Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)

[rdonj]

Yeah, you would. You've got far more mobility than me, especially on thugs/scs, so it would be very easy for you to quickly take over caelum's territories. I've got ghost riders to clear, plus several flying scs/thugs, a good number of grounded scs and thugs, and a pretty large army with strong buffs and the ability to cast stygian paths, but I'm stuck behind the bottleneck of doom and would need to capture bandar-kadek to make any real progress. Unfortunately bandar-kadek has a seriously potent army hiding behind its walls and it's going to take a real effort for me to take the province. Further, if I did cast stygian paths to move an army it would lose most of the support mages, so it really wouldn't be that useful.

I don't know exactly where all of caelum's armies are, but there is definitely a strong military presence in my area. I would probably not be able to capture more than a dozen provinces if I tried to blitz over them in a race to capture as much territory as I can. So I would not expect to benefit too much from the land grab, especially over my giant allies.

And yeah, I'm not overly interested in fighting a war with Niefelheim. As far as I'm concerned the game was supposed to be over approximately when Caelum capitulated, with me then providing the artillery I've been saturating caelum with to convince marverni that victory was not feasible. I think that if I tried I could put up a reasonable fight against you licker, but I am not really interested in trying to kill my allies. If you'd like to try to kill Yomi off though I could be persuaded to look for a sub

[licker]

Heh, no no, I've tried that in another game where my allie agreed to have a massive battle royale, but after a turn of figureing out the logisitics of getting our mega armies inplace for it we both decided it wasn't actually worth the effort.

I'm sure you could cause me some problems, but honestly, I don't think I've lost more than 5 or 6 jarls all game, and I've been building them nonstop since probably turn 4, so I have over 50 of them, and some are earth empowered, many are boosted to A2 for CT and my packs of Niefels can warp around with either the flying ship or the gate stone.

Any dangerous looking thugs I have 4 or 5 different hunting spells to target them with, an dangerous looking armies which are not Caelean... can be torn to pieces unless they are cold immune, and I've even built up my fire mages to the point where I can spam fires from the sky remotely.

I'd love to hear from Radiogibbon though, he may have a wish factory going on, or any other number of silly Astral end game strats (though his gem income has been pretty poor all game, unless he's been claming like crazy) he wants to try out. I do have a Tartian factory going though, and will expand it to 2 per turn if I really feel like I need to

I've got anything I want researched researched, so I don't really even know what to do with my researchers anymore. I don't have a huge blood economy, but with the amount of blood mages I have I could turn one on at any moment if I really wanted/needed to, though it would take a couple turns to get the logistics of it worked out, and frankly, after playing LA Ulm I don't really want to bother with more blood economy micro nonsense.

My gem income is huge, and getting bigger as Caelum loses land to me, the forge is massively overcast at this point, but I have such a huge earth income (including blood stones...) that even if it went down I could put it up again easilly.

My only weakness is dominion, but what do I really need it for? I can freeze any province I need to attack, and its not as though either of you are running big heat scales anyway.

Obviously, since I seem to be winning, I'm happy to call this game, but I hope Marverni has something to try on me, though even if he can put a good sized and maged army or two out there, I can raid him (really anyone) to death while that army takes whatever overland spells I can throw at it.

I'm thinking I can be raided as well, but Caelum really didn't have too much overall success with it, and I have so many SCs and Thugs (haven't even mentioned my conjuration bonus site cranking out death summons like crazy...) that I can take stuff back easilly, and even garrison things if I really wanted to.

[rdonj]

Yeah, I don't really think it would be feasible for anyone to defeat you at this point. Even both me and marverni together, unless he has some really nasty surprises in store for you. Me, I've been gearing up most of the game to kill bird people, not giants. Some of that overlaps, but I would definitely want to change things around for anti-giant duty and I don't think I'd have enough time at this point to do it before I was crushed. I certainly don't have anywhere near your number of SCs, so I would have to rely on mage-backed armies and anti-sc groups... I think I could kill a few more jarls than caelum did, but overall I would expect to lose horribly I only bothered to deploy counters to what caelum actually used at least once, so there are areas I haven't really developed terribly much that would be enormously more useful against you. For one thing, I hardly have any of my main battle mages because every remotely large battle included a storm... rendering my hannyas incapable of hitting a damn thing. There's also a school or two I haven't finished off because I more or less haven't been fighting big army battles against caelum since turn 30 or so, when one of his massive armies with storm/wrathful skies/air elementals/thunderstrike spam was defeated by one of my massive armies of demons and lightning immune thugs. I actually outlasted him, his wrathful skies killed enough of his own 75% resistant troops to make him rout Of course my losses in non-immune units were pretty horrific, so it was pretty much a mutual decision not to waste our resources on one another.

Anyway, I'm just not prepared for it, it would take me over a year to even think about invading you and I'm going to have my hands full with caelum for a while in any case. I'm surprised you've lost so few jarls, I must have seen the deaths of nearly every jarl who died. It was giving me the impression that you were actually having some vague level of difficulty :P

[licker]

Well I'd have to look again, it could be closer to 10, but I have 50+ anyway, I have Tartians, I have some elemental royalty, I have golums...

From fighting Abyssia, then Sauromatia, and now Caelum I have plenty of items forged for various immunities, I cranked out a pile of ammulets of antimagic and have a dozen skull caps (though not on SCs) for MR issues.

I got the E9N8S4 (or 6, can't remember) bless...

Yeah I played Neifel pretty standard, but I just wanted to see how abusable the big bless strat for jarls is.

What made all the difference of course was getting the forge up, and no one taking it down. Well it went down once, but by then I'd already gotten a ton of artifacts and other stuff out of it.

I'll give out a couple 'secrets' anyway, I found conj and thaum bonus sites early, and plopped down forts and preped them for their eventual uses. Yomi and I agreed to an early Nap and it progressed from there as I needed a safe border, and he needed me to forge stuff for him. I also Napped Marverni early and while his dominion crept into my lands it didn't really bother me.

[rdonj]

I only have about 26 Dai Oni, and 9 of those are working as support mages... I have dozens of oni generals left over from attacking ulm and later holding off caelum, but unfortunately they wouldn't be that useful against you as they are now. I could make tartarians if I wanted to, but since I don't have gift of health or the chalice and a TERRIBLE nature income, I haven't bothered. I was working my way to poison golems though, the ubiquitous demon bane swords were getting a bit old with how quickly they could take my SCs down.

Lucky, I only found an evocation reduction site, and even then I found it pretty late and haven't really gotten much use out of it. "Yomi needed me to forge items for him" is putting it a bit lightly :P At the beginning of the Yomi-Caelum war the only astral I had was on my god, and I needed to forge luck pendants and anti-magic amulets quickly to make viable anti-caelum thugs. Then with my complete lack of water mages I also needed water items forged... two things that niefelheim can handle quite capably. I think it was a really good deal for both of us, because while I'm certain I could have killed you back when abysia and ulm were both alive and kicking, I would have been slaughtered by caelum when he decided to come after me and he would have won the game, hands down. Or if he'd left me alone, I would have had to deal with abysia eventually and I think that wouldn't have gone so well.

[licker]

I added 48h to the turn since we haven't heard from RadioGibbon and I'm busy enough that if I don't have to do any more of these turns I don't want to do any more

[rdonj]

Fine by me. I'll send him a pm, hope that gets his attention.

[RadioGibbon]

Sorry I missed this conversation guys (and thanks for the heads up rdonj).

I'm kind of torn. I always like to fight to the end, but I am pushed for time and don't really have a chance against Niefelheim. I sort of stalled mid-game, and couldn't decide which way to expand, and as usual my gem-searching strategy is really poor, I was crippled by a lack of astral pearls all game. I think I'll concede and we can spend our time on game's whose outcome isn't so certain.

What I did have:
Those Big fat green dragons at one a turn
A Demon Lord next turn (No idea what he does but thought I'd summon one and see)
A combat communion I was building up (Loads of L1 astral mages with cheap magic items who could be buffed to the max by a backline of Com Masters)
2 astraled out druids for Teleport/Master Enslave/Vortex of Returning army snatches


So very well played Licker - hope to play you all again some time in the future.

[licker]

Well if you want to play it out we can, I don't want this to seem like I'm forcing anyone's hand.

I think though that even with some of your strengths your poor gem income (you didn't clam did you?) would eventually wear you down.

My MR on my SCs is high, and I have some drop in and battle field evocation spam guys ready to throw at anything dangerous.

That and Master enslave isn't very effective against me since I don't really have any 'armies' to speak of.

Its just unfortunate that Caelum had to go AI, as otherwise there would have been some opportunity for you to position yourself against me, though even so, my ability to cloud trapeze just keeps on growing

Anyway, I will set the game to end, and if we agree that I would win eventually I'll accept it

Though I couldn't have managed it without the solid relations both rdonj and RadioGibbon provided me with, and at least in rdonjs case our relationship was mutually beneficial through all our trading.

[rdonj]

So carpetbagger, does that last turn imply you're staying? You don't seem to have switched over to AI yet, and you just won what I am fairly certain was the most important battle of the entire war. When I think to myself how that would have gone if my SCs hadn't wasted all that time in the back... how many lovely explosions could have rocked your lines... it's such a shame.

And licker, shame on you, running into my only non-cold immune dai oni with a giant army of niefels. That was the one that killed an air queen