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Donkringel posted:To Koboldy go where no Kobold has gone before!
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Oct 28, 2021 20:41
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Troll King is my choice because of how it plays and the very well done genderqueer/transgender stuff written for that faction.
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Oct 28, 2021 22:39
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Kobold in the name of cannon fodder ascendancy.
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Oct 29, 2021 05:24
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Kobolds
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Oct 29, 2021 05:42
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Can we add challenge conditions to your next run?
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Oct 29, 2021 06:00
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The Lone Badger posted:Can we add challenge conditions to your next run? I think I'm just going to be doing this one vanilla (although I'll probably be doing more AI teams.) I do kind of want to do more of a challenge run at some point; I was thinking more in terms of just using one of the weaker factions (kobolds are probably a step down from what has been shown off here, but not exactly the bottom of the barrel) but if you've got any interesting conditions I'd be game to hear them. I had considered doing a secondary vote for challenge conditions but I'm having a hard time thinking of things that would accomplish the goal of making the run more interesting to watch rather than just creating more of a slog.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:13
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God's Perfect Himbo, part 9 The demonologist has another hellstack up and running in the north, threatening to push out of their base.  I try to keep them distracted in the hopes that they don't try pushing onwards.  It's not really working as a distraction, but with the winter weather my flying raiders are picking up more territory than the demons are.  Sure enough, here's the demonologist's home base. It wouldn't take too many more troops for me to take it outright (thanks largely to the advantage of flight vs. fortifications), but this raiding party isn't up to the task.  I really want to get my giant frontline in place before I take on those dragons.  I spot another thundercloud in the sky and summon a storm giant to seize it, being immune to lightning and safe from the thunderhead's ambient lightning.  So, slight miscalculation: thunderbirds are also lightning immune, while storm giants are not immune to the wind attack that the thunderbirds have. Neither the giant nor the birds have the formation AI setting to close to melee, so the storm giant happily sits there spamming lightning for 0 damage while getting chipped to death by wind damage. There goes another 75 gems. I might actually be hurting from how many air gems I'm wasting if I didn't have a way to dump all my other gems into air. In some respects this makes cloud lord a lot more reliable than warlock: even though in theory warlocks can eventually turn all four gems into elemental royalty and other good poo poo, cloud lords get to dump 7/8 of their total gem output into a single gem which lets them get endgame summons out vastly faster.  The hoburg citadel is even better defended than the necromancer, at least in conventional terms. But until they hire a new commander and saddle up there's not much they can do about me stealing all their outlying settlements (of which there are a lot, holy poo poo. It's no surprise that the demonologist/hoburg power duo is punching above its already hefty weight.)  I'm not going to ram headlong into those dragons, but there are smaller stacks without them that I can attack with impunity. Of course, "smaller" is a relative term here.  Gale just absolutely disintegrates them.  Some demonologist troops emerge from the southeast to reclaim my forward holdings.  The giants are here   Us. Having multiple lines of giants pushes the back line so far back that we're going to be out of range for a lot of our spells, but the only spell we really care about here hits the entire battlefield regardless.  Them. They've got it even worse as far as overly deep formations go: ranged weapons have even more limited range than most spells, which is one of the big weaknesses of fodder factions since they don't really scale up. Once you start doubling or tripling your front line to make up for their squishiness you rapidly reach a point where your bread and butter ranged units can't even reach over your own meat shields, which makes your attrition extra horrific since you have to choose between letting the front ranks get cut down without archer support or having a thin front line that won't last long enough to keep the archers safe. That's just in conventional fight terms, too; once the big spells come out they're just hosed. It's entirely possible that they won't get to fire a single crossbow this fight. There are enough of them that one or two might survive long enough through sheer random fluke, but I'm not holding my breath.  Gale quickly starts thinning out hoburgs, but it barely touches the clockworks. The giants are taking a beating, which is OK; that's what they're there for.  The queens' AI spends several turns picking off hoburgs with lightning spells before busting out another Gale. Even the small clockworks are hurting by now; they have the armor to shrug off regular hits pretty easily but they keep running up and getting stomped by giants. 3 armor doesn't do much against d20 sized damage.  Unfortunately, the storm giant AI still has most of them standing around uselessly throwing lightning at the lightningproof dragon while it engages them one at a time.  Eventually it maneuvers itself into position to get hit from more than one, and the fight mercifully ends.  An expensive battle. I made a slight miscalculation on the giants: because the storm giants are already ranged units, the magic-wielding storm titan stays in the same rank as them. And because the titan has slightly more HP, it starts out front and center within that rank. Which is also the front rank of my army since cloud lord doesn't really have a lot of melee summons. So my 200 gem titan was one of the first to die, rather than the giants that cost ~25 gems apiece. Some losses were inevitable--again, that's what the giants are for--but whoops. The next titan will be dedicated to summoning only and stay out of fights altogether.  Finally my raids on blue's base have attracted the attention of the demonologist back homewards.  Luckily I did have enough gems that I was able to get a replacement titan and some giant summons in. So here we go again, this time without an insanely precious storm titan centering our front line.  Other than the ruby dragons, this batch has more lightning-themed mechs than fire-themed ones, which suits me just fine since they're all lightningproof either way and their attacks are much less dangerous to me.  The lightning mechs might be less dangerous but there are more of them this time around, which does mean the giants take longer to punch through them all.  One of the dragons manages to fight its way into the middle of our formation.  They're taking a decent amount of damage, but Thuella is on fire   She goes out, and the dragon is hanging on by a thread as its buddy goes down.  With the dragon at single digit HP she gets reignited while the storm giants sit and watch.  Thuella dies right before it does. RIP to a real one. Some random clockwork soldier winds up being the last holdout.  An even more expensive victory, although Thuella isn't noticeably more expensive to replace than a storm titan (she's not dead for real, just banished back to the Plane of Air.) And the hoburgs will have a hell of a time replacing those dragons, especially if I can keep contesting the big ruby mine next to their base.  Oh poo poo, the demonologist is breaking out the big boys. Well, bigger boys; the really big boys still haven't come out to play. With Thuella down and the giants badly weakened this might actually be a problem.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:58
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the holy poopacy posted:I think I'm just going to be doing this one vanilla (although I'll probably be doing more AI teams.) I do kind of want to do more of a challenge run at some point; I was thinking more in terms of just using one of the weaker factions (kobolds are probably a step down from what has been shown off here, but not exactly the bottom of the barrel) but if you've got any interesting conditions I'd be game to hear them. I had considered doing a secondary vote for challenge conditions but I'm having a hard time thinking of things that would accomplish the goal of making the run more interesting to watch rather than just creating more of a slog. A run where you can choose the exact setup you want, with the win condition of conquering heaven.
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Oct 29, 2021 18:11
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Step 1: dwarves as your opponents so you don't win on accident when the AIs lose  I did couple runs trying to explore different planes, and without a dwarf AI I never get far past elysium, because the AI kills itself stupidly.
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Oct 29, 2021 18:35
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 barring catastrophe I won't stop updating until that happens
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Oct 29, 2021 18:41
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Xarn posted:Step 1: dwarves as your opponents so you don't win on accident when the AIs lose Bystander AI and Starting Defense Only both help with this if you're okay with a basic mod or two.
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Oct 29, 2021 21:47
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Late to the voting, but do barbarians. I've never managed to win with them, they just seem so underpowered.
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Oct 31, 2021 17:49
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Yeah would love to see Barbarians done, never had a great amount of luck with them; likewise the Bakemono
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Oct 31, 2021 21:20
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TGG posted:Yeah would love to see Barbarians done, never had a great amount of luck with them; likewise the Bakemono Soothsayers will cast fortune 100% of the time, and werebears regenerate. Luck on ethereal ancestors does good work too. Maybe I had a good matchup against a necromancer/senator/enchanter but those seems like killer combos. Bakemono though, those guys I have trouble getting off the ground.
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Nov 1, 2021 03:24
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Bakemono have pretty good midtier summons. Get lots of Tengu and you'll wreck most other armies.
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Nov 1, 2021 03:33
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It's not going to win this round of voting, but I'd like to see an Illusionist run sometime because they're my favourite faction, and despite them showing up twice so far I don't think the AI has managed to utilize them particularly well.
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Nov 1, 2021 04:01
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Looks like Kobolds it is! Apologies for the slow updates lately, I've been working ahead on the kobold run. It's running a bit longer but I think it should be a fun time.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:42
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God's Perfect Himbo, part 10 I give Thuella's orb to God's Perfect Himbo for safekeeping. He's a bit squishier than the queens of air but this gives him the same accelerated level 4 spellcasting they have, so I won't really miss all that much while she's gone.  Blue has largely reconquered their home turf again, minus few farms and a couple of anthills whose ownership don't matter.  I set to work reconquering some of the land between the the two main fronts. I accidentally left the storm giants behind, but I don't need them for mopping up fodder, and our titan can pick them up at leisure.  Since the Orb of Air has most of Thuella's power anyhow I opt to roll for some more rituals in lieu of respawning her. Cloud Castle is an extremely powerful infrastructure ritual, creating a fortified recruitment site that generates gold and air gems (4 gems/turn!) on any clouds. Coupled with Shape Clouds I can now pop up an aerial fortress anywhere I feel like that will gradually pay for itself. Breakeven is ~3 years, which is fairly impractical: when you first get to 3rd tier rituals you will probably need to spend gems on more firepower now instead of investing for the long term, and by the time you can afford it you probably don't really need to. But it is an option.  The demonologist is on the move. Better that he comes this way than north, though.  Here's the big picture, for reference. Our main forces are in the southeast, around where I'm guessing green's border would have been with blue before they got their poo poo stomped in. I've amassed a bigger force on the northern front but it's still just fodder troops for raiding in force, they're not up to fighting greater demons. Or basically any demons, in the numbers that the AI churns out.  Looks like the AI was pretty lazy about stealing indie sites, this isn't even particularly tough for a walled settlement. Incidentally, you may notice the towns hereabouts all have a Christian cross icon in the lower right. This is an artifact of the Voice of El, who converts settlements to the worship of El. Converted settlements donate a fraction of their income to the church even if they're taken over by another faction, one of the many annoying features of El.  Cloud Castle is an interesting toy, but it's not what I'm after.  That's more like it. Frost Giants are the water gem counterpart to Storm Giants; they don't have a ranged attack, but in return they get armor and a cold damage shield. Also, they don't have a ranged attack, so they will actually walk up to things and punch them instead of sitting there throwing lightning even when the enemies are immune. They are vulnerable to fire damage but they're still actually more useful for fighting flamethrower mechs than the storm giants just because they have melee AI.  I guess I've been pretty lazy about conquering indie towns too; there are still several neutral hamlets on the coast of the sea/lake separating us from blue.  I recruit a force of conventional troops to tackle the thundercloud in the southwest, the same as I did the one closer to home.  Slight miscalculation: since I didn't want to spend any gems I just threw a bunch of the gem-free archers into the mill. The elite gemrecruited troops have enough HP that a lot of them can survive one turn of environmental damage from entering the storm cloud, but 75% of my archers (and their commander) are dead before the fight begins.  They actually do a fair bit of damage, but the thunderbirds' AoE winds finish the weakened archers off very quickly.  The remaining queens split up to explore the frontier, looking for juicy gem sites and trying to cut blue off from settlement income. Nephele gets ambushed, but I'm sure it's nothing she can't handle.  Oh shiiiiiiiiii  iiiiiiiit The good news is, we technically won with a few surviving sylphs, so the orb is in safe hands for now. It's stranded behind enemy lines, but we still have it.  A little further south we find green's original base (now blue's secondary base.) They're stuck on a peninsula behind a range of mountains; not a lot of income, and a slow slog from their base to the front lines. It's a stark contrast to the rich territory blue started with.  My raiding force pokes into blue's base to steal a couple mines and then takes to the skies to escape. Next turn I will have 2 movement points left due to the exertion of flying upwards, which I will use to move two spaces directly north-west to the space at the corner of my highlighted current vision, which you can plainly see is drawn almost entirely as land on the map.   Just doing my part to live up to the cloud lord's flavor text. The garrisons of green's former home base manage to do a frankly embarrasing amount of damage, but still inconsequential.  My water gem income is quite anemic, so even with my trade dedicated to buying sapphires it still takes me a while to get an upgraded frost giant. Not only do they pick up spellcasting (in a school we don't have any access to before this), they get much better armor, including a rarely seen magic shield (0-3 damage reduction, doubled to 0-6 vs. projectiles.) Which hopefully shouldn't matter, because the frost titan is actually smart enough to stand behind lesser frost giants.  Saving water gems for frost giants means I can't really keep alchemizing, so I take advantage of the fire gems that are piling up to pop out a few more eagles for scouting.  The greater demon stack is making some progress into the center of the map. With 2/3 queens of air dead and my giants still in rebuilding mode I'm a bit reluctant to take them on just yet.  Wuh oh. I'm willing to gamble a couple giants, but the titans GTFO; I'm not blowing 350 gems of commander summons just to do chip damage to that stack.  The demonologist is edging closer in the north too.  Meanwhile, God's Perfect Himbo decides to start taking advantage of the terraforming rituals to create a couple stable platforms above blue's breadbasket.  There's another peninsula between green's old base and blue's base, but it seems fairly empty. I do spot an island off the coast, though. I don't want a repeat of what happened to Bernie so I'm going to do a sweep for indie cultists.  Finally I scrape together enough for my first mass ice giant summon. That's like 500 HP of meatshield that's smart enough to stand in front.  With the giants coming along nicely I start regrouping with my big casters, and swoop in to obliterate a weaker demonologist stack. There are a few caster devils in here, but they're very soundly outmatched.  The island doesn't have much in the way of hamlets, but it does have a port. Not that I have any reason to care since all our stuff flies.  Interestingly, the pirates are randomly packing a couple pieces of magic armor: another Robe of Shadows and also some Rainbow Mail. It's not the strongest magic armor (armor value of 2--that's a replacement, not a bonus), but it also adds MR and grants the Lucky status to dodge 50% of all attacks. It's pretty sweet, although unfortunately our big units are too big to wear shirts.  With the first batch of frost giants up and running I do start up alchemy again for a bit, just to get a cloud castle up and running. Now I can recruit an endless stream of chaff right over the heads of blue's base.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:42
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Having a potentially unreachable recruitment site that also generates income and necessary gems is really impressive for dealing with factions that are harder to counter in a straight fight. Being able to constantly harass their economy really helps, even though the AI gets huge resource bonuses at high difficulties they're getting resource multipliers not additive, so 200%, 300%, 400% of 0 is still 0.
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Nov 3, 2021 22:05
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So you could potentially park a cloud fortress right above the enemy homeland, ready to disgorge raiders whenever they turn their back, and there's nothing they can do about it?
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Nov 4, 2021 11:15
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The Lone Badger posted:So you could potentially park a cloud fortress right above the enemy homeland, ready to disgorge raiders whenever they turn their back, and there's nothing they can do about it? Not unless they can fly, though I think its fairly common for most factions to get at least some flying units somewhere in their tree.
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Nov 4, 2021 14:43
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Technowolf posted:Not unless they can fly, though I think its fairly common for most factions to get at least some flying units somewhere in their tree. Whether that also includes a flying commander to lead them into the sky is another matter entirely.
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Nov 4, 2021 14:51
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God's Perfect Himbo, part 11 From the vantage of my new base in the clouds I can send out raiders faster than ever before.  The greater demon seems to have wandered off, so Aella goes to reclaim a town while the giants slowly make their way over. The one downside of frost giants is that they don't fly.  The latest demonologist makes his way all the way down to green's former base.  I may not be able to keep anything around here for very long, but I can sure keep them busy.  And now I've got Nephele back, so I might be able to start holding on to territory here, too.  I have no idea what the hell this guy is even up to  I think this is a symptom of the AI having too many fires to put out; it doesn't really form firm long term plans so just winds up marching back and forth over no man's land trying to figure out which front to commit to.   The hoburg hog cavalry (porcalry?) starts chipping away at Nephele while she buffs herself, but the first Gale is going to delete this army.  Nephele you're not an archer, you don't need Friendly Storm. Oh well.  Ok Nephele that's more helpful but you can just... cast Gale, now  Finally. It still takes 2 rounds to cast, though, and Nephele is getting awfully low  That's... less impressive than I was hoping, the hog knights have good armor and humanlike levels of HP.  Well for gently caress's sake, these aren't even the hoburgs' good stuff.   Welp, back to alchemizing. My other raiders avenge Nephele, sort of. At least I have the orb back, assuming I can scoop it up with a commander before more hobbits come knocking.  The demonologist randomly decides to turn around from green's base after conquering a single mine.  Aella meets him head on with several solar eagles backing her up.  Boy, it sure would be nice if solar eagles were fireproof.  Huh, the holes in our line seem a lot bigger than the holes in theirs...  OK, I blame the hoburg loss on the AI but really I only have myself to blame. So that's 3/3 queens dead (one dead twice.)  Whoops. Really do not want to get ambushed next door to the greater demon. The cloud lord has flying scouts for recruit, I just keep buying them and forgetting to pick them up when I send my raiders out.  Aella is already back, but having learned the limitations of using the queens one at a time it will be a while before I can afford to send her into action.  those are my orbs give them back you are a demonologist they don't even fit  There's another thunderhead close to our new base. Solar eagles have enough HP that the storm's lightning damage doesn't bother them too much, and their fire magic should cut through cloud elementals nicely.  There are still a few holes in our level 3 ritual list, so I grab another one. We'll see Perpetual Storm in action soon.  Evidently the demonologist feels secure enough to head back down to capture green's home territory.  My garrison manages to peel off some of the chaff, but no real damage against the meat of the army.  Aella goes to join up with the giants and runs into a small stack of fodder, although some of these guys are better than your run of the mill chaff. Bloodsworn are low level demonologist summons equivalent to super beefy human heavy infantry, with regeneration; they're ok, but not really worth putting up with the heavy infantry movement penalty.  They're certainly not up to fighting endgame summons, and better still, the hero hanging out with them was carrying around a Bloodstone Amulet. It's a rare and incredibly valuable regeneration item that fits in a miscellaneous slot, which lets us save one of our valuable titans or air queens from decay being a death sentence--very valuable considering demonologists have plenty of decay.  So, Perpetual Storm. It's a freespawn generator, not unlike the senator's revelers. Unlike revelry, you can use it absolutely anywhere, and the freespawn vastly exceed revelers in both quantity and quality. It also generates 2 air gems/turn, so you can use it to build up economy too, but it pales in comparison to Cloud Castle for that purpose. If the square containing the storm is conquered then the enchantment is lost, but since most factions don't have access to a lot of flying/amphibious commanders you can park it over a water tile and probably won't have to worry about that.  The goddamn King in Yellow Hastur is just kind of randomly wandering around the middle of the map, not far from where the moon horror ganked all our giants. I'm not entirely sure where all the horrors are coming from in this part of the map tbh; are they all just randomly wandering over here from the stone sphere up by our starting peak???  The greater devil finally wanders over to the rainbow towers with his stack. Again, this is more damage than I would have expected, even if half of it is vanilla imps.  Here's a look at the big guy himself. Almost as beefy as our giants, with level 3 spellcasting, and demon ritual summoning to boot. That last part is the big problem; taken on his own he's probably less dangerous than any of the queens of air (and we've seen exactly how limited they are), but demonologists excel at spamming very powerful line troops.
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Nov 5, 2021 20:59
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Are the monkeys a playable faction? Fascinating LP. I remember a LP about a previous version of CoE but it looked really janky. Z the IVth fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Nov 7, 2021 |
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Nov 7, 2021 20:20
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So, eldtrich abominations just casually strolling around?? How dangerous is the King in yellow?
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Nov 10, 2021 16:28
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Z the IVth posted:Are the monkeys a playable faction?
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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Deceitful Penguin posted:So, eldtrich abominations just casually strolling around?? He's also a (unique) endgame summon possibility for the high cultist. Powerful spell caster, not an especially strong melee combatant, so he's a lot more dangerous in a cultist army than when doing his own thing. You still don't want to fight him in the early game but unless he gets pretty lucky with both the spells he rolls and the spells he bothers to cast, our birbs wouldn't have much trouble. one of his possible spells is giving all friendly units ethereal which is a real powerhouse
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Nov 10, 2021 21:24
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cranky corvid posted:The monkey people from Dominions are not in CoE. Cursed game.
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Nov 10, 2021 23:31
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Fitting the LP falls and possibly dies in a Kobold cave
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Dec 5, 2021 18:11
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Eaten by kobolds what a way to go.
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Dec 6, 2021 05:14
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Not dead yet! Sorry for the delays, got wrapped in in the kobold playthrough and then got distracted by Rift Wizard modding.
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Dec 8, 2021 22:21
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God's Perfect Himbo, part 12 Green's peninsula is largely lost to us.  On the other hand, outside of the starting citadels we own most of blue's peninsula, which is a lot richer.  The giant squad is starting to really fill back up.  Perpetual Storm is already spitting out air elementals. They've got the Stupid tag and will be wandering around at random, but they're tough enough to generally stand up to indies and small garrisons and they pour out of the storm in great numbers.  So, about that "outside of the starting citadels"...  The giants are big enough that they can just step over walls in their path.  Flawless victory! Basic human troops can't do much to frost giants with the protection bonus from snowy weather. Maybe if it was something like 50:1 with no backup they could do some damage.  Nephele is back too, but she's been blinded by afflictions. That doesn't necessarily matter when you're throwing around huge AoEs, but it may slightly increase friendly fire from her built in lightning and wind attacks.  Sure, now she busts out Gale. Thankfully, the giants don't really care about the friendly fire.  An impressive killcount, Nephele, but that doesn't undo getting ganked by Frodo Baggins  Also, a quarter of that was our own archers.  The demonologist comes running home in a hurry.  Back up to full strength on air queens.  Sadly, this looks like the smaller demonologist stack.  With the wall of frost giants in place I've still yet to take a casualty, at least from enemy fire.  The hoburgs have had a strong presence at this chokepoint that I haven't really been able to threaten, but I sure as hell can now.  They've got almost a full line of mechs and a few summoned animals, plus the usual pile of hoburgs.  Most of the mechs are water gem flavored, so instead of flamethrowers they get paralysis rays. They're harder to resist, but vastly less dangerous to units that are susceptible to them.  Their weed mage also has Animate Tree, one of the few battlefield summons that consistently makes a real impact. In retrospect maybe I should not have picked a fight in a forest, since it does actually consume trees on the field.  Gale does its thing as usual, but with most of the front line getting stunlocked it's taking a while to punch the mechs.  It's enough that it actually ends my perfect streak. I'll take it, though.  The nearby tower is nothing but chaff, and the giants take up so much space that anything squishy is safely out of catapult range.  The giants just roll right over the tower without slowing as the hoburg line disintegrates ahead of them.  Random crater events are generally pretty appealing as a gem class, although this one manages to have neither of the gem types we really care about   Perpetual Storm is sweeping up indies in its neighborhood. I probably should have cast it a bit further south, blue's home turf is pretty firmly in our control now.  So I do exactly that, setting up a new storm on a tiny lake near the center of the action.  The towers around the rainbow come under attack once again as the big stack that conquered green's base comes back our way.  I've got bigger fish to fry right now, though.
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Dec 8, 2021 22:21
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So great to see you back, gotta love Illwinter, we even just got a new patch all about the Apocalypse!
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Dec 9, 2021 08:09
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God's Perfect Himbo, part 13 The greater demon hasn't been hanging around forts scooping up recruits, so this is almost all summoned fodder. There's an unusually high proportion of low grade imps, though. Some of them can still be dangerous, but not like the bigger devils.  In particular, they're a hell of a lot more vulnerable to mass damage.  The demons' front line collapses in a hail of lightning and giant axes. They've got some decay casters on their side, though, and several of the giants got tagged.  Frost giants aren't lightningproof and the queens rudely have not buffed them with resistance. The healthy ones have enough HP not to care and the decaying ones are dead either way, though.  The giants just straight up knock down a house to get to the devils hiding behind it. The greater demon does not last long once the frost giants catch up.  Our frost titan got decayed, but thanks to the regen from his amulet he can actually live through it. It takes like a couple hundred rounds before the decay wears off, but he lives.  In the process he racked up a million afflictions, including the Temporary Insanity affliction. It wears off on its own after a few turns, but until then he's useless. Unlike Dominions, regeneration will slowly cure the rest of his afflictions too.  Honestly, I'd just as soon keep this one; getting moved to the back row is a great perk for an expensive spellcasting unit.  Dang, that's a lot of giants. I can't replenish the frost giants as quickly, but enough cloud giants should do just fine as long as the hoburgs don't bring out any more robodragons. Really they just need to sit in front and take up space until the air queens decide to spam Gale.  Here we go.  Gale comes out pretty early, but there aren't as many flimsy imps in this stack.  Burning is pretty drat effective against big beefy units that don't resist it, even if they're not extra vulnerable like the frost giants are. I still don't really have any worries about our chances here, though.  Between fire, poison, and decay the replacement frost giants aren't going to last very long. Neither are most of the devils, though--and unlike the greater demon, the demonologist is squishy enough to die to Gale.  Sure enough, the ablative frost giants do their job.  Perpetual Storm does a good job carpeting the backfield with air elementals. I wish I'd had time to set it up out west where there are more wandering indie attacks, but oh well.  God's Perfect Himbo heads down south to recapture green's base, and plants a new storm off the coast to help keep it clear.  The queens stomp a weak stack of human reinforcements.  Aaaand that's that. I'm not sure if blue had any citadels left after I recaptured the green base, so that last battle might have been overkill. There will be a retrospective post tomorrow, and next week: kobolds!
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Dec 9, 2021 23:40
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Good work, God's Perfect Himbo. Caww havoc and release the birds of wark, for Bird People rule now.
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Dec 9, 2021 23:48
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Wasn't sure that the 4 to 5 upgrade would be worth it. But these town fights with the houses and the fort designs do make a big difference.
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Dec 10, 2021 00:04
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quote:An impressive killcount, Nephele, but that doesn't undo getting ganked by Frodo Baggins Probably a descendent of Sam: he's the one who had kids. Frodo did not, before he left.
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Dec 10, 2021 07:13
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congrats bird persons and good luck kobolds, each of you is a real dragon, in my heart
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Dec 10, 2021 17:02
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Well, many of them are definitely going to become real dragons, or at least a tiny portion of their mass will.
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Dec 10, 2021 17:14
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 04:27 |
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God's Perfect Himbo - Epilogue I was a bit disappointed we didn't see more offshore resources, since there are normally a lot of gems and the cloud lord has a fairly easy time grabbing anything within 3 tiles of the coast (or further, if there are clouds to drop down from and/or you don't care about getting back.)  There was another, larger island in the southeast that did have a bunch of offshore resources, but it was too far to be visible from shore and I never flew over this gap.  Army graph. There were some decent size setbacks along the way, but in the end blue was no match, despite the considerable beef that demonologists generate. We never saw green team in action, but I'm guessing the lighter green was the Voice of El--the Priest-King (Aztec/Mictlan faction) can generate a lot of chaff from the get go. They had a decent chunk of the map converted but it looks like they had a hell of a time getting troops. The bottom yellow line is the Enchanter, and you can see very clearly when his golems died. Note how much time lime green spends out hanging around the level of the Enchanter's post-golem strength.  Blue did pretty good on forts, but most of the other AIs struggled. Voice of El literally never had any forts except his starting stronghold, which explains the troop problems.  Income tracks fairly closely with forts owned for the most part. I'm surprised that the pale ones kept up so well early on, which explains how they were able to field those huge armies of cloudfolk. For that matter I'm surprised blue didn't do better than they did, not managing to break past the pale ones until purple was almost dead. I think they may have been stepping on each others' toes, though: the combined blue chart looks like it's generally bigger than pale ones + illusionist (who really struggled.) Meanwhile green looks like it did even worse than yellow, although neither of them is getting a prize.  Iron. I'm really drat glad that the demonologist wound up picking up most of the mines in their part of the map; if the hoburgs had gotten their hands on them there would have been a lot more mechs to deal with.  Human sacrifices are used by the Priest King and Demonologist both. It looks like the Priest King actually won the initial skirmishes over the towns in the middle, but couldn't hold onto them for long.  Hoburg weed. It looks like they lost their herbalist commanders entirely halfway through and took a few years to recruit a new one, which is probably why we didn't see more of their nature summons. Even when they had weed collectors around they don't seem to have made much of an effort at expanding production, judging by the large size of those steps up/down.  Holy poo poo did we trounce everybody on gems. This really underscores how lucky our start was; cloud lord really doesn't get any special leg up on gem economy, unless you count the odd thunderhead.  Without the Senator's giant trade bonus or the proliferation of bigger settlements that the Empire era has (to say nothing of the capital itself) trade is fairly flat through the first half of the game. Even after ours takes off it doesn't tower over other sides as much as most of the graphs do.  Relics are unique to the Voice of El and only come from the largest settlements, which there aren't a ton of around here and certainly not in green's neck of the woods. Note also that their starting base does have relic income on it and El went down to 0 relic income off and on starting around the second year.  The final map. The fronts wound up being a lot less dynamic with fewer, larger teams; if I try teams again I'm either adding a lot more factions or turning off clustered start. The starts weren't quite as lopsided as before (right off the bat, being less crowded tends to reduce the gap between good starts and lovely starts) but we were still pretty fortunate. Partly that's the natural strength of the Cloud Lord: starting in a northerly mountain range might have made for a rocky (no pun intended) start for a lot of factions, even other highly gem-focused factions, but when your troops fly it's basically all upside. On the flip side, green definitely had a rough draw but the graphs show they made a pretty decent go of it. If they had rolled a stronger early game faction than Voice of El then they might have been able to hold off blue. Also, while most of the income in the western half of the map is clustered in the middle of three opposing teams, it was just closer enough to us to give us a crucial leg up securing most of it ahead of the fighting. Again, for a non-flying faction this could have turned out very differently due to the rough terrain between us and those towns, but being able to fly got us there fast enough to get comfortably settled in ahead of the opposition and let us reinforce it quickly enough to hold our own in intial skirmishes, to say nothing of dragging our big guns over from the other goddamn side of the map. God's Perfect Himbo was almost on the northeastern corner of the map when purple & yellow started knocking on our doors, and it took him maybe 7 or 8 turns to arrive at the towns where a ground army would probably have taken more than twice that considering the effects of winter. Mostly, we were hugely lucky that blue made virtually no attempts at heading north or west from their start, allowing GPH to all but abandon the northeast in order to throw everything at the western front. It's easy to see how a dense line of settlements pulled them southwest and directly into conflict with green, but they could have quite easily sent some expansion forces to contest the continent's northeastern shoulder while I was busy elsewhere. While the eastern and western halves of the map were separated by large swathes of unproductive forests that buffered the AI teams from each other, the northern strip we occupied had a decent amount of resources, some of which were sitting where blue could see them. The AI was just too distracted by the fighting in the south to go after easy resources close to home; by the time green was dead, I was knocking on blue's southernmost lines.  And the sky. Yeah, I really didn't spend a lot of time up here in the end, did I? Part of the issue is that the starting cloud was quite isolated; most of the cloud "landmass" is on the other side of the map, behind enemy lines. There just wasn't much of interest for me to send rear line troops to explore, and by the time I got any troops over to where most of the cloud sites were they were in position to go straight into the fray. The Cloud Lord is also a faction that is very focused on gem economy and most gems are found on the ground rather than in the sky, and there just weren't a ton of thunderclouds around to draw my attention.
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Dec 10, 2021 19:51
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