Freezing the World below Absolute Zero - Illians Succession Game

[jalepeno]

ok, I won't be able to play until tomorrow night (at the earliest). What do we want after warfare? Do I hear some seconds for the economic route?

also, that orc stack was scary.

[Qgqqqqq]

Seconded.

[DaveV]

Our only defense against the AIs is to hope they ignore us, so economy makes sense.

[Mardoc]

Sure, econ is reasonable. Tech-wise, that is - keep some production going toward military. Adepts, at least.

I did see that DaveV has settlers almost done for half the north; if we keep pushing that, we can finish up settling by my turnset or so. Then it will be just a matter of growing up our cities and figuring out how to kill a hundred units with a dozen .

[Qgqqqqq]

I think Auric Ascended might have a little spell that helps with that...

[jalepeno]

T240

Too late to get the report in tonight. Boring turn set: still blockaded by barbs (lost 2 more high odds battles), popped big bads from 2 kurio dungeons, settled some cities, revolted consumption/military state, traded an iron axe for 20XP on a adept from orthus (but no more iron ). Oh, and I stuck a blizzard in the mountain pass sheelba is using to get to the malakim

[Mardoc]

Played two turns. Should be able to finish my turnset tonight.

Only newsworthy thing: Sheelba declared war on the Kurios, then Falamar demanded we declare on them too. I did so. I don't think the Kurios can survive, and would rather keep good relations with the survivors. Not planning to actually help them die, of course - if we do anything, it'll be pulling the blizzard west some more to hurt their opponents.

Taxation should come in by T250-251. It will give us the option of Republic which...I think will likely not be worth adopting immediately, but will be worth it later on. As the number of towns increases, and the amount of commerce multiplier buildings increases, the value of republic increases. If/when we build courthouses, the penalty to leaving City States will decrease. So basically I'm suggesting: I probably won't revolt, but we should keep an eye on it and swap over once we hit break even.

Any thoughts on next tech? Not that it'll likely happen in my turnset, but we can choose soon. I personally lean toward Smelting/Iron Working.

[DaveV]

Any thoughts on next tech? Not that it'll likely happen in my turnset, but we can choose soon. I personally lean toward Smelting/Iron Working.

Animal Handling, maybe. Relatively cheap, and Hawk visibility can help a lot. We need to go down the arcane path soon, although we only have one adept and an adventurer who could be promoted. So Iron Working first is a good idea.

Note that Pyre of the Seraphic can be explored.

[Mardoc]

We need to go down the arcane path soon, although we only have one adept and an adventurer who could be promoted.

Working on changing this by stacking up more adepts - Jalepeno started that and I'm continuing. But...yeah, it's pretty slow.

When we do go up that path, I actually think Necromancy will be the highest priority, because it has such good adept level defensive spells. Rust + summon skeleton + Slow might actually add up to a significant dent in a 100-unit axeman stack.

[Aurorarcher]

Animal Handling would probably be a pretty good idea + Hawks are very cheap. IW would give us our Iron back (if we're lucky to spawn one inside our borders), but remember it's not guaranteed - if we don't get Iron anywhere close we're pretty much screwed there. Maybe research Smelting and if we don't have Iron anywhere close maybe we need to reconsider our options? I think what we'll need is mass and for that cheap Iron axemen would be perfect for, maybe some champs too eventually but they're pretty expensive (1 champ is worth about 3 axemen). Also, it'd be great to have some collateral as soon as possible. Wait till Mages or maybe add in some cats?

We need to start spamming adepts more and probably need quite a few more MGs for that as we still only have one MG (or do we have more? Can't check the save at the moment). We should probably start heading towards Sorcery relatively soon - it's an expensive tech and will take a while to research. Of course, we should time it such that once we have Sorcery we already have some adepts ready to be upgraded.