I have the expansion packs. I haven't beaten King, though I've gotten a Lord game to the point that I'm pretty sure victory was inevitable and just didn't bother grinding out the last bit.
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Age of Wonders 3 SG 2: I Can't Believe It's Not 1UPT!
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(July 1st, 2016, 19:58)Quagma Blast Wrote: I have the expansion packs. I haven't beaten King, though I've gotten a Lord game to the point that I'm pretty sure victory was inevitable and just didn't bother grinding out the last bit. Okay. If Bob wants you in I won't object then. He's the orginal poster after all. I just wanted him to know what he was getting into. 
Our settings:
    Went with the defaults for most settings, including allowing the passive seal and unifier beacon victories, although I made the peaceful victory conditions take a bit longer than standard, since I'm still not too familiar with them and didn't want the game to inadvertently end too early. The land sliders aren't exactly even, I had to manually re-adjust them from what I had them at for my own games. Highest difficulty + no resurgence (outside of the autocombat we should probably never use) is going to be rough. But hey, losing can be fun, right? (???) I did grant us the small mercy of having everyone start far apart though. Well, also because I didn't want the game turning into another rush-fest. Our leader:  The skull mask says "evil", but the enormous neckbeard means fun! Turn 1:  Our starting location is fairly good- all throne (equivalent to a Civ capital) starts are mediocre compared with the kind of locations you can discover, but ours has the rare advantage of access to a Great Farm, an improvement which will boost our population growth substantially.  Our starting units are a fairly typical mix of mounted, ranged and infantry units. Actually, because we’re playing as the Tigrans our mounted units are ranged as well, albeit not very good at it, being able to use a weak spear attack at close (3 hexes) range. We recruit a Theocrat for our first hero. He’ll be useful for healing and eventually perhaps converting enemy units to our cause.   Our starting spells are quite good- one gives our city a substantial happiness boost, which will increase the productivity of all of its outputs (gold, mana, population, production, science), while the other gives most of our units +2 blight combat strength. I went with the former, I’d like to get our yields up quickly. Both take 20 mana a turn to sustain, so it’ll be a little while until we can cast the other spell.  I sent our weakest / quickest two starting units out scouting, and stacked the rest. First scout found a cartographer’s hut which revealed a city of Giants nearby- that’s a major boon, the giants are very beefy melee units, which both our class and race otherwise largely lack. I really dislike the Rouge class tbh, they mostly seem designed for competitive MP. They’re Age of Wonders III’s obligatory “subversive” class, largely lacking units built for brawls and instead focusing on lowering enemy happiness, causing revolts, stealthily infiltrating enemy territory, backstabbing units in combat. Which would all be great, except on the highest difficulty levels the AI can see all of your units at all times and receives massive happiness boosts, so half our class abilities are useless. Rogues are the only class which lacks a T4 unit, which sucks, although our summonable T3 end-game unit, the Shadow Stalker, is arguably the best T3 unit in the game, doing significant damage and having absurdly good resistances to most damage channels. Also it can fly and floats through city walls. Unfortunately we’ll be very unlikely to ever be able to summon in more than one a turn, and they cost a substantial amount of mana to maintain. All that said, I’m very inexperienced actually playing as a Rouge, and have only around an hour’s worth of time trying out the Tigrans, so I’ll leave it to the others to explain the advantages of our combination We’re also specialized as a Grey Guard- we receive some nice boosts to our city growth and income, so long as we maintain a neutral alignment. In addition to some spells whose effects I cannot remember, we also have an extremely powerful T4 unit we can summon in the end-game… I’m not sure we’ll be doing that much though, by that point we should be either winning or dead, and we’ll probably use our casting points on Shadow Stalkers. But maybe not!  Back to the game, I have our main (and only) stack clear the Great Farm. Defending are three “Dread Monkeys” one of the expansion units. They have terrible health and mediocre defenses, but a nasty ranged attack which does decent damage and lowers the morale of any unit it hits. Standing next to the monkeys also lowers your morale, increasing the chance of having a “critical fumble” and doing low damage, so you have to kill them quickly. I defeat the band without losing any units, although a Chariot comes close.  We get a monkey of our own as a reward, who pops a second cartographer’s tent, uncovering a neutral Tigran city.  One neat new feature of the expansions is that the dungeon-type features (which feature special battlefields and sometimes really tough encounters, and reward spells / units / resources / equipment for clearing) now also unlock structures which can provide some very powerful promotions for select units. I have to admit it kind of drives me nuts though, I've regenerated way too many maps because I *really* wanted to build stuff like the "Stables of Vigor" in a good production city.  The dungeon here (which is actually literally called a "dungeon"- it's confusing, most other dungeons have names like "forbidden sanctum" or whatever) unlocks a particularly nice promotion & combat boost for all infantry units produced in whatever city claims it. "Relentless" means they never run out of counterattacks- normally a unit can only make three a turn (IIRC), but with the promotion they'll keep counter-attacking as long as attacks keep coming and their HP holds. Sadly we don't have any particularly beefy class or race units we can produce to take advantage of it- the dungeon will be claimed by the currently neutral Tigran city, so we'd have to migrate it to a different race with defensively tougher units, like Dwarves.   I’m not entirely certain what to research- I go for a 6-turn tech which will increase our dungeon diving rewards by 20%. Might as well get that one active early on, while there’s the most land to clear. [Edit- I wrote these notes while playing; in retrospect, this tech was a mistake, I didn't notice it cost mana every turn to maintain]. For production, I rush a Builder’s Hall (+20 hammers, unlocks production of worker and settler units), as is fairly typical play. The hammers will cut 1-2 turns off the production of our other early structures. Turn 2 I make peace with the neutral Tigran city for a small amount of gold. This boosts our reputation by a little bit, but I don’t want the racial unhappiness from declaring, and whatever quests they give us might give us some useful units. We might want to declare on the giants to balance things out.  I attack an encampment of Halflings in order to claim a gold mine. I absolutely despise this expansion-derived race. Their gimmick is that most of their units are physically weak and have poor defense; in exchange, they universally have a 20% chance to avoid damage from any attack. Sure enough, their “lucky” boost triggers several times in combat, and our leader goes down- meaning we can’t conduct research or cast spells for 3 turns! Argh, I had forgotten turning off Resurgence also means your leader automatically goes “to the void” whenever they fall in combat. Okay, they’re staying at home for the rest of my set then, I’d much rather lose ultimately expendable T1 units than have our civ crippled for several turns. I clear a second Halfling-occupied gold mine, losing a Chariot and the monkey in the process. Have I mentioned how much I hate that race? They also have all these stupid bullshit abilities, like their otherwise weak pike unit can throw a chicken across almost an entire map as single-use attack- our Chariot was almost dead, so of course the AI went out of its way to kill it. Then the monkey died because the unit he was attacking got lucky. Turn 3 Nothing of interest happened, just moved some units around. Turn 4  Allowed a bandit camp to flee, I didn’t think I could clear it without losing a unit. We gained 25 reputation, but we lost 25 for attacking the Halflings earlier (they also tried to flee), so we’re only at +25, still safely neutral. This is going to be a headache though once peace treaties and war decs start coming in. Clearing the camp gave us an Orc Impaler unit (a pikeman), plus a crappy +1 melee strength sword. We briefly lost our city enchantment, apparently we didn’t have enough mana to sustain it. Turn 5  Neat feature / dungeon thing in the north, clearing it and building the structure it unlocks will allow us to produce powerful flying Feathered Serpent units (although only at whatever city claims it). That won’t be happening any time soon though. Turn 6  Discovered one of the world seal things. They’re part of one of the new, peaceful victory conditions. Every turn we occupy it, we get a point. After enough points, we win the game. It’ll be a while before we can clear it though. Cleared another enemy lair, this one defended by a weak force of undead. Of course our Impaler took extra damage because one of the defenders was a Halfling and got lucky, allowing it to survive an extra turn. Have I mentioned how much I hate that race? Turn 7  Our “racial governance” levels up. I’m not sure of the exact mechanics, but I think your total happiness in each city of a race is added every turn, and at certain levels you get bonuses. We have a choice between +8 health on our Chariots and pikemen, or making our Settlers 25% cheaper; I go with the latter, as I imagine we’ll be building a fair number of them. The neutral Tigran city gives us a quest. Successful completion awards a priest unit and their vassalage. Turn 8 Settler completes, I start work on a second. Turn 9 Wandering hostile independents killed our Cheetah scout up north. Otherwise just spent the turn moving units. Turn 10  Completed the quest for the independent city; sadly the Impaler heroically died in the line of duty to a T3 Spider Queen, pictured here having a bad day. Settler began the process of founding a new city. Started casting the +2 poison strength spell. We’re going to need more mana soon though. I guess we’re in an okay position. I recommend clearing the farm near our stack, and then moving on to the independent encampment to the north, so that we can settle that fairly rich area freely. Going by order of signups, MJW is next. Composing your reports in Wordpad prior to posting makes sense, I did this one mostly in Word, but please be sure to include screencaps! If that's an issue for whatever reason, just stick with the pdfs. Good luck! We'll probably need it, not being halflings  The Save
July 2nd, 2016, 00:54
(This post was last modified: July 2nd, 2016, 00:55 by MJW (ya that one).)
  I'll play the turns and see if we have to restart. We have the excuse that you didn't use the right "resurgence" setting. Because the AI always uses auto-combat they still can use it. We could have gotten rid of that. I got mad when you used the Prowler as a scout. It's a tier 2 unit. The  abilities are actually quite useful against halflings because you stop them from dodging if you make them unhappy. Don't have anything else useful to say.Edit: I'll call our leader panda.
There is no way in hell I am replaying all of that again and making a new report :P
Let's just roll with what we have, I don't really care that the AI benefits from resurgence. I thought the point was to challenge ourselves anyway? Plus if we die it's not going to be because the AI didn't lose their heroes to random independents (which it gets crazy bonuses against anyway), it'll be because they've got swarms of T4 units before we have more than a couple Shadow Stalkers. I think a bigger deal than using the Prowler to scout was losing a Chariot :P Unfortunately there's only so much you can do when your units whiff several attacks in a row against halflings. Edit- huh, I didn't know you could prevent halfling dodging by making them miserable. It didn't seem to help the monkey much...
July 2nd, 2016, 02:34
(This post was last modified: July 2nd, 2016, 02:35 by Der_Zorn_Gottes.)
Did we get a human priest from the quest? That would be great, because as tigrans healing is difficult. Our Theocrat hero can do it, but otherwise it's bleak. So nice catch here.
As for our alignment, if we want to be nice with dwellings/neutral cities (which we should, since Courtesan Ambassadors is a thing) we have to be ruthless with fleeing guards to remain neutral. What I would like to do this game is explore the variant where you pick the skills which make scoundrels level up faster and evolve into lesser Shadowstalker (which evolve into Shadowstalkers). It is a lot of loops to hop through for a tier 3.5 unit (and by the time we babysit our scoundrels all the way up we could probably have Shadowstalkers anyway if we were determined), but I think it is fun, and that's what it's all abour, right? Oh, and I'm glad we agree in our loathing of halflings.
July 2nd, 2016, 08:14
(This post was last modified: July 3rd, 2016, 01:30 by MJW (ya that one).)
I'm in a bad mood so dropbox here we go!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hcekfc110zxrqb...0.ASG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ulnhyk2ysyq56...1.pdf?dl=0 I should tell you that I like to use leaders in pairs. My setup puts the two Tigrans together. I lost the preist (did you get one?) but Quick dash, Iron Heart and healing healing is more than enough. I just found in a slapfest at Apolyton that the password in a Civ4 game is stored in plaintext. Ya I'm salty and sour and mad. ,,,,Edit: In case anyone cares the last point matters to me because of what happened with SANTCA and RB's choice about not letting random people join them.
Sorry, the unit the quest gave me was a Tigran support unit, the exact name of which I forgot, so I just called it a "priest". I forgot that Priests are a specific, more useful unit.
Thanks for the report, MJW. A couple points: Quote:I've noticed that Bob turning on seals puts us on a clock because there's no way this game is going past turn 80 I figured that wasn't too much of an issue, we had already conquered most of the AI by that point in our previous game... stuff starts to get borderline unmanageable by then anyway, so we might reduce sets to 5 turns or so. We're not going to treat Quagma differently than any other player though. Anyone who wants assistance need only ask, but otherwise we win or lose as equals. Quote:Bob didn't know that our panda could move after reviving I did in fact know that, but intentionally fortified him in the capital, per my report; I tend to play far too aggressively with my heroes, and the extra combat power our leader provides didn't in my mind justify potentially losing our ability to tech again for 3 turns. Quote:Bob didn't contact the giant city so they cannot give you quests  Argh, yeah, really dumb move on my part, sorry. Anyway, nice set, looks like we're in a pretty good position. Der is up! |
