Dominions 5 - There is no I in team, but there is in Disciple

Oh, I should add, I’m sitting a big pile of Astral Gems. Since there is a decent chance that I won’t be able to use them, would anyone like to trade them for Earth or Death Gems? or Gold (30 gold per gem)?
Or maybe a Blood stone.

@legowarrior
I would be willing to trade 20 death gems for astral at a 1-1 rate.
I would be willing to trade 5 death gems for a rod.

Nothing spurs cooperation like a common enemy. :)
Still, only one team can win, right?

I agree with the sentiment that angles of approach need to be resolved. My suggestion would be to return provinces 138 and 140 to you. The allows for access to Fomoria via 155. The fort at 155 remains in my possession, you are easily able to traverse without it flipping occupancy. I’ll leave with a sparing PD to prevent annoying scout sieging, but you can proceed through.

Titans Steps (2) is more readily defended by TNN than yourself in my opinion. Again, it comes down to access, but in my view, I would encourage you to cede that to TNN. I will also add that TNN hold onto 168, 160 and 171.

The egress of TNN is to be via Chilad but depending on temperature scales, it may involve passing via Kailasa’s farmland first. The naturally forms the frontline for a Helheim/Fomoria showdown. The TNN army should be well equipped to defend the skyway. What do you think @Mellified

Of course, some/all of this doesn’t apply depending on what the “other” team do.

Thank you. I’ve got 30 earth gems coming over, and a few other resources.

Yeah. No.

Congratulations Team TC! Please end this one as soon as you can.

1 Sangiune Rod and 20 Astral Gems to @dfs (that’s Ulm, correct?).

Strato, you’re Bery or Mictlan?\

And if anyone wants to trade Flaming Skull or Blood Stone, I’m willing to pay in Fire Gems, Astral Gems or even Nature Gems. Let’s say 15 gems for the Flaming Skull and 25 gems for the Blood Stone.

I am Ulm. 25 death gems back to you.

So in other words, you go ahead and dictate terms, then because I don’t accede, you give up and decide no? Not exactly the way negotiations work. Do you need 155 also in order to push into Fomoria comfortably?

I’m Mictlan.

2 Hammers sent over to Mictlan.

Your terms provide Kailasa and Ulm with access to hit team TC through your land or underwater. Embeded in my proposal was exactly why such an offer would be refused. I even quoted the reason in my reply.

If that’s the peace that you want then it doesn’t seem your goal is providing resistance to team tc, but more on proving that you “won” your war of aggression with us.

That’s an answer to my proposal that I am comfortable with. My response is exactly what I said it was going to be in my proposal. What is it that you would like to negotiate about?

No negotiations. No truce. Battlefield it is then.

The position of Mictlan (myself) is to remain friendly/neutral to all other nations with the explicit exception of Ulm. See above. I wish to congratulate @wahoo @pyrhic and @Valambrian on a game well played with their dominant position through the whole game, right up to the heavy arsenal on display now. I will continue to play this game out until the game itself recognises a winner, but yeah, not going to devote much more time to it otherwise.

Sorry everyone, but my ear infection is getting the better of me (the pain comes and goes in waves). I was pretty good most of this afternoon, but this evening, it hit me before I could work on my turn. I’ll try to get the turn in tomorrow during lunch, so I’m adding an extra 12 hours.

I’m sorry that I’m slowing things down, especially since I’m not in the running to win.

Congratulations to Team TC! The only encounter I had with you, you thumped me. Interested to hear how the game went from a winning perspective.

Congratulations, I didn’t expect it to happen now!

I’ll be glad to hear everyone’s story and promise to tell mine.

But for now, I just want to thank everyone for playing.

Huge thanks to @legowarrior for organizing this game. I knew about Dominions since Dom 3, but was too intimidated by its breadth to try.

Big thanks to my teammates, @wahoo and @pyrhic, for covering my newbie blunders and sharing their resources and wisdom through the whole game.

And big thanks to @Galdred and @Maerlande for pointing me to the Immersion Discord channel where I exhausted a number of mentors with my stupid questions.

How about some screen shots of what happened the last turn. And some info on how the final battles were decided.
And AARs! What did you learn, what plans worked, what plans didnt, what did the enemy surprise you with.

Mostly, TNN screwed over Ur, and Team Agartha lost because of it.

That’s my AAR.

Which isn’t to say they did anything wrong, or bad, its just they took our Mountain range, which closed off expansion for Ur.

And then Helheim Sneak attacked us, which cause them all sorts of trouble in the long term.

I’d also like to thank everyone for playing and Lego for organizing, thank you! Also, a heartfelt thanks to my team mates who did all the heavy lifting and allowed me to just…coast, really.

@dfs sorry i couldn’t respond earlier, but I really didn’t want to tip my hand. Truth is, xib was not terribly strong and I had no legions of stealthed minions or horrors waiting about everyone’s capital. It sounds great, and I’d have loved to be that guy (and maybe, sometimes, I am that guy), but not this time.

I had a handful of territories that included some wasteland and caves and they could barely support the armies I did have. We did talk about it internally a bit(about distributing the provinces differently), but to me, it made more sense for Fomoria (in particular) and TC to have the provinces and money since they could do more with it.

When we put our team together we were angling for darkness - and I think we planned for getting agartha, but when that fell through we sort of cobbled our nations together around overall strong nations(TC) and a pretty strong and straightforward nation (Fomoria) who both could do well in darkness. My role was to cast Theft of the Sun - which i never ended up doing because we realized that it would probably alienate other teams against us and, in the end, probably wouldn’t give us that tangible a benefit.

I dunno, it was really quiet for us the last few turns. Several turns ago, we realized we were sitting 6 thrones (4 claimed) and needed only one to win. Looking through the options for the final throne there was only a couple of good ones, and emerald lake (underwater, unfortified) that was only two provinces removed from a Fomoria fort was the best of them. So we made plans to have the ability to cap our two remaining thrones while fomoria got in place the elements he needed to take the lake. Our biggest concern was Agartha taking our throne nearest it, so we just kept quiet as the rest of the world was bickering. And then we just claimed three thrones in the last turn and got the ascension. Kinda anticlimactic really.

Built for an early war Ulm/Kailasa/Hellheim had internal discussion about hitting bery/mictlan/tnn or agartha/ur/hinnom. Agartha’s expansion so close to Kailasa’s capitol was the deciding factor. It wasn’t the smoothest war and while Agartha/Hinnom held us off, team-TC/Formia/Bats vultured on Ur and then Hinnom. Seeing the successful vulture bery/mictlan/tnn decided to hit us nearly knocking me out of the game. We (Ulm/Kailasa/Hellheim) made peace with agartha/ur/hinnom in order to strike back against the invaders. As we pushed them back…Formia showed up at our doorstep and made us realize they were close to winning. We tried for peace and got rejected only to have team-TC claim thrones and win the game the next turn.

Geography determines your enemies. For all the land we controlled, we only had a single province boundary with Team TC (which we ended up losing to Mictlan) Heavy war with them was out of the question and you don’t win this game by keeping the peace.

I enjoy playing ea-ulm. You have plenty of thugs and great forging on top of stealthy troops that will kill anything. The magic paths are straightforward with very limited options. In 60 turns I was pretty much done with all the research that was going to do me any good. The thing is you have to get out of the gate cause you won’t have any high end mages. Useless against high end astral.

Team TC did well to have Formia do the heavy lifting. I ran up against them by accident when we simul-moved into Hinnom and they just cleaned my clock.

Surprising that in a game with Hellheim, Ulm, TNN and Xibalta there wasn’t a ton of elfing going on. There didn’t seem to be a lot of stealth armies taking tons of provinces in a single strike.

Maerlande counseled me to take the pig instead of the bird. I don’t know how many times that damned bird died, but…I should have listened to my smarter teammate.