Noob's shot at an R'lyeh AAR

[fahdiz]

CharonJr, I'm excited to read your AAR and I'm sure it will give me some good insight for when I finally receive my copy of the game (Friday of this week ). Will you be going one-post-per-turn? Or will you be consolidating?

[Arryn]

Originally posted by IKerensky:
Well Sloth 1 could be a bit tricky, as the better Version of the illithid are definitely the armored one

I disagree that the armored ones are best. R'lyeh has resource issues no matter what scales you take, and the armored ones aren't, IMO, worth the expense. Plus their limited strategic movement will hurt you later on. The strategy for keeping illithids alive is not in using armored ones but in finding magical means to defend them on the battlefield, and in putting other (disposable) troops between them and the enemy.

Thus the arguments over R'lyeh begin ...

[ February 11, 2004, 22:36: Message edited by: Arryn ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by IKerensky:
Well Sloth 1 could be a bit tricky, as the better Version of the illithid are definitely the armored one and your low administration underwater castle just never seems able to field enough.

The armored Illithids suffer from being strategic move 1, however, which almost makes them not worth it, because it'll be that much more difficult to get them to the front lines. Also, I think their mindbLast attack is actually weaker, doing only 10 instead of 12, IIRC.

[gibson]

I'd imagine that luck 3 scale will come in handy with void summoning as well. I know at least in a game I played with Ry'leh with a misfortune scale, I never saw anything useful from that gate, so I imagine they are correlated somehow.

Also, how do you randomize your opponents/settings? I'm too indecisive to choose and usually just click a bunch semi-randomly, but thats a pain when I just want a "quick-start" option to try out a strategy idea.

[CharonJr]

Turn 1

Treasury: 400
Income: 212
Upkeep: 23
Resources: 72

Water gems: 2 (+2)
Astral gems: 3 (+3)

My starting position is province #10 – being the most SE water province on the Aran map this presents me with a tough choice to make:

Should I try to grab the sweet looking farmlands of Gol Phalas (26) right to the NE or Dunheim (28) to the north without waiting for any intel about it in order to try to get a headstart, send my scout there or wait one turn for the standard intel while sending my scout westwards into the only neighbouring sea-province of Devourer (6) in order to see if Atlantis is starting close to me.

For the moment I decide to play it safe, send my scout to the west and build up my army one more turn while I get some rough intel about the farmlands.

Since I want to get my summon-program up and running as fast as possible I decide to recruit a Starspawn for 150 gold in order to send him to the void gate on the next turn.

Due to not (or always, depending on point of view) being short on resources, but short on money I decide to get 3 Illithid Soldiers for my future expeditionary forces/summoner guards and 2 Shambler Thralls instead of the better Crab Hybrids since I don’t know if I will stay in the water or head for land next. This leaves me with 30 gold.

In order to protect my summoner I decide to research Thaumaturgy first (level 1 in Thaum will give me the ability to cast Returning if my summoner gets attacked from the Void).

CharonJr

To be continued...

[CharonJr]

Fahdiz,

mainly I will try to post once for each turn, maybe I will consolidate some turns later on if there should be a lull in the game, but mainly I want to give a step by step account of what I am doing and why I am doing it.

This way I have the best possibilities to get some detailed feedback about what I am doing.


Concerning the Illithids,

I will switch between both actually. I will try to keep the unarmored ones (which I mainly plan on using) out of fights with fliers and recruit the armored ones when I got excess ressources.

The point about the unarmored ones having potentially a better mind-bLast is very interesting, too and might push me even further towards them.

Mainly I plan to use the armored ones at first while I research the magic I need to protect the unarmored ones later on.

IMO the better strategic movement will get more important in the later stages of the game than it is at the beginning.


Gibson,

I think I read in some threads that there seems to be no correlation between luck-scales and summons - just pure luck - but having luck-3 surely can't hurt summoning

I randomized using the randomize function in Excel configured for the maximum number of wanted results. But throwing dice should work nicely, too. AFAIK there is no means to randomly choose a certain number of opponents in the game itself.

Thank you for the feedback

CharonJr

[AStott]

Originally posted by gibson:
Also, how do you randomize your opponents/settings? I'm too indecisive to choose and usually just click a bunch semi-randomly, but thats a pain when I just want a "quick-start" option to try out a strategy idea.

I do it by grabbing a number of six sided dice equal to how many opponents I want. Then I throw them all at once. Then I order them from top to bottom, left to right (similar to how provinces are numbered). Then I count down a number of races from the top equal to the first die. That's my first computer opponent. Then I continue counting from there for the second die, etc. I (of course) skip over races that have already been picked, and when I hit the bottom of the list, I skip back to the top and keep counting. It works pretty well, but an in-game random selection would sure be nice...