Anyone up for an EitB SG?

[Brian Shanahan]

A city to grab the iron is 4 trade routes immediately plus water commerce. All it really needs is a lighthouse, harbor, and shipyard to become useful. Definitely worth planting imo.

Also does iron also provide bronze weapons or do we specifically need to keep copper for that?

We need copper for bronze weapons. But if we have iron and IW then any unit who qualifies gets iron weapons over bronze ones.

Edit: on the gates, you can get multiple units per turn, therefore I'd say it's chance per gate per turn.

[superjm]

A city to grab the iron is 4 trade routes immediately plus water commerce. All it really needs is a lighthouse, harbor, and shipyard to become useful. Definitely worth planting imo.

Also does iron also provide bronze weapons or do we specifically need to keep copper for that?

We need copper for bronze weapons.  But if we have iron and IW then any unit who qualifies gets iron weapons over bronze ones.

Gotcha, so Warfare into Iron Working sounds like a good plan. Though of course DaveV has the final say, if he has a better idea then he should go for it :P

It's a shame we're facing Bannor of all civs, otherwise having some Succubus out right now would be quite fun.

[haphazard1]

As promised, the full(-er) report:

Taking control of our empire on turn 255, the obvious big concern is the ongoing war with the Bannor, and their forces threatening the city of Grottiburg.

Our power rating is just a little bit behind Sabathiel's:

And he has a couple big stacks where we can see them, with who knows how much more out of sight?

That is a lot of axes, plus a decent number of archers.

Our entire military:

We have a good number of pyre zombies, but they are not all on the border -- some are defending other parts of the empire, or are still moving towards the battle front.

Sabathiel would be willing to make peace if we return Gorttiburg, but that would give up all the gains from the war, most crucially the Great Lighthouse. Those extra trade routes are helping us a lot, and we need all the commerce we  an get. So the goal of my turnset is to hold on to Grottiburg. Hopefully this will not turn out to be a mistake -- if our main force of pyre zombies gets destroyed, our entire empire would be open to invasion and everything could fall apart very quickly.

I look over our cities and adjust a build or two, then I attack Sabathiel's trireme with our galleys to prevent it causing mischief. We lose one galley to weaken the enemy, then we finish it off. I send our galleys eastward to see if they can pillage some Bannor fishing boats.

Kandros builds the Catacomb Libralus -- he is obviously already investing in arcane stuff. He also founds Empyrean.

We complete Hunting research, and I start a hunting lodge. We need at least a few hunters so we can clear out those bears, and that spider in our gold mine. Some dancing bears would be useful in our cities, as well.

Falamar is sending zealots to spread Octopus Overlords; Golden Leane gets the religion on turn 257.

I spot a couple Bannor adepts joining the stack near Grottiburg, along with a catapult. Sabathiel continues massing his forces, but has not yet attacked the city. Is he worried about our zombies, or just doing the usual AI shuffling about? I continue rushing reinforcements to Grottiburg, which has a non-zero revolt chance even with all the troops we have there.

I spot a trade opportunity, and send our spare ivory to Thessalonica for her spare furs. More happiness never hurts.

Sabathiel moves a single adept up to the raw node near Grottiburg. I kill it with a pyre zombie. Adepts are not cheap and take a long time to develop, so why not take the target of opportunity?

Our galleys pillage some Bannor fishing nets for 12 gold. Sabathiel has not improved his pearls, and they are on ocean tiles anyway which we can not reach. Falamar has planted a city on the islands north of the Bannor.

The very next turn, Sabathiel sends another adept by itself to the raw node. Again, I kill it with a zombie. All of his other units have pulled back out of our vision. Maybe this is a good sign? Perhaps Tasunke is pushing him hard down south? I would love to get peace without giving up Grottiburg.

On turn 262 Sabathiel adopts Conquest. He also now refuses to consider peace, for any price. This is not a good sign.

I spot a Hippus adept moving around near Golden Leane. With other civs starting to produce arcane units, we need to build at least a couple ourselves. Even if we do nothing but stick them in our capital to gain XP slowly, we will regret not having them if we are still the Sheaim 60-80 turns from now. And given how far ahead Tasunke is in score, we may still be.

Speaking of adepts, Sabathiel sends a third one to improve that raw node, again alone. Zombie, . We can do this all day long, Sabathiel!

On turn 263 Sabathiel shows back up outside Grottiburg with his big stack, now with a bunch of chariots added.

The following turn we complete Smelting research. There is some iron sort of near us:

That is not very convenient. Tongurstad would need two (or would it be three?) more border expansions to control that, which would take quite a long time. But we could plant a city on the iron -- it would be utter junk as a city, but it would claim the iron. Still, no one is going to take this spot from us, so we can wait and decide once we are closer to having the tech to actually use the iron. Planting on the resource, we would not need to worry about hooking it up.

Also, note in the above screenshot that we are now two spots out of the basement. Not by much, but slow progress. I think Tasunke must be hurting Sabathiel, and that is why we have pulled ahead.

We get our first arrival through a planar gate, a chaos marauder appears in Golden Leane. More, please!

Visible Bannor forces on turn 264:

10 chariots along with all those axemen, plus archers and hunters. Not a good situation. I hope trying to hold Grottiburg does not turn out to be a huge mistake.

I set tech for Warfare, as prereq to Iron Working, but nothing has been invested yet. We have a number of other options, from magic to Bowyers to Philosophy to religion to economic techs.

I believe the roster is now:

Brian --> on deck
Mr. Cairo
superjm
haphazard --> just played
DaveV --> UP!

Good luck!

[haphazard1]

Edit: on the gates, you can get multiple units per turn, therefore I'd say it's chance per gate per turn.

That is what I thought, but I was not sure. More planar gates are good, then. Any idea if you need the additional prereq buildings to get specific units? Can we only get a succubus if the city with a planar gate also has a public baths, for example?

The succubus is still a pretty nice unit, with base strength of 4, +2 unholy, can use bronze weapons. That would be overall strength 7, plus their spell ability. Not cheap in hammers, but one or two to act as top stack defenders might not be a bad idea. Or maybe we will get lucky and get some from our gates.

[superjm]

If we want stack defenders, archers are a much better idea than Succubi. They're not as strong but they're also three times cheaper, provided we get the range first of course.

I think we'll be fine with iron zombies and gate units though for the time being. Chaos Marauders are a pretty nice option too since they cost only 45h instead of 60 like zombies. They don't blow up of course but they're fine otherwise.

Also I highly doubt that stack could take out 22 zombies, at least not in one turn. They wouldn't get halfway through before their entire stack becomes completely crippled.

[DaveV]

Got it, I expect to be able to play sometime Saturday.

[Brian Shanahan]

Edit: on the gates, you can get multiple units per turn, therefore I'd say it's chance per gate per turn.

That is what I thought, but I was not sure. More planar gates are good, then. Any idea if you need the additional prereq buildings to get specific units? Can we only get a succubus if the city with a planar gate also has a public baths, for example?

The succubus is still a pretty nice unit, with base strength of 4, +2 unholy, can use bronze weapons. That would be overall strength 7, plus their spell ability. Not cheap in hammers, but one or two to act as top stack defenders might not be a bad idea. Or maybe we will get lucky and get some from our gates.

Afaik you need both prereqs to build and pop the units.

[DaveV]

While I look over the save, I'll repost my explanation of planar gates:

For reference:

AC	Spawn Chance (%)	Max units/gate
0-9	5	2
10-29	10	4
30-39	13	8
40-49	17	10
50-59	20	12
60-69	23	14
70-79	27	16
80-89	30	18
90-99	35	20
100	40	25

To clarify by an example:

City A has a gate and a carnival.
City B has a gate and a mage guild.
City C has a gate, a mage guild, and a carnival.

At AC=0:
City A has a 5% chance per turn of spawning a chaos marauder. Max number of chaos marauders is 6 (number of planar gates * 2).
City B has a 5% chance per turn of spawning a mobius witch. Max number of mobius witches is 6.
City C has a 5% chance per turn of spawning a unit. That unit has an equal chance of being a chaos marauder or mobius witch.

Once there are 6 chaos marauders on the board, city A will not spawn any units, and city C will always spawn a mobius witch. Once we have 6 of each, the tap is shut off until we build more gates or drive up the AC.

So, yay for AC=10; that bumps up our spawn chances and unit total.

Also, we should really be building Mobius Witches. They are a mage unit for a mere 150 hammers, and are born with random mana promotions: 10% chance of each of 16 types, all but Ice and Metamagic. So, an 18.5% chance of no mana spheres at all, 32.9% of one mana sphere, 27.5% chance of two spheres, 14.2% of three spheres, 3.8% of four spheres, 1.4% of five spheres, 0.3% of six spheres, and rapidly decreasing chances of anything better than that. Even with no mana of our own, we can still do a large variety of magic stuff with some decent RNG rolls.

So, my plan is to queue up some witches, settle the iron for +1 strength on our zombies, and deal with emergencies as they crop up. I'll probably play in about 8 hours if anyone wants to shout at me from the peanut gallery before then.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the info, DaveV! Very helpful.

We have some planar gates, and some of the cities with them have at least one additional "enabler" building (mage guild, public baths, etc.). With the AC at 10 currently, hopefully we will get at least a few units coming through to join our forces.

I also like the idea of getting some Mobius Witches built; we might get lucky and get some through the gates, but it would be good to make sure. (I assume any we build count against the unit cap as described above.) Getting them started on accumulating XP will be helpful, as the process takes a while even with channeling II to help.

On the iron, I don't think it will help our zombies until we get the appropriate tech for iron weapons. That will take a bit of time, as our economy is not very strong. Warfare is cheap and will be quick, but Iron Working will take some time. Smelting has added another hammer to all our workshops, which is useful.

[DaveV]

Thanks for the correction on the iron, haphazard!

I played 10 turns. The good news: we're still alive, and we have some Mobius Witches. The bad news: we're now at war with two civs.

The Bannor started to gather some catapults by Grottiburg, which concerned me.



Then they moved the stack away. Maybe Tasunke finally started putting some pressure on them?

And, just when I thought I had some breathing space:



Sigh.

While clicking around, I noticed that Grottiburg has a small chance to revolt:



We should probably send some living units there to pacify the population a bit. I was distracted during my set, but I did send a bear to supply a little culture.

Fortunately for our nearly naked western cities, Kandros selected adepts and slingers as the best units for an attack.



I thought the rarely-used Cannibilize promotion (heal 10% after combat) would be helpful here, since it seemed as though I was going to be attacked by a lot of relatively weak units.

I barely held out with some rushed-in zombies once the trebs rolled into place. Then I was able to counterattack and kill his survivors. For now, things seem to have stabilized on the Dwarven front.

We have five Mobius Witches, some with very useful promotions. Kandros is not showing much military, despite his very high power. Maybe it's mostly land and population?