Re: Fixing the page...
 

I'm not sure why it isn't updating... manually did it this time... we'll see if I can get it to work in the future.

Re: Fixing the page...
 

Tidbit:

And for my neighbor that has expressed concern about blood magic, LA Atlantis' pretender started with 4 blood magic.

Re: Fixing the page...
 

CRONing it?
Owner of script doesnt have the authority to overwrite the owner of the file?

Re: Fixing the page...
 

What's up with the host timing?

Re: Fixing the page...
 

Server was restarted to night before last.

Make sure and check the "Velusion's server info" for this sort of thing.

Re: Fixing the page...
 

Hmm, in one of my provinces, it appears that reanimation did not work. The corpses are still there, and the reanimation orders are still there, but no long dead horsemen.

Reanimation seemed to work in two other provinces I had.

Anyone else confirm this is happening?

A very suspicious coincidence is that if you add up all the troops, it comes out to exactly 75,000 minus 62 (from the scores page).

Re: Fixing the page...
 

Time to go to war then, eh?

Early Age Commentary
 

So, How's it going?

Is the game a success? Too much? Too Big? Cool to see the various ages interacting? Settings working out?

Turn 42 and quite a few are out already.

17 Defeated
7 Gone AI
= 24/62 Humans out of the game

Out of those:
11/22 EA Nations (50%)
9/22 MA Nations (41%)
4/18 LA Nations (22%)

1/8 Water Nations (12.5%)
23/54 Land Nations (42.5%)

Initial thoughts seem to be holding out, Early nations being weaker in the beginning, Late age stronger. Will be interesting to see if the LA nations will be able to hold onto their gains as magic becomes more prevalent.

Water Nations are doing very well early on, 7/8 still surviving and doing well.

Any surprises so far? Players you thought may be defeated that are still holding on (ME!!!), Players you thought might last longer? Surprising nations notwithstanding players?

Predictions? Some pretty hefty leads on troops, provinces, dominion and research so far. Will coalitions such as recently suggested by LA Atlantis knock off the leaders? I could see the game becoming very polarized in short order.

Personally I'm not liking difficult research. I still want a mod that does easy/normal research for the first 3 levels and then moves to difficult 4-7 and very difficult for 8-9. Conj 3 for apsu was painful as I wasn't initially going Conj. Anyway, while my little microcosm doesn't like difficult research, seems like some nations aren't bothered by it *points at LA Ry'leh*.

Kind of disliking the site setting as well, seems low. But again, realizing that there would be TONS of gems floating around if not (even more so than have to be). Late game is going to be disgusting as is. Again, in my little microcosm I wish there were more sites http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Wondering if future games such as this should have a turn limit, say 60 turns. Develop a scoring system and declare a winner? Obviously have to see how this turns out, but just imaging micro'ing one of the last 4 nations!

EDIT: Actually a composite scoring system would be pretty cool. Just to give a bird's eye view on the leaders. Weight the different categories per nations (i.e. income not being worth as much for LA Ermor as for EA Ulm), Add scores to the various measuring units (+1 pt per province, +1 pt per 50 income, +1 pt per 50 dominion, etc) analyze by weight and come out with a #. Obviously not perfect as it wouldn't take into consideration troop quality, SC's or position, but would still be nice to see.

Any thoughts?

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

It seems that we hit some troop border, as i did not get maenads this turn, but when i look at the graphs it does not look like LA ermor & rlyeh where affected also.

btw when i did not make typos, now are 76725 units in the game.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I stand corrected, I recounted and it is 76725.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Looks really strange on the army graphs, Pangaea's line flatlines while others still grow or shrink. But at least I got all my recruits and summons, to the last yumbral. Anyway there have been strange events all the time, my scout reports haven't been reliably delivered ever since R'lyeh cast the Eye.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Thanks for the breakdown on numbers. Very informative.
And the ideas are good also.

Personally I would have liked for the game to run totally vanilla and default settings for the first game so that we could get some real answers on all of that.

I suppose I could. But Im probably going to end up waiting until enough of these have run to make it worth doing one at the other end of that scale. Full chaos mode.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I'm having a good time. I'm glad i joined, but i'm not sure that i will play the next one- i'm anti-diplomacy and it's not optional in this one. The interaction of the ages is definatly one of the highlights for me.

I expected faster attrition, i'm thinking that having lots of neighbors made people cautious about quick strikes.

This is not a surprise, i felt water was the place to be and was absolutely shocked when i saw the draft results- i think me (MA Oceania) and Dreamlands were the only water nations that did not get a bonus! What i now understand though is that the amphibious nations are extra cool. Being able to hide from land powers in the water and from water powers on the land is a major strategic benefit.

I'm thinkin' it will be a three way between R'lyeh and their vassals ("The Warsaw Pact"), the Big Alliance ("NATO") and Ermor ("Red China"), but that's pretty speculative- my little Seagulls of Death have been busy, but it's a big map and my info is, of course, incomplete.

It bugs me too, but i still think it's nessicary to prevent utter chaos.

I think "points at turn x" is a fine way of playing in a general sence, but 60 is too short and for a game this big i'd perfectly happy to just play to turn X and call it a wrap.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Actually the early age has much better bless rushers so I thought they would do better. Its really more about diplomacy though than capabilities.

The map is definitely water friendly - but we'll see how much that translates into late game.

It's turning into WWI with large webs of alliances/pacts.

Yep I like your suggested model better - but the current setting is better than the normal setting.

I personally think that too many MP games over-saturate with gem sites, so I'm fine with the recommended average.

I think that 60 turns is way to low - but I could see 120 turns as possibility. Perhaps I'll see if we can get everyone to agree on a set end time for this one.

Eh - simple provinces work for me. Its all about conquest - everything else is just a tool to get you there.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

My biggest surprise was how average (with a few exceptions) the typical bless rush nations have done. Lanka is doing very, very well but otherwise most of the heims are either eliminated or about average in the graphs.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

It's been a lot of fun and I've been involved with a fair chunk of diplomacy as well. I concur with Tyrant about being in the water too. My lack of MP experience making me desire to hide beneath the waves combined with MA R'Lyeh being my favorite nation, made my first choice pretty easy.

Personally I like low-average site frequency and don't mind the difficult research, although in my SP games I tend to leave it at normal.

The gigantic map means that a large chunk of it is not visible to me, so all these massive power bloc struggles have not touched my borders yet. I am witnessing a lot of conflict to my north, but the long fight between the more southerly land powers near me is over with EA Abysia being defeated.

I'll be looking forward to joining more of these monster games in the future, especially with nation selection like this.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Well, there has been a quite strong tendency to gang up on rushers. We're watching our neighbours on intensity that would put old women in small villages to shame. Can't say anything about proper bless nations since we don't have any up here in NE continent (except EA Oceania, but that isn't discussed in polite circles), but at least Midgård's rush proved to be quite fatal when he was ganged up quite badly.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I had a few thoughts about what happened, my main one being that being jammed into a corner on a map this size is a ridiculously huge advantage. Man was able to attack me without fear of an opportunistic strike from behind, or the sides, because he was stuck in the corner bordering only 3 nations, with no nation at his back. Whereas Midgard was touching no less than 8 nations.

I would recommend that in the future the map be wrap around if at all possible. I'm actually really disappointed the automatic map generator doesn't have a nice way of making wrap around maps.

Also, I'm still very new at this game, and I had a terrible pretender/scales choice, even if the strategy I went with was sound. I really didn't spend as much time as I wanted creating my pretender for this game.

Jazzepi

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I would love to run one on a tower map (tall and thin, only room for an enemy on each side of you). But it would need to be wrapped top-to-bottom, and the game cant handle that without blowing up

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I am pleasingly suprised by my pretender's performance. Only 99 more kills to a round thousand http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Having an SC was really really useful in early game. Does not matter that much anymore of course, now that really powerful magic is starting to appear.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I am really enjoying this game too. But to do well, diplomacy is the most important. A more strategic map can be thought up, for example, a Map that is made of a series of concentric rings. At its simplest, the outer most ring would have 62 provinces, the next one would have 31 provinces, then 15, then 7, down to the last province in the center. Winning can be by victory points in the inner circles.

Then we can use the random special province mods for every province, mod out all teleportation spells. Set income, gems, resource to max. This way we have a very nice and tight fight or die map with diplomacy having less effect at the beginning, although it would still be important later in the game.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Gandalf, about the tower map wraparound, couldn't you just manually edit the connections between the top and bottom provinces so they're connected? I haven't done any mapping but I had the impression that province connections were editable, and there would only be a few provinces that needed to be tweaked.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Seconding the notion about the advantage of being in the corner. In addition to that Man did play his cards right there, with biding his time before attacking you, going straight at the capital and reaping the rewards of several nations' efforts. Now he's quite clearly the biggest guy in the continent, with few nations being able to be more than mere speed bumps. But Midgård starting essentially in the middle of everything was quite a raw deal.

Wraparound would be a good thing, it might also help to make sure no isolated land masses are left stranded by seas as is the case now.

But hey, a fun game. I'd be taking part in another like this too, maybe not the extreme kind LoloMo proposes, though.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I definitely enjoyed myself even though I got reamed by four nations at once ;P It was an interesting experience.

One of the big things that hurt me is that I didn't think hard enough about my neighbors. What I should have done is demanded vassalage from EA Maverni instead of attacking vfb, as he was more than willing to pay item tribute to keep me off his back. Then I could have gone after C'Tis who had no good early-mid game counter to a billion skin shifters. Unfortunately, for me I didn't really pay attention to what the makeups of the other nations around me were, which speaks to my inexperience at this game.

It also would have given me more time to develop my research towards storm + mist.

Also, vfb is the noisiest mother in the world when he's getting attacked http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Jazzepi

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

"Predictions? Some pretty hefty leads on troops, provinces, dominion and research so far. Will coalitions such as recently suggested by LA Atlantis knock off the leaders? I could see the game becoming very polarized in short order. "

I would not call that a coalition to knock off leaders. Given that LA Atlantis has just as many provinces it's just him wanting help to get rid of competition.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I'm getting a bug where I can't see one of my commanders on the map province screen. She shows up in the army setup list, but not on the map screen, so I can't give her any general orders.

???

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Uh, sorry to ask this, but gotta make sure... You sure he isn't just last of the group and you'd see him if you scrolled down the map commander view? The down arrow has confused people before, it's quite hard to spot (to right of the bottom row of commanders displayed on map).

EDIT: and oh, I didn't know province count was THE big factor. Always thought the gem income and research were the graphs to look at. But you learn something each day. I'm relieved to know R'lyeh isn't the top dog after all. Canceling all the blights, then. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Thanks. Still took me 5 minutes to finally spot it. Guess I've never had that many commanders in one place before. You can tell I don't play Ermor.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Friends don't let friends play Emor.

Jazzepi

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

GP - I recall that the "ring world" maps wrap just fine. Technically they wrap in both x and y but if there are no province connections going from top to bottom, it's effectively a single strip.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Hey, Man, didn't we have a NAP?

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

No, we don't. I was quite careful never to agree to one, although you did mention that you wanted one.

I have stored copies of all forum communications, but I'm quite sure I never agreed to one in-game, either.

This is one of the reasons I was so paranoid about you attacking *me*, earlier on.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Your post prompted me to put the finishing touches on a small map idea that I had started back when I was working on my (never-to-be-finished) map editor.

I posted it in the map/mod forum:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...;Number=537867

I will go back to lurking quietly now... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

MA Ctis is happy to report that all of the strange creatures from LA Atlantis and MA Oceania that recklessly invaded our peaceful swamps have ended up in the cooking pots. Every single one. Of the 400 LA Atlantis creatures and the Trident Lord and his mounted armies that entered the Swamps not a trace remains.

All of MA Ctis lands have been reclaimed in one wild night of retribution.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

We've heard reports that LA Ryleh used mind hunts to eliminate the Atlantian's commanders. Just another reason for all water nations AND land nations to descend upon Ryleh.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

though you may have heard rumors to that effect, LA Atlantis had 5 mages and a prophet at the big battle and all of his troops. His mages had gems, a skull staff, a bag of air, 3 bottles of water, boots messenger, robe of the sea, wineskin. He lost the fight fair and square.

And last i checked, MA Ctis is on the north of the map, and LA Rlyeh is on the south. It seems like the alliance's armies are headed in the wrong direction if they want to reach LA Rlyeh.

I am not allied with any super power-much less LA Rlyeh. Though I am allied with MA pythium-as you darn well know. A brief check will reveal that Pythium is an astral nation. And though it may surprise you, I can mind hunt as well. MA Man can attest I made a s1 booster item for him ages ago.

* as an aside, MA Ctis is fighting 1 against 4. And YOU are crying that it is not a fair fight?

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

LA Pangaea is officially changing the name of it's land. It shall now be called Southern Vanheim.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

So how is things going for you all ?

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Interesting. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

By far the funnest Dominions game ever for me.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I'm doing fairly well, but I'm not sure how I'm ever going to get into/across the water.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

This game is interesting. It's quite scary to heard that a player already have most lvl 8 items and the elemental royalty...

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I've had a terrible time turning in my moves lately. I think I staled last turn even though I thought I turned them in. And yesterday I planned out all my moves, hit "E", and the game blew up. I'll have to try again today.

Don't AI me! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

If you insist I might be convinced to accept your vaselage. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

What race do you play? I do not see you listed on the 1st post of the thread that lists all the players.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I've been saying "LA R'lyeh is winning! LA R'lyeh is winning!" for quite awhile now. It's real, it's happening - LA R'lyeh is dominating every graph that matters, he has all the powerful summons and all the significant artifacts. Eventually (and this is fast approaching) a critical mass point will be reached and there will be no feasible way to stop him.

While I sympathize with Xietor and am glad he is doing better - LA Atlantis and his allies are not the biggest threat at the moment. LA R'lyeh is. If left alone he will gobble up everyone weak on land and then start working into the bigger players.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Velusion,

Since Lanka LA Man La Atlantis and MA Oceania are throwing armies, gold and gems at me(and i own what 15 or so provinces), how do you expect anyone to take LA Atlantis cry for help seriously?

But do not feel sympathy for MA Ctis, feel sympathy for those attacking me.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Well, people are continuing to capitulate.

LA R'lyeh will threaten his neighbors with destruction unless bribed to leave them alone, and they are agreeing.

So no united front is forming and it appears likely that LA R'lyeh will advance unopposed.

I don't think it's possible, given the combined gem income of the rest of the world, for him to become invincible just by sitting there and researching and making supercombatants. But if he can do that *AND* continue to expand, there's not a lot we can do.

P.S. - the proper course of action is to identify those who have capitulated/aided/sided with LA R'lyeh, and to destroy them mercilessly. I know of only one example: LA Patala. He must be killed with dispatch and immediacy.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

Even if LA Rlyeh is looking strong, dont forget about ermor. Now he should have enough research, so that when he becomes threatened, he will be able to cast BoT and Utterdark and then a lot of nations will look very bleak.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

*shrugs* either would just get dispelled. I'm not going to be casting either of those this game.

Re: Early Age Commentary
 

I think ermor is a lot easier to deal with than Ryleh. I would hope by now that all the other underwater nations would have some plan formed against Ryleh by now, but who knows....