Figment - Early Game (Started)

[Corwin]

AdmiralZhao said:
I agree with you Corwin.

Usually in our large battles, you are at the very back, and my bats move forward to attack at a glacial pace, enduring turn after turn of spells to reach your lines. I was hoping to switch that around on you this time, by hanging back myself, and letting MoD do the work while we both hung back. The eventual intent was to force your armies/mages further forward, so that Banish to Inferno could start being effective again. The intent wasn't to hit and run; it was to arrive with 200 Army of Gold/Mass Regeneration beast bats, and sit at the far back of my lines, petrifying and charming anyone who came forward to meet us, while the MoD took care of your back line of mages.

Instead, you showed up a bit earlier than expected, and MoD
showed once again why it is hated and reviled. Feel free to use MoD in one of our future battles as payback. I won't use it again in any capacity due, since even when you try to use it in a decent fashion, it has the potential to be an exploit.

I would point out that in this instance the damage was not too great; you only lost one A2 air mage and you destroyed my army at that square. You did not take the province though, which you would have done without MoD.

Thank you, I appreciate your feedback and explanation. It is what I hoped it would be. I will probably use MOD against you on one of the further turns, and that will be it.

As for the results of the battle - at this point I don't care about your bats anymore - you have demonstrated you can replace them much faster than I can kill them. I was hoping to nail your commanders, but instead my SCs were running after illusions and geting affliction. Not to mention that my air mage died and I didn't get the province.

It could be worse I suppose, but considering how tough things are going for me (I have lost lthe leader position in almost all graphs), I was hoping to win at least this big battle that I have carefully scripted and prepared.

Anyway, it is now settled as far as I concenred.

If Fomoria (and Oceanina, if they have high-air mages ) will agree to join this MOD ban, it should eleminate this problem for the rest of this game.

[AdmiralZhao]

Hi all. After communing with the ancestor spirits, I've decided that the only way to cleanse the MoD taint from my family's honor is to withdraw from the game. This decision is in no way related to the fact that turns are taking me 6+ hours to complete, and can no longer be reasonably combined with work and the other demands of real life. If you want, I can try to find a sub, though I think that at this point Corwin has earned his victory.

And now, here is the AAR I mentioned up stream:
Corwin's AAR is spot on; this has been the most hard fought and even game I have played. My past games have been anti-climactic, with one nation having a clear advantage in skill and material. They quickly steamroll their way to victory, their graphs shoot upwards, and the remaining players cede. Because of that, I've never fought real wars past turn 60 or so, and haven't really seen the mass tartarians that they always talk about on the forums.

This game has definitely been different, and is the first time I've seen the *real* late game. At least in the southwest quarter of the map, every province is regularly attacked by hordes of imps, troops of undead calvary, sky-covering swarms of demonic bats, Lords of Hell, unspeakable Horrors, and insane, nigh-unkillable dead Gods who wield fiery swords and awesome magics. Mortals now survive only behind the walls of their keeps, and beneath the magical domes which (mostly) keep the raining fire at bay.. It certainly captures the feel of the End Times.

In more detail, Mictlan continues to press south, though we have been badly defeated in two major battles over the last months. The formerly pristine lands around Sauromatia are now a ruin, but the strong points guarding his capitol have held out, as their SC defenders proved slightly more super than the SC attackers I have thrown at them. Many brave beast bats lay stricken on the ground, echo-locating their last cries as they expire from the various injuries suffered from sword, stinger, claw, lightning, poison, fire, ice, exhaustion, banishment, and cleansing water. Even the survivors have PTSD, and face chronic nightmares where they are slowed to a crawl by fierce storms, while trying to escape from legions of buffed undead. Still, new beast bats are always showing up at the swampy recruitment centers, and we are moving more of them south. The bat's H3 priest-commanders tend to survive, so they at least can head back and pick up fresh troops to shuttle to the front lines. We will be making another push soon, and in the mean time our raiders continue to pillage his un-castled provinces, and are slowly expanding their area of desolation.

So, that's the general situation as of last turn. If no one is taking over Mictlan, then tomorrow I'll make a more detailed post about what went on in this game (from the Mictlan perspective), what strategies I was bringing against Sauromatia, and how I expected things to go.
Cheers,
Zhao

[Rathar]

I'm good either way as I am but a bit player in this. Never used MoD in any game and shan't.

[AdmiralZhao]

Ok, I promised Corwin that I would do a short AAR for this game, so here goes.

Mictlan had a relatively slow start, and didn't really get rolling until turn 30 or so when we conquered Abysia's 10 provinces after many costly battles against their native magma-men. I expected Absya to be a minor addition to our empire, but their lands turned out to have the Steel Ovens (20% forge bonus) and Mount Chaining (40% blood bonus). Finding these two sites as Mictlan is simply huge, and they played a pivotal role in my strategy from that point on. Shortly after Abysia fell, Nieflheim and then Vanheim declared war on me. I was pushing dominion in Abysia (for reasons I'll discuss later), and this was crucial during the war since both my enemies had to go through Abysia to reach my other lands. I dropped all my nature gems (300+) on a gift of health, and fought multiple large battles at Abysia with my double health armies and large numbers of casters as backup. At this point I basically had every mage of note within range of Abyisa, since the forging and blood sites were just a province or two away. Nielfheim and Vanhiem lost the core of their strength in these battles, including their Gods, prophets, best thugs, and most powerful mages. While they assaulted this strong point, I was using Mount Chaining and my S2B2 casters to drop as many horrors as I could behind their lines. Both empires were hollowed out in this fashion, and I was quite pleased with myself.

Then everyone else declared war on me. Even Marveni, who was supposed to be my loyal ally against the Sauromatian threat, broke from their sacred treaties. According to the score charts, Mictlan had grown enormously during just a few turns, and so was now a major threat. Unfortunately, the charts were a bit misleading, since I had only black hawks and turkey-mages in my new lands, and was only barely able to keep their former owners locked up in their castles by using horrors and a few well equipped ArchDevils. I gave the war up as lost from the start, and retreated everyone of value from my undefendable East lands to a new battle line on the Abysian border. The western most choke point of my empire was suddenly the eastern most choke point of my empire. Vast caravans of Mictlani priests and holy warriors made the journey west to the safety of Abysia, while the slaves, independent troops, and map move 1 mages stayed behind to put a noble face on things.

The eastern empire was quickly gobbled up by Sauromatia, Formoria, and Marveni, but I was able to consolidate my control of the west, and then make peace with the other nations once we no longer shared a border and once Mictlan had been halved. In most games I would not have bothered to try and make a come back from this point, since Dominions is essentially a game of geometric growth, and any major setback puts you out of the running for first place. Fortunately, Mictlan has plenty of late-game abusiveness to go along with its early game triple bless abuse. Specifically, the Onaqui bat-mages, who summon beast bats each turn. In addition to being great blood and death mages, the Onaqui summon ~4 bats per turn when they are in dom-10. And with 40% off from Mount Chaining, an Onaqui will pay for itself in beast bats in 8-9 turns. This makes it quite viable for Mictlan to Bat-spam, in addition to clam spamming and blood stone spamming. In terms of return on investment, the Onaqui compare quite favorably with clams, though of course the bats are not quite as versatile as astral pearls. Still, with Mictlan's heavy blessing and some simple buffs (blood lust, mass protection, darkness, etc.) the bats are quite sufficient to massacre mortal armies and quickly tear down castle walls. I'm not sure how well known this tactic is, but I've found it to be extremely powerful in large games where the cost of clams is increased, or where there will be plenty of time for the Onaqui to pay for themselves. Anyway, I had about 40 or so Onaqui squirreled away back there, and their free-spawn provided the core of the Mictlani armies. I'm pretty sure I went the entire game without using the actual Summon Beast Bat spell.

Which brings us up to more or less the present day of the Great War. In many ways, Sauromatia had a superior position at the start the War. Mictlan was always behind Sauromatia in research, and so Sauromatia had nearly every useful artifact. In addition, Sauromatia had all or nearly all of the Elemental Royalty, as well as a legion of fully fitted out Tartarians. A large part of the war for Mictlan was the attempt to take back the useful artifacts, and whittle down Sauromatia's advantage in SCs (especially those horrible Air Queens). Mictlan's main adavantages in the War was its allies, its globals, Sauromatia's initial stales, and the awesome power of late game blood magic. At the end of the war against Vanheim we discovered a site with a 30% conjuration bonus, but I was not able to make full use of it until very late in the war, since the site was far way from my best mages, and too close to the front lines to safely move mages in.

That was the big picture, here a few tactical notes:

- Sauromatia quickly discovered the correct counter to the beast bats, which is to bring along a Staff of Storms. The Bats have a tactical move of 2, which makes them *slow* when they can't fly. They can still fight in a storm, but they can no longer run interference on enemy mages and prevent any retreating troops from making it to safety.

- Forge of the Ancients is of course huge, and in retrospect I should have started trading for earth gems more quickly. At the last turn I had 250 earth gems saved, and was supposed to get another 350 from Oceania on the next turn. Hopefully that would have take it down.

- Banish to Inferno/Cocytos is great in the late game, since it is one of the more certain way to get rid of tartarians/Royalty (at least in the short term). I found out the hard way though that you need to have your casters at the very front if you want to catch enemy SCs at the back row. Even that can be uncertain if there is a storm limiting your vision range.

- Lightning helmets were crucial in many SC duels. I waited far too long in either getting shock resistance or equipping my own Tartarians with them.

- Phoenix Pyre is not quite the unbeatable tactic that I supposed it to be. I lost several thugs/SCs because they were fighting on their own, fell below 1/4 hitpoints, and then retreated.

- Empowering a Tartarian to cast Wish is another somewhat ill thought out idea. It's kind of annoying to have your gem production schedule disrupted because your caster wants to "Whisper to the Dead" for a month. I know at my workplace they wouldn't stand for that sort of behavior for long.

- Horrors turned out to be quite good against SCs. Baalz's post on that topic was very insightful, and I got some use out of it at the end of the game.

- The Astral Windows that Corwin kept seeing was from me checking the besieged castles to see if any reinforcements had teleported in.

Whew! I think that is about it. GG Corwin, et al.

[Gandalf Parker]

It appears that only Oceania is still playing.

[AlgaeNymph]

AdmiralZhao said:
At the last turn I had 250 earth gems saved, and was supposed to get another 350 from Oceania on the next turn. Hopefully that would have take it down.

Wait, did I forget to send you gems? I really was spacing out.

Gandalf Parker said:
It appears that only Oceania is still playing.

Barely. I'm willing to declare it a game.

[Gandalf Parker]

It looks like for the last 5 turns or more that you are the only one turning in moves. So if you want to end the game, we can end it

[AlgaeNymph]

Sure, since nobody else seems to mind.