Crucible - MA, CBM, EDM, fast pace (30 hour hosting entire game) - Running

[Valerius]

Thanks for playing everyone!

I enjoyed the fast pace up until sometime during the latest war when it got to be too much (the fact that I got involved in wars in my other two games, both mid-late stage, certainly didn't help).

This game was notable in that it was the first time I ever engaged in something resembling a rush. I play Vanheim a lot but for some inexplicable reason usually turtle. Anyway, I figured it was a fast pace game and that I would try something different. Overall it was profitable, though it took considerable resources and set back my development. But if Man hadn't joined me against Pythium I think it would have been a definite mistake as Pythium and I might have just ended up in a stalemate.

Saros, you played really well. You had a couple of tough rounds where I took out several SCs but I think if you had surprise attacked me rather than Man things might have gone differently. Btw, your first round of mind hunts took out all my thugs without mind hunt cover. This really limited my raiding as I had only a few S mages suited to the task (equipping sages with cap and coin to have them teleport in was too expensive). And of course I enjoyed the names you came up with for your SCs.

[Saros]

Haha well do you know why it was so tough for you to finish pyth off...
I was essentially keeping him afloat with a lot of discount forging and intelligence to get his thugs and pretender out and battling at the same time as fighting off a determined rush from Jotun. It let him get all the goodies such as brands etc while not having to research construction.
Earlygame was one helluva balancing act for me I must say.

But yeah I think I did pretty well for my first MP game ever, in particular I learned SC's were a LOT more vulnerable than I had expected, especially to blood mages although some of those losses were really terrible luck. I still cant come up with a good counter to earthquake/rain of stones trashing my communions. Perhaps first turn Army of gold/lead but even then you get a whole turn of dropping stones on the poor buggers.
Pity we didn't get a few more turns out. I was about to get 4 suicide master enslave teleport squads of an astrologer with all the S boosters and 2 mystics to put him up to S9 that would plop down on your troop concentrations and a pair of man's armies just to cause some havoc.
The idea was ME would splatter the mystics and then the astrologer would recall home.
Also armageddon was on the cards as a few turns from now as well as possibly burden of time =P
One thing I love about dom3 is all the stuff you can pull when you are losing.

The part where you really won the war was all those remote attacks on my cap. You got probably 50+% of my mages in that one turn as I had just moved all my covering chaff out and the frost dome didn't do diddly squat.
Having like 4 death income the whole game in my entire territory didn't help much either.
BTW where did that fortress in hexwoods come from, It was quite a shock seeing a 600 defense castle suddenly appear. Was there any real chance of my siege force taking it or what? I was gonna give you a little payback with rain/EQ when I stormed it but I couldnt tell whether the walls were going to fall. Siege golems give 90 siege power right? So 6x90=540 siege but you had maybe 100 siege power inside?

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Saros

Haha well do you know why it was so tough for you to finish pyth off...

Yeah, I gathered Pythium was getting some help. I think it was the one thing you and Jotun were in agreement on.

Originally Posted by Saros

But yeah I think I did pretty well for my first MP game ever, in particular I learned SC's were a LOT more vulnerable than I had expected, especially to blood mages although some of those losses were really terrible luck.

I agree I got lucky in some of those battles. The sad thing about the last battle with your tarts is that I lost that Dust Priest but he didn't even need to be there and if you take him out of the picture that was a completely risk-free battle as my vampire lords would have been back in action next turn. Because the fast pace of this game already meant a limited audience, I just went with CBM/EDM and didn't make any changes to them. But normally I would price vampire lords higher than CBM does.

One thing I want to mention is to always watch your lines of retreat (especially when fighting A/S nations or in the late game when everyone has some ability to teleport). If you only have one province to retreat to make sure it's strongly defended and even then it's better to create another line of retreat. For instance, if you have one province to retreat to and another three are controlled by me I would suggest picking one of mine for a remote attack. It doesn't matter if you care about that province but it gives you an escape route if I defeat your army and also send a force to take control of your retreat province.

Originally Posted by Saros

I still cant come up with a good counter to earthquake/rain of stones trashing my communions. Perhaps first turn Army of gold/lead but even then you get a whole turn of dropping stones on the poor buggers.

Rain of Stones is my favorite spell in the game. It doesn't get much better than to chain cast it and see a large communion just disappear. If you want to protect your communion you could try to forge the cheapest armor possible and put it on your mages but aside from the expense (and additional encumbrance) they still have low HP (but I've seen this done effectively with C'tis' mages that have above average HP). The Sword of Aurgelmer was also quite useful in giving your mages some protection. Maybe the best thing is to try to avoid not having the defender's advantage when using your communion. For instance, have a couple of tarts teleport into your target province to clear it out before your communion arrives by normal movement. BTW, I had very bad luck getting A random dwarves and without a second earth booster in CBM 1.6 I couldn't use my Vanadrott's for first round rain of stones casting so I had much more limited rain of stones capability than I would have liked. I've always found earthquake underwhelming and rarely use it, especially once I've got Rain of Stones researched.

Originally Posted by Saros

Also armageddon was on the cards as a few turns from now as well as possibly burden of time =P
One thing I love about dom3 is all the stuff you can pull when you are losing.

Yeah, you can definitely do some damage on your way out and I was very concerned about you casting armageddon. I would have actually done better under BoT than anyone else in the game. Even my dwarves are better off than most mages and my Vanir shouldn't have been bothered much. My sages would have been killed off but research was almost done so I could have lived with it.

Originally Posted by Saros

The part where you really won the war was all those remote attacks on my cap. You got probably 50+% of my mages in that one turn as I had just moved all my covering chaff out and the frost dome didn't do diddly squat.

Your research was strong throughout so when I saw you had moved your chaff out of your cap I thought there might be an opportunity to cripple your research capability (and hopefully kill some fully equipped mind hunters, etc, in the process). IIRC I sent a scout to attack your cap. I was hoping you'd think I was testing the defenses and while that's useful info I really wanted to see what domes you had in place. The frost dome would likely have stopped one of the three attacks (I was of course hoping it wouldn't be murdering winter but one of the fires from afar castings) but I got lucky and all three passed through. Having only one dome that has only a 30% chance of stopping a spell is very risky at that stage of the game. Even just the addition of a dome of arcane warding would have helped a lot. Forest dome also shouldn't have been a problem to cast with your enchantresses. I like the dome of solid air best since it blocks 80% of spells for a one time cost of 10 gems (of course if one gets through it will break but usually you've caused your opponent to spend more gems trying to break it then you had to put into it).

Originally Posted by Saros

Having like 4 death income the whole game in my entire territory didn't help much either.

That was very unlucky to only have a D income of 4, especially since you had the Chalice. With a better D income you could have used the cost effectiveness of tarts to just overwhelm me with numbers of SCs.

Originally Posted by Saros

BTW where did that fortress in hexwoods come from, It was quite a shock seeing a 600 defense castle suddenly appear. Was there any real chance of my siege force taking it or what? I was gonna give you a little payback with rain/EQ when I stormed it but I couldnt tell whether the walls were going to fall. Siege golems give 90 siege power right? So 6x90=540 siege but you had maybe 100 siege power inside?

The fortress was from three red seconds (Blood 8). I'm actually a little too fond of that spell and will sometimes spam more forts than I have the troops to defend, but here I just went for one fort deep in your territory to use as a base. As you noticed, it has a very good defense (much better than wizard's tower) and I effectively find it much cheaper to cast than wizard's tower (I'd prefer to spend 120 blood slaves than 50 e gems).

Your calculations are very accurate: the defense of that fort went from 600 to 37 so you almost broke through in 1 round. I was putting together a strong force in my cap to attack your forts in 49 and 60 and hadn't yet decided if in fact I'd need to gateway them to 90 to defend against you or if I could hold onto the fort in 90 another way and stick to my plan of going for 49/60. I probably would have sent them to 90 and hopefully forced a decisive battle.

As far as paying me back with rain of stones, tart lightning cyclops' are very well suited to that task but like many things you'd want to strike before I could buff (at this stage of the game I'd have fog warrriors for any significant battle). As an aside, I got to Constr. 8 very late in the game and I was surprised to see armor of virtue still available. This has many uses but one that works well is to give it to a tart lightning cyclops and have him cast rain of stones once or twice and then either attack or more spells. Once he's wounded he'll return to your cap. To protect yourself against one shot kills you could give him an elixir of life. And if he picked up an affliction the chalice would take care of that.

Originally Posted by Saros

But yeah I think I did pretty well for my first MP game ever...

I agree completely!