Version 3.08 Newbie game (finished)

[cupido2]

Thanks Ich for hosting! It was a pleasure!

[Cor2]

Thanks Ich. Much fun was had by me.

So post game questions.

1: how powerful was your Arcane Nexus, how many gems did you put in it?

2: what were all these anti-tart experiments that failed?



One of my experiments that had promise but became obsolete before it could work: I had tons of air and water gems and nothing to do with them so I started recruiting my scouts who are cheap and have a precision 12 and giving them war bows and boots of quickness. I feilded about 10 of them in one battle and the amount of arrows they produced was impressive (260 per round) but they were mass enslaved after thier first salvo. I then stripped the remaining ones of thier boots and gave them to tartarians.
I thought this could be a very good tactic if they were given bottles of living water, they could use thier stealth to raid in groups of a dozen.


A tactic that i figured out toward the end of the game was to hire merc to forge items for me. Since item forgeing had become dangerous.

[cupido2]

iirc, I put 800 in it. Don't know if it was in addition to the casting cost or with the casting cost. That was all the gems I had at that time. As I've said in the thread, I got 4 to 40 gems per turn (I think mostly nature and death gems (Gift of reason and Tartarian gate?). I think all in all I got the casting cost back.

First I thought the Tarrasques and my Golem-"SC" could match up, but that was futile.

Then I tried to mind burn them and that spell were those they had killed attacked them (revenge of the dead our how it is called). This left 6 of my mages feeble-minded with no noticable effect.

Then there was the Undead Mastery-Ilithid. That failed of course due to the MR. Unfortunatly that mage was killed and I was death-mage-less for around 20 turns.

I amassed sleepers, about 9 or 10, with eye of aiming, some with boots of quickness, ethereal or Just Man's crossbows. But most of them were killed in a battle against your regular forces. The survivors (3 or so) took part in battle against Tartarians but didn't do any good. Don't know due to lack of number or equipement.

Then I outfitted about 5 or 6 precious E2S2 mages to E5S5 to cast petrify. They were so expensive! Aaargh. Earth magic increasing is a chore. With staffs of elemental mastery, earth boots, those astral caps, the medaillons for astral boost and rings of wizardry. 1 or 2 fell victim to an earth attack. (I was getting angry, always when my seatroll-guards were about to win, they routed. Huarg). The rest were killed by your air queen in my silly attack in the north.

Then I amassed Ilithids to paralyze them (that I tried in the south). Wasn't effective.

Then there was the assassin demon with the Infernal sword. Failed. Was a disappointment.

Then I stole the Chalice. That worked!

Next plan was Tartarians themselves. Weird scripting and strange outfitting (I had no more earth mages to the end)... oh well you know it yourself.

Then the astral corruption to stall the Tartarian output, but it was too late anyways. I havn't had too much problem with it, because almost all my mages had at least S2 so "returning" was no problem, but you have to look up the gemstock of them and a monolith cannot cast it. Oh btw, entering the void gate lures horrors.

Then the home-castle commanders went out to soul slay, astral geysir and so on, but with little succsess.

The succubi were surprisingly vicious. What a fight! But the two were not strong enough in the end.

[Cor2]

Wow, that is alot of diffrent tries.

For me the casting "rage" is the scariest. I lost one SC to that in another game where the opponet had a bunch of paralyzed troops on the feild. My SC a fire elemenal king ran around like mad hitting himself until he died.

You did hit one of my tarts with rage, unfortunatly for you she was killed shortly after that and pheonix pyred into the middle of your troops and ran around whacking.

IIRC, quickness does not effect crossbows, so your Sleepers may have been more effective with black bows of bultuf especially since you cannot resisit with MR.

Something else i would have tried is gifts from heaven, probobly would not have worked due to low accuracy, but boy do they pack a punch.

And last tactic I would have tried is Claws of Cocytus or infernal prison, they have no MR check. They have low ranges (30) so you would have to get dangerously close however.

The astral corruption was brilliant. It really stoped my tartarian production because you combined it with stealing the chalice i had to use all my gems every turn to get it back so I couldn't afford to empower a death 7 mage and a nature 4 mage with astral to cast returning. most of the time i cast and forged nothing.

the horromarks I sustained from the astral geysers lead to several horror attacks. I think spamming horror mark would have eventually been effective, it just would have taken several rounds. Rounds that you didn't have.

All in All well played! It seems you had a disadvantage since the end of the war with TeinChi. Because I started earlier than you I ended up with more provinces, I also had an up and running tartarian factory which really won the game. I think I inherited the strongest position of the 4 players in the game when i took over for Horst, he just didn't know it and was still playing as if he were weak and focusing on diplomacy.

I still feel bad for Tein Chi. They got destroyed. They had no chance against the stuff I was throwing at them then you entered and fininshed them off.

Oh and BTW, the hundreds of gems from the arcane nexus were propaganda. I harvested about 100 the first turn then it decreased every turn until it was about 40-50. Of course the astral corruption meant i was getting between 3-9 gems a round. It probobly paid for itself (I put 999 into it)but not much more. It was worth it to me just to make sure you were not getting those gems.

[cupido2]

Until you entered the game, I never had much lands or any gold and therefore only a little army. The upkeep for R'lyeh is quite stiff. My scales didn't help there much That changed when I attacked Marignon (there you took over from Horst). My cheap masterenslavetactic worked pretty good against him. I was still busy defeating, building temples and regular armies, when you attacked Tien Chi. Those 10-15 turns I was never able to compensate. And I have not much experience with and against SC. That was obvious I think.
At least the master theft of the Chalice in combination with the astral corruption caused some trouble for you. Alas your higher gem income allowed you to always steal him back and hitting me more than you.