AAR: Multi-Player After Action Report (Now Discussing Turns up to 13-16)

[Immaculate]

alright - on we go!

[Corinthian]

Turn 13: Revised.

Welcome back after our long hiatus. It seems we all have taken a break from this thread for various reasons. But now that the game is mostly over I see no reasons why we can not start it up again. We do have more time now after all.

Music for the turn.

Oh yea. First. Lets make it clear that the things I posted last turn did not actually happen. This is because I changed my mind at the last moment. My plans were too precious to not write down in this thread so I had to fool you a bit.

What follows is the correct retelling of turn 13.

A strange sight greets me as I contemplates my invasion. A solitary angelic figure towers over the central fields of Arco. Last turn I sent my sneaking army in to the one remaining indy province outside Arcos capitol in order to get a look at the eventual opposition if he were to attack it.

They saw the following.

This horrific being is Arcos pretender, the Virtue “White Wedding” by Billy Idol. It is the first Super Combatant we have seen in the game thus far and its represents a completely different kind of challenge than the rest of Arcos forces.

Its just one guy, but never the less it dominates the heavy cavalry indies that opposes it. How? It can do this because it has great stats and a huge number of special properties. Both innate and from spells it buffed itself with in the beginning of the battle.

If someone was to attack it, they would first have to overcome a long list of hurdles. Like its Awe +7, witch means you have to make a morale save vs 17 or 19. (I'm uncertain). Indies have an average morale of 10. After that you'd need to get past the Virtues Luck and Etherealness attributes that it gave itself through self-buffing spells. Both effects combined will allow it to ignore 7/8 of all non magic attacks and ½ of all the magical ones. Indies, naturally dont have magic weapons. Nor do they have mages in this case. But if they would nevertheless succeed with these hard feats and also overcome 15 points of defense, they would still only do 1 point of damage per hit. This because it also self-buffed with mistform, witch makes it so that every hit that strike it will only do 1 point of damage unless it is an instant kill attack like soulslay. If it is a magic attack, or if it would have caused more than 25 points of damage after protection, the spell will dissipate. But the attack that caused it to dissipate will still only cause 1 point of damage.

Each of these abilities on their own are beatable, but together they mean that the indies never had a chance. I don think the Virtue even took any damage.

Another thing of note it that it have Astral 9. Something tells me that my opponent was really paranoid about getting magic dueled during pretender creation. S9 does also provide a decent bless of course and access to some neat globals and rituals like Arcane Nexus and Wish. But his sacred units requires a lot of resources and are cap only, so I dont think the bless will see much use.

Some people likes to simulate wars and battles in single player before they do something. I am not that patient that I can run an entire SP game just for that kind of thing, so I just do some quick and dirty calculations in my head or with pen and paper.

Killing this thing is not impossible. But it will require that I rethink my strategies. I dont think the giants would be able to do much against it due to the etherealness and mistform, but my Nemedian Warriors might stand a chance. They have magical golden spears that are totally bling. The Awe would still be a problem, but they have morale 14 base witch could become 16 with Sermon of Courage. That means that they will manage to launch an attack somewhere between 1 time in 3, or 2 in 5. If I attack it with the 10 guys I have standing in the province, that means maybe 0.75 hits per turn after accounting for enemy defense with fatigue and after luck. The warriors do 17 hp damage vs its 5 points of protection. So more like 12 damage *0.75 = 9 points of damage per turn on average. First hit does not count due to mistform. This means I would need 10-11 turns to bring it down. Although it would flee before that.


However this calculation is only true if it does not strike back. Its unlikely to be that pacifist. The flamberge that it wields is both armor piercing and adds 4 extra points of attack skill. Although my nemedian warriors have 16 points of defense, 5 of those points are because of the golden shields they wield. For practical purposes, those shields wont do much difference vs a damage 18 (+18) armor piercing flamberge. I will assume that an attack would be deadly to the warriors 75-80% of the time after accounting for defense, shields, protection and hitpoints. However, the warriors also have glamor, witch means that all melee attacks have a flat 50% chance of missing. So the Virtue will have a 37.5-40% chance of killing one of my dudes each turn.

This is dour statistics because I cant even be certain to face it alone and I only have 10 Warriors ready for attack right now. My chances with it would be rather mediocre right now even should I catch it. I rather hold my troops in reserve and monitor the situation.


Well, you know how LiDCesare is always whining about how Abysia is ruining the game for both of them? Well he is largely correct. Unless you have no other choice, attacking someone without a realistic plan for how to kill your opponent quickly is suicide. Because although you (I) might have enough power to win the war, you (I) will probably not have enough power to do that and also fight off all your opportunistic neighbors. This means that you must either leave a sizable force in reserve and fight a slow, grindy war. Or you attack with all you got and hope that you other neighbors are nice enough to ignore you or that you can finish the war before they can strike at you. Or rely on diplomacy I guess. Though diplomacy have never been my strong point.

For me that is doubly troublesome because not only am I the biggest player by a good margin, I also have three close neighbors compared to the two that just about everyone else get. So thats three fronts I have to guard compared to, say, Abysia.


You know that Desmond guy? Yea it turns out he listened to the bad omens of the previous turns and decided that he rather wanted to sitesearch while he exercised his troops a little. Many other mages continue to sitesearch across the lands, while the ones in the capitol continues to transform air gems in to owl quills.

An expedition of unmarked is sent to the horse tribe lands to the east to determine were the mercenaries I sent there earlier disappeared to.


Meanwhile, more Nemedian warriors are recruited for a “mysterious” purpose. I now also have enough money to recruit a king almost every turn. Or at least when I'm not building a fort.


A strange and awkward singing stone has also been found. It is immediately moved to a nearby pub were it is put to use. Drunk people find it to be hilarious apparently.



Turn 14


A bunch of new sites are uncovered.


The totem collection I already knew was there but the others were a pleasant surprise. We now have enough astral that we can remote site search once every turn. I dont have the research for it yet, but arcane probing will prove to be a continuous and massive waste of pearls for a long while in the future.

The owl quills also allow us to reach construction 2 this turn. The new trinkets are cool and all but we have not quite gained the level of proficiency were we can start mass-producing things other than quills.

The horse tribals were forever mournful of their sins, and we sent them to the land of the dead so they could apologize to the late mercs in person. No casualties.



Meanwhile, a fort has been completed in Nardago and several more forts are being planned or constructed around the lands with the help of my prodigious gold income.

Nothing much else happens because living in a land with Order 3, luck 0 scales is really peaceful. (Future me: With the exception of the, like, four-five times that I have been invaded by barbarians due to other peoples scales.) A couple of kings join the group of mages responsible for manually searching for magic sites.


Turn 15


On the surface of things nothing much happens this turn either.


A magical air site is found in the land of the obstinate horse tribe . And to celebrate that I get an events that give me air gems.


Nothing else much of note is happening in my lands, so I must spy upon other lands to get some excitement. Looking around a bit I can see that Marverni have taken the city of Ermor from Rlyeh.


I doubt they are actually at war as I can't see how Marv would get down under water and I doubt he would invade someone without the means to finish them of. Still, that Marv would have the guts to boss around not just one, but two nations that are bigger than himself and get away with it... Is impressive. Thats one brave bastard.


The construction of a fortified city was started in the plains of Hesperia last turn. Normally I build cheaper forts, but there is something to be said for an admin 50 fort with lots of neighboring provinces sometimes.

An expedition force is also sent to greet the barbarians living in the Dragon ridge Pass. Their weird gods and traditions should be no match for giants. I will show them once and for all that magical larping is no basis for a proper religion.

Despite having the biggest empire out of all the players I have not found a single scout province! This means that my only source of information from outside my lands are the score graphs.

So here are some of the current ones.

On the Province graph we can see two important thing. 1) Damn I'm big! And 2) Abysia and Pan is losing lands while Arco is growing rapidly. This can only mean that Arco have attacked Abysia in the back as he in turn was busy attacking Pan.


On the fort graph we can see that the first forts are coming online for several of the players. R'lyeh lacks underwater capable enemies and seem to be determine to fort up the entire ocean before he get any.


On the income graph I am equally monstrous as I was on the province graph. But I did not get this way until I started overtaxing my capitol. As far as I can tell I am the only one who is utilizing this short term strategy.


The army graph is also interesting, as not only does it show that I have bypassed freespawn Pan in army size, it also shows that Aby just destroyed most of Pans armies with relatively light losses of his own. And might therefore be able to dedicate a large part of his forces towards fighting Arco, as Pan just got a lot less dangerous.


But the big thing to take away from these graphs is of course that Arco followed my suggestion of attacking Abysia.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!

[LDiCesare]

Since I already wrote up to and including turn 16, I'll wait a bit more that other people with more interesting things to say post stories before continuing. It's not like much will be happening in Pangaea for a while.

[jotwebe]

R'lyeh ~~ Turn 16

Chill Carrier: "Surfing Clouds"


The annoying thing with doing diplomacy over this here forum is that you don't keep your sent messages. So if you didn't remember to screenshot your diplo, it'll be lost in the void. Or at the mercy of your fellow players, anyway. Still better than the in-game system, where you can't even check whether you did or didn't send that declaration of war yet.

Or you could save the screenshots of your diplo in the wrong folder. That's why you can now read last turn's Abysia/R'lyeh diplomatic correspondence now.

Since this turn is otherwise really uneventful, that's not bad actually.

Figure 1: really uneventful turn



Figures 2 and 3: amazing thalassopolitical shenanigans



I'm just grabbing some cheap land here. The dangerous guy is on the other side of the world, right there on the beach.



Since one of the three events was some new research, let's look at that for a second. Conjuration 3, apart from some water summons I'm not planning on using a lot we have:



It's a nice booster spell. Doesn't look like that nice a deal on first glance, but since its area of effect is caster, when a communion master casts it, it'll also benefit all of his slaves. In addition the rather steep cost gets spread around some.

But nice as it is, it's not why I'm researching conjuration at this point. There's a certain spell at the next level which is very interesting for water nations.



Obscuro's job is site searching. And he immediately succeeds: the narrow straits seperating Bolfagon and Maverni Ograthon are home to wild wind spirits that make it impossible to cross by ship. Obscuro devises an illusion-based trap that occasionally lures one of their number into a magical pouch.



And lastly, Auluudh has reached Smallsea, the inappropiately named water province surrounding Tir na n'Og's shores. On the new moon, he and his army will rush ashore and wrest the fertile plains of Pirenna from the evil Lich's grasp.

[Adam J]

Jotwebe- there's also an option to save the sent message in additional options which is located below the icons.

[Bluemage142]

HahahaHAHAha! My DIABOLICAL plan to have the last word on turns has FINALLY succeeded!

...wait, no. I've just been busy, distracted, and had sore typing hands. Also, I'm lazy. Here's five turns.

Turn 13:



200 gold, some magic gems, another winning battle, and a mercenary group hired. Oh, and Alt2. That's what we have here. I'm 495RP to Alt5, my next goal, so that'll take a while. Seven turns, if I keep getting Druids.



This is the state of the empire. Notice the red flag down south? We've finally found Abysia. I'm sure I'll hear from him soon enough. Fomoria has a fort now (curse them and all they stand for), and mine is a turn away from completion. WE NEED TO CLOSE THE FORT GAP.



That'll help.

Now, R'lyeh and I had an agreement that could give me that land province up north, so that army will just wait there. Sending mercs up to grab that next eastern province, too. Once I confirm the state of things, I'll move it, one way or the other. For now, have some better news.



Our first Druid. Isn't that nice? Look at those paths! I'd've preferred to have two water or two nature, but eh. You get what you get. Druid #2 is under recruitment, and I have some mercs after the fishmen to the east.



Final orders.

Turn 14:



Curses. See that? Two battles in the same province? Helheim and I invaded at the same time. Well, not technically- he went in first- but close enough. I'm actually rather shocked that I killed one of his thugs (you don't send out six men if they aren't thugs- well, thugs or an insult) with those mercs.

(The names should be a tipoff. Jake and Finn are quite definitely part of RJ's naming scheme, so yeah.)





By now, you've read all about glamour. Combine it with the bless in that final pic (E9S4B4, if you don't have dom3wiki open and/or the effects memorized), and six men can do a ridiculous amount of damage. Oh, well.

I've got a fort up near Fomoria, and I have no intention of sending a Gut out of my capital to set up its lab and temple. Why? Because of the effect on my research. It'd take two turns to get there, and two more turns to build the thing. That's 20 RP lost, and at seven turns from Alt5, there won't be enough time to really make the effort worth it yet. When I get closer to the goal, I'll reassess my priorities, but I REALLY do not want Alt5 delayed!




The message from Abysia is rather a good thing. Perhaps a future ally? I send him a response, hinting lightly at my goals, and offering a rather stronger peace than he suggested.
I also move into R'lyeh in the NE- jotwebe offered me the southmost of his land provinces, and I took it. It gives me another link to the southern border with Fomoria.



Final orders.

Turn 15:



No clue what's going on here. Let's look.



Nature gems. Yay... actually, that's sort of useful. I haven't had time to worry about gems yet, and I need them for berserking. Next!



Good. jotwebe was honest when he told me what to expect there.



Here's the state of the empire. Building a lab down south, to go with the castle. Up north, I've settled into a rhythm of cranking out 40 Marv BCs, a Druid, and an indep commander to lead them. Also starting to stockpile Carnute BCs to the west- when war with Fomoria breaks out, I'll need them.



Alt3 down. Two turns to Alt4, and another three at my growth rate to Alt5. Speaking of growth, it occurs to me that I've been totally remiss in one of my must important duties this game.





Much better.

Turn 16:



Ooh. Not fun. I did take a province, but it was rather expensive. 30ish BCs isn't the sort of loss figure I'm used to seeing. I'm also slightly annoyed at the loss of my Scout. It probably won't damage Fomorian relations, since scouts are generally treated like eccentric foreign tourists, but I sort of wanted to know more about where he was.



I do have my third fort up, and that's worth accepting this turn as headcanon. On to spending gold!

I end up buying a bunch of BCs to replenish my southern and western forces. Oh, and a Druid. And a temple. That pretty much wipes me out.



Still 240 RP to Alt5, once this turn is done. I don't have the cash to get my mage production up (more on that in my Mistakes post, later), so I'm stuck at a paltry 78+9RP a turn.

My two main forces are too mauled to do much, and my mage corps is sort of busy becoming effective, so that's all I can do.

Turn 17:



Huh. The random event was immigration- apparently, somebody else had 1/5 of a province's population up and leave, and they settled in one of my southern provs. Good for taxes, I guess. As for the death match, it's well worth TOTALLY IGNORING, as I don't have a single commander worth throwing in there, and the reward isn't all that great.



Now, if you squint hard enough at this, you'll see that the third fort finished! PROGRESS! Also, because of having a mage/priest along with that army, I've already got it fully equipped for production. I queued up a pile of BCs and a Gut for research there. More BCs at my capital, and a few in the west. I've almost got my armies restored to full... which'll mean I'll need to recruit a few more commanders. It never ends.

(If you're filling out armies/commander, you've got too many men, and you're not fighting enough wars. Also, I did just repeat myself about that third fort. More proof that the me of the past wasn't doing enough thinky.)



Three more turns to Alt5. After that, I think I'll turn my attention to Evocation, for reasons you'll see at the end of this post.



Now THIS province is interesting. You always want to examine which units you get out of independent provinces, just in case something like this comes up. It's an Amazon province.
New players might ask what I mean by that. Simple. Look at this.



Here are the units it produces. The Amazon is a decent archer- useless for me right now, since its bows do 10 damage flat, but better than most of my troops at range. The first of those commanders, the Crystal Priestess, is also fairly useless- a basic priest with a 50% chance of Air 1 and a 10% chance of Astral 1? Sign me up- wait, no. Don't.



This is the Pegasus Rider. Fairly weak, except for a couple of saving graces. First, its defense. 19 is quite impressive- it'd take some thugs or a real mob to hit one of them. Second, see the wings in their list of attributes? Yep. They fly. Set some of these ladies on an Attack Rear order, and they can (with the right placing) end up right where people tend to leave their commanders. Finally, they have lances. The Light Lance is Damage 3, equivalent to a javelin, but it has a special property. The first attack made with a lance does double damage. Yes, you read that right. Strength 9, plus Damage 3, plus a semi-random number (usually 2 to 12), TIMES TWO. Twenty-six MINIMUM damage. That could ruin a well-armored human commander's day... or do some hurt to a giant.



Last, but CERTAINLY not least, is the Crystal Sorceress. It's a mage with a bow- one level of Air, one of Astral, and 10% chance of Astral 2. Not that strong, and 4 RP for 180 gold is sort of bad. I will love these ladies to DEATH.

Why, you ask? Well, it's quite simple. They have Air magic, which I don't get naturally. They ALL get enough Astral to join a communion, which allows me to boost that measly A1 to between A3 and A7, and do a fairly good job casting Orb Lightning. Orb Lightning is a fairly nice Air battle spell, which only requires Air 1 to cast, and deals 10 damage, ignoring any armor (Protection) the enemy has. Thing is, for every level of Air you add beyond the A1 needed to cast Orb Lightning, your mage throws another ball of lightning. At the same square. For ANOTHER 10 armor-negating damage. Oh, and the fatigue cost of Orb Lightning is RIDICULOUSLY low, to the point where a base Sorceress can throw nine of them in a row. Add in communions, and I can have them throwing Orb Lightning until the end of the battle.

"Now, 30 guaranteed damage is nice, but how do you make sure they actually hit somebody with it?", you ask. Simple. These ladies have 14 precision, out of the box. I can boost that to 19 with either Aim or Eagle Eyes, two spells I have right now, by adding a Druid to the mix. The average unit has 10 precision, and most mages have 11 or 12. Same for archers. SEE why I'm happy I found this?

(Also, Precision over 10 counts double. Effective 28, anybody?)

Imagine twenty Crystal Sorceresses, each of which can throw an Orb Lightning a turn for 30 damage a shot. They can ignore all that protection that Fomorian giants carry around, kill the weaker ones in one shot each, and nearly kill his Unmarked in a hit. Figure I can dependably get off eighty of those in a battle... while my barechests are doing what they do best. That's my vision for the future... a boot stamping on a dead giant's face, forever.

(As lovely as that is, I overlooked the gold costs of this are impractical for me right then, and would be better off spent on Druids. Oh, and the time commitment makes it rather impractical. Still, it is a LOVELY theory.)

[jotwebe]

R'lyeh ~~ Turn 17

Soundtrack: SONGO 21: "Amor y Felicidad"

Last turn we left off with Auluudh poised to fall upon Pangaea's defenseless island provinces. Landfall is made in Pirenna:



There is little opposition.



Time to take it easy, let the tentacles hang loose, and relaaaaaax.



This is the kind of fighting I like. Let's take a sip of our ice-cold drink and check what's going on in the rest of the empire.



Hmm, a message from Pangaea?



I'm afraid I can't hear you over the sound of dying maenads. Anyway, new province, farmland, some nice beaches, some secluded magrove-shrouded bays where overgrown idols are worshipped by strange atlantean toad-people.



They shall take their rightful place as slaves of mighty R'lyeh.



Not that we really need more amphibian slaves.



Or water mages. But they go to Abysia anyway, as per our understanding. This does give them underwater capabilities, but I'm not too worried. They Burning Ones will go after other land targets first, before they will dare to come under the waves. Time enough to take care of this little problem if need be.

Now, what else? In the south west, Dxu'daku the mind lord found the rotting carcass of an ancient kraken.



It is a vast expanse of decaying flesh, circled by a zone of airless, dead water. Alive, this monster might have rivaled Yöt-Webbogoth in size. Yet for some reason, it is difficult to find, requiring advanced knowledge of death magic to identify.



The fort in Lake Vastness is complete. Now Nithü has a safe place to work, and in little time we'll have cleaned up the nasty death scales from Helheim's yucky dominion.

So the time is right for another fort, this one off Fomoria's coast.



Yöt-Webbogoth itself builds the gargantuan walls from pieces of destroyed triton palaces.

What else? You may have noted that there aren't a lot of water gems anymore in R'lyeh's eldritch gem storage thingy. That is because I spent them all. On this.



For the water provinces. ALL OF THEM.

We have researched Conjuration 4. Let's do some dream interpretation.

And finally the aboleths perform some unspeakable ceremonies in the lightless depths of R'lyeh, celebrating certain constellations that have re-aligned to mark the birth of that horrible ape-creature only known as "Em", which the unwary and foolish summon through the twisted ring of a Möbius band.

[LDiCesare]

Does anyone want to keep playing? The winner seems clear, annd the second largest player seems to acknowledge it. Of the remaining three, one is likely to be dead by next turn, the second one is in really poor shape, and as for myself I don't think there's any point continuing either since I could probably turtle out forever but that's quite boring.