[aaminoff]

Thanks for the vote, Lihaassa.

I do think it is premature to declare any "winner". As I said before, everyone who played and had fun is a winner.

I still want to kibbitz around the end game though.

So, the 3 big powers, me, Caelum, and Hinnom, made a pact to band together against Sauro. When Sauro finally is done, fighting might break out among the 3 of us. I was of course hoping not to be the ganged-up on, and had started tentatively negotiating with Hinnom to that effect. I think it is too early to say who would have ended up ganging up on whom; I had long-term productive alliances with Switzerland (er, Arco) and Ulm.

Caelum had a huge gem income. Was this mostly from the Well of Misery? (Does that show up in income? see, we're still noobs here). I was worried about that. So my judgement was that Caelum was more dangerous than Hinnom. Hinnom's SCs are uber, but he only has 7 of them (or is it 9?), and in Dom3 eventually any SC can be taken down with the right SC counter.

Which led to the epic wish tug of war for the Chalice. Ulm was doing the wishing, I was supplying him with astral gems. I am 90% certain that the power at the other end of the tug of war was Caelum. The thing is, after a while I realized that Caelum's gem income was such that they could keep the wish tug of war for The Chalice indefinitely. Yikes.

I got The Chalice very early, around turn 30-40, and produced about a tart per turn for a long time, but I kept losing them in battle, so by the end I think I was down to no more than a dozen fully capable Tarts.

VC3 was played under CBM 1.5, which now gets the dubious distinction of "the last version of CBM with gem gems". I would have to look to be sure, but I think at the end I had about 80 blood stones and about 30 clams. I noobishly did not grasp how important gem gens were until a bit late. Oh, and one fever fetish, just for the heck of it.

Another thing I am curious about is how close is my threat profiles to reality.

Hinnom has the 7 Grigori and some number of Baals/Melquarts. Are those Baal/Melquarts decent raiding SCs? By which I mean, can they all teleport, or only some of them? Did you have enough equipment to kit them all out fully? About how many did you have by the end?

Caelum has Eagle Kings, which are great raiders, but I was figuring that with that huge Death income the main threat from Caelum would actually be Tarts. About how many de-afflicted, GoRd Tarts did you have by the end, and how fast were you producing them? The other thing I wonder about Caelum is how much it matters that all of my thugs can cast resist lightning - by this late stage of the game, how capable is Caelum of using other than lightning attacks.

As for my own threat profile, it is difficult to overstate how cool Vanjarls are. I recruited one a turn from most of my castles most of the game. I put the new recruits to blood hunting, swapping out the ones with an experience star to do the actual fighting. With E9N4 bless, mistform, a golden shield and some brand, they are incredible thugs. What surprised me was how many spells that go against MR they would shrug off: paralyze, soul slay, enslave, etc. I suppose it helped that I had S4W4 in my bless as well. Even against Sauro's (admittedly rather poorly equipped) SCs, the careful plans I set up would not work, but then the Vanjarls would walk up and beat on the SC while being immune to whatever they were trying to do. (I was careful about making them eg fire-immune when I was going after the Fire Royalty, but, thats obvious). I think those experience stars matter a lot.

I'm curious to hear others' postmortems.

- Alex