Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS) - Page 17

rdonj · #**161** February 22nd, 2009, 01:46 AM

A little bit of both. One of my dai oni got lucky and, although it was routed and died 3 or 4 times, survived due to phoenix pyre and was able to bring down an air queen in single combat

Also, in the same battle, a group of undead horsemen I summoned with pale riders killed two unequipped eagle kings. That was the luck part. The nicely done part was 3 castings of ghost riders running down the amphibious water queen and destroying her just before she could escape the battlefield. So grand total of my gem expenditure to kill them was 20d gems

. The dai oni is pretty badly afflicted now, including being muted though so I'm not going to pull that off with him again. But for the moment he is still equipped. His deeds will be whispered of in awe for years to come in Yomi's darkest depths.

The sea is looking rather bleak lately. Only a matter of time until caelum's ownership of the oceans is complete, unless something drastic happens.

Carpetbagger · #**162** February 26th, 2009, 04:09 AM

I regret I must go. I missed last turn and have been getting more 2 busy with spring. Sorry for the AI bomb but it shouldnt matter much. peaceout

rdonj · #**163** February 26th, 2009, 05:04 AM

Not going to look for a sub? I'm not sure if you lost anything really important last turn... I killed a lot of sages and a few eagle kings, but that's about it. Anyway, if Caelum becomes AI I'm not sure there's much point in continuing. Marverni is doing a pretty decent dom push and is vaguely threatening niefelheim with it, but I don't think there's any realistic way for marverni to defeat both me and licker at this point. I guess that could change somewhat after the battle with caelum's AI, but even after the many years of war with caelum, niefelheim and yomi have plenty of resources at their disposal and are in prime position to acquire many of Caelum's territories.

licker · #**164** February 26th, 2009, 10:58 AM

Yeah, that is a shame, but I can see it. This games turns take me a couple days to really do properly, and even there I feel I'm not really optimizing anything.

Though at this point the amount of cloud trapeezing Niefel Jarls I have supported by packs of skratti werewolves, and everyone can have most anything they want thanks to my forge makes it difficult for me to see where I would have any trouble with a Caelum on AI.

I haven't seen the last turn, but if it went as it probably did for me Caelum is starting to feel the pinch of some real armies in his lands in stead of just raiders.

Marverni and I worked out a bit of a deal again anyway, and though we have no NaP anymore also don't have any real build up on our border anymore either.

So unless he's got something up his sleeve (and he could, communions and lots of research...) I kind of agree with rdonj at this point.

I'm willing to play it out a bit longer though if others are interested, at least through the end of March when I again have to go on a trip for 3+ days.

rdonj · #**165** February 26th, 2009, 12:03 PM

IMO, Marverni has a dompush strategy up his sleeve and is not really looking forward to fighting mighty niefelheim in a straightup battle. Which I could completely understand, given just how powerful Niefelheim has become.

That said, I can see how bringing Marverni down could be quite difficult at this stage of the game, with the right spells researched and careful scripting.

If Caelum goes AI I'll be spending the foreseeable future killing off that AI, which is more or less uninteresting in an mp game. But if you and RadioGibbon want to fight on for a while more I will continue playing. I may eventually just start sending in turns of nothing, though.

licker · #**166** February 26th, 2009, 01:03 PM

Well it's up to him then, I've no intention of breaking my end of the 'deal' I have with him, but by the same token, if this becomes a 3 way race to see who can chew up the most of an AI caelum I'm going to win that race.

Not braggadocio, just my observations. I can basically put a LARGE army anywhere on the map I want to. ANYWHERE!

Not that I've been doing that, since Caelum could thwart it, but AI Caelum probably cannot.

From looking at the llama stats from last turn it looks like my full scale invasion of Caelum took alot of ground, and there are more forces already en route, not counting my shuffling of my CTing Niefel Jarls.

We all know the AI will suicide itself against any sieging forces, and I'm ready to put two big sieging armies on 2 calean forts, which will probably clear out any reasonable forces he has in the area after a couple of turns.

Yomi can probably do the same, but I think there are more caelean forces in his theater than mine.

Marverni is still slowly creeping south, but hasn't finsihed off the remnants of Sauromatia I left for him.

Anyway, let us know what you think RadioGibbon, if you want to play on for a bit I'll do it, if you want to try your hand in a war with me, I'll do that too

I don't think Yomi has any interest in a hypothetical war with me, but if you do we can try that one too

rdonj · #**167** February 26th, 2009, 01:55 PM

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 · #**168** February 26th, 2009, 02:17 PM

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 · #**169** February 26th, 2009, 03:56 PM

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 · #**170** February 26th, 2009, 04:35 PM

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.