Perpetuality - 62 Player MegaGame (Finished!)

[Velusion]

Not until we fill up + Patch comes out or the 11th. Which ever is sooner.

[mivayan]

Ah.. I was sure I wouldn't join, because it's way too big... but it's so tempting since it's a rare event.

K said:
Blood hunting and clams both have the same counter: kill the person doing it. Assassination spells, kill spells, straight battles, and the like all hurt the clammer. If you have 60 clams, then you have 60 leaders who can be killed and who will drop their clams.

The blood hunters will be in 50 different provinces, so you need domes and armies in 50 places rather than just a few. In theory population destruction works too.

Gem generating items will be important. Either mod away/ban all or none... game might be fun either way.

Ironhawk said:
2) Low Magic Sites: Even if you do bust your butt and get research done, what good is it when you dont have any gems to cast those spells or summon those units?

40 is default for middle era. Is that considered low?

You are right in that quite a lot of nations will be wiped out early by bless nations. But I dont think banning dual-9 blesses will change that, and those aren't a no-brainer choice for anyone except mictlan in a game this size.

[Micah]

Don't forget that since clams are items they can be yanked out of the castle in question and redistributed before any assassination attempts occur, even if you were able to kill a patrolling army deep in enemy territory. So now we're talking about a large force and/or several SC's teleporting/Astral travelling into a province (since you can bet that it'll be patrolled by stuff that'll kill a single SC off easily) and then spamming remote attack spells at every location that's likely to have a lab and a couple of commanders in it.

Oh, just remembered, all those domes prevent travel spells, don't they? Well, now we're talking about teleporting in next to the target province and then attacking it the next turn after showing the defender the composition and capabilities of your army from taking out the PD. Maybe you could put scouts there and then outfit your SCs with stealthed-in items for surprise. Good luck with that.

There is no effective counter to clams. Guarding 5-10 forgers from Corruption horrors to get them into play isn't that hard, and once the clams are made they're nigh-impossible to get rid of short of the complete destruction of the owning nation. They don't show up in the income graph, and they're maintenance-free. Leaving them in the game is going to be akin to making them like recruiting troops. There might be some other stuff you can do with your gold besides buying troops, but you kind of have to do it to some degree.

Flames from the sky has about a 5% chance of getting through a quadruple-domed province, and costs 35 gems per cast, so that's about 20 castings, on average, or 700 fire gems. It will hit half of the units, and kill most of them if they're in the realm of 10 HP, so that means your attacker has to expect that there are about 1500 gems' worth of clams in a province to make it cost-effective to spam Flames, which works out to about 1 castle/quadruple dome/patrolling army per 50 clams to be on the safe side of the cost-effectiveness curve. Even with some liches crawling around to spam Drain Life on any teleporting SC that might come calling that's not a particularly heavy infrastructure investment to keep your clams safe. Add in the obvious problem of actually figuring out where the clams ARE and the advantage for the defender in this situation is pretty insurmountable.

[FAJ]

I think making a mod that makes clams work like fever fetishes would be a comprimise.

[Cor]

FAJ, that was going to be my suggestion, kindof. I think modding the clams to have higher costs and higher path requirements would be fair. Or take them out all together.

[DrPraetorious]

It varies a lot from nation to nation.

I don't think any of this twiddling is needed. By the time a game of this size really gets into the late stages, every player will have hosts of independents. Everyone will be clam-hordeing, people will be bootsrapping into a bloodeconomy, empowering mages of the iron order to make bloodstones, all kinds of crazy crap.

If you have nature on your God there will be entire stacks of units, choking and near death, with sacred shrouds and fever fetishes built off of enchantresses.

GOOD.

A game like this should be all about the crazy. I want 128-member communions. I want them to fight a force of 80 mindless golem super-combatants (your master enslave is useless!) The only reason to even keep playing a game like this into the late stages is too enjoy watching the absolute insanity unfold.

[RamsHead]

I think that when the game does start, when we post in here, we should put the name of our nation and it's age at the beginning of our posts to make things easier for everyone.

[Jazzepi]

I completely agree.

Jazzepi

[Gandalf Parker]

As far as this game being too big.. If 60 people join then it wont be. Whats that map? 1000 provinces? 1500? If its 1000 provinces then we are only looking at 16 provinces per nation. If its 1500 (the maximum allowed) then its 25 provinces per nation. Its not quite the games of wide-open wilderness that allows for massive changes of strategy such as I like to play.

And whether or not this type of game will make certain things too powerful or not is something Im interested in seeing. The devs might also.

[Velusion]

The map is 1000 provinces so 16.6 provinces per player.

Gandalf - there will be lots of wide open wilderness... it will just probably belong to someone else . You should join just to shock everyone... If you win I swear I'll never make fun of your posts ever again

Maybe we can rope a Dev into playing... How about it Kris?