Request for strategy: Late game tips

[tibbs]

I think you need a very good gem income by the time you reach late age. Ideally you would want one or two of the gem globals going, but I think that is going to be hard because you have 61 other nations trying to do the same thing.

If you are surrounded by friendlies, you will need to make one of them "unfriendly" and take em out! Or I guess you could teleport to an enemy province, build a castle and establish a beachhead and wage a war from there.

[johnarryn]

In very general terms, it has been my experience that having high-level construction is very important for the end game. Building equipment for SC's, forging unique magical items... these are important. Certain specific items, such as The Chalice, Sceptre of Dark Regency and others contribute to late-game tactics like Tartarian Summoning. Other, such as The Sword of Auregelmer, are generally just good items to have.

A healthy gem income is useful... in such a large game, I wouldn't focus on trying to get the gem globals... too much competition... focus on site-searching and diversifying your magic.

[jutetrea]

In the greater available experience:

with an open enchantment board, is it better to cast a gem producer as early as possible (use almost all your gems) hoping that it will take long enough to dispel that you make your investment back. Or save up to 100+ and try to make it difficult to dispel?

Later castings you'll start playing with trying to make it stay up, but for the first is the risk worth the possible return?

And on the other side, once an enchant goes up - should it be first priority to figure a way to knock it down? Just so the benefit doesn't snowball for the caster into beefed up future castings? In a larger game, do you find that people will generally let an enchant stay up because:
They don't want to be the ones to waste the gems dispelling
they want to save their gems for other things
they may not have the paths to dispel/recast

There was a game a bit ago where Jot put up Astral Corruption... and it seemed the rest of the board couldn't group to dispel it, does this happen often?

I guess it comes down to, is it best to just take what early slots you can afford and hope for the best? Or save up for a hopefully difficult to dispel cast.

Especially in larger games

[BigDisAwesome]

I always wondered that myself. In my first game one of the first globals to go up was Gift of Health, and I was so surprised that it stayed up until I cast over it as I was getting taken out of the game.

[johnarryn]

Astral corruption is something of a special case because it is a blood global enchantment... because it is easy to get a large number of blood slaves in a short time, blood enchantments may not be worth spending a large number of astral gems to dispel if the blood caster can just put the same spell back up in the next turn.

[Meglobob]

Generally speaking the gem producing globals, gift of health and any other non-offensive globals will stay up. At least until someone wants that particular global for themselves.

Dare to cast forge of ancients, burden of time, utterdark and astral corruption will put you on no.1 most hated list. This will usually result in alot of people ganging up on you to dispel the global and generally slaughter your nation.

Of course in a 62 player game the chances of keeping a global up are alot lower, so globals might not be a good strategy until over half have been knocked out.

[jutetrea]

Interesting.

If the situation is that my old folks are getting crippled and I just want GoH up to slow that process down... would it help to say that out loud? For example "want GoH up for my old folks home, it was cast with 51 gems at lvl 5, dispel as needed?"

Just in the sense of reducing perceived threat? Cuz it seems a good portion of diplomacy deals with perceived threat vs. realistic threat Which is a whole other topic, both defensively and offensively.

[Baalz]

Meglobob said:
Dare to cast forge of ancients, burden of time, utterdark and astral corruption will put you on no.1 most hated list. This will usually result in alot of people ganging up on you to dispel the global and generally slaughter your nation.

Of course in a 62 player game the chances of keeping a global up are alot lower, so globals might not be a good strategy until over half have been knocked out.

Yeah, I'm kinda curious with this mega game to see if there will be a level of gem pooling to get certain globals up. Nobody in this game is going to cast Burden of Time without using a ridiculous amount of death gems...but it'll benefit a certain set of nations regardless of who casts it so it'd make sense to poll for donations just like is usually done for a dispel. Same goes for Utterdark, Astral Corruption, and many others. My guess is the non-threatening spells won't stay up long, not because they're dispelled, but because the five global slots are going to be fought over by large power blocks for globals that benefit more than one nation.