Quote:
Originally Posted by fungalreason
Just curious..... how many pearls did you have by the end, Jim? I'm guessing it's near a thousand
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Most turns, the Nexus was providing ~150 Pearls, it was ridiculous. I was holding 350 in reserve, so on the new turn I typically had around 500.
Since we're done, I'm going to come clean, because this has been really bugging me. I did NOT cast the Nexus with many extra pearls. It was a calculated risk, but also (being rather new when we started this game), I thought Dispel had to beat the total # of gems used in casting. So I thought say if you cast Nexus with 150 pearls, someone would dispel with 151, not 31 as it seems is the case. So, R'lyeh could have quite easily taken it down and kept it down, if they had chosen to do so.
All the globals make a pretty funny story, actually. I had not planned on them, other than the Deep Well, which I considered pivotal to MA Agartha success. My pretender was an Enchantress, 6E6S4N. Kind of a weird build, but the magical flexibility she gave me, made the game possible. On the way to the Deep Well, I decided to leverage her extra pearls into the Stellar Focus (which Marignon would later quietly dispel to put up the Second Sun), just for fun. By this time, no one else was casting any globals other than the Mother Oak, so I decided that since I had no one to use my Nature gems other than my pretender, that GoH would really help out my mages - that choice is really what kept me competitive through the BoT (and 2 Leprosies on my capital).
Eventually, with again, no one to use my Pearls except my pretender, I looked at my assorted gem stocks, and decided that since I was surrounded by people who it would be inconvenient to go to war with, and I was so small and inoffensive, I would see if I could get away with the Nexus. Well I did, and as you said, it was a turning point in the game. After a few turns of stocking up and getting my affairs in order, I started funneling 75-100 Pearls to Marignon on most turns, and once I got Wish, I was in fact Wishing Gems, to create and gear more Marble Oracles - and still able to tithe pearls regularly to Marignon, for whatever nefarious purposes he put them to.
R'lyeh was really pissed with me in the late stage of the game. He didn't border very much on Marignon anyways, but he seemed to devote as much resources as possible to cause my destruction, while Chris happily dissected his empire.
I suppose, as R'lyeh was AI and almost destroyed, it would have become increasingly hopeless (unless someone had Dispelled the Nexus, but then I would recast with ~500 Pearls), but it just seemed that you had an awful lot of powerful combatants out there, Fungal. But then, without much Astral magic, you would have been hard pressed against my Oracles, let alone all of the crazy things that Marignon had out there.
Well, good game everyone, I had fun! <3