200g temples means I can boost my iffy starting dominion score (which i took intentionally becasue of my cheap temples), meaning I'll end up able to recruit more Tuatha and push my dom better. The Arch Bishops have the healer tag, the usefulness of which cannot be understated, and the ability of all H3s to claim thrones. Normally, only your prophet (who has h3 by default) and your PG can do this. Being able to use arch bishops means that I'll be able to nab them a little faster, especially if I make something like winged boots which will give them the ability to fly (and are handily available for construction by my mages). ChickenWing fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 15:32
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Turn 1  Blah blah blah exposition. Once upon a time there was a huge fukken war. One guy won and got to be god. Then he left, and now his servants are getting uppity. This plays out at the beginning of every game. Honestly, the lore behind dominions is actually really neat if you decide to look into it at all, but for now all we're really interested in is mashing pixelmans into each other until one of them falls over. Here is my starting location:  It's...okay. To our west, we have a lake. Good, because it's impermeable to anyone that doesn't have naturally recruitable amphibious units. Bad, because we don't have any naturally recruitable amphibious units. We're going to be ignoring this for a long time. To our north, a wasteland (you can tell by the bull skull hidden behind the white flag). Wastelands are all around bad to everyone except a couple specific nations for a couple specific spells. No population, no resources...it's literally a desert. The worst bit is, it also costs two MP to cross, which seriously hampers strategic movement. Boring. To our east, swamps. Marginally more useful than wastelands. Marginally. Same basic principles though: sucks to live in, sucks to move through. To our south, useful things! Southwest is a cave. Caves are always dark (which severely hampers all units without darkvision) and have chances to spawn super cool independent troops. Plus, they have tons of resources, which are essential in troop recruitment. Due south is a throne. Claiming thrones is how you win the game. They're always heavily protected, and generally give cool bonuses when claimed (although some are just downright awful. Looking at you Beast throne  ). Southeast is a forest - likely to have crap indies, meh income, and tons of resources. There's something extra special about this province, though - see the standing-stone graphic? That means there's a guaranteed magic site. Magic sites give all sorts of neat stuff, like gems and specially recruitable units. That's going to be high on the list of places to go.I'll do a quick run-through of what you can see in the UI on this screen. To the right, you have the menu. Most of it is self-explanatory. Towards the bottom, you can see the sites in the currently selected province. Every capital comes with a fort, a lab, a temple and the magic sites that give you your starting gem income and cap-only recruitable units. Center top is your pretender and economy. The coloured icons at the bottom of the economy window are your gem inventory. The little icon to the right shows what time of year it is - currently, it's spring, year 1. To the upper left, we have the province display. This shows all the information you currently know about the selected province. Lower left displays the units in the currently selected province. Each nation starts out with their commander and a scout, as well as a predetermined number of troops. In the case of this game, you get 100g of each of your simple troops. I'm taking the safe approach for turn 1. I don't get any intelligence on what is in my neighbouring provinces until turn two. If I decided to send my starting army out now, I might run into a giant concentration of heavy cavalry or worse, so instead I'm going to send my scout to investigate and make my starting commander a prophet. This is the full map of the world:  There's no underwater nations in this game, and so there's not a lot of water provinces. In fact, I think the one to my west is one of only three. Water can be a boon and a curse - often, it works extremely well as a natural border. However, often this serves more to isolate people, which is rarely a good thing. For my first turn recruitment, I get one of my cap-only mages and as many of my best troops as I can.  While I could probably get a lot more of my worse troops, a couple turns of quality recruitment should last me a long time, whereas garbage troops will drop like flies. Critical mass is an important concept in dominions - enough of a crap unit can usually take on anything, but higher quality units drastically lower the number requirement. Later in the game, we may see single units designed to take on infinitely many garbage troops at a time.
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Nov 5, 2014 16:06
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My flag is the best in the game, just sayin'.
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Nov 5, 2014 16:17
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Kitfox88 posted:My flag is the best in the game, just sayin'. Is it a PD counter?
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Nov 5, 2014 16:30
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AfroSquirrel posted:Is it a PD counter? Pegged at 100 of course.
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Nov 5, 2014 17:05
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Harab Serpahs have Air, Earth and Death randoms Chickenwing, not Air and Death.
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Nov 5, 2014 17:19
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WESTEROS: Draft info and Turn 1 First, the cast. GREAT LEADERS OF GLORIOUS NATION       (capitol only) Tuatha Sorceress are there to be really good at air magics and nature magics and eventually provide diversity in earth and water. Vanjarl who were picked because they are excellent sailing leaders who can provide blessings for my troops while being quite capable warrior mages in their own right. They also have blood magic which will allow us to build a (very expensive) blood economy later. We will be making a lot of these. Airya Seraph are the guys who will be mostly reading books for the nation. When required, they can be pulled off of book reading duty in order to lay waste to armies with the power of lightning. Ancient Lord is a big dumb leader with lots of hp and an inspirational bonus. I will probably make very few to none of these since Vanjarl can also lead armies pretty well while also being good at other things. Acolyte is a generic priest that costs a little less. Markata Scout is a little cheeky monkey who can scout around. Obviously this nation is extremely focused on Air Magic. Diversity is a distant 2nd thought. I won't be concerned with anything but air and later blood for a rather long time. HONORABLE TROOPS OF GLORIOUS NATION       (capitol only) Eagle Warrior great inexpensive sacreds that fly once blessed. As soon as I have a 2nd fort I'll probably be putting these guys on monthly recruit and leaving it forever. Jaguar Warrior these sacred orange furry cosplayers will be the backbone of our armies. Inexpensive, dangerous, and durable. Spire Horn Warrior chaff that can also do a decent alpha strike due to the 1st round charge bonus on their magic lance. Will probably make a lot of these for sieges and attacking archers/back lines. *flies in storms* Raptorian Warrior basically spire horn warriors but worse due to increase resource costs and lack of stormflight. I don't care about these and probably won't make any besides the ones that will pop up in my province defense or appear in my starting army. Retiarius a one-battle troop that is extremely powerful for the cost. Also has a net which is super good since things stuck in nets can't do anything until they get out. I will be making a lot of these guys early to augment our jaguar warriors who can only be built in limited quantities due to their sacredness. Gladiator a different flavor of Retiarius that are strictly worse in my opinion due to the lack of a net. They do get two attacks though. I will probably never make these. GLORIOUS GOD OF GLORIOUS NATION, BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS  This is our guy. He's going to chill in a dungeon for a few years while the nation uses his extremely powerful bless to great effect on the variety of excellent sacred troops available. At the same time we have enough points to get really strong money scales with zero points leftover. If/when he wakes up he's going to be hell on wheels. For our national spell, we picked up Summon Se'irim which makes these guys:  They are insane particularly when buffed by good spells which we will have. Essentially it's about as powerful and durable as your average size 3 demon while being size 2 (smaller is better in dominions because more fit in a square, granting your front line more attacks vs a few large idiots) and sacred. I won't have them for quite a while though as they will require a functional blood economy to mass. Does require a wasteland to summon, which hopefully won't be a problem. For our capitol site, we got one that give 3 Air and 3 Earth gems. The earth gems won't matter much early but they will allow me to empower an Earth1 Tuatha Sorceress later to break us properly into Earth Magic. And finally, we have the ability to perform Blood Sacrifices with allows you to sacrifice virgins to spread the dominion of your god. This is extremely good and I was quite frankly surprised to get this boon since I had last pick. Other players neglected blood mostly and if the game goes long they will probably regret giving me this. ============= Starting position  I got a much better start than Chickenwing based on what I can see turn 1. I've got farms around which are usually worth a lot of gold and worth trying to take early to bump your critical early game income. No lovely provinces adjacent to impede expansion movement which is also a plus. I also have an adjacent throne northeast and also, very importantly, a lake to my north. Due to my sailing Vanjarl I will be able to dominate the area around that lake so I will be focusing my expansion that way. For the first turn, I prophet my terrible Ancient Lord I start with and give him a suitable name. I also recruit an Acolyte, 6 jaguar warriors (you can only recruit as many sacreds as your dom score. I have 7 so that means a priest and 6 guys. This goes up for every 5 temples you own, maximum 10.) and as many Retiarius as my budget will allow. My starting Markata Scout is scripted to retreat and ordered to attack my adjacent throne province to check what mages, if any, are present.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:39
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I'm lame and haven't been documenting my turns as exhaustively as Nuclearmonkee, but I do have a few turn 1 things! First off, my nation and starting point. COMMANDERS  My cap-only mage, the BiW gets some decent paths and has solid research! Unfortunately she's expensive as gently caress and, again, slow to recruit.  I basically grabbed her for forging, site searching for alchemy fuel, and helping jump start a blood economy if I last that long. One of my recruit anywhere mages, also expensive as gently caress and slow to recruit. I'm bad at this. He'll be used for casting some of the better globals in the game via his nature paths, and also as battlefield support magic caster.  Water has some good globals in it, and he can also get astral paths via his random paths. Also research fodder since he's relatively cheap and I can pump them out from any fort each turn.  Ignore the troops okay I got lazy by now. The Gode is an expensive as balls priest, but my other choices had been picked by the time I got to him and I wanted an H2.  All the same, he's not terrible at all. The Manflayer has +2 to morale for troops under her command total, and starts at a respectable 80 leadership, is mounted, and has decent stats other than her average MR. Scout is just picked because flying scouts get places quicker to snoop faster.  TROOPS  Minotaurs are Bad and are probably the worst choice I made. Maybe if I get shittons of gold flowing in I can buff them with battlefield spells and they'll become worth a poo poo.   Berytians! Like the minotaurs I got these guys as a twofer together. The spearmen are pretty meh, but the elites are solid line troopers. Good protection, a whopping 15 morale under my manflayers, and solid defense because of their shields means they're generally good at holding enemies where I want them until poo poo dies. Assuming I bring enough of them, at any rate. My other two troop choices for generic troops were EA Ulm's double weapon warriors and Tien'Chi's heavy footmen. The warriors are okay I guess, footmen fatigue out too fast to really be more than meatwalls.  The backbone of my armies, the Great NATIONAL SPELLS  They do what they say on the tin and with my Pan's casting them they'll hit a fairly decent chunk of the battlefield. I get them at game start so they're solid until I roll out more useful nature buffs with research.HONORABLE PRETENDER  My Jam is immobile pretenders with Big Scales, so normally I go with a fountain or monolith or whatever. The pillar's neat though, so I decided to grab him this time As to where I started, well.  I have a farm province, so it's better than chickenwing's start. Also, as you can see, I do in fact have the best flag in the game. 
Kitfox88 fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 19:55
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I'm not going to document any of my turns at all unless some crazy poo poo happens, but I'll explain my nation and the thoughts behind it. I'm going to start with my national spell since a lot of my decisions were based around that:  There's two spells that summon different types of Tengus, Karasu Tengus and Konoha Tengus. Karasu Tengus have better stats, but you get more Konoha Tengus per summon and you get an extra one for each extra air path you have. I got to pick my national spell second, so I knew I was guaranteed to get some flavor of Tengu. I ended up having my choice between the two spells, and I went with the Konohas. These guys are sacred, have two attacks, and have storm flight. They're cool and good and are gonna murder poo poo with a W9 bless. Cap only mage:  Oreiads are pretty good at air magic and have the necessary paths to summon tengus as well as do other things. They get one guaranteed AEWN random path and a 10% chance at another. I'm gonna hope I get one with an air random early on so that I can be slightly more efficient with summoning Tengus. Also, as I found out after the game started, they are apparently stealthy. Accidentally picking stealthy mages is the theme of my drafting strategy. Recruit-anywhere troops:  and  Fir Bolg are really cost-effective troops, and picking one meant I got the other. I'm probably literally never going to recruit the axe ones though because javelins own. Sauromatian archers are cool, they have 11 precision and a composite bow for only 10 gold and 5 resources. As it turns out later I will have access to flaming arrows so these guys will probably be pretty useful. Cap only troops:  My thought process for these guys was pretty much just 'well, I'm going to have flying sacreds who like to have a w9 bless so I might as well pick more flying sacreds who like to have a w9 bless.' Recruit-anywhere mages:  and  Airya Seraphines are super garbage as far as being a mage goes, but they are literally the only recruitable flying priest with good leadership in EA. They are also, apparently, stealthy. So I'm basically down a mage pick, but I'm going to use these guys to lead and bless my Tengus and Wind Riders and fly around and be annoying. Tengus and Wind Riders would probably still be effective without a flying priest to lead them, but with Airya Seraphines leading them they're going to have a ton of mobility. Boudas are just good mages. They get 1 FED random. The F ones are less useful than E/D ones but they can cast Flaming Arrows which is nice. The heretic thing and the causing unrest thing is annoying but it won't be that big a deal to work around. They have a forge bonus which means they spend less gems to forge things, which is nice. Also, they have a werehyena form which is, apparently, stealthy. The accidentally picking stealthy mages count is up to three now. Priest, Commander, and Scout:  I picked Vergobrets because they have 80 leadership and I thought that they would give a morale bonus to units they command. They don't actually do that, though, and I will probably never recruit one ever. Warrior Chiefs are cool, I can recruit them in forests and mountains without building a fort in the province. They can lead a lot of units and are stealthy. Black Harpies are like, the best scout in the game. They are cheap as hell and fly and you can recruit them from any forest. Anyone who has recruitable black harpies is probably going to recruit them from every forest they can and cover the world in them. I know I am. Simple Troops:  Axe Warriors are mostly just to go with the Warrior Chief. Like him, they can be recruited from any forest or mountain province and are sneaky. They have 2 melee weapons as well as throwing axes, which is nice. If I buff them they'll probably be able to murder poo poo, I'm not really sure. Pale One Militia are totally garbage as troops and I will do my best to never ever put them in a fight. But, they are really cheap, have decent strength, don't need to eat and have a siege bonus. This makes them really good at sieging down forts fast and is literally the only reason I took them. If I'm really, really desperate, I could try to use them to expand underwater or something but it would probably be awful. Around this time I realize that my only options for mages to research things are Oreiads (Cap only, STR, expensive), Airya Seraphines (Way too fuckin' expensive to consider them for researching), and Boudas (Fairly expensive, STR, and massing them in a province to research is going to skyrocket unrest). So, all my mages are garbage for research. Luckily, I can pick one more mage for my nation, but it's gonna have to be something cap-only. So in a desperate effort to solve this problem I draft these guys:  They have one guaranteed FAWE random and another 50% shot at FAWE. And, importantly, they have a forge bonus. So with a hammer, ones with A randoms will be able to forge Owl Quills for 2 air gems per quill. Owl Quills give a bonus to research and are pretty cheap and easy to get to. Warrior Smiths that don't have Air randoms will be able to forge some other poo poo later, probably. Pretender:  I was pretty obviously going to take a W9 chassis and there were a bunch of those available. I settled on the Volla because I figured an N4 minor bless would be more useful than an S4 or E4 or something. When/if she ever wakes up she will generate 1 water and 1 nature gem a turn but honestly, the game will probably be partially decided by then. For scales, I went for as much money as I could while maintaining the major and minor blesses. My pretender name comes from being mad that Jonjoe wouldn't rename my nation to 'Skyfuckers' and now my cloud-dick flag doesn't make any god drat sense. Here's my starting area. I didn't take a turn 1 screenshot so all the icons and stuff are turned off so that you can't see where all my troops and poo poo are. The province with lines coming out of it is my capital.  I think that I probably have the worst start in the game. There are two land provinces in my capital. My capital is in a wasteland, which doesn't affect its income, but does make it really awful to move any non-flying units into or out of it. Now, you might be thinking "But Flame112, I see a farm right there next to your capital!" What the screenshot doesn't show is that the province is both a farm and a border mountain. Farms typically have high income and low resources while border mountains have low income and high resources. You might think that, together, you would get a province with average income and resources but in my experience they tend to just be terrible in both. This one in particular has 35 income (after factoring in my crazy money scales) and 9 resources. My start fuckin' sucked. The only redeeming thing about it is that most of the surrounding land is mountains and there's some forests nearby, meaning it's going to be easy to recruit my warrior chiefs, axe warriors, and more importantly: harpies. To recap: Basically, my nation has a lot of ways to be really annoying towards anyone I'm fighting. I'm going to have squads of tengus and wind riders flying around and fuckin' poo poo up and my actual armies can be backed by Fir Bolg and Sauromatian Archers. If I feel like being sneaky as well as annoying I can send squads of Axe Warriors out, along with sneaky were-hyena form Boudas and Oreiads for mage support.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:35
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Every time I look at an LP or anything of this game, it's less comprehensible to me than the Paradox engine, but I'm intensely fascinated by both. Thanks for explaining some of the stuff and the rationale behind it, everyone. And for the other LP link, gonna go look at it and hope it's comprehensible to me
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Nov 6, 2014 00:54
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This looks really fun and is going to be a total clusterfuck, I bet! Interesting to see people going pretty heavy on Air magic so far.
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Nov 6, 2014 01:00
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So I guess I should do this, too. Just so you all know the great plans I had, since I'm all alone in my besieged cap right now and it's rather unlikely I can do more then destroy the army on my cap a second time. Then I'm done and finished. This is my cap-only mage. She can summon fire elementals pretty easily, but more importantly: Thanks to being sacred and my bless choices, I can power her up to cast combat-magic practically for forever. Also a plus: Fire 3 means I can summon fire spirits, which are fire 3 mages in turn. And summoning firespirits may cost a lot of money, but since they aren't slow to recruit, I can get them faster if I need extra mages. Having some nature magic and a small supply bonus means good synergy with large armies and access to some neat items to forge. This mage was meant to be the leader of my mage-stacks in late game, together with firespirits.  This nice snake lady is my standard army mage. (Also research mage.) She has fire 2, which means combined with phoenix power she can use most fire battlemagic with no problem. With death 2 she can also do skelespam if she runs into something fireballs won't solve. Since I was planning on having a lot of them, the small supply bonus turns into a rather large one in a large army. Which means no worrying about crossing empty wastelands! The crazy-high fire resistance of 29 is one of the main reasons I took here. I was planning some really evil fire-related shennanigans in late-game, when just throwing fireballs and skeletons isn't really cutting it anymore.  Mr. Earth.txt. Taken mostly for magical diversity and because later, when all my snake ladies were supposed to move around to turn other people's places into ash, they were supposed to do double-duty as researchers + preventers of bad events. Also as priests and sacreds they can power up like my cap-only mage, which means they get the same bonus reinvigoration and extra-hp from my blesses. Sweet! Sadly, I never got to recruit them once.  My slightly above average priest. Next!  Pillage bonus for raiding, sacred, can move a lot of chaff around, said chaff gets +2 morale (or +1 with formation). That's it really.  My scout: Has high stealth (75), glamour and can easily move through forests and mountains. I would have preferred a black harpy, but everyone wanted one and there was just one available, so I took my second choice in the draft instead.  Sacred snakes which give extra morale to every squad they get attached to. Was taken as a nice morale booster for cheap chaff.  My cap-only troop. Meant mostly as an indie-killer. In practice quite often the target of fireballs. Apparently my snake ladies don't like hydras. (I know, I was surprised, too.  )A lot of attacks, HP and fear. Also a poison cloud to kill indies even faster. Worked actually better without mage support. Taking the hydra wasn't actually planned. I just suddenly got a special or something I didn't plan for and suddenly had another slot free. So I just took a giant monster in case someone else had.  This cap-only troop was part of a larger plan I made involving a lot of burning arrows, flying astonishingly far and then roasting my enemies. It's a sacred archer so an air bless would have been nice to give them even more range, which combined with their high precision would have made for some obnoxiously dangerous clouds of spiky burning death raining down, but this would have forced me to rebalance my pretender build. In an alternative world, those guys would have had their range bonus and my expensive cap mages would routinely die when I inevitably miscalculate how much damage they can resist. In this world however the mages got their extra-hp, but never got recruited. Well, gently caress.  Cavalry with lances for sweet, sweet charges and composite bows for some close-range arrows. I never get to test my raid-ideas with them, which spared a lot of them a hilarious death, I'm sure.  An Annunaki of Love and War, carefully balanced to cast all spells and globals I had planned for, while still being able to wake up fast enough to still be relevant in the early game. Now besieged in her own cap. My sacred mages got a small reinvigoration and hp-bonus from her bless, while combat units additionally benefitted from an attack bonus. (The mages got that, too of course. But they weren't really likely to ever use that.) Then there was a national spell to summon giant toads. With some creative forging, a lot of my mages could have potentially used that to create an army of frog monsters. Sadly another thing I never got the chance to use. Turn 1 I sat around, send out a scout to a nearby province, recruited some units, that's about it. Turn 2 Here I learned I was surrounded by lovely provinces, including a wasteland. Since my cap was also a wasteland, this didn't bode well.  This is my proud capital. Black friday happened just before the second siege army arrived, so the economy went to crap. The irony here is, even without a siege force I couldn't actually recruit anything, since my still living mages and units take up more money in maintenance than I actually have income. So right now I'm just an rear end and use my gem stash to summon units to make it harder to siege my cap down. Occasionally I harass the army sitting on me with fiery death from above. I plan on doing this until I've run out of gems, then I assault the siege force one last time with everything I have in a try to kill as many of the bastards as possible. Then I'll pull down my lab and go AI, the end. Edit: I forgot to mention my chaff, some dudes with sharp sticks to block and some dudes with bows to shoot. Both cheap. Libluini fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 01:01
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Whoa spoilers
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Nov 6, 2014 01:24
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How are u posted:Whoa spoilers More like visions of doom. My name is Cassandra and this is what I prophesy: Snakes will die.
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Nov 6, 2014 01:44
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I like it. I'll be watching this! It's like a cross between Ferengi's solo LP and Lilli's multi view LP, though without as much angst (Libluini I am looking at you).
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Nov 6, 2014 02:41
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Holy gently caress. mercenarynuker posted:Every time I look at an LP or anything of this game, it's less comprehensible to me than the Paradox engine, but I'm intensely fascinated by both. Thanks for explaining some of the stuff and the rationale behind it, everyone. And for the other LP link, gonna go look at it and hope it's comprehensible to me If you have questions, just ask! Also, if you want really good, in-depth analyses, most of the basics are covered in the two threads on lparchive. They're both dom3, but a lot of the features are similar. ChickenWing fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 03:40
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Why would you buy f6 on an Annunaki of Love and War? That's very inefficient. Edit: and could someone post a link to the post that we explained the draft rules, it must be very confusing for some people. Speleothing fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 03:48
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quote:quote:To our east, swamps. Marginally more useful than wastelands. Marginally. Same basic principles though: sucks to live in, sucks to move through.
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Nov 6, 2014 07:18
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Here we go again! What're the odds of finishing two in a row? Love the draft idea. Wish I had anything close to a normal schedule and could MP it up with all ya.
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Nov 6, 2014 08:07
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Xenoborg posted:Are the provinces on the North and South sides of the Southern leg of the lake connected? Sort of. The connections are a little strange. Speleothing posted:could someone post a link to the post that we explained the draft rules, it must be very confusing for some people. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3498140&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=128#post435844009
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Nov 6, 2014 14:19
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Speleothing posted:Why would you buy f6 on an Annunaki of Love and War? That's very inefficient. Inefficience is my middle name.
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Nov 6, 2014 14:38
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ChickenWing posted:Sort of. The connections are a little strange.
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Nov 6, 2014 16:12
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I really don't see reasons to double down so hard on magical paths other than Astral and recruit-anywhere A2+. That pretty much goes for all of you.
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Nov 7, 2014 21:51
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TheDemon posted:I really don't see reasons to double down so hard on magical paths other than Astral and recruit-anywhere A2+. That pretty much goes for all of you. Could you elaborate on why?
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Nov 7, 2014 22:29
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spoiler alert
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Nov 7, 2014 22:39
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How are u posted:Could you elaborate on why? If you have mages with a good path in a magic, why would you need different mages with that path rather than just recruit more of the first? Diversity allows for flexibility and increases total income. Astral is good for communions (and stellar cascades is p good).
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Nov 7, 2014 23:17
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I don't need any of those things and either my strategy will work or I will burn out and die. Air has everything I want in it.
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Nov 8, 2014 00:22
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TheDemon posted:I really don't see reasons to double down so hard on magical paths other than Astral and recruit-anywhere A2+. That pretty much goes for all of you. "Never not go balls deep" - Jesus H. Christ
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Nov 8, 2014 03:27
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Nuclearmonkee posted:I don't need any of those things and either my strategy will work or I will burn out and die. Air has everything I want in it. like nitrogen. and oxygen, i guess.
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Nov 8, 2014 03:56
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Turn 2: Things have happened!  ...not necessarily important things, but things nonetheless. Unless you have a specific super awesome unit you're waiting for, generally you're going to name a prophet on turn two. It is critically important that you give it a stupid and/or funny name so that everyone can see how clever you are. I named my Noble Commander Santa's Slightly Larger Helper to go along with A Big Fukken Elf because I am the Almighty King of Wit and Humour. ...come to think of it, that's a pretty wicked PG name. Original ChickenWing Idea, Do Not Steal. Moving along, we now know the rough disposition of the independent forces surrounding our capital.  I say "rough" because, to be frank, your scout-less scout reports are pretty garbage. Troop levels frequently fluctuate by +/-25 troops. All the report is really good for is knowing: a) are there A Lot of Troops, A Moderate Number of Troops, or A Handful of Troops, and b) what is the unit makeup. Even this last part is subject to interpretation - I've been blindsided by heavy cavalry (the bane of expansion forces) in provinces that were reported to only contain militia. Reports from provinces with a scout in them are *moderately* better. The only way to really know is to attack and see for yourself. Our scouts have reported some decent numbers surrounding us. To the north are barbarians. Hard hitting, mostly unprotected units with high morale and the ability to go berzerk. Depending on their numbers, they can either be murderous or barely a bump in the road. To the east, we have generic indies. Generic provinces usually have a mix of archers, militia, heavy infantry and heavy cavalry. This province is only reporting militia and archers - it'll be high on the list of places to go. Our best expansion corridor is to the south, however. Southeast, we have deer tribe - garbage indies that are even easier to steamroll than generics. The only downside is that they make *really* bad PD. Due south is the throne.  There's a LOT of dudes on this throne - I guarantee it's a level 2. We're going to be leaving it alone at least until we're done expansion, probably a little longer. Cataphracts are serious business without a lot of chaff to absorb their initial charge. Southwest looks promising - those are bakemono-sho in that cave. This means that we might be able to pick up some non-garbage recruitable indies, which is always nice. To the west, the lake is full of tritons. That will be trivial to take if we ever want to. Here's a look at our expansion army:  We're not putting our tuatha in our expansion force just yet - I'd like to build up a secondary force that can expand in parallel with our first force. It's very important to expand as quickly as possible, and the more expansion parties you have, the more provinces you can take per turn. Generally, you want to end the year with over twelve provinces. It's more difficult than you might think. I've tested out expanding with my starting force in a couple of single player games, and they ended up proving themselves fairly well against the less difficult indies. We'll have to cherrypick where we expand, but these should last us a couple turns. We're starting out by sending them to Halemyre (the Deer Tribe province to the southeast). The guaranteed site there should be an early boon, and the forest means that we'll be able to recruit more than three tuatha a turn. Our scout moves on from Yrik Balkor to Copper Woods - it's a decent chokepoint and fort location, so we're probably going to want to expand there soon. Finally, now that we have a mage, we can start researching!  We're just going to dump all of our RP into Evocations for now. Evocations are the big, mean, meteor-slinging, fire-raining, battlefield-destroying spells. Specifically, Evocations 4 will get us Thunder Strike. Thunder Strike is very important to us if we want to win any battles past early game. We'll take a detour or two to pick up some small buffs to help us more efficiently cast Tstrike, but for the most part 100% of our RP is going into evocations for now.
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Nov 8, 2014 14:14
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Meanwhile in  Libuico:-I start abusing the incredible low, low indie-forces around me. -I notice several explanations for why there are not many defenders in the provinces around me. Explanations which involve things like wastelands and low population. Which means even after I start conquering some provinces, my income stays barely high enough to continue recruiting from my wasteland-cap. But welp, I take this as a challenge and I'm continuing on my quest to conquer the world in the name of snakehood! gently caress ups in my early turns: -A hydra gets surrounded and slapped to death by some no-name indies. -In another battle, my pikemen are really determined to run into the fray. Sadly they completely ignore the poison cloud surrounding my hydra. Which is fighting the same indie-squad at the time. The battle is won, but I'm left with something like 1-2 pikemen. Ouch. Edit: Note to self: Next time try to take poison-resistant troops if you're determined to put them together with a poison-spewing monster into the same army. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Nov 8, 2014 |
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Nov 8, 2014 14:31
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Based on names alone, so rooting for Belgium.
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Nov 8, 2014 15:11
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Regarding scout reports, for those less informed who may be reading this LP, you can get even more accurate reports from a unit with the Spy tag, but it's generally not enough to justify using those units over bog standard scouts due to cost (including opportunity cost) and/or availability concerns. But so far I gather this LP is aimed more towards those who have read prior LPs and have a slight grasp on the mechanics.
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Nov 8, 2014 15:12
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Turn 2 None of my neighboring indies scouted at less than 60 guys and include elephants/heavy cavalry so my plan of splitting it out so I could attack with 6 jaguars, 4 retiarius in one army and 20 birdmen with the rest of the rets isn't going to work. Fortunately, that throne that I attack/retreated with a scout contains only 52 barbarians along with no mages.  This means it is definitely a weaker level 1 throne, but I'm not going to complain due to the ease by which it can be taken. I combine all of the Retiarius and 10 birdmen into a single group, micro positioning so that I get first hit, and send them in with my prophet Big Dumb Idiot. In my cap, I make 5 more retiarius, an expensive Vanjarl and a few more jaguar warriors. Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Nov 8, 2014 |
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Nov 8, 2014 15:48
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quote:We're starting out by sending them to Halemyre (the Deer Tribe province to the southeast). The guaranteed site there should be an early boon, and the forest means that we'll be able to recruit more than three tuatha a turn. Guaranteed site? I know forests have a slightly better chance for sites overall, but what gives that province a guaranteed one?
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Nov 8, 2014 17:36
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Xenoborg posted:Guaranteed site? I know forests have a slightly better chance for sites overall, but what gives that province a guaranteed one? The big stone/monolith looking thing located in the province on the map. Those are either a guaranteed site or a many sites province, I forget which.
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Nov 8, 2014 17:46
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For my turn two I propheted my starting manflayer, then moved a stack of warriors and footmen to the weakest province next to me and took it.  I don't have any screenshots for a while
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Nov 8, 2014 20:12
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Flame112 posted:The big stone/monolith looking thing located in the province on the map. Those are either a guaranteed site or a many sites province, I forget which. It's a guaranteed site. The site is revealed when you get there iirc.
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Nov 8, 2014 20:48
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How do you tell which ones are manysites provinces then? Or can you not?
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Nov 8, 2014 22:44
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