Cromagnumpi Wrote:This has game has exposed to me just how much more I need to learn about proper strategies. I can't seem to get any momentum going. I've tried a few times. I get Auric up to friendly and then it seems like the hippus are buying him into the war and I'm at least on tech pace with the other civs but within a couple turns of war Auric is fielding champions and my limited number of cities just can't support fielding troops that quickly. I guess I need to be more aggressive earlier but then how do I ever expand cities and what's to stop Auric from smashing me over the head in any game. I love the idea of never being able to trade with civs that have a religion but considering that they almost all start with a religion I feel like tech trading could have been turned off (and unfortunately that's how I normally play my games.)
Awesome idea but I'm not ready for this kind of challenge.
Yeah, this game turned out to be a lot harder than I intended. What I was going for was a game that would let you jump into tier II/III warfare almost immediately while having a back door victory condition to cut down on late-game slog. To put it bluntly, my design utterly failed.
In my shadow game, I raced out several aggressive plants towards the south and focused on setting up a quick aristofarm economy. The AI can easily out pace you in tech, but sucks at tech prioritization, so a dedicated beeline can help a lot with maintaining military parity. I myself grabbed KotE early and set up one city that would do literally nothing but build adepts for the entire rest of the game, which gave me an army of mages to form the backbone of all future incursions (mages are awesome in a game like this because they so dramatically reduce the number of casualties you take while defending against the AI).
I too actually got to really high relations with Auric, and set out to conquer the Hippus for more land (my army at that point was entirely mages and axes). Then, just after I eliminated the Hippus, both the Khazad and the Ilians attacked with stacks of champions. I actually lost at least 8 cities to their combined forces before I managed to get Dragon Slayers and stabilize. Military State is your closest friend at that point--once you can draft Dragon Slayers, it is very hard to lose if you are willing to draft your cities completely into the ground. At one point most of my cities were unhappy despite me running 100% gold and getting +10 happy from gambling houses.
If you can kill either the Hippus or the Ljosalfar and also kill or permanently befriend Auric, you should be able to win eventually (though Basium and his 200+ angels is one hell of a fight).
tl;dr I personally had fun playing this, but it was much harder than I expected and one hell of a slog towards the end.
Sorry about that. Thanks for playing, anyway.
Played in: PBEM 4 [Formerly Jowy's Peter of Egypt] | PBEM 10 [Napoleon of the Dutch] | PBEM 11 [Shaka of France] | EitB XVI [Valledia of the Amurites] | PB7 [Darius of Rome] | Diplomacy 3 [Austria-Hungary] | PBEMm/o vs AutomatedTeller
My fault, should've made that clearer...