4121

Your guess is sort of correct. I didn’t think Nate was going to go to the wasteland, I had rather hoped he would strike at your army and that you would weaken each other. So if the opportunity arose, I could strike at his capital next turn. I thought even if I did clash with Mictlan I would win handily, but underestimated the eagle warriors. I had a lot of artillery, but he got in my rear lines too fast for it to win the day.

  1. Speaking of the “short win conditions”, I don’t think I like them. Having played two games with them now, it’s not my thing right now. I understand where others in this forum have been and why they may like them though. Over time, I will prob. find an appreciation for the unique challenges/flavor that they bring. Right now though, I think I prefer games with more traditional win conditions.

Game would have played out in an entirely different way with a more traditional win condition. I would have played a lot more conservatively, focus on getting Earth Blood Deep Well etc and playing the long game. I’m glad this game wasn’t like that though, not the biggest fan of endgame micro.

  1. I really wish I could somehow decouple this comment from the game just completed, because I don’t want to take anyting away from Scribble’s win. He played very well and beat asses.

I think I’m in the minority on this, and I realize it prob. sounds like sour grapes, but I think it’s prob a bad idea playing a game with:

  • A map with significant water
  • No aquatic/water starting nations
  • Land based amphibious nations

I do believe though that a nation that can get their full fill of land provinces while dominating the water effortlessly is prob in a great position. I think we have a similar setup in Middletown, so I’ll be curious to see how that plays out.

It’s an advantage certainly, but I don’t think it was significant in this game. The six or seven water provinces I had got me some extra gold and maybe 8-10 gems income, but I would have gotten some of those provinces even without an amphibious nation.

I’ll do a more proper AAR later on.

4122

The Maker of Ruins took Perkins to school. Four 45 damage armor-negating attacks each turn that always hit, tough to deal with. And his buff cycle with elemental fortitude, summon earthpower and invulnerability was pretty useless. Might have been winnable with the right script and gear, but since he’s immortal it wasn’t a big loss.

4123

Wow, so there’s different horrors that can show up? I always thought they were the same…

4124

Yeah, aside from your garden variety lesser horrors and regular horrors, there are a series of Doom Horrors. I have experience with the Hunter of Heroes, who killed my super-SC Tjatse in a game as Jotunheim, and now the Maker of Ruins.

4125

I agree with Scribble in that I dont think it had any real impact on the game.

Depending on the game, it could even be a detriment as it might mean you have that much more territory to defend, and only select troops that can do it - do you defend it all and waste precious resources that might be better utilized elsewhere?

  1. Speaking of water, I think it’s a Qt3 thing, or maybe it’s just an oddity of my experience, but I was surprised at the degree to which folks here seem to feel that they inherently “own” the water provinces adjacent to their land provinces. It wasn’t a huge deal, I just mention it is a quirk that came to me in this game.

Only speaking for myself, I’m pretty defensive about water next to my capital. After that, it’s mostly first come first serve.

4126

Congrats on the win Scribble. Seems to me from the other since of the map that you played an excellent game and dominated for pretty much all of the second half. Glad I did not have to face you directly - just our minor scuffles were bad enough.

I’ll post some thoughts from Eriu a bit later when I have some time.

Yeah, I’ve never seen any, but that thing Scribble fought is downright nasty:

KjV48Mi.png617×528

4127

I randomly rolled this nation, but was pretty happy with it initially. It’s gone from being a candidate for the worst MA Nation, to now at least middle of the road with surprising power in the mid-game. Chief amongst the new toys are:
-Paths of the Deep. Research 0 gateway spell that required E4H3 for five earth gems. Gives amazing mobility to your armies and lets you defend on many fronts. Sorely needed for this nation.
-Avatar of Darkness: Enchantment 5 summon a darkness-emitting immobile statue for four earth gems. Again a marvelous defensive tool, giving you darkness at will in defensive battles. I never actually needed to use it in this game.
-Keeper of memories: A cap-only A1 mage with research bonus 2 and forge bonus 25%. Gets you cheap thunder bows, chi shoes, armors etc. Very useful to gear up thugs with.
-Fury of loss: A research 0 holy spell requiring H3 that gives +4 attack to sacred units. Great for your ancient ones and for all those sacred statues.

There’s some other new stuff as well, including Wisdom of the Ancients which gives a short term research bonus and leaves you with a fairly useless commander. After analysing this a bit I found out that it wasn’t the best way to use my precious earth gems.

I spent a long time testing pretenders, and the design goals were conflicting:
-Had to peak in the early and mid-game since the game settings are such that it may all be over before the lategame rolls around.
-I wanted a minor bless useful for the Ancient ones in early expansion as well as for my sacred statues. Statues aren’t helped at all by an earth or nature blessing, but that is the most useful blessing for ancient ones.
-Obtain better magic diversity, particularly into nature

I ended up with an awake dom 9 A2E3D2N4 ancient oracle, with terrible scales: Turmoil 3, sloth 3, heat 3, luck 3, magic 1. The minor nature blessing would help a little for the ancient ones and the oracles, and he was a kickass early expander due to lots of hit points, fear, awe and immortaility. Had to drop getting a useful bless for the statues. I also had this idea of having him summon gargoyles and gift of reason them to make mobile thugs with lots of hit points due to my construct-friendly dominion. That never panned out, he was too busy fighting and doing other stuff, it was just easier to summon marble oracles for thug duty. I didn’t plan on doing much troop recruitment outside of my capital obviously.

The research plan was to focus on construction (so that I could make artillery and gear for my pretender/thugs) and enchantment for the national spells and personal regen for my pretender.

Not going to go into detail about the game itself unless someone has specific questions, but I want to mention that I had two amazing strokes of luck that helped propel me towards victory:
-Turn 3: I get a hero! Not just any hero, but Kin-breaker the onyx oracle. He’s E3W1H3, with high hit points, 25 armor and 3 misc slots. He’s a real SC and took provinces solo as an expansion party in his own right. With equipment and buffs later on, he was a menace. He got a heroic ability giving him even more base armor, pushing it up into the thirties. MA Agartha’s great heroes was part of the motivation for going L3, but I got the best one and early enough to make a big difference.
-Turn 14: I had up until this point been rather unlucky with random events. Just as many bad as good events, and none really good. That all changed here. I got the 3000 gold plus a bunch of fire gems and a magic item event twice in one turn! As icing on the cake, one of the items was a hugely useful treelord’s staff. Never had any cash problems after this (1000+ gold left in the coffers every turn).

4128

I’m not sure I’d call the hero lucky considering you maxed your design to have a strong chance of getting heroes. That’s good planning on your part.

I was surprised by Agartha’s power b/c I haven’t fiddled with the updated nation. I recall them being pretty pathetically weak and was amazed with the quality of troops/heroes.

As for gold: You basically were using more summons and the gold let you catapult into many provinces and income right?

4129

The gold didn’t really effect my expansion that much, but it had three effects:
-I could immediately put up two extra castles
-I could purchase a squad of 10 elephants to use against Pythium. This didn’t end up being as devastating as I had hoped, because Pythium turbo-researched paralyze to counter it
-The extra windfall let me produce a lot of Agartha’s rather expensive mages and made my research curve a sharp one

4130

KillScribble

Your thugs and heroes made the elephants extraneous.

I pitched a shoe about Agartha taking a province two provinces from my capitol. Playing as a nation with a strong end game, this seems a rash choice and indeed I ended up getting rolled early.

I thought that since the moded version of Pythia had troops that were so much nicer than the original Pythia I would have a stronger early game than expected from a hydra-less pythia. I thought Agartha would have a strong middle game. I think I was right in both of those thoughts. On the other hand, I badly misjudged how strong Agartha’s early game was. I also miscalculated the degree to which the rest of the world would respond to Scribble potentially getting a second capitol early.

Although I was able to destroy the first army he sent my way. Trying to push back into his lands at the expense of expansion proved my undoing. When he destroyed my army, I simply didn’t have the production to replace what had been and I was pretty easy pickings at that point.

That’s twice in a row that I have made early exits. I hate to play to survive instead of playing to win, but I may just play the next game trying to stay relevant to the end.

4131

What does the VP graph look like?

THIS IS 2VP

2VP_zps99c41eec.jpg1024×640

THIS IS 3VP

3VP_zpsf6af52ae.jpg1024×640

THIS IS 4VP

4VP_zps9e7154f4.jpg1024×640

If it’s 2VP’s, then you likely have the same problem that occured in one of the previous QT3 RANDs. (unless the victory condition is meant to be 2VP’s)

4132

It looks like a 4 VPs spread on the graph for Middletown.

4133

Thanks Nate. Good to see at least one of the players is making sure to check that the game won’t end prematurely this time around.

4134

I just got that teacher’s pet feeling. Stop praising me, damn you!

4135

Nate was moving out towards a province he thought he could take with his army. And then I was thinking about leaving enough defense behind to guard against your small army while heading towards your capital, burning and pillaging on the way. Scribble didn’t tell me he was attacking that province, obviously hoping that he’d slip in a large army to go for my capital. As to what happened in that battle, I killed most of his forces, and then my sacreds attempted to take down the giant badass SC and failed. He single-handedly destroyed 90% of my forces in one (well, several dozen) blow(s).

So much for an easy province.

Two things:

  1. If I attacked Scribble, you were going to win by building up and then mopping up the weakened attackers. Scribble is one of the best on Qt3, we all know it. Even if I had attacked, Scribble would most likely have weakened those attacking him as we spent more and more on armies, equipment, etc. Our mages would be fighting and not researching, and while we’d be getting more territory, we’d be splitting it three or four ways. Who knows if the alliance against Scribble would then hold together against Abysia.

  2. I was hoping I could convince Eriu to attack you at the same time. This did not happen.

I’d be happy to answer any other questions. I don’t regret getting mad at you earlier, Austen, but I do regret how I behaved a bit like a drama queen. Apologies to all for having to sit through that. Like I’ve said through PM, I’m over the whole thing. Scribble and Sharaleo (and any others who said the same thing) were right-I should have just focused on playing the game and not gotten my feathers ruffled.

Anyway, I look forward to the day that I take you out in Middletown, whoever you are :).

4136

Random description…

“Her whisper is a breeze, her voice a gale, and her kiss the silent death”

Damn, i like this game.

4137

So, Eriu.

I think I can sum up my play in this game as ineffectual - mostly due to the choice I made to back Austen (Abysia) in striking against Scribble.

I made a researching pretender, with major earth and minor nature bless, banking on my holy mage commander chassis’ as thugs and potentially GoR’ing some summons as required. I only had one sacred and capital only recruitable unit which could benefit from that bless, but I did not think they would be of any use to me during creation.

I bumped into Austen first to my west and established terms with him. We had a river separating us, so that made sense and I was not done expanding. pyrhic (Pangaea) was to my east and we also made terms.

Expansion continued pretty well until we hit the point at which Austen began to make the case for an attack against Scribble. At this stage it made sense to me, Scribble was way out in front in most graphs and was a couple of turns away from annexing Pythium. We reached agreement that action should be taken and my thought was I could easily take control of Agartha’s water provinces. I had easy access to water by this stage and was already building some Tuatha thugs.

The plan was to control the ocean and follow up by ferrying troops across the water via commanders with barrels/bags/pills. This is the main reason I was unswayed by Nate arguing against Austen - I thought I had a sure thing going on in the water.

Turns out this strategy failed me badly. I ended up spending way to many gems over kitting thugs that ended up running into Scribbles SC’s, which made pretty short work of them as they were mainly kitted for dealing with PD/chaffe.

The combination of me being unable to hold the water provinces with my thugs and my troops naturally being indisposed to fighting in the water ended up both dooming this whole enterprise to failure and costing me an exorbitant amount of gems. I had little water gem income, so many of my air gems went into pills, bags and barrels, which were required on every thug and commander considering entering the water. Additionally, just about all of my summons were poor amphibian - Lumber Constructs, Fall Bears, Vine Men, Clockwork Horrors - I had a massive army of crap that was crap in water.

By the time I realised the error of my ways (despite Scribble pointing them out to me) I was down several thugs and a pretty significant gem investment, leaving me with several turns of rebuilding into a better strategy, which was too little too late.

That strategy, in hindsight, should have been the cheaper Sidhe Lords as a chassis, some of those sacred and stealthy recruitables as bodyguards, less gems on kitting them, moving them deeper into Scribble’s territory and conducting a proper raiding strategy.

Truth be told, I should have ignored Scribble entirely and looked to have grown my own powerbase by taking on a neighbour, probably Pangaea - no offense pyrhic! :)

So, all in all, ineffectual, but hopefully more lessons learned.

4138

The Tour

I’m planning on randomly assigning middle era nations.

I have two takers so far and need one other player for my target of 4-5. While it’s not a newbie game, all players are welcome.

Plan on playing on something like Mines and Forts with 100 provinces so there will be a LOT of space in contrast to the way most QT3 games have been set up lately.

4139

If you need one more to kick it off, I will play. I am still trying to catch up to most/all? of you in skill, but will play if you want to get the game going and my skill level is satisfactory :).

4140

The Tour

Players
Kelan
dfs
wahoo
pyrhic
Nate
we have room for one more player.

Since Kelan is a newcommer, I’m going to allow him to select his own nation and then randomly assign the rest of us middle era nations. Kelan please let me know what nation you would like. I would like the game to start around Feb 8th.

We’ll play on the mines and forts map with conceptual balance 1.94 on. [Kelan you want to make sure during pretender creation that you have the CBM mod enabled]

The real goal of the game is to create as much forum woofing as possible. We’ll likely stop when we feel somebody has become unstoppable. The formal victory condition will be three capitols.

My guess is early warmonger Nate tries to steamroll the newbie and wahoo and I have to ally in order to eliminate Nate and the game goes to whoever Pyrhic does not stab in the back first. Wahoo will be deeply offended by my diplomatic tactics and never be seen on this board again. I’m just saying. It’s likely not going to be pretty.