They are bad ass, lots of early game punch due to nice sacreds that can be purchased at any castle, lots of late game punch due to some sweet high level national summons.
The real key with Lanka is to find some indie mages to round out your rather limited national mage selection. Just using national mages, Lanka will never get above D3, or N2, or B3, or A4. And no Fire, Earth, Water or Astral magic present at all. Once branched out enough to make some items from other schools or cast some spells from other schools to cover their weaknesses they become a real beast.
I just have to ask. Is this the longest thread ever on this forum, or is there an even longer one somewhere?
Might be, it’s got about 50 pages on it’s older brother the Dom2 AAR thread. And that was certainly one of the top five longest on QT3.
HOPLITE
Would anyone else favour lengthening the timer again, to 120 or 144 or (my pref) 168h? Turns aren’t getting any shorter, and IIRC C’tis (Jonathan Crane) and I both tend to have to hustle to squeeze in our turns just before the 96h deadline.
Rollory
4665
Ok, what’s going on here? I put huge effort into matching up my best troops and best commanders and best tactics against the invincible hordes of Ulm and get slaughtered. So, determined to go out in a blaze of glory, I rustle up piles of crappy infantry and attack all across the front in small groups that should be easily defeatable by the proven performance of Ulm province defense. And I’m making more and better progress this way than I ever came close to doing when I was actually trying.
Where the hell are the unstoppable legions of steel that smashed my awesome prophet?
If this goes on, I’m going to start thinking Nick Walter is right, and we can’t have that.
Okay, that made me laugh out loud because as I read through your post I thought to myself “Aha, he’s discovered the effectiveness of mobile raiding tactics, that’s my specialty!”. Then I read the last line ;-)
Death by a thousand papercuts baby! Even the mightiest of giants will bleed to death from enough scratches.
Hetzer
4667
So nick when we do receive a map to have a little look in advance on what to do with a ready starting kingdom?
I’m still fiddling with the concept. I considered just modifying an existing map but that’s a lot of work and a lot of the pretty existing maps contain too much ocean for what I wanted. I also want a wraparound map so that there’s no unfairness with starting positions in corners vs centers. I might just have to randomly generate maps until I get something decent and then manually fiddle the map file.
Anyone around here good at drawerating that’s willing to whip up a decent looking map image that is all or mostly land? I can do the rest in the map editor.
So Tien Chi is running around through my utterly shite PD, and a squad of giants returns the favor. Meanwhile Sauromatia attacks from the opposite side.
That went much better than I expected. Here we bid farewell to Sauromatia’s prophet.
Agartha (Crom) - Why do all of my neighbors have such high PD? It’s murder on my scouts. FYI, I’m not spying on you, I just want to get through to spy on others!!
Pythium (Inquistor) - Oof, getting cramped. Sucks having your capital adjacent to a big ass body of water when you’re famous for your air-breathing heavily armored human infantry!
Yeah, the giants have been destroying me… I no fire and no real front lines soldiers that stand up to the giants…but I got me some plans!
Ouch, what the hell happened to Man’s armies? I went ahead and checked the score graphs and the size of Man’s forces just plummeted while everyone else’s stayed at about constant looking growth.
Does it have something to do with elephants?
This summarizes it pretty well. Patala is currently sieging what I’m pretty sure is Man’s capitol. Man tried to break the siege, but about a dozen elephants cut through his lines (including his pretender) like a hot knife through butter. Man might have a shot at winning, but the AI choose to waste longbowman arrows at the heavy infantry behind the elephants instead of the elephants themselves. Had they routed (going back through Patala’s ranks), the battle might have ended differently. On the other hand, those were high bless sacreds left on the field, so Man was in a hard place no matter how you slice it.
Glad I had a scout on-site.
Rollory
4675
You’re overestimating - it was nine [edited from six, I remembered wrong]. And most got False Fettered and cut down.
Had they routed (going back through Patala’s ranks), the battle might have ended differently
They were stacked with the sacreds, which have high morale, plus the morale boost from blessing. So routing wasn’t going to happen before all the elephants at least were dead.
This is a pipe dream, but I think it would be great if Dominions would allow all players to view the battle that had the most casualties in every turn, maybe with a minimum threshold of 50 or something. This would represent the legendary nature of these battles, and while it would certainly affect game balance in some way (“I see that he is using elephants, I will now research Terror…”) I think it would be worth it just to let all players see these spectacular battles. Given the diversity of troops and magic in the game, I’ve been lucky enough to see several battles where I had no idea who was going to win, and watching these epic struggles is just so much fun. Particularly when it isn’t my Pretender who gets killed…
So we both ran back to check. Indeed it was 9, which is “about a dozen”. Unless you want to argue semantics, which I don’t. Anyways, I see your point about the stacking.
Rollory
4678
I only objected because I remembered it as six, and that would’ve been worth arguing about :-)
That was…not pretty, but it was probably the best chance I had. :P The Pretender survived, but that’s probably the best that can be said. The situation probably isn’t recoverable, even though most of the elephants are dead, and two of the ones left are heavily wounded, simply because of those sacreds of yours, but…well, I’ll see what happens.
If I had that fight back, I’d have scripted her to spam Fear and hoped to rout an elephant or two (I’d thought about it but didn’t script it), but with the way they were stacked, and the way the AI decided to target (argh!), it likely wouldn’t have worked anyway.
I remember some games where I got elephant mercs right off the start and wreaked havoc, so I suppose I was due for some karma. Well played, Rollory…you bastard.
Hetzer
4680
Is there any other game starting?
I believe Nicks Tick-Tock will take a little while as he has to make a map for it… as far as i understand it isnt soooo easy to make one with a starting kingdom running…
Im only playing in one at the moment as my samurais got hammered down…
