Slugfest 3 Finished - Turms wins (playing Arco)

[Turms]

Hello all,

Is Boron (Pangaea) still missing?

I am at war with him and it is bit hard to know what to do just now.
Last turn there was no problem - I wasn't attacking him anyways. But to continue I think I need to know the situation. I don't want to fight against someone not taking turns.

- Turms, Arcoscephale

[Boron]

Turms said:
Hello all,

Is Boron (Pangaea) still missing?

I am at war with him and it is bit hard to know what to do just now.
Last turn there was no problem - I wasn't attacking him anyways. But to continue I think I need to know the situation. I don't want to fight against someone not taking turns.

- Turms, Arcoscephale

Thanks Turms. I did my last turn.
I did the turn before too but i was a bit busy and unfortunately sent the .trn-file instead of the .2h-file.
Since i am a bit busy atm i only check my email every 2 days, the host shedule. So i read Oversways email too late too. Sorry for the delay, now everything should be fine again though . So hf slaughtering the innocent pangenean wood creatures .

[The Panther]

I have become AI, so feel free to annex the wastelands of T'ien Ch'i at your leisure.

At least waste provinces have a higher probablilty of sites (supposedly just like swamps), and I have searched them a bunch such that I have massive gem income. Three of them even have a higher gem income than my capitol. So the provinces are not entirely worthless.

Unfortunately, I made my pretender to maximize gold income on the rich world, and that failed from starting in the wastes. Plus, I am obviously not very good with TC, which seems a very difficult nation to master. Not taking a magic scale was a huge mistake for sure.

Good luck to all players while I am out on vacation for the next couple of weeks.

[Oversway]

Want to reveal your strategy? I guess lots of gold could be used for lots of strategies. But say compared to going with an sc pretender? (I bet TC wouldn't benefit much from a rainbow pretender )

[The Panther]

I took the Father of Serpents with E4D4N4. His job was searching using the missing schools from my Fire/Air/Water/Astral prophet CM. Also the three level 4 schools gave a minor bless to my red guards, celestial summons, and mages. That part worked splendidly in that I found 21 sites in 7 provinces searching 1124244040 (missing blood and unholy) with only my astral-random prophet plus God. Of course, waste is supposed to have a 20% site bonus, and when added to the 75% game setting, this seems right to me based on my numerous sites.

I took income scales (order, growth and only heat 1 sloth 1) for high gold. In my test games after about 10 turns, I was able to recruit a CM every turn plus some red guards & archers, and still build 450 gold castles every other turn. I testing mostly on Inland, which was a huge mistake in retrospect. Had I noticed the preponderance of wastelands and the many starting spots with too few neighbors on Ringworld, I would have made a different pretender. If I had known I was starting next to a VQ, I would have taken the Fire 9 bless and quickly destroyed her with my Celestial Soldiers and Red Guards. But I had taken F9 bless in one of my recent games and wanted to try something different.

In the actual game, I suffered from a serious lack of income. Also, my drain 1 scale meant I was in dire need of a library, but I never found one.

I did discover that TC without magic research is pretty darn bad! Though TC may be weak regardless...

For sure, I will know a lot more about how to play TC next time!

[Boron]

The Panther said:
If I had known I was starting next to a VQ, I would have taken the Fire 9 bless and quickly destroyed her with my Celestial Soldiers and Red Guards. But I had taken F9 bless in one of my recent games and wanted to try something different.

That doesn't work. I only need to script her for casting fire resistence and voila your flaming weapons are totally useless .
20 protection and useless flaming weapons makes her still unkillable by almost any troop. Some black hawks to attack her while buffing would probably work though.

[The Panther]

I recall that the 8 AP damage from the F9 bless is NOT a fire attack but it is normal Armor Piercing (not negating, right?) damage. On top of the 8 AP damage, there is an additional flame attack that sets targets on fire which IS useless against fire-immune troops.

As for the hawks, I intended to do that but my lab burned down in my capitol on the very move I was going to use it against you. It would not have worked anyway because you brought along a lot of carrion troops which the low-morale hawks almost surely would have attacked on the way to the rear.