Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I echo Squirreloid's concern - Blackguard, can we have a delay of 48 hrs or so?

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

sure, I'll delay the game for you US folk. we still got more than 24 hours for the original turn duration, I'll add 24 hours for now and if you guys still need more I'll add another.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

extended the game by another 12 hours so all the turkey eaters can finish their turns without unneeded pressure. this will also take us back to evening(GMT) host times as it was until not too long ago.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

as you guys can see Patala has gone AWOL, thus I've extended the turn by another 24 hours(making it 48 hour extension in total) so his teammate can complete both their turns, and hopefully someone will step up and sub for the Patala player.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Is something being done about MA Man? That nation has staled the last 4 turns. That's a full month, the real world kind, with no turn submitted.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

MA Man is dead in the water, the way I understood it, his teammate was dead and he was no contender for anything. he also revealed his identity on the forums already(in case you missed that thread he made). I should probably just turn him AI, but letting him chain stale helps keep the game on a fixed schedule, so it's not all that bad. still, I guess I can turn him AI if it bothers you guys so much.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Man should be turned AI so that there is some disincentive in place to conquer all his stuff.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Man / Mictlan are still very much viable IMO. Not as viable as they were before the douche bag Man player bailed on the game, but certainly not an AI candidate. And an AI nation in a team game (while team-mate is still alive) can cause real (and very unfair) problems for that nation's team-mate.

The ideal solution of course is a sub, or the still anonymous Mictlan player to agree (by contacting the admin, and not via thread posts) to take over control of both nations (which IMO, is certainly far better than the constant staling or turning the nation AI). But only the active Mictlan player can decided if he/she is willing to do that (or maybe call in a favour owed to acquire a new team-mate)

All of this is IMO of course. (as the admin is the person who decides)


Edit - If you want to keep fixed hosting times, then I believe that can be achieved by turning quickhost off. Although I've not actually played in a llamaserver game without quickhost myself, so this will need either testing or confirmation. But in 'theory' it should keep fixed hosting times (unless my understanding of the quickhost feature is faulty)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

hmmm, I was under the impression that his partner was dead, my bad than. if that's the case though than I wonder why his partner didn't say anything about it, or volunteered to do Man's turns himself. not like there's a time shortage in this game, there have been plenty of extensions already and will continue to be if there's a real need.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Calahan:

Well, it's hard to say that Mictlan's game was very competitive. Hard to say how much was it his teammates fault. He can transfer gems from Man, set him AI and grab his provs, before others do.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

seems like Mictlan is played by someone other than the 1 listed on the list IH gave me. also, found someone to actually play MA Man, since earcaraxe abandoned it quite a few turns ago. extended the turn by 24 hours for the new MA Man player, will give him more if he'll need it.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

24 hour extension granted by player request. I guess a few more of you will appreciate the delay as it's nearing Christmas.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

meh, I wanted to give a 24 hour extension, but after llamaserver made it a habit to reject my attempts at doing so, causing me to repeat the command 3-4 times on each extension attempt, now it worked properly for a change and it got extended twice. so y'all have a 48 hour extension instead. sorry for the inconvenience, so if you wanted a longer turn you got it, if not than all I can say is that it'll be over soon.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

11 vps really isn't sufficient. I suggest an immediate change to 15.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

quoting the original post of this thread, which contains the game rules:

team MA Jotunheim+MA Abysia has conquered 11 VPs this turn, which makes them the victors. therefore I have declared the game finished on llamaserver. congratulations to Calahan and DrP, the winning team.

this game should have been over a while ago, there is absolutely no reason to prolong the game even longer once the actual victory conditions have finally been met. Calahan+DrP have been the clear winners of this game for a very long time now, it's just that they didn't meet the 10 VP cap so the game went on, giving the runner up teams a chance to catch up and snatch away the victory, which they failed to do.

so anyway, the moment we've all been waiting for, who was who. warning: the list IH gave me isn't 100% accurate, I will post the original list as unfortunately I didn't keep a very good track of the changes I was aware of, so I can't accurately correct it. please correct the accuracies in the list, if you're still around that is.

1. Squirrelloid + Raiel 53 – LA Mari 64 – Patala
3. Maerlande + Burnsaber 12 – EA Agartha 68 – Lanka
6. Baalz + militarist 43 – Bandar Log 52 – LA Ulm
7. Ferrosol + Kheldron 71 – LA Bogarus 63 – LA Utgard
9. TheDemon + Blazin961 0 - EA Arco 10 – EA Ctis
10. Apsophos + earcaraxe 30 – MA Man 7 – EA Mict
11. Alpine Joe + Ghoul31 18 – EA Kailasa 27 – MA Arco
5. Zeldor + Quitti 35 – MA Machaka 4 – Sauro
12. Agent Smith + Hoplosterum 34 – Ma Tien Chi 32 – Ma Marignon
2. FrozenLama + Trumanator 44 – Shin 29 – MA Pyth
8. DrPraetorious + Calahan 37 – MA Aby 42 – MA Jot
4. Juffos + Hermeister 58 – LA Abysia 19 – EA Yomi

I know that Squirrelloid was playing Patala and Raiel playing LA Mari, despite IH's list saying otherwise. I also know that the LA C'tis(replacing EA Kailasa)+MA Arco was played by Dimaz and Kuritza.

I think a few other players have also switched nations in between them. also, now I can say it, I've subbed myself for LA Abysia until it was defeated completely, than later I subbed in for Bogarus and held them until the end. no idea who the original owners were(whether the list is accurate or not about them), I just took over these 2 last stand positions that suffered from a lot of previous stales, as part of my efforts to keep this game going and preventing people from giving up. unfortunately, as you all know, quite a few people gave up and vanished, which caused us quite a few problems.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

False humility is tiresome, but Calahan is awesomely good at this game. A lot of the attention to detail was his, as was his vicious dismemberment of Yomi/Aby early on, which is what propelled us into a lead we were able to hold. We also settled on a double-blood strategy that was his suggestion. So >50% of the credit goes to him; although I played quite well myself, I think.

I was a bit disappointed that our last turn prep was for not. Those armies storming our last three VPs were outfitted to resist multiple teleporting raiding armies, fires from the sky and murdering winters, and we'd anticipated a major communion-of-death to teleport into EA Saur and try to stop me there.

Nothing manifested :(. I had an absolutely fantastic army of slavering demons, and the castle was empty!

But to give you an idea of how fearsome Calahan is - we had forge orders replacing almost all of the at-risk inventory in the fort storms this turn, and you may have noticed teleporting squads of Asmeg thugs backed up with blood magic casters covering select retreats. As for winning the game faster: well, we might've tried, but that would've been the surest way not to win at all :).

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Apologies for the last turn stale, I misread the turn due time and ended up submitting 4 minutes late.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Too bad, I was hoping for some more fighting with the winners...

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Well, congrats to Cal & DrP.

There is at least one "but" though - Ironhawk should have never allowed you to take 11 pointers and you should have never accepted it. No matter how good you are and how well you played, it can be said that you won because you had better team than other competitors.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Post-mortem:

Should be fairly obvious in hindsight what our plan was as the EA Arco/EA C'tis team. We were of the opinion that C'tis is very underrated in the early game, so we put him in the front, Skellyspam and Elite Warriors kicked major ***. I had an awake Great Sage and was rushing for Rain of Stones and Mother Oak. Blazin took a Lord of Rebirth and planned to put up a strong Gift of Health and do mentors -> tarts. We achieved this and it made us at least a minor contender in the lategame.

We were attacked early by Utgard, I think about 2 turns before we were ready to go to war with them ourselves, but Skellyspam and Elite Warriors beat the crap out of giants. Our big problem was bringing forces in through the various chokepoints so the war with Utgard/Bogarus took a dozen turns longer than we wanted. We should have moved on way sooner instead of taking time to clean up, and by the time the cleanup was finished Jotun/Aby had their commanding lead.

I guess we could have thrown the game at this point, but we counted caps and decided there was an very small outside chance we could grab enough. I dropped BL sucessfully, but we messed up on Ulm, and Jotun beat us to dropping on Lanka by one turn. Would have been an interesting battle on Lanka had it been one turn later. Obviously it would have been extremely difficult for us to take and keep Lanka and grab Patala, Marignon and Man (ok Man might have been easy) for the win, but that's the dom3 endgame for ya if you choose to fight.

Anyway, big congrats to DrP/Calahan, you played the game at a pace far above ours, and that led you to a well-deserved win.

I will mention that at the point where we were asked if we wanted the game to continue, another team (presumably the other Arco/C'tis) had already asked for the game to continue before I had a chance to PM Blackguard. So, it wasn't just us drawing things out. Personally I think that going out fighting for victory in the endgame was far more exciting than conceding the game. I felt much more fulfilled having fought the game to the end, regardless of what anyone says about it having been over long ago. I hope there are others who feel the same way.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

It was a good game. Congrats to Calahan and Dr P. Also much much thanks to the admins!

TheDemon summed up our perspective on the game rather well.

I thought we did decent even with our 8 point team. I think it was a huge mistake looking back not going blood.

The map was generally good though the movement restrictions were a blessing and a curse. Great for the beginning of the game but such a huge pain near the end. It basically encouraged being able to summon up armies rather than actually move armies.

My biggest disappointment was the lack of any large decent battle for myself before the end of the game.

Otherwise if you guys ever do this type of game in the future, you might want to consider anon diplomacy through dom messages only. It would have certainly made the middle/ end games more interesting in that weaker teams could have teamed up on the leaders. I feel that for the most part people were too frightened to do anything of the sort in this game.

I'm taking a dom break for a while but I've enjoyed my first and only sharpnel forums game. Hopefully ill returned sometime soon and play another with you guys either here or in goon games.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Thanks to everyone who played in this game. No thanks to those who attempted to screw it by bailing. I would be very interested to know exactly who played which nation (I was Jotunheim, Dr.P was Abysia for confirmation of our roles). Major thanks as well to our admins IronHawk and Blackguard, without who the game wouldn't have happened. Thanks as well to Zeldor for putting the game together, and a final thanks to Dr.P for putting up with me for 6 months :)

I will probably write up some sort of AAR when I get chance, but free time over the festive period will be a bit unknown (so it might not appear until the New Year)


Well the big flaw in that argument is that is suggests the teams were accurately scored to start with, which I personally don't think they were. Several nations should likely have been shifted a point or two up or down. Plus there could easily have been standard points added for certain factors. Any blood nation should likely have got +1. Same applies to any Forge Lord nation, as they are a must have in a team game (and likely worth ~15-20 gems per turn once mid game kicks in).

For what it's worth I reckon the Bogarus + Utgard team was the best pairing by some way, and they were actually our first choice (I'd be interested to know how we lost out on the tie-break actually). They were easily a 13-14 point team IMO, since Bogarus being a 3 was an absolute joke, and 7 would have been closer to the mark. Since they had the killer combo of blood + best research + Forge Lord = kick arse nation that'll allow all the Artefacts by turn 25 at good discounts, plus have the weakest "early rush victim" part of their game removed. And I still don't think there is a 1 point difference between Utgard + Jotunheim on a 1-10 scale. On a 1-20 scale maybe, but not 1-10.


Plus another big problem for me in focusing on our 11 point team total is that it gives an excuse for the real reason we won, which was generally poor play by most of our neighbours. I'll likely go into this when I do an AAR, but our potentially tough early war became easy when Yomi stupidly just let me walk into their cap for nothing, while LA Abysia decided on bizarre research goals that didn't help in the slightest in stopping my forces. (whereas other goals would have caused problems)

Add to this that during the potentially vulnerable early turns of our first war, Pythium and TC both had chances to attack and make things complicated, but both decided to keep to themselves and wait to die (like a lot of players in the game). But it should have been obvious to both that whoever won the Yomi/Jotun war was soon going to be targeting them. So as I say, focusing on a minor issue like an 11 point team is just diverting attention from the real reasons we won / problems that existed in the game.


Anyway, thanks again to all who played and did the work for the game. Best wishes to you for a fun and happy Christmas and New Year :)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Calahan:

That's what I meant - you should have not picked them, to avoid talk like that. And now you even admit they were worth 13+ points, not 11... I'm not trying to take anything from your victory [as I totally agree about poor play by many nations], I'm just pointing that you should have picked different nations, at least one :)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Just to set the record straight, I took over Bandar Log for militarist around turn 11. The train wreck that followed was all me. Thanks all for the good game, especially our admins IronHawk and Blackguard.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Big thank you to Zeldor for setting the game up, and huge thank you to Ironhawk and Blackguard who kept this game going through all its lulls and difficulties, subbing for missing players is above and beyond the call of duty.


Blazin fails to mention that he came into this game as a newbie having only played for about a month, he played nothing like a newbie, and he leaves the game as a bitter vet who needs a dom3 break :laugh:

Oh and our 8-pointer was our 1st choice :laugh: yeah we might have shot ourselves in the foot there. But I think our result proves our team was competitively strong. We probably should have put our "powerhouse" choice first: LA Marignon + EA Sauro. THAT'S a 13-point team right there. Our picks were:

I think if anyone actually had a problem with the 11 point teams, they would have raised a stink when the game started. Talking in hypotheticals about it now is stupid. You won the game fair and square, and no one disagreed with the rule that allowed 11 point teams.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Hhhmmm, I guess you could look at it like that, in that we should have chosen ourselves not to pick a high points pairing. (although not convinced the nations we picked actually gelled together that well, but individually they were good). But there were 2 problems with that.

1 - As I said, I didn't think the team scorings were accurate, which meant there were already teams picked that were well over 10 points IMO. I guess me and Dr.P could have voluntarily handicapped ourselves, but tbh that subject didn't even come up.

2 - This was the main problem. We had Pretenders and game plans sorted for our 3 team picks, but when all got rejected, we were basically back to square one with the game due to start in under 24h (which is the time IH gave us to select a new pairing IIRC).

So there was no way we could come up with two new Pretenders for two new nations, and a whole new game plan in that timeframe. A timeframe horribly reduced for me and Dr.P due to time-zone differences. So we simply picked, I think, the only pairing that allowed us to follow a similar plan to what we were going to do had we got Utgard + Bogarus.


So if you expect a team that gets all of its nation choices rejected to stay competitive without getting 11 points, then you need to change the selection process, and/or allow anyone who ends up in that position a lot more time to select a brand new team, and come up with new plans and builds. Because expecting that to happen in 24 hours just isn't going to happen (although of course the short time frame might just have been IH's decision to get the game going, which I can perfectly understand)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Hehehe, DrP? Shame on you for lying to me...:)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

TBH, the game was interesting up until EA Ctis/Arco attacked us, since at that point we were seriously considering action against Jotun/Aby once we finished off some of our opposition. But getting jumped by someone who should have been going after jotun/aby instead took away any hope we'd be able to help take down the leader.

Attacking a major power who is not the leader in a RAND game is *always* a bad idea. I learned this the hard way in LandRAND, i wouldve thought other people might have gotten the message from Zeldors ranting in that thread...

Edit: Was that actually Baalz playing LA Ulm? Because Maerlande and I thought the Ulm player was utterly n00bish all game. This can't be right...

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

So I thought I'd take a gander back at the pre-game talk.

DrP is up to his usual mischief here. In retrospective I'm actually not sure how much of this is tongue in cheek and how much is serious:

It worked pretty well for Patala/Marig. Ulm/BL were a bit of a trainwreck though.

I think this assessment was fairly close, but in all honesty I didn't see much of Sauro/Machaka.

Let's ignore the obvious misinformation about Aby/Jotun, and instead laugh that three of the four teams here ended up in the top 3 or 4 (Kailasa was exchanged for LA C'tis).

Oh DrP... :D All 3 of the "actually good" teams... folded quickly.



Baalz is more serious:
Off the mark there.

Baalz surprisingly honest with his own team asessment.

Baalz nails our gameplan fairly precisely.

Sees the Aby/Jotun team for what they are.

And he's right about two teams that had trouble staying alive.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I didn't lie! I just said that I *wasn't Jotunheim*, and that I wouldn't give you any other clues.

I was Abysia, duh.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

At the point where we attacked you, we believed that no one in the entire game had any chance at all of winning a fight vs Jotun/Aby. We did think we had a small chance of being able to race them to 10 VPs, especially if the other Arco/C'tis team were able to slow Jotun/Aby for half a dozen turns. You are of course entitled to the opinion that we were wrong and that we could have taken on Jotun/Aby (with your help I assume?). But our teams opinion was that even if all 3 of the other major powers fought them it would just draw out the inevitable.

I'd probably make the same choice again. In my opinion it was the best option of a bad deal. If we had decided to attack 10 turns earlier instead of wrapping up our Bogarus sieges, it might even have been close.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I agree with TheDemon, he made the right choice and had us *substantially* worried. We were confident we could take anyone (and pretty confident that we could take *everyone*) in a straight-up fight. But that is not the victory condition!

Fortunately, theDemon and co. were gambling on meeting very little resistance, which of course they did not.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I still cannot relax after the game was suddenly over so decided to put some AAR at least...

First of all, congratulations to Calahan & DrP, you played well and deserved the victory. Also, thanks to our admins for their work and to Zeldor for interesting map.

Some pre-game stuff: initially I was contacted by Zeldor who offered me to join his new big team game, I was interested but I had 3 big games at that time so decided to skip it. Then one day I saw a message that the game was ready to start for several days but one of the teams disappeared, so IH was looking for sub. I talked with Kuritza by ICQ and we decided to take it. We were given strange combination of nations, MA Arco + Kailasa. I can understand the reasoning for this team with clams, but without them, it makes no sense. No blood no death. Average start. So I asked IH if we can change one of the nations, and since there were no objections I decided to take a nation I know well enough, LA Ctis. Now, probably we could’ve changed the second nation as well to something more familiar to Kuritza, but the other teams were choosing their nation with the possibility of not getting what they wanted so we decided that changing only one nation will be fair enough. Anyway LA Ctis + MA Arco was much better combo in my opinion, with strong death, potential wish caster without empowerment, forge lord available, etc.
Here I have to say that we hadn’t much time to do the pretender design really, considering the fact that we agreed to play just before going to sleep and were asked to submit pretenders in 24h (so for example I had about 2 hours to actually do it). So I didn’t even looked at the map or considered other teams when doing it, I just took my favorite Lord of Rebirth 4x4 (earth nature air death 4), set d to 2 and gave him also s4 for access to golems and some nice arts. Kuritza took Forge Lord to do rings and stuff later and to help with initial expansion.
Now I seriously think LA Ctis is underrated by many, and the score of 4 is just wrong. I agree it’s not top LA power, but it has strong position during all game phases and worth at least 6 or 7 imo. Also their research is very good, with recruitable anywhere good researchers, mentors and lamps easily accessible. My pretender design 1) gives minibless to the sacred mages 2) allows to search for vital nature and earth 3) allows forging of hammers and boosters. Also good SC chassis for early wars and mobile early RoS caster. Air was necessary as it was the only source of high air for our team, and as I said I added S for the chalice and gatestone.

My research plan for the game (again, without looking at map or teams) was I think standard for LA Ctis – some ench for skellies, constr all the way to 8, with branching into evoc for banefire or alt for lowlevel buffs, drain and darkness in case of need, then conj for tarts and embers. Kuritza wanted to put the fire global asap to have enough fire for many embers as it was sort of hard to go into tarts for him, while fighting with communions before he gets to them.

OK, so the initial part is more or less over I think, so to the game itself.
First of all, when I looked onto the map for the first time, I was really confused :) Actually we planned for me to do initial fighting and Kuritza to build our backs, but I started near the caves and he was in the inner part. My initial expansion went pretty well (all the game I was hiring only desert rangers from cap and I only hired a group of falchioneers once when I still hadn’t enough chariots, desert rangers are very cool) and the initial search also went well, on turn 10 I had: 4 reanimators, +8 d/turn, ench 20 site and library next to the cap. Ench site was really important as it allowed summoning more reanimators. So I started to move into the caves.

The cave part of my expansion also went relatively well, as I already had a good stream of chariots and desert rangers to deal with preset indies without mage support, so most of the mages were researching, also I found 5n 20 thaum site on turn 15 with my pretender which was clearly made for my tarts strategy. I met my first neighbor, EA Arco, when I took one of the provinces next to gateway. Honestly, I didn’t know about preset sites before I did it, but as soon as I saw it I understood that it’s time to look into map a bit more. So I understood that I will gain more by continuing into the caves than by attacking arco that already had the oak at that time. Also at that time I made “map import” feature in my dom3xTester, which allowed me to test the battles with preset indies much faster. By turn 20 I was first on the province graphs, second on research and was going to take the gateway province. Then I took another side of the gateway, and went for another one on the opposite side of my caves. Also I started to capture underwater caves that I had access to, so on turn 30 I had pretty big empire without fighting with anybody.

On turn 31 I finally hit constr 8, and it was the beginning of the end:
turn 32: Failed creating The Chalice, Tome of Gaia, dimensional rod, etc.

turn 33: Failed creating Sickle, etc

turn 34: Failed creating Gate Stone, etc

So we lost most of the gems we accumulated this way. In the end we had the +3d scepter, sword of Aurgelmer, the Ankh and several lesser ones. And the Tart strategy suddenly became 10 times harder. At that time Kuritza saw the opportunity to attack one of our neighbors, Sauro, I didn’t have much to help him there so just continued with my cave expansion. I made several golems however and aided him a few turns later, and I killed 30+ sauro mages with RoS by my pretender, so soon Sauro was crushed except for one big army in the center of Arco lands and Kuritza continued to move into their valley. After some debate we decided that I need access to the battlefield so I stormed the central island and invaded machaka caves.

At that phase (most of the spells researched) my strategy of playing LA Ctis consists of deploying “standard armies” of 100-150 chariots + some rangers, 15-20 sauromancers, buffers for AM, Army of Gold, LaD. These armies are strong enough to kill ordinary enemy groups while their loss, painful in itself, can be replenished in 2-3 turns. I deployed several armies against Machaka and started to slowly move into his lands, he castled all his caves and used RoS and quakes on first round to kill my mages, also they all became deceased due to his poison golems in sieged castles, but anyway I managed to capture most of his castles (his poison golems were really hard to kill, somehow my mages didn’t like to banefire them so I needed to put them all in front to spam disintegrate, fortunately 20 mages spamming disintegrate for 50 rounds were enough to kill mr26 golems even with bottles). At that time Aby started to invade TC, I knew it was the final chance to stop them but didn’t have enough forces to actually do it as the tarts were not ready yet and standard armies were not enough to deal with Aby/Jotun demon armies. We decided to keep the nature to put unbeatable GoH so I had practically no tarts at all (only 2 were commanders & not stupid out of 20+). Also all the game we had problems with the air (for example, in the end before raidings I had +13 A while the next lowest one N was +24) so we weren’t able to forge enough storm staffs to deal with flying demons. So after our twins EA Arco + EA Ctis invaded everyone we had the choice to attack J/A and die, do nothing or attack someone else so we attacked Mictlan and Man. At that time J/A started raiding us and the game ended.

At the end I had 5 standard armies with the addition of grendelkins and ember lords, very powerful group at the central island and 700+ gems GoH. I was hoping for some interesting fights (although I agree that we had no chances alone). Anyway, it was pretty interesting game. Thanks everyone.

PS Also I attach the last trn file here.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

:) Snap.

We had been saving for a 999 GoH since around turn 45, as we had a 30 Ench site to cast it from, and were hoping that would make it un-overwritable (if that's even a word). We had around 775+75N at the end, and were hoping to have 999N before turn 70 (as we were spending a few N each turn)


ps. Thanks for the nice AAR

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

We were also planning for 999 with 30 ench site in the center, we were 2 turns away from starting wishing for gems with lucky s5 guy so probably could've finished it earlier if not for your attack (I had 770 before it happened, +60/turn from provinces and wish).
PS So I'm still wondering who took the Chalice?

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I hear that "later" all the time. Only Jotun/Aby were actually doing something "now". It was quite obvious there is not much room for waiting when you need to grab only 10 VPs.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Interesting on the GoH strategy, we took the opposite view, that if our GoH was ever overwritten we wouldn't put it back up and instead would put our D gems into Legion of Wights and Ghost riders, and our N gems into gear. I had a 20% const site and was near filling my lab every turn. Mind you we had been pumping tartarians like mad and had dozens and dozens already. I had a wish caster ready and astral stockpiled about the last 20 turns but never had a wish come up that I needed. Blazin didn't want me to wish The Chalice as he preferred the Wights strategy, and although I considered the Gate Stone I never felt it would be efficient.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

i'd like to point out that spending extra gems causes the cost reduction site to be useless. The extra gems have no effect until you've exceeded teh unmodified cost of the spell.

(Calahan, you should know this!)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Lol, well even I don't know everything about the game mechanics, since there are quite a lot of them, and the global ones are some that I'm weak on since I've never tested them that much (as it was only last year I found out that boosters had no effect, as until then I thought they did).

Don't remember seeing any posts saying bonus sites don't affect globals (apart from base cost), but can't say it'd be the biggest surprise if that is the case. But never tested it either, as I think this was only the second game I've ever played where I/we had a bonus site. (so never had need to test how it worked before). I thought it would allow the discounted cost to be put back in as bonus extra gems, but if not then I guess not. Useful info to know though (what's the source of this info btw?)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

I discovered it in WTW when i thought i was being clever by casting AN with a 50% bonus site, but it seemed to be common knowledge on IRC when i mentioned it.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

(turn 31)
DrPraetor: You want to make all these items with two forgers at once, at opposite ends of the turn order? That's a potential waste of gems...
Calahan: No! Everyone else could be making these artifacts *right now*! Hurry hurry hurry!
DrPraetor: I think that's unlikely, our opponents have more RP than I do, if they were rushing construction they'd have had Const 8 *turns ago*.
DrPraetor: also, I want to say something *really stupid* that will drive home my comical ineptitude.
(turn 33)
DrPraetor: See? We got all the artefacts we wanted no problem. What's the rush to make the gatestone?

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Too bad I had only one guy able to forge most of them... A good lesson :)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

Congratulations guys.

I took over as MA Man after its long stale hoping to get some practice in as I've been away from Dom3 for so long. MA Man was horribly underdeveloped, especially for late game strategies. I'd have liked more of a chance to sort it out and do some damage, but my personal situation aside, all credit to the victors - it's never easy to win a game this size.

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

So... the game is officially over, we all received an email about it and it just... hosted and wants new turn files. Huh.

I guess we have to set new victory conditions and play 2nd round, now with diplo and revealed teams. How about 15 VPs held for 3 turns? :)

Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
 

yeah, no idea what's up with that... I told llamaserver to end the game again, hopefully it'll actually do it this time, not just send us confirmation emails ;)