|
Looks like Cloud Lord is officially it for the next run, sorry kobold fans!
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2021 15:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 00:41 |
|
|
Bernicus Sanderius, part 9 The moon mage goes exploring to the north and finds this unusual formation of stones. Like the mystical column this has some strange effects on the weather, and more importantly, shits out horrors.  Soultorns are the Little League of horrors. They've got some resistances and regeneration, but they're basically just slightly tougher infantry troops.  I'm racking up absolutely silly amounts of iron due to the amount of trade Bernie's generating, so I start slapping down ballistae on any fort that doesn't already have them just in case deer or fishmen wander in.  The southern peninsula is all but secured.  Looks like we found the illusionist's now-deserted home. Guess they had a secure base the whole time, although they probably would have had a slow start; there's a distinct lack of income sites around and a lot of rough terrain for them to slog through to get anywhere.  The soultorn wandering around the ship stones had an invisible buddy backing him up. It's ethereal and has a paralyzing ranged attack, but it's not too scary. I lose four hastati, which is still cheap for wandering horrors.  I was hoping to have some more savannah down here to explore during winter, but guess not. Adding insult to injury, the only additional property in the illusionist's starting turf is a guard tower. So they had to deal with a hardened fort that marches out troops to reclaim villages, but doesn't actually provide any income.  The ship stones work a little differently from the mystic column; instead of a passive weather effect, you can interact with them to gently caress with the seasons. More autumn means less winter, so this is a plus in my book.  The metal initiates takes some troops and starts exploring westward, spotting this big boy stomping around the forest. It's an 80 or so HP giant plant monster with armor and damage resistance, so taking it out would be a tall order without magic backup. I think these guys stick to forests, though.  Oh poo poo, I've been completely overlooking this. Spider thickets are nasty monster spawners but they can blend into regular forests pretty easily, especially when there are some regular dead forests nearby. I'm pretty sure the dryad queen had this one flagged, because otherwise there would be dozens and dozens of spiders everywhere.  The spiders are no match for a legion backed up with archers and mages, but if the spider thicket remained unclaimed then it would start spitting out stacks of these at a pretty good rate.  The southern strip of savannah does have at least one more settlement, and it's a good thing I found it when I did.  These guys are bad news. Not only are they unusually nasty compared to most hamlet defenders, if they get left alone too long they tend to open world-ending portals to hell.  My economy is starting to get quite silly and the gold is piling up, but I can never have too many ballistae so I crank up my trade. Buying at overprice lets you pay 4 times as much gold for 2 times as many resources. It's a bad deal, but I'm made of money.  The map generator is perfectly happy to generate ports on inland lakes. I'm not about to complain about having more recruiting sites on the front lines.  I guess I should probably start spending some of this money. I set the capital to start autorecruiting princepes solaris, because why not.  With the illusionist's territory basically secure (and no, there were no other settlements on their starting peninsula) the empress goes to explore the clouds some more. They're a bit monotonous but there are villages up here to conquer.  Looks like the southern swath of savannah actually might lead somewhere after all.  More horrors   Even more horrors  The cloud people have magical damage and the Champion of Storms has wind and lightning spells, so the empress isn't invincible up here. When you can cast multiple sleep & paralyze spells per round it's close enough, though.  While I'm exploring new frontiers I decide to pop a boat out from the southern peninsula to see about taking some of those offshore resource deposits.  Ah! A new AI faction appears.  The empress takes a sky village held by some mesoamerican themed units. Again, nothing that poses any real threat.  The new purple faction isn't limited to the far south. Looks like we've got kobolds.  Kobolds are a freespawn faction built around being the ultimate fodder. There are almost 300 units here and I don't see any mages, so I'm pretty sure like 50 real troops would be more than enough to wipe them out.  Undines are intelligent elemental beings that can cast weak magic. That's a little bit scary, but there's only one and I'm bringing a literal boatload of troops to the fight.  Fighting aquatic enemies with a boat has its disadvantages; I can't really bring a front line to bear, and although I brought plenty of archers the ones in back aren't really going to have the range to hit anything directly in front of the ship. Still, it's enough.  There are some things I'm steering well clear of, though.  I'm getting a little tired of the friendly fire from the old wizard. Since I've just been mopping up indie villages basically all my casualties are self-inflicted. I do keep a couple smaller AoEs on hand but the bread and butter here will be Call Lightning.  I push further on into kobold territory and find an occupied mine. For us they're just a source of gold and iron, but for kobolds they're fortresses and spawning grounds.  Higher level kobolds can also summon dragons to their nests. Dragons are stupid and do not follow kobold orders, but they have their own unique AI behavior instead of wandering around randomly. Generally they'll just sit around and help defend the nest, but periodically they'll briefly fly off to attack any unowned villages within range before returning to home base. IMO this makes them substantially less useful than stationary defenders; they're big and scary but not "solo a real army" scary, so they're a garrison that periodically abandons its backup and leaves both itself and your vitally important base vulnerable. With the old wizard leading I could probably take on the whole mine right now, but I think for now the plan is to bide my time and wait for it to gently caress off. I don't know what they might have lurking offscreen and if my meatshields are depleted I don't have a good way to replenish them. And while the kobolds get fortifications I'm pretty sure that once I clear them out it reverts to being a regular mine where I'm a sitting duck.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2021 16:10
|
|
|
Are we going to use all that money to make God Emperor Bernie, Master of the Budgetary Commission or something at some point?
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2021 16:20
|
|
|
Bernie will be ascending by and by, but there are a couple issues that make me hesitant to pull the trigger at this point. For one, AFAIK if the empress dies the emperor can take a new empress. But the God-Emperor will not marry a mortal woman, so if Lavinia dies after Bernie ascends then I'm down a god-empress.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2021 16:22
|
|
|
You seem to be getting a lot of horror spawns compared to my usual games. I assume that's probably just because larger maps have higher chances of horror spawning tiles though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2021 21:36
|
|
|
Zengetsu posted:You seem to be getting a lot of horror spawns compared to my usual games. Honestly, it feels like most games I have to put up with worse. Not only does the spawn rate feel higher than in CoE4, it feels like there are more locations that attract horrors, and also I think phase spiders might be new? At any rate I don't really remember them from 4, and they're worse than a lot of minor horror spawns.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 00:05
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:Bernie will be ascending by and by, but there are a couple issues that make me hesitant to pull the trigger at this point. That's an entirely understandable reason to not ascend to godhood just yet. Also there are still plenty of statues that can be made. There seem to be enough horror spawns that it's worth having a passable caster in most recruitment sites/towns. Interesting aside, from having played many hundreds of hours of CoE4, it seems that the random generation was affected by the factions represented in game, both for the world at large but also the near spawns to the faction itself, hence why there's always at least one Ancient Forest near a Dryad Queen at start. The most interesting result I'd found of those slight twists so far in CoE4 was having a bunch of Burgemeisters and Necromeisters in a Fallen Empire start and in the world-gen history the empire was brought down by Hoburg necromancers and the Capitol was infested with undead and Hoburgs.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 01:42
|
|
|
So is it sort of like dwarf fortress with world generation then?
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 03:52
|
|
|
titty_baby_ posted:So is it sort of like dwarf fortress with world generation then? I think stuff like that is more coincidence than anything. You can select different world gen parameters for different "societies"/eras/levels of development, and there are a few special versions of most of the more interesting societies, but I'm not sure that it actually takes which factions are present into account for selecting which version of a society is in play. Maybe it does??? I guess there are some strong associations between most of the sub-societies and different factions. I mostly play on Agricultural which is very generic and doesn't really have specific sub-societies, so maybe I just haven't had the chance to see it in action.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 04:05
|
|
|
It seems like world generation does somewhat take into account the factions involved in a game to ensure there are usable resources for everyone. So like how there will definitely be Ancient Forests somewhere near Dryad Queen and Druids to name a few.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 04:14
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 04:16
|
|
|
Bernicus Sanderius, part 10 Magic library spotted. Libraries mean more wizard recruits and also would let me promote my metal initiate, so this is an important find.  They tend to be fortified and have wizards backing them up, but I have a goddess backing me up so they're basically hosed.  The sorceress has some decent spells, some archer-centric support buffs backed up by an okayish blasting spell, and is packing a magic ice sword and acorns that summon some vine men.  It doesn't help. Amusingly, spells tend to do damage to whatever the target is standing on so Syllable of Death winds up blowing holes in the fortifications, although it won't target the front of the wall.  I spot another, different purple faction in a darker color.  Now that I've made contact with the next enemies the empress will definitely be needed on the ground, so I send the moon mage up the mountain to explore the sky further in her stead.  My naval expedition has collected several coral and gem sites for a bit of extra money. I don't think I'm going to take this one, though.  Yeah I'm probably just going to leave this well alone.  Dark purple has a citadel and a ruined castle. So far I'm just seeing generic human troops, so I'm not sure what faction I'm looking at here but they're definitely no match for an army with a goddess in tow.  Back down south, the wizard stack finds a couple watch towers which will be handy for reinforcements against the kobolds. This one has an odd assortment of defenders; I think this is two separate groups of indies that wandered in, but I wouldn't have expected them to be on the same side? Regardless, the bishop fish has a few loot items, including another magic bean and a ring of invisibility. There's also a level 1 spell scroll, which... I guess is nice, but I have a really hard time caring what level 1 spells my mages know at this stage of the game. Or most stages of the game, really; there are a few factions that live and die by their starting spell rolls, but you pretty quickly get past the point where 1st level spell rolls will be the deciding factor in anything.  A "small" kobold stack wanders up. This isn't even going to be remotely close.  I launch an assault on dark purple's citadel. They have the siege advantage this time: 15 of the 21 casualties we took happened before the fight started (there are some discrepencies in the kill vs. death counts due to troops getting confused and killed by their own side.)  You can see the holes left by the catapults, but now that they're done shooting it's my turn. Unfortunately the empress decides to gently caress around with her lower level spells at first.  That's better.  The dark wizard can buff troops with ethereal, rendering the walls irrelevant. With the entire enemy army mostly stunlocked this doesn't really change the outcome even a little bit, but it does speed things up.  Elsewhere, the old wizard murders half of the kobold front line before they can move.  The AI did at least have the good sense to pack this army with slingers, who manage to do enough chip damage to bring down a couple of troops.  The kobolds must be doing something right in general. Another unmet AI faction bites the dust.  They're on the advance in the center too, encroaching in dark purple's territory.  Up in the clouds the moon mage spots some indie kobolds occupying a valuable city. Their chief even carries a magical cloak of displacement, which isn't particularly great defense but it's decent ballista insurance if nothing else.  Cloud cities have some unique recruitment options. They're expensive, but cloud people are ethereal troops with magic weapons--closer in strength to the illusionist's phantasms than the plain 1-HP illusions. For some factions (like the senator) just having guaranteed archer recruits is probably worthwhile.  It's not a good turn to be a kobold. This stack is about three times the size of the one in the desert, and it does manage to do about three times the casualties. That's still a 20:1 loss ratio, and while kobolds are expendable they're not that expendable.  Our naval expedition ends in ignominious defeat. I guess it's accurate to the Roman theme?  Wow, I just completely underestimated these guys. In Dominions ichtyids are basically trash troops outside of the utility value of the nets they sometimes have, but these things are swole as hell. Honestly I'm impressed it was as close as it was between their superior stats and home turf advantage, although I guess all those archers are good for something.  The old wizard takes a city off the kobolds. I didn't get a screencap of the combat summary but I didn't lose more than 1-2 troops.  The dragon finally flies out to nab a measly farm. It doesn't have quite enough movement to get back home, so it's exposed now.  It does some damage, but it's spreading the hurt around while getting focus fired by 60 troops and a max level wizard.  Another dragon immediately appears to grab the city!  Second verse, same as the first.  The Ring of Evasion it was carrying has a 25% chance of canceling any given attack (possibly physical only? Unclear.) I stick it on my old wizard for added insurance.  The kobolds are actually outflanking me (and dark purple) to the north. Just a reminder that the hundreds of casualties they're taking are basically nothing to the kobolds. Speaking of which, dark purple's real commander finally shows up: looks like they're the Demonologist that wiped out the warlocks earlier. I probably could have guessed just based on the looks of their citadel but I'm a little shaky on what some of the home fortresses look like and I haven't played demonologist in forever (demonologists are one of the factions that have to deal with summons turning hostile and attacking you, which I'm not a fan of and put up with enough on other more interesting factions.) Regardless, they're pretty scary so I can't do much but hunker down in the citadel and let the kobolds run amok for now; at a minimum I need to join up the empress with my main armies in the area.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 16:42
|
|
|
I'm honestly surprised the demonologist has made it this far. They nearly always die off to indies or themselves for me.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 17:20
|
|
|
A nice thing recruitment sites on other planes can do is they'll start rolling on special recruitment pools only available on those locations, so having a cloud city can get you access to some Air based Caster/Summoners.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 17:55
|
|
|
Zengetsu posted:I'm honestly surprised the demonologist has made it this far. They nearly always die off to indies or themselves for me. That seems to be a function of the uncontrolled chance on their summons; even for human players, whiffing critical summons early on can leave you dead in the water even if it doesn't outright kill you. But those summons tend to be really good to compensate for the failure chance, so when the AI gets lucky long enough to reach critical mass they can just be brutal.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 17:56
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:That seems to be a function of the uncontrolled chance on their summons; even for human players, whiffing critical summons early on can leave you dead in the water even if it doesn't outright kill you. But those summons tend to be really good to compensate for the failure chance, so when the AI gets lucky long enough to reach critical mass they can just be brutal. The difficulty setting giving them over 200% more resources probably helps with reaching that critical summoning mass where they aren't in danger of dying to passing deer.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 18:00
|
|
|
scavy131 posted:The difficulty setting giving them over 200% more resources probably helps with reaching that critical summoning mass where they aren't in danger of dying to passing deer. Oh, I mean critical mass for not dying/taking irrecoverable losses from their own failed summons. If you fail the control roll on your first summon of a given tier, or you fail the control roll on the second one and it kills the first one, it's a pretty huge setback. Higher AI handicaps do help them bounce back out of the "murdered by deer" danger zone but they're still going to be easy pickings for other AIs that were able to snowball from the start.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2021 18:11
|
|
|
Welcome to Elysium. Beware of Deer.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2021 04:03
|
|
|
Drakenel posted:Welcome to Elysium. Beware of Deer.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2021 04:35
|
|
|
Bernicus Sanderius, part 11 With the dragon out of the way I get a move on evicting the kobolds from the mine. Note that every little pentagram on the ground is a hidden magical trap, one of the features of kobold strongholds and a big reason I didn't want to take on the dragon here.  In this case they're decay traps, which are all but guaranteed death over time. The wizard easily clears the kobolds, but I lose half my army to the goddamn traps.  Offended that we're squatting on his house, the demonologist rolls up with his entire goddamn army. This, uh, might get bad.  These things are built like tanks and just casually throw out confusion attacks, and they're far from the worst thing here. There are multiple rows of mostly mages standing off to the left side of this pic.  The ballistae open a couple holes, but most of these things are beefy enough to shrug off a ballista hit.  A lot of the non-humanoid devils have AoE breath attacks. So on top of bringing 100+ human troops and several dozen mages, they also brought a couple dozen troops with mage-equivalent firepower.  I BROUGHT GOD, MOTHERFUCKERS  Devils tend to have good MR, so sleep mostly knocks out the useless human troops while the demon barrage continues.  Lavinia is also packing a mass banish spell, but again: devils tend to have good MR. This handily shuts down whatever summoned undead trash they summon, but each cast might only get 1-2 odd devils.  There are a lot of fliers out there who can simply ignore the walls. Whatever survived the initial barrage gets cut down pretty quickly.  Slowly but surely, the demonic horde gets pushed back by the banish spam. Most of our troops are dead, but the gates still hold for now.  Gradually elementals start filtering through to the front, summons from the backline devils with elemental magic. Since they can't be banished or put to sleep, they're winding up doing most of the fighting. The cloud elementals are picking off wall troops with their ranged lightning, but they're going down easily enough.  So, uhhhh. Several disease demons have worked their way up and they're packing AoE decay spells, and as it turns out iron gates are not immune to decay. It's only a matter of time for the gates, as well as the remaining wall defenders. Only the inner keep holds.  Even without gates, Lavinia's magic holds the demonologist's hordes at bay. Slumbering troops pile up around the chokepoint.  CoE's battlefield is a two-dimensional plane, and in order to represent flyers passing overhead they are allowed to displace other units in their movement. Typically this causes a minor disruption at most but at one point she actually manages to nudge the dark wizard off the tower altogether.  From his new vantage point he is able to lob his spells much more effectively, projecting fear and damage into the middle of the enemy's diminished formation. Slowly he begins to carve out a clearing in the upper corner.  But in doing so, he has put himself in the range of the demonologist himself. The dark wizard holds out for a few rounds, but soon is bested.  The gates open. I do not know if this is a reaction to the dwindling number of ranged troops left on our side, the loss of all the threatening demons, or a Dominions-style stalemate timer after 200 (!) rounds of combat. Regardless, Lavinia is able to work much more quickly now that she can throw melee attacks and Syllable of Death around.  In the process of mopping up she actually picks up several replacement troops from confusion.  That battle was so big it doesn't fit in a single page of results. By my count, that is 36 spellcasters on the enemy side, almost half of them level 2s.  Besides the empress I have a total of 6 troops standing after the battle, and they're not necessarily 6 of the ones I started with.  Still, I definitely came out ahead of the other guy. It looks like their other stack got wiped out by kobolds this same turn. I was going to write something about how this attack demonstrates how bad the AI is at evaluating things like fortifications, siege engines, and wizards, all of which is true. But I went back to my old save and reran the battle a few times and... honestly, I got lucky. My odds of winning were maybe 3 or 4 out of 10. Decay is brutal and there's decent odds the disease demons hold out against the barrage of sleep+banish long enough to tag the empress and then it's GG. At the time I was too lazy to watch the entire battle (it's quite long) so I didn't realize just how closely I had come to losing. Irritatingly, this created a discrepancy in the screenshots above since when I went back to grab screenshots from the second half of the fight I was running a newer version of the game and it hosed with the battle playback. I swear I didn't scum this fight, though; I just took it for granted that hey, God-Empress wins big fight. The AI still made several critical mistakes: there was little point risking their demonologist himself and gambling their entire existence on the attack's success, and the sheer mass of human troops contributed nothing except slowing down the devils advancing from the rear. Better play could have given them even better odds and kept them alive for a few more turns even if they lost. Overall, the AI made the right call in attacking, their luck just came up short.  I spot another cloud city, so I gather some cloud archer reinforcements and head in. Tengu are very nasty: every single guy on their wall has a ranged AoE wind attack. But I have the numbers and a level 2 mage backing me up.  Oops. I did not look very closely and they have a level 3 mage backing them up.  So much for conquering the sky.  Back on the ground I move in on the other kobold stronghold, which turns out to be their starting fort. It goes much the same as the first one, although I'm rapidly running out of meatshields.  I retreat to the city and get some ballistae in to help defend, but the kobolds are moving in to retaliate and I'm spread awfully thin here.  The upshot is that without any troops, I have no worries about friendly fire, especially when I'm sitting behind a wall and all the kobolds are outside.  BWAHAHAHAHAHA  This fight is basically the best case scenario for a wizard sitting on a castle wall and nuking everything. The wall gives cover bonuses vs. projectiles which render those slings pretty harmless where something with better weapons might have been able to plink the wizard to death, and kobolds have something like 3 HP so they die very quickly to AoE spells. So now I can talk about how bad the AI is about evaluating things like assaulting wizard-held fortifications. Theoretically if they ran an all-ranged army they might have had a chance of getting a lucky shot in, but the wizard's big spells badly outrange their tiny slings and bows and having several rows of useless kobold infantry meant that by the time they had a shot at the wizard they'd already been standing around getting blasted for a while.  OK, that was fun. I've spent long enough faffing about.  "...Emperor. Though this might be a good opportunity to study a transition into godhood, the Department of Divine Studies has been reluctant to send a request for some of the Divine Imperial flesh." Like the Empress, the God-Emperor is a double level 3 caster with triple digit HP. Storm Magic and Solar Magic are both fantastic spell schools; while Godflesh does not make him literally invulnerable to nonmagical damage, it does give half damage from fire/slash/pierce/bludgeoning damage and extra armor. He also gets a ton of wide area damage, including multiple ways to hit the entire battlefield. Unlike the Empress, Bernie's divine form does not fly. Which is a problem, since he's too big to fit on a boat and not big enough to wade. This is the main reason I've been holding off on transforming; until I can get a flying/swimming item (that fits in a miscellaneous item slot, or perhaps a weapon if such a thing exists) he's stuck on the imperial isle.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2021 22:44
|
|
|
That demonologist fight was something of a rarity in CoE: a big exciting fight where both sides are more or less evenly matched. Very fun.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2021 23:54
|
|
|
Yeah, I was very surprised in a pleasant way when I saw this go down. Most fights tend to be very one-sided; the AI is written with the understanding that it's known to be bad at evaluating magic, fortifications, special abilities etc. so it seems to be programmed to only attack when it thinks it has overwhelming force. I had just enough advantages that it misread a modest advantage as an overwhelming one, but not enough to just meatgrinder the whole army like the old wizard did.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 00:06
|
|
|
You were incredibly lucky in the fight against the demonologist, not just because the God-Empress' spell rolls were good enough to keep a demon horde at bay, but one of the issues that Ritual Summon based factions seem to struggle with is that they have a hard time delegating summoned troops, there were two different Demonologist summoner commanders in that stack that attacked you, only one needed to actually lead the attack but I'm not really sure if the AI ever leaves behind summoned troops or gives summons from one commander to another.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 00:29
|
|
|
Why is the emperor pic Age of Mythology Zeus lol
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 14:49
|
|
|
I BROUGHT GOD, MOTHERFUCKERS had me cackling
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 14:52
|
|
|
the other guy pulls a deer, you pull a ballista he puts your guy to sleep, you put his under charm they bring a legion of demons and mages, you bring God
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 15:00
|
|
|
scavy131 posted:You were incredibly lucky in the fight against the demonologist, not just because the God-Empress' spell rolls were good enough to keep a demon horde at bay, but one of the issues that Ritual Summon based factions seem to struggle with is that they have a hard time delegating summoned troops, there were two different Demonologist summoner commanders in that stack that attacked you, only one needed to actually lead the attack but I'm not really sure if the AI ever leaves behind summoned troops or gives summons from one commander to another. I don't really know that the AI will bother to shuffle troops between commanders, short of a commander dying and leaving its troops behind. They will coordinate stacks together to make combined attacks, after which they either seem to have the original stacks go their separate ways or else permanently absorb them together into their deathball. They do sometimes leave leaderless troops (particularly ranged and/or slow ones) behind to garrison fortified sites but as far as trading troops off and leaving the commander behind, I haven't seen it. I did forget to mention: I checked the name on the demonologist and it's not the named leader of the faction. So at some point they already lost their original demonologist and had to replace them, which is probably why they never got to the 3rd tier caster or summons. This was against a demonologist that already suffered a serious early game setback (demonologists are prone to experience those on their own, but the fact that they started smack in the middle of the continent probably did not help matters any. For that matter, they're positioned behind the dryad queen and illusionist and may have weakened both with their skirmishing.)
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 15:31
|
|
|
Bernicus Sanderius, part 12 So our new God-Emperor has one little problem: he doesn't fly. I could wait to try to scrounge up a magic item that gives flight or waterbreathing...  Or I could do something unbelievably reckless!  Welcome to the Void. It sucks here. This is where all the horrors live, which is the least bad part of this place.  You also tend to randomly warp around every turn, and the map gets blanked at the start of every turn so you have no frame of reference for where you're at, making exploration practically impossible for most factions. Even if you hung around long enough to get a good idea for some of the local landmarks, the terrain itself changes periodically. Wandering through an unmappable, mostly featureless void would be annoying enough, but every turn you spend in the Void also gives you a decent chunk of insanity. Like Dominions, this gives your commanders a random chance to refuse orders for a turn, and it ramps up quickly enough in here that after ~10 turns they're just perma-insane, unusable and immobile, sitting around drooling on themselves as they drift through the Void waiting for a doom horror to eat them.  Or you could get lucky and find one of the few ways out after 2 random warps. I did have a Plan B sitting in my pocket in the form of another planar travel scroll. If I didn't find an exit within a few turns I was going to have Bernie scroll out to Kokytos; this would still leave Bernie irreparably insane half the time and also trapped in Hell, but this would theoretically be preferable to being stuck in the Void.  The pillar is a gateway that dumps us out in the Nexus, the center of the Elemental Planes. There are other gates that can just dump you back on Elysium, generally in one of the horror-attuned structures. In some ways that would have been better, or at least made for a much quicker game, since I'd have been able to get Bernie back into the fight immediately. Nexus has a lot of goodies for us, but doesn't put us appreciably any closer to getting home.  We're immediately thrust into a fight against a magic citadel, which all things considered is a much better place to be than the Void.  There's a high level enchanter here leading a bunch of low-mid level enchanter creations. These things are fairly tough for how many they have, but they're still not that much more powerful than elite human troops.  The big statues are more of a problem. That's a lot of durability and a very nasty ranged attack.  Enchanters can have some tough crowd control spells, but mostly they're buffs and it looks like that's all this guy rolled for higher level spells. This one comes with a bunch of magic items but they're mostly irrelevant; there's a crystal that gives him a mirror images effect, which might soak a couple extra hits for him but not enough to swing the fight.  We've definitely got the edge in magical firepower, although the armors take half damage from lightning so this might take a while.  Fortunately, once the animated bows are all dead the enemy obligingly opens the gates. This is a good news, since the legionaries were killing themselves trying to stab the electrified magic doors.  The principes hit hard enough to chip their way through the armors between Bernie's lightning volleys. The statues have no lightning resistance, so once Bernie starts focusing on them the battle ends quickly.  Not shabby at all, IMO.  Of course, having recklessly shot my god into the blind void and somehow come through on the other side, I immediately find a ring of water breathing that would have let him cross over to the mainland. There's some really goddamn good armor too, although it's a couple sizes too small for Bernie's new form.  That's not the real prize, though. Nexus is basically the most valuable site in the game, a castle that's also a level 3 library that also gives you a 25% discount to all rituals. If you're playing a ritual class that can get in and out of Nexus easily this gets really, really good. You can also have a commander use Nexus to scry a random spot on any plane (but mostly Elysium proper.) This is not really very helpful; there is a lot of ground to be covered between all the planes and there's no guarantee that you won't hit a spot that you've already seen, plus you go a little bit insane if you randomly look into the Void (including the little bits of void that other planes use as boundaries.)  It's also surrounded by magic portals, although they're pretty heavily guarded. Unfortunately Bernie is currently afflicted by a bout of VOID MADNESS and unable to explore the gates or peruse the library.  Once he snaps out of it I have him work on filling out his spell list. Every single one of these gates is guarded by something with lightning damage, so I'd like to fish for some kind of resistance. The "research the history of Elysium" option just gives you a blurb about the selected era. It's not particularly useful, although if you selected random era I think this will let you see what you're working with should you find a library early enough that you haven't already figured it out.  Nexus can't recruit normal units, but instead it periodically gets these guys as a random offer.  Ether Warriors are buff ethereal giants with magic weapons & armor and are well worth 100 gold a pop, but unfortunately I've blown my cash hiring wizards and can't afford this batch.  So I get this guy instead. He comes with another dream crystal and an affliction-curing elixir of health. Hydromancy is actually a pretty nice school for blasting spells in CoE, although I didn't really get any of the good level 2 AoE damage.  I also grabbed this for a measly 43 gold. The old wizard sure would appreciate having an infinite source of fodder.  Back on Elysium, the final AI emerges while I'm rebuilding my forces and it's the Scourge Lord. They're a new faction and I'm not entirely sure what to expect from them especially in the AI's hands, but if they've survived this long and are contesting the middle of the map they're probably doing pretty well for themselves.  This particular stack isn't anything to be worried about, though. The giant insects are better than most animal summons, but not by much. The row of 6 guys in the back are Scourge Heralds, buff 1st level casters that the Scourge Lord can summon pretty cheaply, backed up by the Scourge King himself.  This, on the other hand, might be something to worry about. This is one of the more notorious features of CoE, and why it's so important to expeditiously clear out hamlets and villages in case any cultists are hiding there, because the demon invasion will absolutely gently caress up the world.  Thankfully, it's on an island some distance from the shore, which is probably why the cultists were able to survive long enough to go off. I don't even think that many devils can fly, and even if they did the AI probably isn't going to be capable of figuring out how to cross the ocean without drowning most of them.  ...maybe I'm not giving Illwinter enough credit.  I would really like to have a flying invulnerable titan with mass banish spells available to address the demon invasion, so Lavinia grabs a couple spearbearers and goes to squish the kobolds' sorceress stack.  The sorceress almost immediately sends most of the legionaries fleeing. So much for my plan to have them stab all the sleeping kobolds to death.  The empress very, very slowly plinks the ~100 kobolds to death.  It turns out the single ballista I mounted on each of the outlying sections of the capital wasn't actually enough to fend off a demon invasion. Who knew? I probably should have built some more statues while I was at it, but I really didn't think it would be relevant.  I round up a few wizard recruits and several dozen infantry. That ought to be enough, especially since the new wizard comes with a magic lamp that summons a giant air elemental in battle (apparently CoE does not have proper genies.)  Well, poo poo. No wonder the ballista didn't do anything; you'd need to shoot one of these suckers about four times to reliably put it down.  That's a lot of poison.  Still, these things don't have any special defenses. The capital is now secure, and now that I know where the demons are headed I can easily build up enough wizards and troops to hold off future waves.  Oh for gently caress's sake!
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 17:01
|
|
|
I find it tad amusing that CoE series (where player leads (at least in the start) mortals) has probably more world shaking effects than Dominions (where player leads head god candidates). Or maybe it is just that CoE cares less about balance and can actually represent major things happening at the map.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 17:56
|
|
|
Banemaster posted:Or maybe it is just that CoE cares less about balance It's this. There was a big argument about the demon invasion event on the CoE5 steam forum a couple patches back because it can happen as early as year 3 and many players wanted a reprieve. The Swedes refused on the grounds that having the world randomly end when you're barely out of the getting-eaten-by-deer stage of the game was "interesting", although they did make the odds scale down with map size since larger maps take longer to clean cultists out from.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 18:11
|
|
|
Banemaster posted:I find it tad amusing that CoE series (where player leads (at least in the start) mortals) has probably more world shaking effects than Dominions (where player leads head god candidates). Since there can be so many more independently acting parties and individual spaces that can be occupied by different units, there's simply more opportunities for things to happen. The biggest Dominions game can get up to about 100ish provinces iirc, but a big CoE map is thousands of tiles just on the plane of Elysium, not including the other planes, all of which can have separate sites and entities messing with the world. Bernicus already has several decently sized armies marching across the map and, as we can see from the most recent cultist-caused Demon incursion, there's still gaps in the front that could use another army or two.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 18:14
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:
Another use is that it can tell you what flavor of Fallen Empire you're in.
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2021 18:46
|
|
|
the holy poopacy posted:
Lol. there are so many different flavours of demon in COE5 that putting together an army that can handle all of them can be tricky.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 01:06
|
|
|
Demons don't gently caress around, at least not the higher tier ones. On my recent Kobold game I managed to find a scroll to yeet a kobold prophet down to inferno to see if I could scrounge some resources. Kicked over an emerald mine and started facerolling the local villages, but any towers or cities or god forbid the lords? Noooope. I even saved and poked em just to see, they just lay waste.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 07:02
|
|
|
If a non-Demonologist faction conquers territory in Infero can they raise demon troops?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 07:22
|
|
|
Kinda. You can buy sinners and cart them to a demon oven to turn them into a single random demon. It's pretty slow and inefficient though, I think it's five sinners to one low tier demon. You can directly buy bloodsworn who are beefy regenerating human heavy infantry. I recently burrowed down to inferno as a warlock using an elemental earth king and was surprised to learn the AI is smart enough to realize when there is a route to Elysium proper. All the wandering demon stacks came to the borehole to have a vacation in the sun and my poor elementals ate poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 15:21
|
|
|
AmishSpecialForces posted:Kinda. You can buy sinners and cart them to a demon oven to turn them into a single random demon. It's pretty slow and inefficient though, I think it's five sinners to one low tier demon. You can directly buy bloodsworn who are beefy regenerating human heavy infantry. I recently burrowed down to inferno as a warlock using an elemental earth king and was surprised to learn the AI is smart enough to realize when there is a route to Elysium proper. All the wandering demon stacks came to the borehole to have a vacation in the sun and my poor elementals ate poo poo. If it's anything like CoE4, the only safe way to dig down from Elysium to the Inferno is making sure the tunnel in Agartha is at least 4 tiles long and then you flood the tunnel the same turn you dig into the Inferno. That way you can only get to Inferno if you have an aquatic/amphibious unit, and demons can't get out because they'll drown when they end a turn underwater.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 15:32
|
|
|
Bernicus Sanderius, part 13 The three-way front between the remaining players is getting busy. The ominous looking obelisk is a Pillar of Power erected by the Scourge Lord; left alone it will drain the lifeforce of the land and turn surrounding tiles to desert in order to generate magic resources for the Scourge Lord.  My ratio of infantry:archers is not exactly ideal, but I've been funneling archer mercenaries to more important fronts while just autorecruiting a bunch of principes along the northern front.  The scourge lord's flavor has clearly gone through a couple different versions, his description references big evil overlord armor but the icon is still just a vaguely Middle Eastern guy in robes.  The heralds are quite tough. The Scourge Lord is one of the bless factions, which in CoE is a scaling bonus that you can upgrade through magic rituals. These guys start out as beefy heavy guys with ~10 HP and 2 armor, which has been buffed to an extremely tanky 23 HP/4 armor and a couple resists to boot. Other than the armor, they haven't even gotten any of the really good bless upgrades yet (they're random.)  It gets pretty ugly. Sheer weight of numbers carries the day, but it's a long painful slog.  I haven't forgotten about the kobolds, either.  They actually manage to do even more damage than the scourge lord. In my defense, they actually have a large force of green and white archers, which are considerably deadlier than the slingers (and infinitely deadlier than the generic fodder kobolds.) Green archers in particular get poison arrows, which scored 9 indirect kills above and beyond the 10 they're credited with here.  I kick the scourge lord's ghouls off the pillar of power and take it down, I'd rather not have to deal with a desert wasteland on my border.  Meanwhile in Nexus, Bernie has finally filled out his storm magic list (at least for the levels I care about.) I forgot which level Thunder Ward belonged to, so I wound up going through all the level 3 spells as well as the level 2s before I got it.  This is the big reason I wanted it. There's one of these guarding each of the elemental portals leading from Nexus, paired with corresponding Wheel of Frost and Flames. I can't do much about the frost part, but the principes solaris already have fire resistance and thunder ward will take care of lightning resist.  Way down south, we finally see a kobold sorcerer. Now this guy is pretty bad news for our "stand a wizard on the wall and have him rain death on the enemy" strategy, since if he gets close enough he can murder our wizard with poison magic.  I decide that my force has sufficiently recovered to risk facing them in open battle. It works, although they chew up my stack of meatshields again.  On her way to confront the demonic threat the empress acquires a pet spider, who promptly gets left behind because it doesn't fly.  Her husband charges the elemental portal.  The earth/air wheel tramples its way through our front lines and is shrugging off a lot of attacks as it tramples through our archers, but the fire/ice wheel doesn't have the same defenses. I wind up losing another 30 troops, which is a little bit worrisome since I can't get more of them in here; on the other hand, I can (slowly) get ether warriors instead which are theoretically better.  I probably should have reinforced the port with more than one ballista. It gets lucky and takes out the big bone devil in a single shot, though.  Miraculously, the defenders hold. Some imps can be pretty scary, but the bone imps not so much.  The sea father retreats to the former demonologist citadel for reinforcements. Down south, the old wizard does the same.  I buy up some additional reinforcements to protect Bernie's heartland.  A lone fiend of darkness bounces off our home port's defense, but somehow our ship sinks in port? I think this may have been a glitch with boat placement in port battles, since the fiend gets shot down during the siege phase.  That's a pretty scary stack of demons, but thankfully the watch tower is pretty well packed.  uhhhhh Siege phase is almost over and not a single serpent fiend is dead.  OH THE HUMANITY  Poison is a slow death, and point-blank ballista fire actually gets a decent number of the serpents, but the defenders get wiped out.  The kobolds have retaken their original lair, so the old wizard takes his reinforcements to clean them back out before they can properly settle in again. They have no fort, no traps, no archers, no spellcasters, and no dragon, which is to say: they eat poo poo.  Bernie's through the portal and is now on the Elemental Plane of Earth. He finds a crystal forest worth a tiny bit of gold, and a silver deposit worth a not-tiny bit of gold.  Stone Drakes are pretty tough, but I picked up a batch of Ether Warriors before I went in. Ethereal guys with big magic swords don't really care about these things even when they don't literally have god on their side.  Dammit. I was hunkering down in the city and now the bone devils are back out at sea heading southwards.  Lavinia backtracks to deal with the fallen watchtower. The serpents pile a bunch of poison on her, but for the most part they're locked down pretty quickly.  It's slow going trying to get save-or-dies through their MR, but once their initial poison barrage is burned through they don't do any substantial damage.  I left Ravenharbor to the demons for too long and now it's irreparably destroyed. I don't really need it since it's flanked by ports ~5 spaces away to either side, but it's a reminder that I can't really gently caress around here.  The Scourge Lord has come sniffing around my citadel door while I've been busy regrouping.  Huh. This one's got some magic armor from somewhere. That could be a problem, paired with the armor boost from his bless...  The bugs and animals die pretty easily, but the heralds and Scourge Lord are going to be tough to crack. The Scourge Lord's battlemagic is a bit unique; normally mages in CoE get to cast with no resource expenditure whatsoever, but defiler spells actually require literal lifeforce from the area. If there are plants on the battlefield they'll steal HP from them to cast their spells (you can make out some energy beams in this pic from them draining trees), but if the battlefield is barren they wind up draining HP from their own troops.  Eventually the Sea Father and his summoned elementals wear them down. You can see the trees have thinned out considerably; a few of those are on the Leo, but half a dozen scourge casters definitely took their toll.  It's not cheap. On the plus side, I pick up the spiffy armor (with a built-in armor value of 4 on top of a juicy HP boost) and a few other miscellaneous magic items.  I added a couple more ballistae to the port, and they give a good accounting of themselves, but it's not enough.  It doesn't help that every single one of those shadow imps is a spellcaster. A weak one, but that's still a lot.  The cavalry arrives before the demons have the chance to destroy a second port.  Another wave arrives to contest it.  Lavinia is critically wounded  She pulls through, but will definitely need some time to recuperate before pushing back any further. Meanwhile, Bernie continues to plunder the Elemental Plane of Earth. These guys are tough: a whopping 4 armor on something with 41 HP to begin with, two beefy attacks per round and a one-time charge, and even a little bit of magic. They show up as mid-level warlock summons, which makes me glad the warlock got killed in the cradle. On the other hand, the scourge heralds aren't that much behind them and are much more spammable--and they have room for their bless to grow even more. The scourge lord's endgame summons probably don't quite measure up to the warlock's, but they could get pretty scary with a quantity-over-quality approach.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 16:27
|
|
|
Ooh you finally saw one of the elemental Champions. Funfact: If you control a Citadel (or possibly City, unsure in CoE5) on the relevant elemental plane, when each turn's recruitable mercenaries are rolled there's a chance to roll one of the relevant Elemental Champions, which can summon level 1 elemental spawns as a ritual in addition to being Commanders, and fast so they have 4 movement inherently. This also makes the appropriate gem resources appear on the map for the player if they aren't already collecting them. While it's not quite as beefy as some of the things a dedicated Warlock can do, it's really nice that with some effort you can get summons for all the first tier of elementals and can definitely broaden out a faction's units if games go into the silly lategame.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 17:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 00:41 |
|
|
Bad luck with the inferno invasion portal also spawning close to your holdings. Sometimes you can use the inferno events to just eat the AI while you hunker down, but it looks like they pretty much have to go through you to reach the AI.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2021 18:09
|
|