MP: ThreeFort - Experimental game - Squirrelloid/Bandar Log wins!

[Squirrelloid]

Cap and Coin? Lol. I never forged a coin all game, and only a single cap.

I cast a total of 6 or 7 mindhunts. Every mindhunt was cast by an S4 rishi.

Most of my pearls went to Kinnara, gear for Kinnara, and Gandharvas. I think i forged a total of 3 boosters in total, and most of those late in the game. I simply couldn't afford to use gems on such things regularly, I needed troops and I needed Kinnara for the air access, holy, or thugging ability. (In particular, arrow fend was *necessary* against Agartha's bladewind spam, so early on that need was especially dire). Kinnara's holy magic let me use divine blessing while communioned without my prophet being there (my priests otherwise are all H1).

Now, at the end I had 7 Kinnara and an 8th on the way. That's 200 pearls right there. That's about half my pearl budget for the game in Kinnara alone. Figure another 4x18 for Gandharvas, 50 pearls in gear for thugs (ethereal robes + pendants x5), and a decent number of pearls spent for LotNS/PotS in combat, plus some sundry other forgings (some void eyes, the one cap), and you start to realize just how tight my pearl budget was. Now, arco may have *nothing better to do* than cast mindhunts. But BL certainly does.

So honestly, I didn't see much impact of mindhunt on my end. I agree there were likely *metagame* effects because I *could* cast mindhunt. But my pearls were being used in entirely different ways.

I'm not sure I agree mindhunts should be 3 pearls. A pearl is worth double another gem, and seeking arrow is what, 4a? Of course, its not MR negates, but does have to deal sufficient damage to kill (Eriu, you were targetting the entirely wrong province if you wanted to actually kill something). And even when it fails to kill it might inflict a wound or can be built on by other arrows. Mindhunt is defendable against by a few items, is a lot more expensive to boost penetration (and less total boosting), so the actual cost to kill a commander that matters is expensive (multiple mindhunts from mages with good gear), and then you're gambling that your opponent doesn't have a sneaky astral mage in the province or didn't teleport one in before your mindhunt went off. I made very sparing use of mindhunt because its so expensive to use well and because of the risk.

I do have some suggestions for the next game regarding spell access:
1) The all-battlefield resistance spells should be made available. I know they're normally Ench 8, but without them its much too hard to defend against a number of elemental strategies at all, and its only 50% resistance so its not like it even makes you immune. There is no good counter to things like Grip of Winter or Heat from Hell without access to them.
2) While bloodmagic is underpriced in the normal game, i think the repricing was handled the wrong way in this game. It was no surprise that no one even tried to do anything with blood magic (that i saw - did Mictlan even try to use their national blood spells?). Given the gem economy was basically online immediately, but you'd have to start up the blood economy from scratch, slaves should have been treated as more valuable than in a normal game, if nothing else. The ultimate take-home here is that a number of blood spells probably needed to increase in price, but it wasn't all of them, and many of the price increases were probably too much.

[LoloMo]

We should simplify the initial fort system. I remember that we waited quite a while for all players to submit their fort locations. With this small map, no forts will be constructed. Is it possible to start the game with say 2000 extra gold that can be used for fort construction? Then we can set the initial forced NAP to the first 5 or 6 turns.

If it's not possible to give extra initial gold, then maybe a similar thing can be done by putting gold settings up to the highest.

Regarding the spells, we can just lower the level of spells that are included. It's natural for players to try to weaken other nations and strengthen their own nation by taking out certain spells. We can just lower the available spells to level 5 or even 4, rather than have long negotiations on which level 6 spell is overpowered. Hopefully, this fixes the problem with blood spells too.

[LDiCesare]

As for fort locations, you could just set them in the map and decide the capital to be in the middle. That speeds up the process and is quite easy.

To me the most annoying spells were the damn black hawks (impossible to break the walls despite almost all my forces on the fort, and with some wall-breaking bonuses to boot). I have no idea if they can be as effective in a non-nerfed game, though, but I think a Flame from the Sky ruins them pretty well. But then there are domes. But then FftS will eventually pass through if you spam it.

Also seeking arrows. I think that Caelum could stockpile air gems whereas I and Eriu were busy using our gems on other stuff (black hawks, jaguars...). Caelum's stockpile was efficiently used to slaughter the commanders whom I sent to besiege their capital. Without mages and leadership, my southern army was soon toast.
I'd suggest a map that forces players to attack an identified neighbour too btw. If 2 players randomly gang up on the same guy, the poor is likely toast and the remaining player can easily sit and wait, stockpiling gems instead of losing them in battle. When hsi neighbour becomes too big or small, he can effectively attack him. I think it's a bit cheesy, although one would be stupid not to profit from the situation. I started wondering where to go when Eriu pleasantly offered me a god to kill, but kept being afraid that Caelum would strike me rather than BL.
Also note that seeking arrows are very effective against humans but mostly harmless against giants and big-hp commanders. Since it was hard for me to summon big-hp leaders, this made seeking arrow more effective. This also makes nations with recruitable thugs much stronger. Oh. Also, I s*** at putting up domes.

I never tried blood. I had no blood mage to begin with, so I'd have had to hunt + empower + hunt + cast. The game was far too short for that.

[Valerius]

Ok, a lot to respond to.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Cap and Coin? Lol. I never forged a coin all game, and only a single cap.

I cast a total of 6 or 7 mindhunts. Every mindhunt was cast by an S4 rishi.

Most of my pearls went to Kinnara, gear for Kinnara, and Gandharvas.

Interesting info. I'm surprised you cast so few mind hunts. You hit me with, I think, 3 of them after I attacked you, so I figured you were using them more extensively. I had no idea you had that many Kinnara's - but with no indies and limited forts I'd imagine everyone had fewer scouts than usual.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I'm not sure I agree mindhunts should be 3 pearls. A pearl is worth double another gem, and seeking arrow is what, 4a?

I assume you mean that pearls can be alchemized into other gems at 2:1 ratio instead of a 4:1 ratio? Keep in mind that also can make S based spells cheaper to cast than other paths. If you're spamming mind hunt and I'm spamming seeking arrow, once we burn through our S/A gems you can alchemize much more cost effectively than I can in order to keep casting spells. But I think the biggest thing is that gem value is relative. If you're spamming seeking arrow you are likely an air nation and those are gems you won't have available for cloud trapezing. Now in this game we had a low province count and I doubled cap gem income so it was more viable to have a large stockpile of A gems to use against an opponent but normally if I'm spamming seeking arrow it's a sign things aren't going well.

But I think the biggest thing was that without indies or many forts it was difficult to stock armies with decoy commanders to soak up remote attacks. In a normal game decoys can help against mind hunt but they pretty much make seeking arrow pointless. Your typical indie commander will survive a seeking arrow and still be available next round as a decoy (you don't care if he gets afflictions). Decoys are effective against mind hunts but not as much so since usually they will kill the decoy commander so you have to keep restocking them. Mind hunt also has the advantage that it can target stealthy units and doesn't care about HP. So in a normal game seeking arrow is situational as opposed to a staple like mind hunt.

This leads to the question of whether we allow indies for the next game. If we do it will help with dealing with any kind of remote attack on commanders. Very interested in hearing opinions on this and also whether I should include magic sites that allow mage recruitment.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

1) The all-battlefield resistance spells should be made available.

I wasn't too worried about this becuase the Ench. 5 Fend spells have a large AOE and without a need to keep commanders in the lab researching even 2-3 mages can cover a lot of troops. Of course if you don't have fire/water mages and you're facing an opponent using those paths things get trickier. Water's actually not bad because there's several summons that can give you access to that path. Fire is difficult but that's because until you get to elemental royalty and tarts the only summon with fire access that comes to mind is the terrain dependent Hidden in Sand. I can look into removing that or maybe adding an F2 summon so that everyone would have access to a fire mage. But I'd prefer not to have the battlefield wide resistance spells added.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

2) While bloodmagic is underpriced in the normal game, i think the repricing was handled the wrong way in this game.

Well, obviously I nerfed blood heavily. I'm willing to take a look at the blood summon costs and reduce some of them and maybe add some spells back in. But I think the logic you used for your balance mod applies here as well. And it's worth keeping in mind that if you don't care too much about the few spells at level 3 you can basically devote every blood mage to blood hunting from the turn they are recruited.

Originally Posted by LoloMo

We should simplify the initial fort system. I remember that we waited quite a while for all players to submit their fort locations. With this small map, no forts will be constructed. Is it possible to start the game with say 2000 extra gold that can be used for fort construction? Then we can set the initial forced NAP to the first 5 or 6 turns.

If it's not possible to give extra initial gold, then maybe a similar thing can be done by putting gold settings up to the highest.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

As for fort locations, you could just set them in the map and decide the capital to be in the middle. That speeds up the process and is quite easy.

I can check into this but it seems easier to maybe increase gold to 150%. Depending on your scales, you may have to compromise between recruiting your most expensive mages or building your most expensive forts the first few turns but I think that's ok.

As far as the map goes, my thought was that we'd find a new map averaging around 12 provinces per player. But we can reuse this one if we don't get 8 players; either the five player version we ended up using or the original six player version.

If we do use this one again, LDiCesare's suggestion certainly simplifies things.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

To me the most annoying spells were the damn black hawks (impossible to break the walls despite almost all my forces on the fort, and with some wall-breaking bonuses to boot).

Yeah, I actually felt it was a lame tactic. But I really thought if Caelum attacked you'd withdraw and I'd be back in the game - as long as I had managed to keep my cap. But I should mention the reason I was able to hold out was the doubling of my cap A income. Any opinions on this aspect of the game? My intention was to have each nation have a good supply of gems its mages could use but maybe it was too much?

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Also seeking arrows.

I think seeking arrows really paid off for Caelum because he was at peace the longest, there were few decoy commanders on the field and cap gem incomes were doubled. Whether we make the next game a no-indies game is a big question.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Valerius

Ok, a lot to respond to.

Interesting info. I'm surprised you cast so few mind hunts. You hit me with, I think, 3 of them after I attacked you, so I figured you were using them more extensively. I had no idea you had that many Kinnara's - but with no indies and limited forts I'd imagine everyone had fewer scouts than usual.

I probably would have made more extensive use of it if not for the following:

Caelum gets S1 randoms and was making certain he brought one with every force.

Agartha gets S1 randoms on golem crafters, and since he had a large force of golem crafters, I wasn't about to throw mindhunt around until i was sure all the S crafters were dead.

The only reason i threw 3 at you when you declared war on me is I saw your VQ (with astral, meaning i couldn't mindhunt her province) and the death summons elsewhere, and concluded you had few if any S1 spectres (barring a phenomenal death income!), so it was a calculated risk. Of course, you also had plenty of blackhawk leaders to eat mindhunts, so i'm not sure i did any real damage.

Basically, the high risk involved with using mindhunt combined with an abundance of better uses for pearls made me much more conservative in my use of it.

I actually had like 8 scouts at the height of my scouting power. Of course, I sacrificed some against Caelum to check PD levels. But they were worth the fort use to hire.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

The only reason i threw 3 at you when you declared war on me is I saw your VQ (with astral, meaning i couldn't mindhunt her province) and the death summons elsewhere, and concluded you had few if any S1 spectres (barring a phenomenal death income!), so it was a calculated risk. Of course, you also had plenty of blackhawk leaders to eat mindhunts, so i'm not sure i did any real damage.

Good calculation; aside from my pretender the only commander I had with undead leadership was a lousy ghoul. And you were 3/3 on your mind hunts: Sidhe Lord, Sidhe Champion and Black Hawk.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I actually had like 8 scouts at the height of my scouting power. Of course, I sacrificed some against Caelum to check PD levels. But they were worth the fort use to hire.

At game's end I had 10 scouts, all concentrated in Agartha's and Mictlan's provinces. I had more at one point but lost some to patrollers. My guess is that I recruited more scouts than anyone since I had plenty of turns with two forts free but not much gold. I actually had a scrying site but my pretender had better things to do and I had no other S mages that could use it.

[Valerius]

Guys, I've summarized the settings for the next game at the bottom of the first post. Once we settle on them I'll open a new thread and start recruitment. If you object to some of the settings please speak up.

Also, I think it fair that we get to choose nations before opening up recruitment. Of course you can keep your current nation but feel free to switch if you'd like. To review, the list of banned nations is: all water nations, Ashdod, Jotun, Ermor, Pan.

I'm going to power game this time and switch to Vanheim. Fear my skinshifter hordes!

[LoloMo]

Is the spell mists of deception still banned? Do we start with 12 provinces or do we start with just the capital and expand as normal? I would certainly play again!

[NooBliss]

>> I wouldn't say Agartha didn't fight to the death. It was hard fought and he was totally out of material when he set AI - as in, not a single unit left or province left to his name. I just had to finish breaking fort walls.

I had some Oracles prepared for a final fight tho. But they... disappeared.
Well at least I lost to a game winner. Arrow Fend impact was simply huge.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by NooBliss

Well at least I lost to a game winner. Arrow Fend impact was simply huge.

It better have been, I spent a lot of pearls to be able to cast it wherever I needed it =)