Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I haven't heard anything.

So he's staled the past two turns? That's not good.

Does anyone have the admin password? It might be good to extend the hosting until we can clarify what's going on.

I was going to ask to push the hosting to 72H anyway because my turns are taking several hours to complete now...

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I do. I'm going to extend now. I'll change interval to 72 hours and add a delay.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

That`s how you rock. After all, you`ve already got almost half of the map, right?

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I did 1 more 24 hour postpontment. What do you want to do? I haven't heard anything from LL and he has a couple stales in a row here. He staled his last turn in Blood Sacrifices. It looks like he is getting turns in in Power Beyond Comprehension.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

You probably know his tactical and strategic situation better than anyone. If he has a hope of fighting you off, then I'd say we should get a temporary sub until/if he returns. If not, we should probably set him to AI -- although we should probably give him an extra day or two to be safe.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Has Pangaea been staling as well? I know Pan had a change of ownership to Jolly Roger, but I have seen a turn posted during my sporadic checks over the past couple of turns.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I had no idea that feature existed.

You sir, get a cookie!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

It`s hidden in "Admin options". :)

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I sent a note to Jolly Roger about Pan.

I'd say we give him and LL 24 more hours to respond before we look for replacements.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I'm wondering if Jolly Roger got caught up with LL staling and was waiting to hear back. He's been pretty responsive in the other games. If you hear from Jolly Roger let me know and I'll make the switch for Pangaea

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I postponed another 48 hours to get the new Pangaea player setup.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) (recruiting! 11/12)
 

While we're waiting to sort out our player situation, I thought it would be interesting to count how many units I had at turn 20, and it was 1,137 unead. I had a pretty good start with 26 provinces at this time and was spending all available gold to building temples and forts.

I did lose several hundred troops to Patala and Atlantis on turn 20, so under perfect circumstances I might have had around 1,500, but I don't think I could have improved this very much -- certainly not anywhere near 10K.

By the way, I did some tests last night where I calculated the average troop generation over 100 turns. Here's the data:

http://devnada.files.wordpress.com/2...ermorspawn.jpg

Basically, with 10 dominion in a province with no structures built, i.e., fort or temple, LA Ermor will generate about 10 chaff a turn. Put in a temple and fort, and the average is about 23 (with higher quality units).
If I have time, I might rerun the tests with Soul Gate up.

I'm wondering if the 10K total was in the old days of LA Ermor where their dominion didn't kill population as quickly? This gave a lot more money to Ermor who could afford to buy lots of priests, who could then reanimate the recently departed into legions of soulless. However, even then, I don't think anyone could get close to 10K.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

My OCD kicked in and I felt compelled to count how many units I lost at the hands of Atlantis and Patala on turn 20. We lost 588 undead, or about a third of all my units in 8 separate battles -- only two of which I won (one of which was against an undefended province). That was a bad turn, although worse was to come.

Anyway, I would have had 1725 units in my empire as a best case scenario.

If I had somehow been able to put all undead into a single large horde, Atlantis would have utterly destroyed it with his scary super-soldiers. If you're curious, here is what most of my battles with Atlantis looked like at around that time:

http://devnada.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/b29.jpg

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

dont like your kill ration, rev. how'd you survive?

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

It got a lot worse later on. On turn 23 Atlantis blew through a large defense force 400+ strong in one of my fortresses that was next to my capital, where I only killed a handful of his soldiers before being massacred.

http://devnada.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/b117.jpg

You can read more about it on my AAR at http://devnada.wordpress.com/bsod/, although I'm only on turn 20. However, I should have the next couple of turns up in a few days.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Gentlemen,

finally I took command for Pangaea as replacement player.

"Preserve the nature and pray to the one and only god !" :angel:angel

Thanks for taking me in.

Cheers, Klaus

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

About Ermor's survival - it was quite simple. I went for his capital, got defeated, lost ~30-40% of my army because of skelespam from ~10 death mages, got another ~30% starved and plauged because I miscalculated. My blessed troops are really difficult to replace, BTW. I had no ability to storm his capital again and to continue the war I had to use almost of my mages - and to use large front with only two supply items. And I already used half of my mages or so in the combat, so my research was worse than miserable. Some bad events killed ~60% of population in the capital, so after upkeep I had like 400-500 gold per turn. It was possible to continue the war, but I without some way to gain some gold quickly or without assistance from Midgard _and_ Abysia I had really good chance to became a ruler of wasted land without any ability to recruit. And everybody else was engaged in some type of war.

And Patala just lost. I really do not know what was the reason of this.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Ok. We have a sub for Marignon also. KeithZ is taking over. Thanks Keith!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

The skellispam helped, but there was a bit more to it. You had 23 protection Ice Guards and Arssartuts with a E9A9N4 bless that made them virtually unstoppable by my chaff -- including summoned skeletons.

The main reason we were able to stop you was because we burned nearly all of our gems to summon a wall of Wailing Ladies that were able to use their AOE soul-slay attack to destroy a good chunk of your melee troops -- especially those uber Ice Guards. Even then, we were only able to kill some of your troops before you cut down my ladies.

The skellispam did help by holding back your forces long enough for the fortress defenses to kill enough of your undead to force a route.

Patala actually did quite well. However, he was sandwiched between Me and R'lyeh and suffered a lot of economic damage that prevented him from mustering a large offensive force. I also focused most of my attention on him since my forces couldn't hurt you.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

hmm. i seem to be down to two provinces, and one is undefended. i am beginning to think i may not win this war...

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

But the important thing is you have an army in one province!!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

yes matty. i suppose that glass IS half full...

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Maybe if you are vewy vewy quiet. No one will notice and the rest of the world will destroy themselves and you can emerge the winner.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

that would be the only real chance at victory now. but if bonedaddy wins, it will be very lonely

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

I watched that battle several times, Wailing Ladies killed 15 soldiers tops. You needed to put them in single unit formations and hide them in the chaff. DtD made them cry for the last time. The biggest number of casualties was from those nasty ballistas, so it was the second reason. Really small fighting front - so yeah, I did kill ~20 skellies per turn, which was within your capability to replace. I played with the battlefield for a little. Even if you had no Ladies and almost no starting chaff (I killed them in the first turn of battle record), I had only so-so
chances to win.

So to capture your capital I had either double the number of mages or bring at least 50% more troops. There was no real means to do anything else - I had no research to speak of because of the DtD spam.

Well, it was a gamble. And the reason why maps with borders are so unbalances sometimes - in toroidal ones Ermor usually faces 3-person coalition. :)

Patala IMHO expanded too slowly. I expected him to do it better - with the ethereal elephants. Also, I have some suspicions that his dom scale was down to 4 (or less), which is pretty bad.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) (recruiting! 11/12)
 

You didn`t take a combat pretender that can take provinces by himself. You didn`t overtax at 200%, didn`t hire indie priests and didn`t reanimate with them.
Nad all of this adds up

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) (recruiting! 11/12)
 

That's incorrect. All my provinces are taxed at 200% at the beginning -- not that it made that much of a difference because population dies so quickly.

There's not enough money to recruit priests in large quantities in the beginning -- at least not without sacrificing temples and fortresses. Even then, an H1 priest can only reanimate 10 soulless per turn and he can only do that while there are corpses on the ground, which quickly decay into nothing.

Assuming you did manage to recruit 10 priests in turn 1 and had unlimited corpses, you'd reanimate 100 undead per turn. After 20 turns you'd have 2,000 soulless. Of course, in reality you wouldn't have anywhere near that amount.

I'm not sure how a combat pretender would help very much unless you think he could help generate extra income, which he would have -- by a little bit, but certainly not enough to recruit an army of priests. By the time you did, there wouldn't be very many corpses left for you to reanimate.

I'm not trying to completely shoot you down here, but I just don't see how this would be possible. The only way I could see this method being half-way successful is if you completely focused on nothing but priests and then moved them together in a big army to reanimating after pillaging provinces. Even then, I don't think you could generate 10K armies by turn 20 and you'd totally gimp yourself since Soulless kinda suck. They are basically big bags of meat that you put on the front lines to soak up damage.

One other thing: I don't think a combat pretender on a large map as Ermor is a very optimal. The main weakness of Ermor (besides being ganged up on) is a lack of magical diversity in the end game, and the best way to mitigate this is via a scrawny rainbow pretender.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

You're absolutely right. I watched the battle a few times and reset the random number generator (via the U option), and I won every time without the wailing ladies.

Next time I'll intermingle them :) At the time, I had no idea they could be that effective.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

OK, maybe I was mistaken. Still, it doesn`t matter too much, because now we`re going to face ETHEREAL undead hordes. I`m calling ghostbusters.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

If only I could summon this guy :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-sALU_hveA

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

C'tis sees salvation!!! undead hordes to our south, coming to save us. hallelujia(sp?)

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

More like - to take away your last precious D gems.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

we don't have many. and i am tongue in cheek here. obviously, salvation by the ashen empire would be a mixed blessing...

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Hi.

I know that´s a pain in the ***, but I´ve just received a message I have to speak on a congress in Prague, means I´ll be out of town from Thursday (14th) morning to Saturday(16th) late in the evening.
So I could continue on Sunday morning (GMT).:doh:

Sorry, hope that´s not too annoying. The good message is I´ll be available without any break until the 11th of August.:angel

Regards, Klaus

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

couldn't you tell the congress in Prague that you are involved in a dominions game? wouldn't they reschedule?

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

No worries Jolly Roger. We'll put a delay on for you. Just don't rush back just for this!!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Bone Daddy will patiently wait outside the walls of your fortress.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Thanks for you patience...:D:eek:

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Alteration 9 was one hell of unpleasant surprise from Ermor. Fog Warriors+Army of Gold... Damn.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

yes. Reports are that Ermor is packing more than just a bunch of undead chaff.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Bone Daddy's zombies have been griping incessantly about their lack of protection on the battlefield. It was getting so bad that Bone Daddy couldn't walk through the halls of his many fortresses without hearing

"I don't like getting hacked apart all the time"
"Those blades hurt!"
"I don't want die again. Don't make me go out there again!
"Where's my foot? Seriously. Where's my foot? I lost it again."
"I'm hungry. Is there any monkey left?"

Bone Daddy would tell them, "You undead clowns are already dead! What do you have to lose?! Shut-up and get back out there so I can resume my evil plotting in peace. And stop talking. Zombies aren't suppose to talk".

However, this didn't appease them very much, so Bone Daddy was forced to use his vast and terrible intellect to research additional protection spells and conjure the units capable of casting them. We think it's silly since undead hordes are meant to be vast, but easy to destroy. They are not supposed to be vast AND hard to kill? Right? It makes a mockery of every zombie movie ever made.

But our hands are tied. And we must confess, it is rather effective. Welcome to our brave new world.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

HA! you guys were pushing C'tis around at the bus stop! but now my undead big brother is here. get ready for C'tis to start talking tough(i will mention here, just this once, that i do realize i was thorougly defeated and outplayed-)

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Everyone: I'm on vacataion from 6/22 to 7/1. I'll do my best to get turns in but I will probably have to extend a couple. CHeers!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Wait...
Ermor casts Army of Gold>Ermor has alteration 9 > Ermor has Utterdark.
And he`s got THE best gem income by far, due to Strands of arcane power and Well of Misery.
So,it means that in couple turns he casts Utterdark with 890890890678 gems overcharge, everybody has their money income reduced by 90%, armies desert, we cannot recruit mages, Ermor wins.
Congratulations, revenant2, you`ve won.

I. Hate. LA Ermor.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

We'll neither confirm nor deny your assessment, although to retain his glow of evil Bone Daddy takes morning swims in a large pool that's been filled with nothing but his supply death gems.

If the rest of the powers concur, we'll accept victory as humbly as we are able. However, we suspect that Bogarus and Atlantis (and possibly some of the other survivors) might not be so willing to give up their souls just yet.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Nah...we'd still like to have fun with the army we built. Even if its a case of running a few battles and watching you pull out Utterdark when you need it, then concede.

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

yeah. and i still think i have a shot at this thing...

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

Thats the fighting spirit parone......go get em mate!

Re: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]
 

i have like 40 units left!