[Spoilers] Biggus Decius and the Sucking Vampires (Bobchillingworth / Calabim)

[Bobchillingworth]

Ah, that's one of my favorite scenarios! I usually beeline for the Order at the start for Valin- he can easily take on the Calabim leader directly to your East on his own, especially if you also get the free Great Commander from Military Stategy.



Yeah, the Infernal are the toughest guys in that scenario, Crusaders are a pretty good bet since they get free Demon Slaying promotions (40% vs. demonic units- which is everything the Infernals should have, barring catapults).


You get a secret ending by the way if you save Beeri Brawl for last

[Dantski]

Played and completed most of them, unfortunately there's 3-4 that crash when selected.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, you can get around the CTDs for most of them by starting a single player custom game, saving, quitting, and then trying to load the scenario. You can also try loading the scenarios through worldbuilder. The "Against the Wall" scenario won't load for me no matter what I try, though.

[Sciz]

Yeah I founded the order pretty early on and i'm spamming Crusaders to the infernal front. My Valin died though when i was gang banged

Still got Guybrush Threepwood left though!

[darrelljs]

Nice update...man I sure do love Aristofarms .

Darrell

[Sciz]

sorry for a bit of off topic posting, but i had to say it somewhere:

Those infernals in that scenario may have numbers but wow are their units weak. I was in a everyone against everyone war, and was attacking those weird triplet balseraphs in the east with my main stack, and had like 10 crusaders for defence up north against the infernals. Infernals march in with a stack of 27 archers, 21 hellhounds and 15 axemen. I figured i was screwed, pressed end turn.

What happened was glorious. He suicided his entire stack on my city of 10 crusaders, I didn't lose a single one. Wow.

[DaveV]

Back on topic :

I couldn't even claim those wine if I wanted to right now- check out the resource icon shading, the barb city controls the one closest to me.

Oops, missed that. Well, then, conquering the barb city *is* a high priority.

my land is borderline excellent- lots of rivers, a nice mix of health and happiness resources, and three gold

The only happy resources I see are wines (good) and elephants, which don't help you out until you research Hunting. That tech would let you capture animals for additional happiness and build hawks to monitor the bad guys, but it's pretty expensive (460 base).

semi-mandatory infra in this city as everywhere else (breeding pit, smokehouse, granary, market, carnival)

Ugh. You don't need the first three until you're whipping or feasting, either of which is a *long* way off. You have *way* more food than you can use, so a little more health is not very exciting, either. These buildings are quite expensive, too: think of each one as 1 setter, 1.5 workers, or 5 bloodpets.

Market I already suggested, so I won't argue with that one. The carnival is 80 hammers for +1 happy, just as expensive as the health buildings. You could get happiness more cheaply with a training yard, or get +3 happy for about 2/3 the cost of those two buildings by researching sanitation and building public baths. I don't usually build carnivals unless I have FoL priests, in which case it becomes a +2 happy, +3 culture building with the free tiger cage.

Another build to consider eventually is Deruptus Brew House, which gives +1 happy in every city for 160 hammers, but can only be built in a riverside city.

Bottom line: build lots of bloodpets (4-5 per city), workers (1.5 or 2 per city) and settlers till you fill up your land. Why not make Nubia your catapult city, since you'll have a long wait before you can build them in your proposed new city?

You should probably try to pop the lairs before your opposition does, once you have a decent standing army (and once you've upgraded all your warriors to bronze weapons). Note that you can guarantee that no bad guys can pop from a lair by covering all the surrounding squares, like this:

xxx
xLx
xxx

Where the x can be any unit: worker, settler, summon, etc.

[Bobchillingworth]

Gold, Cotton, Incense, and Reagents are all happiness resources too



I didn't say that smokehouses etc. were massive priorities right now, but of course I do eventually want them almost everywhere... after a while I intend to completely ignore the happiness cap and grow my cities as large as possible so that I can get max exp from feeding. That's... sort of the whole point of the vampires, otherwise they're just weaker champions with some moderate death and body magic. Also I should indeed eventually have FoL priests, thanks to Sareln- according to Selrahc you can use the "found temple" ability in other people's cities, so I'm hoping that the "add to carnival" ability works the same way for tigers. As for Deruptus, good build, but it's pretty expensive at the moment. Since it also gives potentially up to +30% gold depending on what resources you have available, I may want to hold off until I settle a very wealthy river city.


Nubia I think is best positioned to build new city garrison units, due to its ability to construct 1-turn bloodpets and distance from likely immediate/near-term future front lines (I probably need to do a diplo update soon- lots has been going on lately)

I was going to hold off on the lairs until I had vampires, so that I could block the spawn points around the lairs like you suggested with free skeletons. If I got a tech, it'd also have the advantage of more likely being an expensive one. But since I think you're a more cautious player than I am, if you think that I'm probably safe to start exploring them soon, I will- I'm just worried about spawning something like 5 azers / mistforms or a heroic strength Ogre. Also having to kill the lizardmen / skeletons on most of the lairs means that I could end up having to throw away a lot of bloodpets to get the job done.

[DaveV]

Incense and Reagents are happiness resources too

If you have the [strike]Priesthood[/strike] Philosophy tech, Incense gives +1 happy for pagan temples, and FoL, Empyrean, Order, or OO temples. Reagents give +1 happy for Temples of the Veil. So, not for a long time, and maybe not at all.

Nubia I think is best positioned to build garrison units, due to its ability to construct 1-turn bloodpets and distance from likely immediate/near-term future front lines

I guess it depends on how safe you feel, but in Nubia you can build catapults maybe five turns after discovering Construction; in Morr'ta'nar, it will be some 30 or more turns. If you need catapults before that, you're out of luck. Any city can build bloodpets; I usually try to build catapults in one of my best production cities (especially since it will probably produce too many hammers for bloodpets at some point).

I was going to hold off on the lairs until I had vampires, so that I could block the spawn points around the lairs like you suggested with free skeletons. If I got a tech, it'd also have the advantage of more likely being an expensive one. But since I think you're a more cautious player than I am, if you think that I'm probably safe to start exploring them soon, I will- I'm just worried about spawning something like 5 azers / mistforms or a heroic strength Ogre. Also having to kill the lizardmen / skeletons on most of the lairs means that I could end up having to throw away a lot of bloodpets to get the job done.

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I agree with what you're saying (nitpick: spectres have no unit support cost, but skeletons do) about waiting till later. I meant that it would be good to be in position to pop the lair before an enemy unit can do it.

But once you capture the barb city, it would be good to kill the lizards in your borders and station a bloodpet on top of the lairs so you don't have to worry about them eating your workers. Then, when you have some extra bloodpets, catapults, or workers, you can do the surround technique.

[Maksim]

If you have the Priesthood tech, Incense gives +1 happy for pagan temples, and FoL, Empyrean, Order, or OO temples. Reagents give +1 happy for Temples of the Veil. So, not for a long time, and maybe not at all.

Was it really Priesthood that allowed the usage of Incense? I keep thinking it might have been Philosophy, which is somewhat earlier on the tech tree.