Re: Swarm 2.5
 

Ack! The server is back up now. It went down when I wasn't looking.

Sure, I can set you AI, no problem.

Good game, man!

Re: Swarm 2.5
 

After this turn, I will be able to go back down to 48-hour turns btw. I should have this turn done in 24-30 hours.

Thanks for your patience, all. Damned company, actually scheduling *work* for the majority of my business trip...; )

Re: Swarm 2.5
 

Turn 44 up.

Re: Swarm 2.5
 

Turn 46 up.

Re: Swarm 2.5
 

Damn, think that was my first-ever MP stale. Not that I could have done anything.

Re: Swarm 2.5
 

Turn 48 up.

WAR!
 

Marignon's voracious appetite is insatiable. We had hoped that T'ien Ch'i's vast army would give them pause, but Marignon has rolled right over them like a juggernaut. Soon, T'ien Ch'i will be destroyed by those foolish, misguided fanatics.

This cannot be permitted.

We are an honourable people, and we will abide by the terms of our NAP with Marignon, though it may mean T'ien Ch'i's downfall. Hold if you can, valiant warriors! While we do not even have the NAP with T'ien Ch'i that we share with Pythium and Marignon, we cannot sit idly by and watch T'ien Ch'i fall. Soon your foe shall face another enemy.

Marignon must be stopped.

It is now Turn 58. On Turn 60, we will give the orders to our armies, and they will invade on Turn 61!

Re: WAR!
 

The High Inquisitor of Marignon will watch with glee as your pathetic 'god' is tortured until he recants his claim to the Divine Throne. We appreciate your honorable gesture, but breaking our NAP only hastens your downfall.

Re: WAR!
 

Foul magicks are in the air. The wisest old Inquisitors (the ones who are still alive, anyway) say that the vile alien presence under the sea is to blame. The Great Paladin of Marignon finds it odd that the aliens would hesitate to attack with force, out of 'honor', when they don't hesitate to corrupt time itself and thereby cause hardship and death among our peoples. He recommends immediate, unrelenting attack, despite the Pact of non-aggression.

Yet, other voices, most notably the most powerful Grand Master himself, urges caution, not wishing to overextend Marignon's armies.

As a compromise, the following message is delivered to the aliens: "The Empire of Marignon considers your unholy magics to be an act of war. Yet, Marignon is a most honorable nation and will abide by the Pact we have made. We wish to inform you that it is unnecessary to abide by the letter of the Pact, if you refuse to abide by the spirit. Let us keep the orders we have issued to our forces for this month, but next month, if you wish, we can both consider the Pact to be dissolved. Don't keep to the three-month rule for our benefit, for we wish to push your unholy race back into the sea as soon as possible.

Let us know your decision.

-Marignon"

Re: WAR!
 

"Foul magicks" indeed. Leave it to unreasoning fanatics of a false religion to spout such obvious hypocrisy. Be careful Marignon, lest you condemn yourselves with your own words.

Or have you forgotten your own Great Hunt?

That spell has cost me two hard-won empowered bloodhunters, and forced me to abandon a forest laboratory. We can only imagine the harm it has done the other nations, with more forest provinces than R'lyeh has. We had simply assumed you did not consider it a hostile spell against R'lyeh--or at least, that you would publicly take that obviously self-serving position. There was just enough merit to it that we did not seek to pursue the matter with you.

However, if the Great Hunt is not to be considered "foul magicks", then neither can the Burden of Time. --Or is it only that the one was cast for you, and the other against you? Can even Marignon be that blatant in its hypocrisy? It is your nation that has not abided by the spirit of our pact; we have simply made use of the opening you provided for us.

We are also confused. It is currently Turn 59, and our orders have been given to our minions. We will be unable to change them before Turn 60 arrives--and that is the turn that our NAP ends and we can give the orders for our armies to attack, as I have stated clearly in my declaration of war above. Yet you seem to be 'offering a compromise' of ordering the attacks next turn. (Or does Marignon intend to attack us this turn? We would be extremely irate at such dishonourable tactics, and at the least if you tried that we would expect you to extend the current turn, and turn off quick-host, so that we could change our already-submitted orders.)

I suspect there is a misunderstanding here however; you do not strike me as the sort to resort to such tactics. ; ) If you are asking to *delay* our war so that orders to attack cannot be given until Turn 61...let us know. I cannot agree now, without checking the game again, but we would certainly consider it.

Re: WAR!
 

There must be a turn waiting for me at home.. if you've already taken it, then nevermind, let's just wait until the NAP expires normally. I must be a little confused as to the timing of the NAP -- I want it to end as soon as possible. I was giving you the option to end it early, or so I thought. We've been taking turns pretty quickly! Maybe I'm having trouble keeping track.

** Only the unrighteous need fear the Great Hunt! I'm sure your filthy blood hunters were targeted precisely for that reason. You should thank us for destroying them and bringing you closer to righteousness, if such a thing were possible with one of your kind. Your corruption of time with the foul magic of death is clearly a violation of our treaty, since it affects the righteous as well as the unrighteous! The Paladins and Inquisitors of Marignon are righteous by definition, of course. **

Maybe I forgot about the Great Hunt, hmm. But you have to admit Burden of Time is a little different! That's a much worse spell.. I may have killed a couple of yours, but all of mine are going to die. Ack. I was having old age issues as is..

Re: WAR!
 

I'm afraid I cannot sympathize very much with that position. That's like complaining "You punched me back much harder than I punched you!" ; )

My sympathy lies with poor Pythium and T'ien Ch'i. They're the smaller players in this game (although T'ien Ch'i is almost gone) and they have to suffer the penalties of our globals as well.

Let us see what happens now, when our forces collide.

Re: WAR!
 

IndyPendant - dude, you're psychotic.

Xox - okay, first, you're attacking the wrong person, second, we had a non-aggression pact! Please turn around and attack the nearest Ryleh province to prevent him from winning.

Re: WAR!
 

Heh. Thanks, CUnknown...I think... ; )

However, all my alpha-strike has done is even the playing field a little. I've already lost a number of thugs, your armies are much bigger than mine, and you have had the use of those provinces for far longer than I have. It remains to be seen whether I can keep what I have taken from you. I am far from winning the game, and it's in Xox's best interest for him to let us wear each other down for a bit anyway. Frankly, I'm surprised he attacked you at all, particularly if you share a NAP. I suspect he thought you would steamroll right over me, as you have all your other opponents--and he may yet be right! And finally, unlike T'ien Ch'i, Xox and I share a NAP as well, and as a quick search of my posts would show...

...I take a very, very dim view of violating NAPs.

That having been said, I would understand if Xox wants to end our NAP, and give his three-turns' warning now.

Re: WAR!
 

Yeah, it was meant as a compliment. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I've just never seen that sort of thing before.. it was pretty impressive.

I agree that you are not going to win the game in the next few turns.. or, at least I hope that you don't have -more- where that last turn came from. If you put up another turn like that next time, that would be it.

Yes, my armies are stronger than yours (although you have more darkvision guys than I do, so that does even the field a lot).

But -- you've got artifacts and tartarians. You've got 3 globals to my none. You have way more gem income than I do, I believe... at least, it seems that way from the last turn. Definitely you do now, seeing as you took like half my provinces.

It's sort of a global skirmish right now.. we'd both just be trying to take as many of each other's provinces each turn as we can. I think you're right, that this could go on for quite some time.

Pythium can definitely attack me if he wants... I dunno what the best move for him at this point is. My initial reaction to seeing that turn was that you were winning in a landslide, but maybe it is not as bad as that. If I can start taking back the provinces and killing some of those starspawn, maybe you wouldn't have the resources to repeat that kind of thing. We will see.

Re: WAR!
 

Wow, I'm impressed that you still had money for PD after Utterdark.. you must have been saving up cash for this purpose.

Seeing as you have 5 globals active, and you're only a few provinces away from hitting the victory limit, I think it's pretty safe to call it here unless Pythium has a secret plan in the works..

Good game, IndyPendant. I thought I had this one won, but there is nothing I could really do to counter your teleporting tactics. I think, if we do this map again, it would be best to make water races illegal. Or cut down the number of water provinces. Not that you didn't do a great job. Congrats.

Re: WAR!
 

I'm ready to call this game, too. I knew I should have started an alliance against R'lyeh... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/skull.gif

Re: WAR!
 

Thanks CUnknown. Yes, I had been planning (read: worrying about ; ) this blitzkrieg for weeks, including saving up for PD. With 5 globals up and so many provinces, I think I can achieve the win now as well. We'll see how Xox feels first however.

And funny you should mention about the Lonely Mermaid map having too many sea provinces... ; )

Re: WAR!
 

Well, I PM'd Xox, and he has responded acknowledging my win. The game is officially over, and I can finally say good game all! ; )

I received, created, and exploited a number of lucky breaks this game. The first, ironically, was Ulm attacking me very early in the game. If he hadn't, I probably wouldn't have attacked him, but early game he was just about the best possible foe I could have. Low-MR, high-resource troops and limited battle magic, and a capital on the shoreline. Yum!

Second lucky break was discovering a Citadel of the Lore Masters site early on, which jumpstarted my magical diversity and bloodhunting something fierce.

Third lucky break that I leveraged to the maximum was sort of Marignon. (No offense, CUnknown! ; ) He offered to help me mop up Ulm's remaining forces, and I let him take a bunch of provinces primarily to avoid looking like a big, tasty target to everyone else. I was comfortable with what I had won. This developed into a respectfully wary, friendly relationship between our two nations. And then he promptly went on an aggressive conquering spree--which allowed me to turtle up, research and site search like mad, and point frantically at him while whistling innocently...; )

I also found it strange that I got *all* the artifacts. Every. Single. One of them. (That I could build, anyways.) Was anyone else even close to getting them? I went Conj-5 for sitesearching, then Const-8, then Conj-8, with only a few stopovers for a couple of levels in other schools. And except for Wild Hunt, no one else bothered with globals. At all! That surprised me too...

Next lucky break was Marignon's Wild Hunt, because it allowed me the excuse I needed to launch some offensive globals early, exploiting the loophole CUnknown left me. ; )

Last major lucky break was when I realized how I could win. It felt kind of cheap, so I suggested changing the winning conditions so that the provinces would have to be held for 3 turns--and was flat-out refused. So I blinked, thought "okay then" and turtled up even more fiercely. By the time Marignon attacked T'ien Ch'i, I was fully outfitting about 2.5 Starspawn thugs a turn.

I was actually really nervous about that. At first I was concerned someone would try to take my land provinces away from me--forcing me to divert research and equipment resources to fighting a war. Then I was concerned Marignon would conquer too quickly for me to build up a sufficient number of thugs--or that he would do something similar to what I was quietly planning, and blitzkrieg the last ten to twenty provinces he needed for the win before I could react. I was also concentrating almost all of my efforts into one single tactic, and if I lost too many battles when the time finally came, or if I underestimated Marignon's defensive strength even with Utterdark up, I really had nothing left except Globals. You have no idea how much time and thought I put into agonizing over every little detail, or how many hours I spent on those last two turns....

I had a ton of fun with this game!

Re: WAR!
 

I'm glad you had fun! I did, as well.

I didn't realize what a threat you were, I mean I knew you were powerful, but the extent of your power I really had no idea. I probably should have attacked you straight away after we finished Ulm. It's just, I couldn't have defeated you completely (I had no underwater capability), so I decided to save you for last.

I never got the research for artifacts.. I had other research priorities.

About the victory conditions -- I didn't refuse to change them. I thought it was a good idea, actually. It's just it was impossible to change at that point. As soon as someone conquered the necessary # of provinces, the game would have ended. And, it really wouldn't have made a difference anyway.

I thought that I could win quickly by just conquering the world and never even going into the sea. There were 120 provinces, 20 sea provinces, and only 80 were needed for the win. My plan was to force you to react to me being about to win, let you take the first strike, see what you had going on, then push you back into the sea with overwhelming force.

That plan didn't go so well, obviously. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

I thought I was far in the lead in this game, I just greatly underestimated your strength.

I knew you were building tartarians, but I could have handled those. I didn't anticipate you hoarding death gems for all those globals.. Utterdark really screwed me. And I didn't anticipate the teleporting starspawn -- well, I mean I know you mentioned that you were going to do that. But I thought the 15 PD or so that I had would handle them. I didn't anticipate all that equipment you forged for them!

That's what really blew my mind.. everyone one of those guys was equipped out to the teeth. Your conservative playstyle led me to believe that you were weaker than you actually were. If I had all the gems that you apparently did, I would have... you know... done what I did in this game. Expand and destroy as much as possible!! Bwhahaha!!!

But definitely in no-graph games, I can see the reasoning behind holding yourself back. Certainly worked out well here. I think if we had graphs on, this game would have been very different. Who knows what would have happened..

Re: WAR!
 

Sorry Marignon, I did not realize we had a nap, I searched my emails before i attacked and did not see it. Yeah i hate those globals and wanted to attack ryleh, but you were rolling over tien chi and I owed them big time for helping me defeat Pangea who was the one who had attacked me very early on.

My personal victory conditions of defeating Pangea satisfied and no longer having the ability to be a big player i was just trying to support tien chi. In my opinion You should have attacked ryleh instead of tien chi and tried to enlist us smaller empires in your cause.

xox of pythia

Re: WAR!
 

Ha, good work Indy, hope my contribution to the war effort helped out. =)