pyrhic
4521
I’d say the highlight of the game later on for me was still finding some cool artifacts available - forge of the hammer lord was the gateway drug, after that mage bane, the egypt hat thing that summons mummies(the mummies turned out surprisingly ineffective as I lacked the gem income to equip them as i probably should have) , the summit, pebble-skin suit (which i found out will turn your awesome 4E caster into a troll after a while), the sword of many colors and the kurgi death broach that summons horrors to name most of them. It was a bit of candy-store for me, and I found myself experimenting with stuff i probably should have left alone - like the tartarian chains, which i still blame the death of my near-invulnerable prophet on.
My experimentation into some of ashdod’s high level summons was pretty fun too. I’m sure we all loved that spinning wheel of death thing i had bouncing around. Banquet and dirge of the dead proved fun too - sadly, i didn’t play that much with blood, and only got one archdevil(F3S3).
I really wasnt aware I killed your pretender near the end - that mustve been in the huge battle we had when i lost my nigh-invulnerable Ditanim armed with mage bane and that amon hetap thing(among other stuff) - that dude was a downright terror. I never watched the end of that battle, but he died when he had nowhere to retreat(not sure why he didn’t return to the castle)
Yeah, now I’m glad I never ended up picking a fight with you… ;)
Great win though, well played.
For the record I had the other Air Queen. Tried to get a Magma Lord, but someone had already snatched them all up. I had a stack of abominations my Pretender had been summoning and half a dozen Ember Lords fully kitted. A bunch of other various SC’s fully kitted, a trove of non-uniques in the shed and more astral gems than I really knew what to do with (beyond wasting them on some dispels that I would not have poured enough into to be effective).
I probably could have defended myself adequately enough had anyone encroached and I had been paying attention, but not enough firepower to go up against any of that. Mind you, I really would have liked to try Master Enslave…
Kelan
4523
Yeah, grats DFS!
I also wonder about that Utterdark spell. I put a huge amount into a dispel once and was wondering how close I was to having a chance at it.
EDIT: I should have read your response more closely. I may have been close, but you probably still had a few 10s more than I had in my try.
Kelan
4524
I will try to post some more later, but here are a few quick highlights from the game that I recall:
-
I started out fairly strong which may have caught the attention of everyone else. I believe at one point early in the game that most everyone was allied against me except for Eriu, and even he stole one province from me before helping me a bit. I was proud of holding people off throughout this part of the game and winning that huge battle with Man was a highlight as if I lost that, I believe I was on the road to ruin.
-
Mid game I got stronger and believe I had some good momentum going. I probably made a bit of a mistake not switching up mid game and going after Agartha. However, if Utterdark didn’t go up when it did, I believe I would have wore down Man and had time to work on Agartha with all my tools and mages (Utterdark literally shut down all hiring for me). He just had such a huge income lead and for so long that it was an uphill battle either way. I should have worked with Man at this point most likely, but then we could still be going in the game for months more.
-
Overall it seemed like we had a lot of evenly matched players, and without a dominating player, the game took a long time to finish. I must admit that I did lose a little stamina for it by the end, and I shouldn’t have. Either way, it was well fought and grinded out by everyone and there were some memorable battles in this one for sure.
pyrhic
4525
Ah, my precious guys…
The first one is the terror: with only a blessing and earthpower on, regen 10hp, Fear +12, Awe +4, SR100, FR125, CR100, PR100, ethereal, reinvig 6…he was also just a little insane…but that’s more like a quirky little personality trait…
Except for Caelum. We just sat in our lofty spires with disdain for the machinations of the world beneath us. Sadly somebody forgot to advise our Pretender that there can be only one.
The stuff nightmares are made of…
Kelan
4528
Wow no kidding. Those things are freaking awesome!
dfs
4529
He didn’t die in battle. IIRC it was a remote assassination spell that slipped through the couple of turns when my capitol was not domed. A horror? I think that’s what it was. Despite my earlier warnings about keeping everybody scripted he went into battle with no bodyguards and no real plan and was fresh meat.
I thought it was Ashdod because we were pretty openly at war at that point and then found the horror spamming unique that you had. Anybody else want to claim the assassination of my god?
pyrhic
4530
Sounds like me - i tried to hit you every round with whatever i could afford, and I do remember hitting your capital a few times before you had domes up, but you’d think i’d remember killing your pretender…
Speaking of which, at one point you were getting spells through 3 domes…ok, fire’s a bit of a gimme, but forest and arcane warding too? CMON!
wahoo
4531
As Man, I fought a war off/on with Pythium a few times. I blew one major combat and he could have put me out early but he was a bit too cautious. Once the war with Ereu started, I was pretty sure I had lost. B/c I knew that I would a) win b) be so beaten up that I would get killed by everyone else. I could see the handwriting a long, long way off as Agartha was given a long respite to build up SCs and horde gems after his first painful war vs. Eriu.
After a long, long painful fight of playing wack a mole vs. Eriu I had him beat. I had his castle sieged and I knew how to beat his army even with fog, etc. But I couldn’t do it fast enough. I got jumped by Agartha/Pythium and I was pretty much a paper tiger when they attacked. The war vs. Eriu had deleted my resources so I got rolled up pretty quick. At one pt, I was fighting everyone left but for Caelum as Ashdod rightfully decided to retake his old land.
I did decide to spend most of resources fighting Pythium b/c I was surprised/annoyed that he teamed up with Agartha and given him the game. So most of my resources were on my northern front letting a tart heavy agartha take everything else. I still had fire gem income but was being pounded by mind hunts, raiders and other spells. That’s went I dark b/c the game was pretty much over. I was losing troops every turn to gold loss and had a few different folks on my last 2 forts at different times. My only hope was to get beaten on so badly that Pythium must turn on Agartha to have a chance. Didn’t work though as Pythium remained on the offensive and I won some big victories but Pythium just had so many more troops etc.
From my perspective, I was fighting hard for about 30 turns vs. Eriu making some progress. Pythium/Agartha were turtling and just stockpiling massive resources. So on the scales I had a huge income lead but it was being spent/wasted during the Eriu fight. So when the other turned on me, I was so heavily outgunned it was ridiculous.
pyrhic
4532
What a strange game - from my perspective everyone else was turtling and I was doing everything i could just to keep my head above water…
My hat is off to everyone in this game for having played so attentively way, way deep into the crazy endgame.
dfs
4534
This.
There was a moment in the first Eriu/Agarthan war where if I had committed everything I had I might have been able to put him down. I didn’t and he rose like a snake and smacked me down in turn. I ended up with very unfavorable peace conditions that I’m sure he accepted because he knew he was never going to be able to break MY castle and live through the dogpile. It wasn’t until Man broke him that I ended up with most of that territory back.
Ah, fair well, old friend. It has been grand…
Hello again QT3 Dominions players.
I’m not currently playing. After Middletown here on QT3 I played in a large RAND game over at the Dom3 mods forum. Should have known better than to play in a game with more than 10 players - micromanagement fatigue set in bigtime at the end and I haven’t touched the game since. Picked up Dom 4 more out of loyalty to the creators than anything, and might get into multiplayer eventually. The problem for me is that I don’t really know how to play casually; I take these games quite seriously and with all the decisions you have to make as the games go long they take up a lot of my free time. This trait made me pretty successful in multiplayer, but has resulted in a bit of a love-hate relationship with a game that takes up too much space in my head when I’m playing actively.
Anyway, nice to see the community is still playing. Maybe I’ll join again at some point and you can teach me all the new tricks you’ve learned since last time. :)
Welcome back Scribble! Now all we need is Mysterio back up in here as well! :)
Well in the new Dom4 thread, anyway…
Kelan
4538
Hey there Scribble. If we get another game up sometime for Dom 4 with a smaller amount of players, I would probably be up for one sometime in the near future. Look forward to you joining up again although I tend to do more learning and getting smacked around by you than the other way around ;). I still have a few vivid memories of our games.
Middletown with me as Jomon and you as Ulm. I still have a spreadsheet here titled “Turn 32 War Ulm Start Communion Planning” where I have this huge spreadsheet of scripting for my reverse communions and fatigue estimations by round. I was all proud of it until you brought a bunch of 2S Member of the Second Tier and did a round 1 mass spam of Magic Duel and wiped out my communion. Granted, you lost a bunch of your mages too since we were both 2S, but it totally wrecked my communion :P. Then a bit later I was all proud of my little mini thug Shura and Ujigami and then you blasted them with a first try Mind Hunt. He couldn’t have Mind Hunt and Soul Slay researched already, could he? Yep!
Sleipnir in my first MP game as Gath and you as Marignon. I lost what I thought was a fairly close early battle to you when you brought along your Green Dragon to the fight. The poison was just a little too much for my guys and I never did recover from that.
Still, lots of good fun and memories.
This perfectly expresses why I stopped playing, as well. Also, in a TBS game as grand and detailed as Dom3, it’s too easy for me to suffer from paralysis analysis, as I take the MP game (as opposed to the SP) much too seriously. I really need to learn put myself into timeout after I get kicked in the nuts before posting online.
I think the MP community would be better served by Dave Perkins returning instead of me. I’m certain he’s more devilishly handsome and wittier than me. Just don’t tell him gg after a game in which he plays poorly. Ooh, he hates that!
