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.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

ah ok, yes its the magic combo nature/death which is of interest with him...


and sorry for the messed english sentence.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Carrion Dragon has the following benefits:

Counts as a Manakin for purposes of Carrion Wood theme (is affected by the Carrion Woods Unholy special spells, notably, Mend the Dead and Regrowth)

Has a huge amount of hp. It's not uncommon to see him breaking the 400+ barrier in dragon form in positivie dominion.

Has a crazy amount of attacks with Sleep Vines and etc.

Has Recuperation.

Base form has stealth, so you can stealth into an initial province, your dominion is raised by being a pretender, and attack a province. This is how CW expands early for me.

His negatives:

Counts as a magical creature.

Counts as undead.

Can't fly (Obvious I know, but the first time I used him I changed form to fly somewhere and forgot he was a dead dragon http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif


I like him with Astral/Earth.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Also to be taken into consideration is that the Carrion Dragon currently subtracts 2 from the starting magical paths when deciding if you will get a certain bless bonus.

I.e. if you buy 9 death and 9 nature, the game will belive you only bought 7 death and 7 nature.

This is because the default shape for a carrion dragon is the dragon form, not the humanoid form. Hence the -2 in paths.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Oh, thats bad. Should be looked at imho.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

thanks Zen.

This level penalty is a bug I suppose (and I hope, I would not like a feature like this one!)

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

The Carrion Dragon's bless effects have been fixed. Barring unexpected complication, the next patch will be out very soon and spruce Ol' Viney right up. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon6.gif

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">What exactly do you mean by "very soon"? Is it more like "this week" very soon, or "next week" very soon, or more like "Very Soon(tm) from the makers of Real Soon Now(tm)"?

[ February 09, 2004, 06:13: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

I would guess that very soon means within the next 141 hours, 32 mn & 17 seconds delta +- 1000 %

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">What exactly do you mean by "very soon"? Is it more like "this week" very soon, or "next week" very soon, or more like "Very Soon(tm) from the makers of Real Soon Now(tm)"? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That would be a programmers very soon. You've seen the devs post some of their formulas here. Its probably a long formula involving at least half a dozen variables and some open-ended dice rolls.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Probably a TSR kind of very soon , i.e:

Roll a D6 that the unit now roll a D4 on the following table:

1- days
2- weeks
3- months
4- years.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Mmmm, with only one expensive sacred unit (the Black Centaur, 70 gp) that you can *only* build in your (depopulated) capital, I'd say that blessing is not a priority for CW pretenders anyway...
Or do you plan to make a horde of berserk dryads ?

And I confirm that to pop loss is 1%/ candle. Its dangerous on small, crowded maps, but I've had good results (nothing exceptional however) with a starting dominion of only 3 candles. Pop loss is acceptable (about 800 pop / turn). At least you can buy some units, and even some indy mage (a luxury that base Ermor cant afford). And Carrion Reanimation does not depend on dominion.

Cheers

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Mmmm, with only one expensive sacred unit (the Black Centaur, 70 gp) that you can *only* build in your (depopulated) capital, I'd say that blessing is not a priority for CW pretenders anyway...
Or do you plan to make a horde of berserk dryads ?
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Ahem, the Carrion Dragon pretender is not only usable for the Carrion Woods theme you know...

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

That's be very soon as in "those that make such decisions haven't said exactly and probably don't know as it is currently being tested." http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

IOW, nobody can promise tomorrow because tonight somebody could find a bug worthy of delaying the release. It'll be out as soon as it has been reasonably evaluated as not being problematic.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Personally I'm unhappy about the carrion dragon since his attacks are of the "strength not added" variety.

That takes care of most of the advantages of a dragon http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Strength not added?

What?

He has a Bite and a Claw which both use his considerable strength.

Only the 6 Vine attacks dont' use his strength, but they don't do any damage regardless, they are just to fatigue the unit so it can be easily hit by the rampaging deady. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I personally love the Carrion Dragon, as he can switch modes if you come into contact with someone who you can't use brute strength to beat do, you switch him to a Pan (with respectable hit points) throw some armor and weapons on him and can fight off the new threat. And if he gets in a bad position, switch to a Dragon and foam at the mouth.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

"Very soon" has turned out to be very soon indeed. The 2.08 patch has been approved as a release candidate and will appear ASAP! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Woo-hoo! Thank you Illwinter!

Do you think it'll be out by Friday?

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Eh? *Base* Ermor can afford to purchase Indy mages just fine. Massive population slaughter isn't a part of the base Ermor theme, only in the AE and SG themes. Although it almost seems like anytime people say "Ermor", they mean Ashen Empire.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

That's because the Dominions 2 Broken Empire Ermor is new to the series. Dominions 1 base Ermor was the Ashen Empire.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

Thursday (tomorrow) or Friday seem like reasonable ETAs. Barring the server going down or something, I don't know what would delay it.

Re: how to play Carrion Woods ?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Excellent. Thank you, Psitticine, for your reply. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif