Qt3 QTtheHIll Dominions Disciples game thread

Wow, I had no idea that you could have more than 4 sites per province. You have a couple up there with seven! No wonder I was so low on the gem count.

And holy cow was the Eyes a good global. The charts really help the intel.

Looking forward to more!

For those that have been reading, you might have picked up on something that I’ve mentioned a few times already: the disease that was spreading through TNN. Why was I so concerned about it? There’s a lot of reasons, but mostly it had to do with the economy of this particular game. When disease hit, it caused death in the province and often caused unrest. The death was a bit of a long term concern - I had no growth scales, so pop death was something I needed to avoid on a strategic level. Unrest was also a nasty little problem, both because of its impact on income (even one unrest takes a disproportionate income) and also because TNN doesn’t have many good counters. The economy conditions meant normal recruiting was rare and what i did have a lot of were thugs - which weren’t great at patrolling anyways. Even where i did have masses of troops, the troops tended to be things ill-suited to patrolling - like trolls, fir-bolg warrirors, or beasts of some sort. This meant that getting unrest down once it started meant I had to invest disproportionate troop strength relative to the unrest I wanted to get down. When it became obvious that this was something of a covert attack, as opposed to random events, i really started to get worried…

If you look at TNN’s composition in the nation chart I posted (above), you can see there are only 3 provinces producing more than 100 income, and this is despite having 9 forts and the spell trade winds running on my capital. In a turn like 84, I often had income right around my upkeep (Turn 84: Income 1631, upkeep 1486) - it really wouldn’t have taken much to put me in deficit status. In fact, I’d converted fire gems to gold 3 or 4 times throughout the game in order to keep my economy going. If the rest of TNN was strong, I thought the economy was potentially at risk - and the scenario that i feared was a broad, coordinated, blitz; the kind I imagined Caelum, with its Aerial raiders, would excel at.

In this scenario, I saw raiders striking at 6-10 provinces while coordinated disease and unrest attacks hit my pop centers. My gem income would crash. My large armies would start deserting. I would try to recover, but with disease taking its toll, i couldn’t mount patrols and recapture lost territory. The house of cards would collapse quickly.

The final reason the disease was so vexing for me was really due to my own laziness. As the game progresses, I often have a hard time of keeping track of my key casters. Key casters might be those ones that had a particularly beneficial roll on a key path (like when you have a 10% chance for an additional path, and one of 4 paths that will be selected - so your most optimal path might only have a 2.5% chance of hitting). Or it might be a random event that produced paths you wouldn’t normally have access to. Or it might be someone I boosted. To combat the micromanagement, i tend to consolidate these in the place that is easiest and/or best for the role I need them for. And, as luck would have it, all these rare and important bodies were assembled in the TNN capital. And they were now in danger of getting diseased, and becoming mute, or feebleminded, or just dying.

So, if you think of it from an ROI perspective, Lanka’s strategy was very effective. For the cost of a black servant(5D) and a bane venom charm (10D), he cost TNN:

  • The Fata Morgana global (90A) (partially)
  • The Eyes of god global (50S) (the first one) (partially)
  • Gift of Health (50N)
  • Vengeful Water (70W + 130W) (partially)
  • Miraculous cure all elixir (30N) (magic item)
  • Disease grinder (15D 5F) (magic artifact)
  • A whole bunch of Summon Great Eagles (10A each)
    (partially) means disease detection/'prevention was only part of the reason for the spell

That’s kinda like 600 gems there…not too bad, really. And as these thoughts coalesced in my head, i realized how brilliant Lanka’s idea really was, and so i took to it too. I sent a few of my own disease carriers into lanka, but as I realized these were being detected, I started sending more and more into Kailasa (who, by that time, had started his war on me). Of course, I could afford more virulent hosts and although i sent Black Servants too, I also sent mummys, and harvesters of sorrow. I often gave them flight if they didn’t already have it - just to make them unpredictable and hard to catch.

So, it’s turn 84 now. Sixteen turns until TNN ascends.

With an uneasy peace across the world of TNN, I’ve made a decision made to attack Caelum. The intel from the Eyes of god has helped me determine this is the best path to victory. Their land disposition is vulnerable to my Sidhe raiders and they have the two capitals I need. Yomi is tied up with both Pan and Atlantis(still!), and will not be able to open a front in time. Lanka is not only afraid of me, but is too weak to be any threat. Kailasa is as close to an ally as we have in this game. Yes, Caelum will fall.

Already my stealthed raiders are in Caelum territory:

  • the force to hit the Caelum capital of Machaka is fully stealthed and sitting beside it
  • the raiding support to cut off Machaka is in Caelum territory and waiting
  • other raiding parties are in Caelum territory, almost ready to isolate the capital
  • my teleporting, gating, and trapeze forces are just about in their launch positions
  • Operation Feeble Kings* will launch on turn 85. If all goes to plan, TNN will ascend by turn 90.

But, of course - things are rarely that easy.

Turn 84 is the turn we discover the Lanka black servant with the venom charm in the TNN capital.

On turn 84, TNN forces are not in position for retribution on Lanka.

None of this was was part of the plan.

*Ok, honestly, I did not have a name for this operation, or any operation. This name was just created for the media…

Operation Feeble Kings. heh.

carry on :)

Ah, good stuff, especially the comment about the impact of the disease carrier. I have to admit to some parallels of thinking in regards to laziness, upkeep, and paranoia. But thats one of the reasons why this game is so good.

Looking forward to the next installment!

Lanka AAR (short and discombobulated)

It was the first time I’d played Lanka, and the first non-disciples game I’d gotten far with Blood as a primary path. Lanka could spam a ton of undead chaff and since they didn’t cost much upkeep that’s the strategy I pursued for patrolling my Blood-hunting Provinces to keep unrest down. Also, just about every Lanka Mage was Holy, and would cost much less in upkeep (though expensive for setting up new forts as they’d need both a lab and a temple to contribute Mages for research. I figured Astral would be a good path (and Lanka seemed to have no Astral mages), so my pretender was 9 Astral/6 Blood - the blood got me the boosters I could craft to get to 9 blood when necessary. Went with Heat Scales as well as Chaos, as Lanka’s Demons got bonuses from both. This would come back to bite me in the ass.

To be continued…

Turn 86: Blitz Lanka. 2 turns were all that i could afford to spend to turn my troops around for Lanka, and turn 86 was the start of the blitz. The plan was pretty simple - separate his capital from his forts, and separate his forts from his other lands. With this accomplished, seize the capital. If his fortress forces came out to defend the capital, i’d meet them in the field and annihilate them - and if they stayed put, i’d leave them alone. I knew his army was mostly summons - but what mages he had, likely required upkeep, and the initial blow should have been pretty devastating to his economy. I also knew he didn’t have a large degree of gem income, so this broad attack would likely cripple him.

Light green is the TNN Empire before turn 86, darker green after, and orange, the remaining lanka territory.

The blitz unfolded exactly how I had planned. Now, to just seize that capital!

But…there was a strange message…

Province 50? That’s Skin Route. Skin Route is my western bastion. It’s a throne site, fortified, and producing 5 gems/turn. It’s currently very well garrisoned - partially due to the Lanka invasion, but also to stand up to the massive Lanka columns guarding the steel ovens right beside it. To call it well garrisoned is a bit of an understatement. With 3 elemental royalty(earth, air and fire), my Hero Lugh, my prophet Caireall, 2 sea kings and a few ‘assorted casters’, not to mention nearly 100 trolls, 12 ether warriors, various seasonal spirits and summonings, it might just be the strongest province in the game! What the hell is Caelum up to?

Might this be a ruse? A gambit to get me to hold back? Clearly he’s talking with Lanka - but that message was sent before my attacks were visible and now he must have the realization that his ally is no longer combat-capable.

What is going on? No worries - TNN is strong, and the ‘allies’ are just communicating now about the fall of lanka over this turn. By the time the dust settles, messages travel, and strategies evolved, Lanka will be no more. Then, we will deal with Caelum…on to the Capital of Lanka!

Turn 87 did not go to plan. In fact, it was very nearly disastrous.

One of the things I’ve learned in all my losses at Dominion is that in the later game, you really have to think things through to be successful. It’s not just understanding that you’ll need a staff of storms, or a secondary gem carrier, or backup casters - but you’ll also need to think of where you might need key casters and items in the turn after and the turn after that. For instance, having teleporting or trapezing casters is great for your first attack - but if the province they’re in either doesn’t have a lab, or they haven’t taken the fort - those teleporting mages will be landlocked for 2 to 5 turns. If they’re carrying vital materials for your war, those materials will be hard to get back into another relevant battlefield. This is one of the reasons why the gatestone probably is my favorite artifact (and arguably, one of the games most powerful) . When you combine it with boots of the planes - you have a very effective magic item conveyence system (among other things) - which also means you can return the gatestone to another place. This combination gives you a lot of mobility and versatility.

But i’m getting ahead of myself…Turn 87 opened like this:

Going through the relevant msgs in order:

  1. Hmm: Someone dispelled Fata Morgana - that’s a bit of a surprise…
  2. Astral Window on Lanka. If our attack this round is successful, we’ll have the fort under siege/ready for storming this round. The astral window will give me better info about what I might face in the fort…but, hmm - that’s strange. The astral window was destroyed by a dome over lanka. It’s not an economic concern - i’m casting this with an item, so there’s no harm done to me or the caster. But if lanka has a dome up…
  3. Successful mind hunt on Podesieon, the earth royalty that Lanka exposed last round. Good news! That’ll hurt him and cost him gems/time to replace if he even can…
  4. Sabdh’s cloud trapeze into Lanka was blocked by the dome. Sabdh’s a primary support tuatha - 3A3N. She’s needed for the assault…
  5. Casting eyes of god again - attrition global strategy in play
  6. Lugh’s gatestone into Lanka was blocked by the dome. In addition to being a primary caster in his own right, Lugh’s bringing the bulk of the troops for the lanka assault with him. This is very bad news…
  7. Gift of Health goes up - largely against the diseases
  8. Kantena’s trapeze into lanka was blocked by the dome. Kantena is my primary astral support. Due to the need for my astral mages (still), there is no astral back up planned. The assault on Lanka is coming off its hinges
  9. Ok, we found a scryer - that was a little silly of whoever did that. This is why I have astral mages scattered around!
  10. Thuella’s trapeze into Lanka was blocked by the dome. Thuella is a primary caster (A5) and needed for the powerful air magic protections of the besieging army (which never got there anyways).

So none of my magic transports to lanka were succesful. This is pretty bad for me because they were there to fight whatever forces showed up outside the fort. They were deliberately over-powered to ensure that they would win so that the weaker follow up support, arriving conventionally on the regular move phase, could arrive unimpaired. Wait…with none of the magic transports effective, that means the regular move turn will be an unsupported attack by units not intended nor scripted to fight a primary battle. Oh…no.

  1. Arouse hunger didn’t work. It’s a weak spell, but i thought lanka wouldn’t have had any protection up so i thought it stood a good chance of working.

  2. One of my golems was defeated by a nasty lanka thug. The golem accounted for himself reasonably well, taking out over half the creatures against him (36/62) , but…i’m a little shocked he fell. He was to isolate the capital from reinforcements from the north west.

  3. T’ien Ch’i was ATTACKED?! by Kailasa?!?! We lose the province, though the assault force lacks mages (only 4)

  4. Keep of totems was attacked(and captured) by Kailasa too? That’s my astral mage factory!

  5. Caelum has attacked my sea province west of Atlantis with an Eagle king and 80 Kydnds. There was no defence there, so he won easily

  6. In Deaf vinyard I capture the province around lanka’s northern fort.

  7. Pangea is still alive?!? and attacking Yomi!?!

  8. With 3 conventional troops I attack and seize the province of lanka. My major gem carrier was an earth reader(E3F1) who arrived unscripted, on a pocket ship, carrying an artifact i wanted to get into the lanka battle (Bell of cleansing). Luckily his support is a sidhe and a Ri - however both are ‘below grade’. The Ri is diseased, and the Sidhe was used in my attacks on the lakes and lacks armor (because he needed water breathing). The earth reader is ferocious - unscripted and with 30 gems in his hands, he lays waste to the superior lanka forces. Maws of the earth, 2 earth elemental summons, and 2 magma eruptions decimate lanka - well, until some undead monkey hits him in the head with a rock, or poop, and he dies. I don’t have many Fire/earth casters. I need fire/earth casters. I can ill afford to lose one, and losing the pocket ship, artifact, a couple other items and the 30 gems he carried just adds insult to injury. The whole attack just about failed, but the lone sidhe was the last unrouted troop and carried the day.

  9. T’ien Ch’is walls are breached?! Oh, this does not bode well…

  10. And finally, 87 turns after the start of the struggle, Yomi finishes Atlantis.

I’ve problems.
I’m overextended in Lanka.
Kailasa is mounting a serious invasion on my southern flank.
Caelum is moving against me in the north.
Yomi’s troops in the water are now free from the atlantis obligations and could be seeking to intervene on either my northern or southern fronts.

How did this all go to shit so quickly?!

not all bad. that attack on Yomi by Pan probably changed the course of the game :)

Thanks for taking the time to write all this up, @pyrhic! I wasn’t in the game, but always enjoy reading these.

Wow, this level of detail puts my OldSchool AAR to shame!

Great stuff, Pyrhic. Please keep it coming.

Pyrhic’s comment about the Caelum mystery message above was basically the indicator of where I was in the throes of reaching close to 100 fatigue thanks to casting full time shift work, part time study and a number of other responsibilities on top… You can imagine how easy it is to write a message to Kailasa (not Lanka) about TNN, and sending it to TNN. It was a total mistake, I ended up showing my hand. Of course, given the screenshots, TNN was clearly outpacing myself as Caelum.

I love Caelum and their glass cannon ways and I’m glad I played them.

It’s a huge paranoia i have with the Dominions messaging system. Practically every time i send a msg, item, gold or anything through it, i double and triple check that I’m sending it to the correct place. I can’t count the number of messages I’ve re-written thinking that I mentioned Kailasa in the text when I meant Caelum, or some variant of that.

Their messaging system is clearly in the top 20 things i think they could easily rewrite to make much more user friendly…

Caelum and Kailasa were looking at TNN for quite some time before this attack. The call from Lanka, and the knowledge that TNN was bigger, and getting more so, was the impetus. If he is slugging it out with Lanka, hopefully Tien Chi is weakly held. Fata prevented me from gaining much info. And I did not dispel it. Any astral I had was either passed to other nations for dispels, or was used to get Siddarthas. I never got to summon a Rudra…bummer.

I was actually considering attacking Tien Chi around turn 80. But I got hit by a plague ( random event, I think… if not, speak up!) and that distracted me a bit. So when this attack went off, I was not as prepared as I had hoped to be. Which is why there were only 4 mages in the initial attack force on Tien Chi. That, and my decision to wait a turn while more mages showed up, was not good.

I look forward to seeing what decisions TNN took.

End Game:

When I took time to think about it, turn 87 actually wasn’t that bad, and I realized that it actually might have saved me considerably more pain. Lanka would obviously have to wait now - the dome would interfere with direct magical attacks, and my forces on the capital were too weak to capture it. I did lose an important caster, and a bunch of gems worth of material - but gems I had in abundance, and I did have other F/E casters. However, in stopping my magical transports, Lanka inadvertently left me with the forces best able to counter Kailasa’s push. Had my attack on the capital been successful - I would have had heroes, items and armies too remote to return to aid TC.

Kailasa was the obvious threat right now, but I couldn’t ignore Caelum and potentially Yomi. Sea of Ice! It was a brilliant solution to these threats. In one swoop it isolates the Caelum army and divides yomi (without actually directly attacking him). They could then either work around it by teleporting troops/commanders from under the ice, or work to dispel it - but either would cost them time and gems. I also distantly hoped that being confined under the ice might cause Yomi and Caelum to war with each other, but i knew that was pretty unlikely.

With Caelum and Yomi cleaned up, that left only Lanka and Kailasa. I decided that Lanka, like a wounded enterprise, wasn’t going anywhere - I could tie it up sufficiently with a few Sidhes. The disruption they would cause to the gold and gem income to lanka would be enough, i figured, to keep Lanka from harassing me. And so that left me the bulk of my forces to defend against Kailasa. Now how to best do that…

While Kail had broken the walls of TC(nice job on that, btw - those eagles do have some really good uses). I knew his force wasn’t strong enough to take on the city. I had a dozen casters, including my pretender and Antrax(Banefires 4F3D) and about 70 troops however my heavy hitting thugs, including Lugh, my prophet, the ether lord and the wraith, were all elsewhere. While his troops had flight, they never had storm immunity and so they wouldn’t be flying (i had a staff of storms as well as Tempest, so storm would be up at start). This meant that the fight would be in front of my walls, where his forces would be channeled and susceptible to my casters, who would also have ample time to buff the defenders. But still, even believing that i could withstand his forces, i didn’t think he would fight. He had 2 armies in tow - the first had taken my astral mage factory next door, and the second was just behind that. That’s where his mages and his grunts would be - so i had 2 turns, i figured.

Magic might be a problem, and to this point, I never had a dome up in defense of TC (why would I need it, there was no threat there?!) This made it easy to return forces, but i also didn/t want interference. My guess was that he’d do one of two things this turn - he’d back off TC entirely to see how i responded, or he’d quietly reinforce. My gut was telling me he’d back off - we’d played enough games together that I thought Akaoni would figure I’d respond in force. By leaving a token defender there, he’d get a gauge for the fight he was in - meanwhile his first and third armies would all converge into a superstack beside TC to take it for good.

I decided not to play into this. I would return my heavy thugs, and the troll army. They were all coming in magic transport, so they’d safely make the fort. And if i was wrong, and kailasa did storm the walls - these forces would be present for a very nasty surprise (castle storming coming later in turn resolution than magic rituals(including transport)).

Turn 88 was pretty uneventful. Sea of ice went up. Eyes of god came down. An arrow hit my pretender in the heart, but thanks to the gift of health no real injury was sustained (no affliction). An earth elemental also killed one of my support casters in TC (the one that had the staff of storms). This could have been bad - an elemental or a remote attack killing a key support could be pivotal in the battle to be fought. I needed to get some protection up.

Kailasa did not retreat from TC as I had thought, but neither did he attack. instead, he brought up troops to reinforce them. His third army was now bordering TC, and so I didn’t think an attack was imminent this round either. At this point, all my important defenders were back, and his chances of successfully storming the walls were, in my opinion, not very good. I now had over 300 defending troops - half of which were trolls and ogres. In addition, those heavy thugs of mine were all back, supported by an air royalty and bolstered by those artifacts that I had been creating for the last 20 turns…yes, if an attack came, we were ready.

I’d lost the lanka capital - this was expected, and now my forces would play cat and mouse with them - just seeking to be annoying and prevent his forces from opening a second front. Domes were going up though all around my territories(including 2 domes in TC), and i was hitting Kailasa with remote attacks of my own. The 2 domes in TC was interesting - initially, i did this because i was pretty much using all my air gems (magic movement largely - you can see in that screen shot how many i was carrying at this point. This is also what made losing air items like staff of storms and pocket ships annoying, is that they were actually somewhat painful to recreate - often meaning that i had to postpone something else to do it) and I figured i had tons of fire gems so why not create a fire dome - some of Kailasa’s casters are pretty frail so it might just work. That didn’t really pan out though, but what it did do is let me know how effective my ‘real’(astral) dome was doing. At only 50% effectiveness, it’s hard to rely on the astral dome and so you might not know how good it’s doing(it only alerts you when it stops something). It stopped 3 of the 4 attacks, letting through an earth attack in one really strange battle.

Sometimes you have these fights where there are no real stragglers on your side. Every commander you have has a purpose - they might be there to cast a key spell like fog of war, or some wards, or relief. Or they might be there to summon undead, or cast some nasty battlefield spells like magma eruption. Or they might be there to be a SC or thug and fight hand-to-hand. But, point is, everyone’s got a job to do. Sometimes in these battles though, you have too many jobs and not enough able bodies. You might have something you really want done - but everyone’s busy doing something else important. So, in these instances, you might find yourself giving a scout a key artifact like Tempest and dressing him up to play a part in the battle. Of course, if you’re going to do this, you should give the poor bloke some protection…and you end up with something strange like this happening:

Vulcanus would survive that battle of earth and water and lightning, but it was amusing none-the-less.

This is all on turn 89. Not much is going on in Lanka - trading as per expected. Caelum is starting to get a little more aggressive though, and is starting to send thugs out into my territories around its capital of Machaka. I kill some of these remotely, but there’s a couple of nasty ones that will emerge over the next few turns. Additionally, they start taking some of the old lanka territories - i find this particularly funny given they are ‘allies’. At one point, Caelum owns more of Lanka proper than either myself or Lanka does…

But in the south at TC, a window opens up for me. Kailasa has splinterred off some of its forces to gain some additional territories around TC. Surprisingly, Kailasa also tried to storm the fort. It ended up poorly for him…

With that dramatic win at TC to start turn 89, it looked like things might be over for Kailasa, but the map certainly doesn’t look that way:

However, thinking about it a little more carefully, and this is a great opportunity for TNN to win the war.

While a lot of Kailasa chaff was killed at TC, most of his mages escaped (save for the communion gurus). However, they’re a routed army, and are not necessarily in the places Kailasa would prefer them, nor (more importantly) will they likely have good gem support. Good players often have ‘mule trains’ of gem carriers to support big offensives, however, there’s a limit to what can be planned for and it’s unlikely he’ll have backup gem support in all the areas that his mages ended up. More importantly, it’s also unlikely that the bulk of his chaff(in Keep of Totems) has the key mages it needs to attack(or defend itself). Akaoni will know this, and this round he’ll be consolidating his troops. That gives me one round to strike a death blow - only afforded to me because of magic movement.

Thanks to the gatestone, cloud trapeze and teleport, I can move a large force magically onto keep of totems. This will arrive and resolve, with full magical and gem support, before his move orders take place. If, at the same time, i seal off the exit from Keep of totems, i can remove the army’s escape path, and in one swoop eliminate all the Kailasa forces.

At the same time, I’m worries about Caelum incursions - I figure the best way to tackle these is to push out my borders. It doesn’t look like Caelum is well defended, so largely with my thugs, i plan the most elaborate TNN assault. If all goes according to plan this turn, not only will Kailasa’s assault be totally destroyed, but a total of 12 territories will change hands. The plan looks like this:

It was a couple awesome battles that I lost horribly. Well, I did some damage. Great stuff…

Turn 89 resolves into Turn 90 and Keep of Totems is the first of the 3 magical invasions to resolve. If i had my choice, it’d be the last, as some forces will now be able to escape to the southeast, but resolving first does have some benefits.

Surprisingly to me, i find my assault at a disadvantage, both in terms of mages and in terms of overall size.

TNN:

  • 5 Mages: Lugh(fire, Nature), Tuatha Sorceress(Air, Nature), Queen of Air(Air), Wraithlord (death), Sorceress(astral). Of these, only the wraithlord is kitted in a thug role. Given my attacks elsewhere, i couldn’t spare any other thugs for this battle.
  • 95 trolls, of various types and kinds, and 20 additional ogres
  • 12 ether knights
  • 20 elemental type creatures (elementals, summer lions, etc)
  • 45 firbolg warriors (basic TNN recruitable)
    for a total of about 195 troops and mages

Kailasa:

  • 17 mages, including 8 yogis(astral), 3 gurus(astral, nature), yaksha(earth,nature), flame spirite(fire), illusionist(air), troll king(earth), faery queen(air, nature) and his prophet
  • 82 great eagles
  • 17 trolls, plus 2 ettins
  • 88 archers
  • 31 guhyakas/asparas (kailasa magic troop with awe, good attack, but poor defense)
  • 7 manticores
    for a total of 251 troops and mages

The order of battle (sorry for the awkward splice, trying to save space, but the Kail troops were on higher terrain making it difficult to align…there’s actually a 20 grid gap between our forces)

I know i’m heading into a lot of archers and eagles, so I’ve draw up my lines with this in mind. My forces are set to largely hold and attack. I’ve the trolls out front because 1) they’ve high hit points and will soak up a lot of damage 2) with regeneration to recuperate wounds, they’ll take less morale checks 3) When they do take those morale checks, with a squad average approaching 20 morale, they’ll more make them successfully many times so will stay in the battle. Close in behind the trolls, i’ve the firbolg warriors. These guys also have great morale (also around 20), have higher defence (17 to the troll 8), and carry shields - but with only 15-20 hp (to the trolls 60-80) and no natural regeneration, they are more brittle, so i want to expose them less. However, at size 2, they’re a great complement to the trolls size 3 and 4, and when the battle starts, they’ll start filling in the grid with the trolls (each grid can hold a max total size of 6). In the far flank, i’ve grouped elemental support to prevent a collapse there, and on the near side, more trolls. To protect against back flankers, and to plug any holes, i’ve my ogres and my ether warriors, which are all grouped around my casters in the middle.

Our opening Battlefield magic is like this:

Round 1:
Kailasa: Communion setup, wind guide, Divine blessing, Fog Warrior, marble warrior and flaming arrows
TNN: Mass regeneration, Thunder fend, antimagic, Fog warriors

Round 2:
Kailasa: Communion Mastery, Relief, Curse of stones
TNN: Serpent Blessing, Doom

Later rounds:
Kailasa: Curse of stones *3, Rage of corned rat, mass protection and marble warriors
TNN: Fire fend, Marble warriors

The battle turns into a slog in the middle, with fog warriors dueling it out on both sides. My weaker magical forces are largely spent on the battlefield casting, while his continue to pester the field with spells pretty much throughout. As the battle continues, TNN forces start gaining an edge and eventually win the battle

This result might be a little surprising, but there’s a few things here that helped tip the battle in TNN favor:

  1. Eagles are big. Great Eagles are pretty good troops over all, but they are GREAT BIG eagles. They’re size 6, so they occupy a whole grid square, and nothing can move in their square. When they line up, they effectively create a wall their own troops can’t go through. This works against them two ways - their fresh troops cant get through them to start fighting, and routed/fleeing eagles cant escape. Additionally while they’re ok troops, they’re not exceptional - they’ve attack and defence around 12, a single digit protection and a pretty good pool of hit points (like 50). However, they only have 2 attacks and more often than not, they end up on the receiving more attacks per square than they’re giving.

  2. TNN troops hit harder. Most people understand that harder is better, but in this battle, it really does. 25pts of damage is the point where fog warriors(ie mistform) breaks, and the TNN troops consistently do more damage per unit. Many of the trolls are 25+ damage, as well as the ogres and the ether warriors - so while the eagles are generally getting 1 pt hits on TNN troops, the reciprocal hit is more frequently negating their mistform

  3. The Kailasa battlefield spells were not as effective as they could be. Curse of stones is great in the right place, but against troops that are buffed with antimagic, and considering it’s already at a +4 resistance, it hardly hit any of the TNN troops. Blade wind is also very weak against mistform, and so two really big tools of Kailasa were diminished. I’m a little surprised(and pleased) that Kail didn’t try mass flight + earthquake…that would have been deadly i think. Rage of the cornered rat hurt more than helped…this is a bit of a toss up, but had the rest of the eagles just been allowed to flee, many more of Kail’s troops would have escaped and quite possibly could have resisted some of the other attacks in the other provinces (which were much closer than i would have liked).

  4. The gift of health global in effect can’t be discounted as a factor here. In addition to this fight being in TNN’s dominion, its troops have larger health pools than normal and are that much harder to kill.

  5. The large archer profile of the Kailasa armies. Archers can be great and effective tools, but in this particular battle were a bit ineffective. Many of their arrows were lost to the storm, and when they did hit, rarely did telling damage. When they ran out of arrows, the archers were mediocre fighters and not able to stand toe-to-toe with the TNN bullies and trolls.

In the end, TNN prevailed, and despite some very tight skirmishes in the TC capital, the the province to the west (where i lost my Etherlord), the grand offensive performed well…

Machaka is isolated and Kailasa is largely defeated. Vengeful water goes up as a global, and with it, TNN shuts down information about its forces to all opposition and gradually forms a noose around Lanka as it seizes Machaka.

Vengeful water proves exceptionally useful, and bags one…really scary and unexpected foe:

I imagine Caelum was going to use her to assassinate or seduce some of my important commanders, but I’m happy not to have found out.

In ten turns, TNN ascends.

Good game all - hope you’ve enjoyed my recap, it’s been fun to do, but i’m glad to have completed it :)

Thanks Pyhric, for your awesome AAR. really looking forward to wylde ryde 2…

This as a great AAR to read, even if I didn’t quite follow everything!