2801

That works for me. I ended up being awake 2 hours later than normal getting my turn in last night and I still managed to kill a bunch of my mages, heheh. I blame it on being half-awake, although they mostly followed script and I pretty much did it to myself!

2802

Spring Lion: sorry for my tardiness, peeps. I’m happy to go with the flow: I was trying to make a game of it in my own limited sense.

Stevil

2803

Spring Lion

With that said, I’m going to call this one.

I want to thank all the participants for the few delays and stales that kept this game rolling. I do hope everybody had fun. 3 stales all told in 79 turns and lots of nations. This one may have been one nation larger than I want future games to be, but it was just about the right size. We all shared borders.

For those looking to play a game who have not played before, Spring Lion was a relatively quick 80 turn game that started in early December of last year. 6 months/80 turns. Many games go longer than that in terms of time with fewer turns.

I have an AAR of the interesting battle that I fought in the game. I have been meaning to post it for several months and just have not got around to it. Will try and get it up soon.

2804

Does that mean, um, I mean, have I really won?

2805

Congrats!

2806

Hmm. You thrashed me.
You destroyed Arco enough to take his capitol and the capitol he had taken.
Patala was stunted by an early war with Bogarus and then bogged down with a war against TC who refused to lift a finger against you.

Yeah, I would say you really won.

Congrats!

2807

Yay, that’s my 1st!

Thanks all for the game, and I hope you had at least half as much fun as I did. Will post AAR soon.

2808

Grats Tenuki! That was pretty dominating.

2809

well done tenuki

2810

I really want to post about this, but can’t seem to find/make time :(

2811

[If this report looks self-congratulatory in places, please forgive me. I’ve never gotten this far in a game of Dom3, let alone won one.]

Fall 2011: So here I was about to enter for the third time the pool of sharks that is the Qt3 Dominions crew. dfs hosts a game, fast turnover, just the thing to mull over during those ennui-laden winter holidays. Luck had it that I got the first draw, so I chose Gath, whom I had nominated myself. Almost immediately afterwards I was like NOOOO! I SHOULDA GOTTEN TEE CEE!, felt embarrassed about it, typed a forum message anyway. When I tried to send it, my mobile internet crashed and refused to restart, so I thought fuck it and went to sleep. When I looked at the forum the day after, TC was gone. Thus, Gath.


Preliminary considerations and pretender design

Gath is interesting. You get all paths except Water and Air, but nothing over level 2 except Holy. You get excellent cross-path mages who can forge all the boosters for all your national paths. You get a cool but expensive H3 B2 F/E/S2 sacred thug chassis with 55 HP and MR 18. You get two kinds of recruitable sacred troop that don’t really benefit from the same blesses. You get a sacred national level 2 blood summon that is quite excellent but can only be cast in a waste – not to be relied on on this map. You can blood sacrifice, but your temples come at 800 gold a pop. Major letdown. Such is the cost of your forts, respectively the utility of your cheaper forts.

The guides recommend some kind of bless. E/N seems natural with giants, and I probably should have taken it, but I had this idea. F4W4S9 immobile with O1 P1 H3 G1 L2 M1 and dom8. Order/luck isn’t ideal in vanilla, but I wanted luck and magic for extra gems while also needing order for the gold. Probably not the best choice all in all.

Anyway, F4W4 gives Gath’s little sacred medium infantry a respectable 12 att and 15 def, along with Twist Fate for survivability, while their paltry damage output can be boosted with Strength of Giants and Weapons of Sharpness or Destruction. Gath’s sacred giants are a little bit on the runty side of the breed with 38 HP and 13 prot, which decided me against an E9Nx bless. What they have going for them is strong defense (16) and great damage output due to high strength and Grampa’s Magic Porker-Poker a.k.a. an Anakite Sword. F4W4S9 should make them useful as anti-thugs, I thought.

If I get to summon Se’irim – beautiful. Ring of Wizardry? First one from my pretender, without a hammer due to lack of hands, but yes. Kohen Gadols? You could think of a better bless for giant thugs, but with good E and N access it should be no problem to make them regenerate and achieve subzero fatigue. And hey, S9F4 allows me to cast Call Merkavah! (Which is a rather unsuitable notion to base your pretender choice on. When I did cast the spell in the end, I did it mostly on principle. There was no shortage of equally useful ways to blow 222 pearls.)

I also took a Glyph instead of an Oracle because I had this spontaneous association with the cover of an old Guns ‘n’ Roses record. The joke did get more than a bit long in the tooth over the months, a fact that was exacerbated by my pasta plate’s stubborn refusal to grow extra item slots.

See below for other regrets.

2812

Early game

The bless made expansion pretty easy. With enemy archers decoyed, those sacred giants can simply walk up to heavy cavalries, ignore the first of those unlikely lance hits and chop their horses in half. Indie barbarians are a problem for giants, but archers and Levite Zealots took care of that. Mercs got me into the water and Obscuro got me a trickle of air. I was happy with my patch of real estate, and it looked like I wasn’t scaring people any worse than my army could handle. So I made peace with my neighbors, stayed out of Bogarus vs. Patala and laboriously built some castles and temples and lots of Levite Zealots to discourage the heathens from sliding even deeper into sin.

Early magic

My first research target was evo-2 for Arcane Probing. As an Astral nation with only an outside chance of ever forging a clam I wanted every pearl I could get the conventional way. I got 9/turn, so that went pretty well. My complete and thorough, mostly manual Nature search on the other hand netted me a whopping 1 gem/turn and two Farms of Plenty. Wonderful. How many Rings of Regeneration was I going to forge exactly? Vine Shields? A Fairy Queen? Perish the thought. Fire also semi-flopped, and scarcity of N gems precluded mass production of Fever Fetishes.

To compensate I neglected blood research in favor of army buffs and construction (for boosters) and spent all my slaves on blood stones. This plan initially met with difficulties of its own: I had to recruit 8 of those 400 gold Kohen Gadols before I landed an E random. My first actual Blood Stone came somewhat later and at a much higher price than I liked.

Lack of E2 randoms also meant even greater dependence on N gems for reinvigoration on my first thugs, since a Girdle of Might alone simply doesn’t do for a unit with base encumbrance 2 that also needs armor. I was thoroughly fed up with my pretender choice at this point.

Turned out my first real thug (and later SC and Debunker of Oracles) was an Ice Devil, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

2813

Turn 25+

At some point in the late second year I was reading a lot of diplo urging me to take this or that side in some war. Also, my (awesome) patrollers were killing up to six scouts per turn, turn after turn. People weren’t going to stick to scouts forever. And even though Zealots cost only .5 gold per turn in upkeep, I was starting to feel it. Building projects were grinding to a halt, the economy was suffering, people started reading entirely too many books. I clearly needed a war.

My preferred target would have been Pangaea because of its evil dompush along my northern border (dom 10 dormant vs. dom 8 imprisoned pretender, 200 gold vs. 800 gold temples). Unfortunately, Pan owned two forts locally whereas I had only one. The perfect province for me to attack Pangaea from was a nice, fat farmland with a fortified city in it, and it was in Arco’s hands. So I declared war on Arco, advising Juffo that bloodshed could be averted in return for the province of Lombaria (58) including its fort and lab. Juffo agreed, with the added provision that I was to declare war on Pangaea.

So far, so lucky.

After securing Lombaria, I started attacking Pan and got Tirannea (65) under siege pretty quickly. I was using a mix of my sacreds and a medium-sized archer force boosted with Flaming Arrows. However, just as I was done sieging, ddtibs dropped his Gorgon on me and vaporized my army. Bummer.

After this episode, the war died down to a fizzle with us entrenched in our forts exchanging baleful stares and the occasional half-hearted raid across the border. Pan’s dominion push was becoming worrisome. Brian (my prophet) and blood were barely enough to keep the candles on in
and the Gorgons out of my forts. The places in between were getting dark, and my income worries intensified again due to Pan’s crappy scales.

On the other hand, research really took off thanks to those 50-gold sacred sages. Seeing a chance to make const-8 first, I decided to postpone anti-Gorgon research for a while.

2814

Turn 35+

Then everything happened at once. My pretender awoke the turn after I made const-8. I wanted a RoW, then a RoS and all the key artifacts I could get. I got them, but thinking I was in a rush I spent more gems than I probably would’ve had to by not using hammers in order to get stuff faster.

After four or six turns or so of meticulously planned forging madness, I looked at my gem stash and realized that I could safely forget about Gath’s astral summons for a while. Um. What had I taken F4W4S9 for again?

[Btw, months later Maerlande wrote in the forum about having seen more people lose than win a game due to an artifact rush. Even though I believe that I managed to put some stuff to pretty good uses during the game, I was painfully reminded of this point in Spring Lion.]

I willy-nilly decided to turn my attention to blood magic for a while. The only other potential blood nation (Patala) didn’t look like it’d soon recover from its victory over Bogarus, so I figured I should be able to get some of the unique summons. A first target was Blood 6 for Ice Devils to properly break into water magic. Then I found out that Ice Devils make good SCs (never had one before), and water had to wait.

Turn 40+

With artifacts and my first thugs/SCs, the war against Pan picked up some momentum. Arco wanted to join. I said welcome and tried a quadruple lesser horror/scout combo to block his way to Pan’s capital in the hope that he wasn’t the type to break a NAP. Never having done this before either, I ordered each scout to attack the province he was in instead of criss-crossing move orders. Net gain: minus four scouts; and Arco had a clear path into Pan’s end zone while mine was still blocked by Pan’s well-defended forts. Bye-bye Nature magic, and I had also effectively blinded myself. Nothing more embarrassing than a dick move gone wrong.

Pan went down eventually, with Arco getting the cap and me two forts (65, 70), with a third one (81) still under siege. Not so bad after all. This was late in the fourth year.

2815

Turn 50+

Looking at the whole board again I started feeling a little queasy. There were three large powers (Arco, Jomon, Gath) and two smaller ones (Patty, TC). I was wedged in between Arco (gem leader) and Jomon (research leader), while the two did not share a border. Uh-oh.

I was still siegeing Pan’s fort in (81), dfs started posting stuff about Gath being a threat in the forum, and people all around me except Juffo quietly terminated their NAPs with me while maintaining a conciliatory tone of voice. More uh-oh.

Diplo time:

  • Pyrhic (Patala) wrote, confirming my suspicions about an impending dogpile on Gath. He demanded the remaining fort of Pan’s (81) and another province in return for staying out of the war. I declined, and we swapped some threats.

  • dfs (Jomon) remained overtly noncommittal while building up armies on my northeastern border.

  • Steve (TC) was open to negotiation and agreed to help me against Jomon.

  • Juffo (Arco) was hard to get a hold of in diplo but shared my worries about Jomon’s possible clamming cum S9 pretender. Our NAP held.

Jomon attacked before I could complete the siege in (81). A decent-sized part of my army was still tied up, and I hadn’t gotten my marching done. dfs took several provinces with his thugs (groups of Ryujin and nasty, kitted out Ujigami) while moving on Grey Mirks (54) with a proper army. Luckily for me, four of his Ryujin ran into a Kohen Gadol leading a large archer force in transit between two forts (65 -> 54), and the Ryujin got killed. Underwater I had no way to offer resistance.

Then TC attacked Jomon in the south, and dfs withdrew the army that had been moving on my border fort, presumably for defense. I was able to storm Pan’s last castle in the same turn and counterattacked Jomon immediately afterwards, taking a number of provinces with my veterans from the Pangaean war. A couple SCs (Bune, Carbonara) attacked Latien (39), to be followed up with an army the turn after in order to get a siege going.

Arco and Patala also started snatching pieces of Jomon, which was fine with me.

As the siege of Latien dragged on, I was continuously fretting about a Master Enslave attack by Jomon’s pretender and scripted my army to defend against it. (I did not know at the time that immobiles – like my own Glyph – are unable to break siege.) dfs kept taking water province after water province while I used teleporting SCs to pop off Jomon’s land troops when they showed themselves in the open. A tentative assault of mine on Towen (31) was beaten back by Jomon after one turn. Things came to a head in turn 59, when dfs finally tried to break my lockdown in the famous Battle of Latien.

2816

My apologies to everyone is Hugin for the stales. I am doing my best. I already have a turn in for the current one.

2817

Turn 59+

After that battle, Arco decided that the time was right to change sides. Juffo quit his NAP with me and cast Eternal Pyre the same turn, expanding his gem lead to about 35. I had been saving up gems for Eternal Pyre myself but hadn’t dared to cast it for diplo reasons. With the need for caution gone, I dumped all I had into an overcast and succeeded, taking the gem lead by a small margin.

The turn after (#60), my SCs stormed Latien and Bune the Ice Devil killed Jomon’s oracle. Finally a fort in a waste! Latien also had some nice Astral sites, which boosted my pearl income to 20/turn. In turn 61, Arco went over to Austen. (Btw., thanks Austen for keeping the game going at this point. I imagine it must be pretty difficult taking over a nation the turn before a late-game war when that nation has just lost about 60 gems by having its global overcast after one turn. Well played.)

The war against Jomon reconciled me with my bless choice a little: Twist Fate appears to negate a Gifts from Heaven hit. That’s a nice thing to have on a 55-HP SC wannabe. Water also got underway with my Ice Devil starting to forge stuff. And the gem income boost from my conquests made the prospects for an Astral endgame look a little brighter again. Finally, conquering a fort in a waste allowed me to summon some Se’irim (very good units with an F4W4S9 bless) to use against Arco.

2818

turn 62+, war with Arco

Arco and I both stuck to the terms of our NAP, so we each had one turn for last preparations. Patala and TC kept pillaging Jomon. dfs punished me for my half-hearted attempt to take another of his forts, after which we made peace easily.

Arco had been building up a huge force to the East of Latien in Namor (35), including several high-class thugs and a Grendelkin SC. I didn’t think I’d look good attacking that force, so I re-scripted my army in Latien to defend against Arco’s setup. However, Arco split his force to simultaneously attack me in Latien and march on Jomon’s capital. The (weaker) Latien branch ran into my patrolling army and was wiped out. The stronger part eventually took Jomon under siege. Somebody (Jomon I guess) dispelled Arco’s Mother Oak.

After the second battle of Latien I went on the attack and used Gate Cleavers, a Roc and Crumble to take several of Arco’s forts in short order, the third one being his cap. Arco eventually counterattacked with Ettins, Golems and later Zmeys raiding my soft spots.

On turn 68 or so, I alchemized all the gems I had (except N and D) and cast Arcane Nexus with my pretender.

Turn 70+, The End

After some debate in the forum, the dreaded get-Gath alliance finally materialized. Patala had recovered and took the fort in Namor (35) from me with a huge army led by his Destroyer of Worlds. Counterattacking was out of the question, and I had a rather large empire with lots of gaps between forts… as Scribble had pointed out, the game was far from decided and there was a very real danger of my getting raided to death.

What to do? I vaguely remembered Gryff talking to me in Foss about how much he liked Strands of Arcane Power for defensive value. I looked up the spell in the manual, and it turned out that it fit my situation perfectly: It only works in your own dominion, but Gath can blood sacrifice. All the mages of my two main enemies (Arco and Patala) were low-level astral casters, and I had an S9 pretender; there was no chance at all of his ever losing a Magic Duel against them.

(The best result I got was 1 dead and 9 feebleminded enemy mages in one turn, plus a magic site. It was an utterly cool spell in this situation, and I wish I had planned for it from the outset.)

I cast the new global and then basically turtled, blood saccing as much as I could in order to push my dominion into enemy territory. Military action was limited to raiding Arco with Gadols and Zmeys, trying to pop his raiders with Anti-SCs, collecting D gems with the Sickle, and slowly pushing my way towards the former Pangaean capital, which I was able to snatch with SCs/Crumble when Arco moved out his army to attack another fort of mine.

Money had become secondary, so I stopped trying to break the sieges on my forts, slowing them down instead with summoned defenders (and Iron Walls against pyrhic’s Massive Monkey Mob) while letting the Strands do its dirty work.

I also cast Call Merkavah (for dompush value and on principle), wished for gems once, got an Air Queen, started summoning tarts, and waited until Master Enslave was researched in order to take out Arco for real.

And that was the end of it.

2819

grats tenuki!

2820

Well done, tenuki!

Hmm, it probably doesn’t bode well for me in Sleipnir considering you just excelled in a game using the same Gath I am trying to use. No wonder I have been getting schooled so far, heheh.