playing ANYONE against everyone

[Gandalf Parker]

W/N?
For some reason Oceania always did very well in the AI tests.

[Xietor]

While making a 100 clams may be a great strategy, it is another perfect example of how to kill the fun of a game to me. I think i would rather lose, flying my gorgon around and leading armies with banelords etc, then to micromanage some mages to generate pearls.

ideally, i would like to see the number of such gem producing items limited to a few per race. Clam generation also minimizes the importance of some pretenders that generate gems, global spells that generate gems, and actually hunting for gems with spells.

I realize that making clams is a valid strategy, but it is one, for the sake of fun, i would like to see nerfed. Tlk about a buzz kill.

[Shovah32]

LA ulm counts not useful for anything other than bloodhunting? With a high dominion fountain of blood you can have stealthy, flying squads of counts and vampires flying around risk free. You can have counts flying around to raise skeletons a few times, die and do it again next turn or my personal favourite get as many counts as you find neccesary and set them to fly in and either summon lammashtas, attack closest(in friendly dominion) or summon lammashtas, retreat(the lammashta fear often auto-routs counts but the lammashtas fight on so no problems).

When your blood hunters who are scattered around you empire are flying, stealthy, immortal, army leading, skeleton/lammashta raising, raiders who can fairly easily be turned into thugs you can be pretty versatile if you maintain your dominion levels. With my sleeping fountain of blood i can also get all blood royalty other than demon lords while having dom8 and nice scales(and i can also forge soul contracts early). The ideal defence situation is having an enemy army attack you in your dominion and hitting it turn after turn with flying, immortal counts and vampires(along with vampire lords who are even better thugs due to soul vortex).

[Xietor]

Though I have never played a race with a lot undead, I have played against Ermor a ton. Does Purgatory not affect LA Ulm?

[Graeme Dice]

Shovah32 said:
LA ulm counts not useful for anything other than bloodhunting? With a high dominion fountain of blood you can have stealthy, flying squads of counts and vampires flying around risk free.

Sure they can fly around, but they can't actually accomplish much while doing so. They don't have the stats to act as thugs, which means that all that they can do effectively is raise skeletons and, in the very late game, cast disintegrate. You also don't need LA Ulm to get vampires, Mictlan is just as capable of summoning them (although they have little reason to bother) and is likely to have a higher blood income to boot.

[Shovah32]

Mictlan will have higher blood income to start but when your hunting in all your provinces it should be around the same(also counts auto-summon free thralls). The flying lets them raid(if you know they wont die) aswell as getting then where you need quickly(particularly useful when defending) and their stats are pretty nice. LA Ulm actually does have better access to vampires(though lower starting blood income unless you use your second tier mages for hunting) due to counts only costing 44 slaves rather than 77 for lords(they have slightly improved stats and +1D and blood, none of which really help any of the strategies i listed)

[Baalz]

Graeme Dice said:
Sure they can fly around, but they can't actually accomplish much while doing so. They don't have the stats to act as thugs, which means that all that they can do effectively is raise skeletons and, in the very late game, cast disintegrate. You also don't need LA Ulm to get vampires, Mictlan is just as capable of summoning them (although they have little reason to bother) and is likely to have a higher blood income to boot.

Oh Graeme, you're just not thinking about it. Here are a couple things that you can do with the counts:
Skelispam
Lashimas
Blood Sabbath - followed by hell power (hint: spawns a bunch of horrors while giving you some pretty big death mages until the horrors kill them before attacking the enemy. )
Drop a bunch of counts on the front line with a few death gems apiece and rain shadow blast down. The counts are so mobile, it's not hard to converge 10 of them wherever you want, and 20 shadow blasts has a pretty devastating effect on most armies.
Empowering counts can be damn effective if you're clever with blood sababath (the sabbath slaves are effected by the master's buffs). Empower a count a single level in fire and another count in earth and now you can have a swarm of iron skinned, fire shielded, immortal, flying, regenerating, lifedraining dudes who steadily build up xp because they never die. Variations on this are endless, and you never need to worry about the dude you empowered dying...
Enemy SC giving you grief? Again, converge a whole swarm of counts on him and hellbind the hell out of that heart.

Perhaps they're not the best unit in the game, but they are a FAR cry from useless if you just apply a bit of thought to them. The power of Ulm's counts is not that any individual one is a badass, it's that Ulm is unrivaled in the number of vamps it can generate, particularly early in the game. A swarm of counts can be very effective - and can't quite stress this enough - they're immortal! That fact means you can use and abuse them in ways you never would other units.

[mivayan]

Baalz said:A swarm of counts can be very effective - and can't quite stress this enough - they're immortal!

Those ideas seem quite usefull actually.

Just beware of the opponent using 45 stealth preachers to remove your dominion in a province on the turn of the big battle.... preaching happens pre-combat.

[Evilhomer]

Yeah but dominion spread happens post-combat (for whatever reason - including preaching)

[Hellboy]

Xietor said:
While making a 100 clams may be a great strategy, it is another perfect example of how to kill the fun of a game to me. I think i would rather lose, flying my gorgon around and leading armies with banelords etc, then to micromanage some mages to generate pearls.

Well, that's a matter of taste, I think

ideally, i would like to see the number of such gem producing items limited to a few per race. Clam generation also minimizes the importance of some pretenders that generate gems, global spells that generate gems, and actually hunting for gems with spells.

It would be cool if that were moddable (and maybe it is?). I would expect it would be straightforward to mod such that clams (and related items) don't exist. If you're playing with trusted players it should be quite easy to incorporate this as a house rule.

I realize that making clams is a valid strategy, but it is one, for the sake of fun, i would like to see nerfed. Tlk about a buzz kill.

Well, again, it may be a buzz kill for you, but some of us really enjoy the economic elements that forged generators add to the game. Oh, and btw, all the generators did get significantly nerfed between Dom2 and Dom3.