how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Hi everyone, see topic.
How do i play with the Carrion Woods Dominion ? I tried it 2 times and wasnt able to hold off the enemies, one time i took a caster pretender, the other time the carrion dragon, which seemed better.

[ February 06, 2004, 15:08: Message edited by: Ragnarok-X ]

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Carrion Woods is arguable the most difficult faction of them all. Why? Because your troops are fairly expensive and you loose income at an alarming rate.

The main strength of this theme is summoning stronger than average undead. Indeed this tangle of vines can be more than a match even for Ermor. But to reach the numbers you need summoners so that is the main priority. Try your best to pillage enough gold to afford two pans. Commanders don't starve but cost quite some amount of gold in upkeep. Make a pan your prophet to cut down his salary.

Once you get the ball rolling you need to find nature sites en masse since you will be relying almost completely on summons.

It's a hard faction to give much advice on. It's sort of a nature Version of Ermor. It's easy to reach armies of 300+ units and they are well supported by poison magic. Divide your Vinecreatures so that the stronger Versions suffer less attrition in battles against less important enemies. Also try grouping them along movement rates so that your armies don't get divided on the battlefield.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Carrion Woods is like Ermor Ashen Empire. Eventually you dont need money or population.

I like to play with either the Lord of the Wild so I get free maenads, or the Carrion Dragon if I give him the right magics so he can create Carrion Lords without having to pay money for a pandemoniac

One of the evil priests (red candleholder) as a prophet can be handy since they have special spells which will boost all the carrion creatures.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

I think the capitol should be immune to dominion death in Carrion Woods. In other words, Capitol's population grows (due to requisite growth scale) and all conquered province die.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That would certainly make the theme worth playing in my book. Currently, I see it as an awful theme, because you pay for that growth scale just to get it....and get absolutely nothing for it. It seems like a worst-of-both-worlds hybridization of Desert Tombs and Ashen Empire.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

While sitting in the .. you may guess where .. at work yesterday, I let my mind wander and somehow stumbled about a possibility to make Carrion Woods an actually great Theme/Nation. And while dratically alterting how things work, everything is available in the code already.

- Make all "Carrion Woods"- specific troops cost 0 upkeep.

- Make new nation spec. site: "The hidden grove of natures call" or somesuch.
Works similar to R'lyehs gate, but with nature skill. Gives standard troops, nature summons, black troops, black commanders with growing skill.

- temples will still cost 100 .. you might need to convert gems at some point during the game, but this doesn't seen out of theme to me.

A.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

thanks for the advices. i have to say though that the vine creatures your carrion lords etc can summon arent really that good. You get mostly small ones which are definitly NO threat since they die VERY easy by missile troops. The stronger ones (minotaur and elephant corpse) are really rare, i usually only have 2 or 3 minotaurs and the same amount of elephants in armyes >100 size. Is there any way to control the reanimation, i.e. does luck give more big vines, or does a carrion lord reanimate more/stronger units than a carrion centaur ?

ty

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Still cant deal Impossible-C'tis(which one filled by indy troops) in 1v1 Aran w/o rush|longsome war by some theme. Another parlance is, still cant handle those theme well.. Carrion Woods, Standard T'ien C'hi, Return of the Raptor Caelum.

Carrion Lord reanimate faster than the lady/centaur, but same quality AFAIK.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

does the carrion dragon has an advantage carrion them wise compared to another pretender?

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">A sneak form that can suddenly become a dragon? Kinda kewl. Might be an interesting assassin also. A pretender assassin.

But mainly his Carrion Lord form can summon the other Carrion Lords if you give him the appropriate magics (2 death 3 nature?) which saves you the expensive costs of a Panic Apostate.