Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

T'ien Ch'i,

Your arrogance appalls us. You may have beaten us this time, with your underhand use of magic to shred our brave soldiers. But to win a battle is not to win a war. We will fight again.

Sauromatia.

(OOC) I must say I'm very impressed you've managed to get magic working so well as a newbie. I've still never managed to kill more than about two people per battle with it. How did you get the knack so fast?

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Maybe hes not a noob! The bastard!

Ever seen that episode of south park where butters pretends to be a freak? We will find you out!

Btw, check your PMs llamabeast

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

FAJ, you too.

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

I'd like to know, as long as it doesn't ruin his strategy or anything, how T'ien Ch'i is using the magic to full effect. My competence is pretty much troop buffing, and long distance artillery spells (lightning, all the fire shooters) that maybe kill 2-3 people per battle. I guess if you had like 15 astral mages casting mind burn every round it would make an impact http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

(OOC) This is my first game as Tien Chi, my first multiplayer game in Dominions 3, my first EA game... but it's not my first Dominions experience. I played a lot of Dominions 2, and while a huge amount of the tactics are completely different, some skills carry over.

Dominions 2 Magic was grounded in the fact that there were much smaller armies. An invasion of 60 guys was taken seriously. As such, the king of the battlefield was spells like Mind Burn and Frozen Heart which autmatically hit. In Dominions 3, armies are much larger, so I made a gamble that spells with a small area of effect would almost always hit something, and thus be amazingly effective.

That gamble appears to have paid off - I didn't even research the classic 100 Percent accuracy spells I knew and loved in Dominions 2 because the changes in the game seemed lik they would make different research paths good.

So no, I'd never done this before, but I've done something completely different and could make a logical guess as to what I would need to do differently to adapt.

-Frank

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Another thing to consider is that new players frequently overlook the Path Buffing spells. These are spells which boost your power in a particular magic path (Summon Earthpower, Summon Storm Power, Power of the Spheres, Communion Master/Slave, etc). With these spells in hand you can turn a relatively weak battle mage into a powerhouse.

Examples:
Generic 2E mage, what can he cast? Legions of Steel maybe? blah. But cast Earthpower to take him to 3E and suddenly he can cast Bladewind, which will just slaughter all the lightly armored enemy.

Generic 2F mage can cast fireball. Pretty good. But buff him to 3F with phoenix power and he can cast Falling Fires. Then you can just watch your enemies burn in the huge AoE

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Also note that summon earthpower has a double bonus as it also gives extra (+4 iirc) reinvig to the caster, letting him cast even more.

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Oh, and I think our battle against Arco went about as well as could be expected.

The Great Catsby has Spoken.

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Looks like Arco's god was slain in that battle...

Confused and enraged
 

Ok, is this game updated/patched? What version is the host running?

I just got a battle message that said I lost a battle, being beaten by the defenders; killing about 95% of their troops and a commander while loseing about 30% of mine and a commander.
When I watch the replay, The enemy routs and I win the battle (by a pretty decent margin), and the commander that is reported dead is clearly alive and well.
But, the commander, after the battle, is actually dead, and the province was not taken.

This is confusing and frustrating.

I am using v3.01. What could be so different in the two versions that would change a large victory for me, to a loss for me, with the loss of my most powerful commander?

Re: Confused and enraged
 

This game is still running on 3.00. It's a bad idea to upgrade a 3.00 game to 3.01 because the Hunter of Heroes doom horror will appear and kill everyone in the hall of fame. Once 3.02 comes out this bug should go away and the everyone can patch. New games can safely start on 3.01 by using a mod to eliminate the Hunter of Heroes.

If the server and client use different versions the battle replay will not match the results exactly. It is usually close, but... sometimes not. This is the only problem resulting from mixing versions.

In the meantime I recommend you install two versions of the game, one 3.00, and one 3.01, and you use each one to play games running on that version of server.

Re: Confused and enraged
 

But what is so different about the versions that would cause such a huge difference in the outcome?

Re: Confused and enraged
 

My understanding:
The game doesn't send the whole battle, just the initial setup. The results are actually computed by the client. But, different versions have different random number seeds, so the results come out different even though the algorithm is the same.

Re: Confused and enraged
 

Tons of things. Maybe some weapon or armor was tweaked. Or Spell AI. Or morale. Or several of those together. There are too many things to count that could drastically effect the outcome of a replay when compounded over multiple combat rounds.

The key thing to remember is that this is just a battle *replay* inconsistency tho. Not a problem with turn generation. Its annoying but it won't alter your gameplay.

Re: Confused and enraged
 

I reinstalled at 3.00. Apparantly, my Commander got killed because when My army routed (for apparantly no reason) he was too fatigued to run. He was fatigued because he cast blade wind. He died with earth gems on his person. That dumb bastard would rather die than use his earth gems to reduce fatigue. I gave them to him FOR the purpose of reducing fatigue. How can I get them to USE the gems?

Re: Confused and enraged
 

Most people complain that their mages use too MANY gems to reduce fatigue...

Unfortunately there is no way to control what your mages use their gems for. In dom2, they would use more gems if it would keep them from going over 100 fatigue, but if they would go over 100 fatigue anyway, they would not use gems unless necessary to keep them from going over 200. No mage would ever voluntarily go over 200 although sometimes it would happen anyway (communion slaves with more than one master). There's also a limit to using gems for fatigue reduction, the math of which I no longer remember.

Unfortunately, sleeping mages left behind on a losing battlefield is just one of the hazards of dominions combat...

Re: Confused and enraged
 

Gem usage is a complicated affair. In your particular case my first instinct is that you have been bitten by the rule where a mage cannot use more gems per spell than he has natural (unbuffed) skill in that path. So say you had a 2E mage, he would need to use a gem just to cast the spell and then perhaps another for fatigue. But even with this, he will still get 40 fatigue per shot. And that adds up fast.

Re: Confused and enraged
 

Serves me right for not waiting the one turn to research summon earthpower :|

TBH, I didnt know you could raise your level with gems, so I expected him to cast fire cloud, not blade wind.

Re: Confused and enraged
 

You mean you gave a guy gems and sent him in unscripted? thats a little silly dont you think?

Re: Confused and enraged
 

I gave him gems when he left my capital, as I would have researched evo4 by the time he got to the front lines. I didnt have earthpower yet, and forgot gems boost level, so i didnt expect him to cast anything with those gems.

Re: Ha. Ha. Ha.
 

Yep. With Arco's god dead and cursed, we can really get ready to research properly.

The Great Catsby has Spoken.

A Public Announcement
 

The server will be rebooted tomorrow morning shortly after the turn generation (or earlier, if everyone plays their turn today). This will result in a brief outage of around 10 minutes.

Re: A Public Announcement
 

I'm Agartha

Tips to everyone that borders Atlantis and Maverni. They are both grinding down my huge forces but in the end I see no way I can survive and I beleive that quite soon they will break through and exterminate me.

If you border either Atlantis or Maverni... beware as I go down they will turn their forces somewhere else... perhaps against you!?!?!?

Re: A Public Announcement
 

I just attacked T'ien Ch'i again, only to be met with, at a first count, 13 mages! So obviously I lost again.

I took 4 mages with me, each with level 1 in astral, and a couple of astral pearls, and scripted all of them to do magic duel, in the hope of disposing of some pesky Celestial Masters. Three of them did it and died, and the fourth one did something else.

So, I have a couple of questions - was it just bad luck that I lost all three duels, or did the Catsby do something clever? And why did my fourth mage not do what I told him?

Cheers,

llamabeast

Re: A Public Announcement
 

It was probably either bad luck/superior enemy mages that had you losing. Would you like to tell us what sort of magics were employed by both sides?

Re: A Public Announcement
 

What do you mean? His mages were Astral 1 also. As for how he killed my army - blade wind, magma bolts, falling frost, acid bolt etc.. Bad things. On the plus side, the Catsby is now horror marked. Is that a very significant thing? How often do horrors attack? He'd probably just blade wind them anyway.

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Magic usually targets creatures with more hit points first. Catsby has over 300 hit points, but is himself a pretty serious Astral caster, so your magic duelers targetted him preferentially and then exploded.

As to the Horror Marking, it's pretty obnoxious. Since this is a pre-patch game, Catsby will probably be attacked by Umor the Eater of Gods within 10-20 turns. That means that he'll have to be scripted to casting Returning pretty shortly, which means that he won't be appearing in a lot of future battles.

-Frank

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Public service announcement: The server has been rebooted. Regardless of the apparent "hours until hosting", the next turn may be generated at 10:10 AM Pacific time tomorrow (Monday), which would be the normal generation time. Or, I might forget, and then it will generate according to the server's own timer, which will be somewhere around 4:30 PM. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: A Public Announcement
 

To Neifelheim,

Anodyr to us was more than just a battle. It was a symbol to our people that no matter how intimidating and powerful, any foe can be conquered. We hold no illusions that we can compete alone against the evil alliance you have forged with Vanheim, but we do hope the battles over the last few months have shown the world that all is not lost and there is still hope.

As our people curse your pretender, and his unscrupulous ascent to power, we do respect your warriors. The giants that fought so bravely in Anodyr had no chance of retreat, and while many tried to flee the field in panic, the true giants of old stayed the course and fought to the bitter end.

All were killed, including the ones who tried to flee. Let it be known that the giants that fought with their last breath will be buried in their frosty halls. Ships have set sail to the south not to make war, but to return the bodies of these brave warriors that we have grown to respect so much.

We recognize that the chances of peace between our two nations is slim to none, and at this very moment you aid Vanheim, by allowing them safe passage through your lands into ours. We have seen the Vanheim war machine first hand, a keep in every province turning out Vans to annihilate the entire world.

We our a people of honor. As was promised, you are now expelled from our rightful lands and the talks of peace can begin if you so wish. We do not know what the future holds, and we can only speculate at the power of the evil force that stirs in the South, but a victory is a victory, and the glimmer of hope has been restored to our people.

WORLD WAR
 

With the attacks on the nation of Oceania by R'yleh and Nifelhiem we have been forced to call all nations to take a side. Will you stand for justice and valor with Oceania and Vanheim or will you go down in history as the weak who slobbered at the feet of the strong?

make your choice...

Re: WORLD WAR
 

I assure you, the (apparently) simultaneous attacks by our nation and Niefelheim are purely coincidental. While we have good relations with the giants, our military operations are not coordinated with theirs.

To all unaligned nations, I assume you are all sufficiently occupied with your own problems to take an interest in what is entirely an aquatic dispute between Oceania and R'lyeh.

Re: WORLD WAR
 

To all filled with fear,

There's no alliance between Niefelheim and Vanheim.

Because of necessity we have been to common wars against Ermor and now Caelum that attacked Vanheim after Niefelheim attacked them.

Vanheim wishes now nothing more than time to lick our scratches and build prosperous well being for Vanir, Ermorean and Caelians the same.

-Jörund, The Prophet of the True God

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Magic Duel always attacks the strongest enemy astral mage, it doesnt care about HP. If Catsby was the strongest astral mage you had then all the other casters would have attacked him and failed due to his astral advantage. Dangerous thing tho, putting astral on your pretender. Your enemy could have gotten a lucky shot and killed your pretender with one spell!!

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Then peace shall be. You fought bravely and a honourable battle. When Vanheim cut my supply lines (now why do you think he is my ally?), I had no chance against you. I was hopeing that your missbelieve of my alliance with Vanheim will make you think I'm stronger and you will accept a pace and I can set foot on your continent. You did well not accepting it and earning your lands and reputation with blood.
With Vanheim we are drifting towards a cold war, not alliance, since I attacked one of his allies in the same time (but not alliance) with R'yleh.

To C'Tis: The time when the mighty god of the Sons of Winther will trear it's chains is near. Our peace agreement stands until that time. I'm waiting for your proposal for the future... Until it's too late.

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Well it's not that near is it? It's about twelve months away isn't it?

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Indeed, 10 more turns... Give or take a few.

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Lord DreamSlayer of Neifelheim,

As far as I am concerned, I will continue to honor a non-aggression pact between our two nations. If in the future I should decide that a further buffer zone is needed between my capital and your provinces, I will notify you beforehand in order to allow you proper time to mount an adequate defence. Your past honorable actions demand no less from me.

I will recommend to you, however, that should you decide to march upon my lands, be sure you are at war with no one else for you will take heavy losses.

--Kydorias

Re: A Public Announcement
 

Kydorias,
My dear friend, I wish peace as much as you do. If I wanted to destroy you, I could have done it ages ago. In the other hand I left you to prosper and gain strenght, for I think your men/lizards are honourable fighters and they are better as allies then slaves. I wish you no harm, quite the contrary, I wish to propose an alliance to you, if your hearth bears no grudge against me or R'yleh, my trusted friend.

To Atlantis and Caelum:
I wish to offer peace to you. In the past we may had some minor missunderstandings that led to a full scale war, but as with Pangaea, I hope the war will end, and a new age of freedom and happyness will come.

To Jörund, The Prophet of Vanheim:
Our nations are very close to the end of the peace. When your warriors slew my prophet and my best warrior, and took ten magic items I started to suspect that your intentions are somewhat hostile, but many other Gods told me, that we are allies. I still don't understand this, but if so many GODS tell me that allies tend to kill each other as a sign of friendship, I may accept it. But since our numbers dwindled in this friendship I propose finding another way of showing it, like trade or leaving each other alone...
Thanks a lot, my dear friend.

Thanksgiving
 

With the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday in the US, has any thought been given to stopping the turn timer? I will still manage to play my turns but sometimes games do stop or slow down on holidays.

Re: Thanksgiving
 

Guess not. OK, I will be away for a week starting tomorrow and will be back on Monday. I will leave the game host running, however, if there is a problem (power failure, etc) I will not be able to fix it until Monday.

Re: Thanksgiving and forgiving
 

Unfortunate slaughter of Niefelheims army,

We are very sorry for Niefelheims losses.

Our high command would not foresee the possibility of the Niefelheim giants attacking away from the city that they besiged. This would have left a hostile city with a wall behind their backs. Our command thought that giants would get hungry - so they wont leave the fortress behind their backs.
But still they left!

Meanwhile our army that was scripted to deal with a fragile mass of Calian archers killed caleians and occupied the province they were ordered to take.

Giants left their sanity alone to besiege the Caelian fortress and ran themselves in corpore to province our army was ordered to take.
Vanir watched awestruck.
Giants on the fields were running towards our victorious army!

As the giants were coming against our army so fast our men had only one choice. To obey their orders and hold the province.
Priests and mages bowed their heads and wholla! the skies opened immediately and down stuck the fury of Vanherr Thanatos. More than 20 Giants were slaughtered and 16 of our troops died as well.

We mourn for our and nifelheimian losses and only hope that our nations could forget this unfortunate accident and let it remind us of the importance of cordinating the war efforts and of the importance of communicating wishes of each party.

We hoped seriously that Niefelheim could have agreed on our very good proposition (for them) that would have given them more than half of the Caleian lands and Caelian capital to the giants.
But no, they would not agree on those terms!
Instead they claimed that in addition to more than half of the Calien lands and capital Niefelheim would like to trade our province that Calum had temporaly occupied to us! Huh.

We did not agree on such a offer.

And this resulted in chaotic advance to Calian lands and neither of us would know where other would advance. This chaos resulted in their elite Giants army falling.

Now again We have sent Niefelheim yet another proposition which we seriously hope them agree on so we would not have to weaken our offers any more.

-Jörund, The prophet of the True God


---



Thanksgiving suits us even thou we dont thank the occupation of the indians or afganistanians or iraqians or anyones lands by warmth in in these parts of the cold world. But we forgive because the occupiers never know what they are doing.
-Whollaborg

Re: Thanksgiving and forgiving
 

The nation of R'lyeh is in need of some small number of nature gems, perhaps 15 or so. We have astral pearls, earth gems and a handful of death gems to trade.

Artifacts for sale
 

The nation of Sauromatia would like to declare to all interested nations that it has developed some small skill in the construction of magical artifacts, and would be willing to produce and sell such artifacts for a commission.

Sauromatia.

(OOC) I can produce large numbers of items up to Construction 4, with Death 2, Astral/Nature 1. Other magical paths may be available on enquiry.

The rate will be 1.4 times the casting cost, e.g. 14 death gems for a skull mentor.

llamabeast

Re: Artifacts for sale
 

R'lyeh,

Sauromatia will provide the gems you seek. In return we would ask for as many death gems as possible, with astral pearls making up any shortfall.

Sauromatia.

Chilling
 

Niefelheim told that they are going to attack us! Splendid http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
-Jörund

Re: Chilling
 

I told you I wish peace. And I offerd you to keep any province you wish in exchange for only one province. If you want everything and wish to gave nothing in exchange, that means war by my terms.

Re: Chilling
 

I have to say, I'm really enjoying reading the diplomacy in the thread for this game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif In most games I've played a lot of diplo and trades are kept under the table and its a lot of work to find out whats going on in the game. But here you guys just put it all out for the world to see and its really fun to watch! Also, this is perhaps the most fluid diplomacy I've seen in a game. Frequently, in dominions, when a war is started there can be no peace until one or the other player is dead. But here you guys make war and peace very easily - it makes for a much more dynamic game!

Re: Chilling
 

Sssh, Ironhawk, don't tell them how the game is "supposed" to be played, this game is far more fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Artifacts for sale
 

Fascinating. We have Construction 6 and will make a better offer to any nation which is friendly or neutral to Tien Chi.

Neutral Nations get things fir a 20% markup, friendly nations get items for even price. We know that you know who you are.

They can make Skull Mentors. We can make Skull Faces. And we'll do it too. We can make any item of up to Construction 6 except Blood items and will do so at a reasonable rate.

The nation of Tien Chi will not sit idly by while the Sauromatian dogs make magical gems through arbitrage.

The Great Catsby has Spoken.

Re: Artifacts for sale
 

"Friendly" nations get a discount...heheh.

It's too bad I didn't last long enough to interact with you Trollman, it would have been fun. You seem to have the hang of this diplomacy thing.