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

[parone]

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

[mattyburn7]

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

[parone]

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

[mattyburn7]

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.

[parone]

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

[Russian_Comrade]

Originally Posted by revenant2

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.

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.

[Shardphoenix]

Originally Posted by revenant2

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.

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

[revenant2]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

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

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.

[revenant2]

Originally Posted by Russian_Comrade

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.

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.

[Shardphoenix]

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.