[SPOILERS] - Tredje and Mardoc are Sheelba of the Clan of Embers

[Mardoc]

Played the turn. I started playing around with other spells with the sons - I vitalized a tile near Braduk, and I summoned a Flesh Golem. I'm not really sure what makes sense to feed to the Golem, but at the least it's another unit.

Also arguing with Iskender about the Axe, but I did tell him he's safe from the Sons unless he invades me.

[Mardoc]

I'm liking this 2/day stuff .

More details on my argument with Iskender:

[COLOR="Silver"]From my point of view it's really simple - I offered my assistance in exchange for, among other things, the Axe. It is the payment for my effort and as such should be delivered. The analogy with cities is invalid - we did the razing to win in a reasonable time (or win at all), so to meet your end of the deal. A more adequate analogy with the current axe situation would be me refusing to carry out my duties ie. sending troops to fight because Bob has found a way to make it difficult.

I do hope you'll find the axe soon and we'll be able to dismiss the issue. I don't feel very comfortable in this kind of confrontation, preferring the kind with tiles, units and odds. Although there's one more issue we need to make straight. We agreed not to use one's worldspell against the other. What is your interpretation of this agreement with regard to SoI? It's unarguable that a direct SoI attack would be a violation of the agreement, but a more convoluted conflict might be a source of some misunderstandings. Let's try to sort it out now so we can enjoy the game part more.

Iskender[/COLOR]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]Iskender,

Regarding the worldspell - Tredje told me this was intended to be an
anti-rush agreement and no longer applies. Despite that, the only
direct quote he's shown me was to the effect of 'will not use to harm
the other party', so I'm interpreting it more rigorously.

I will not use the Sons or their summons or other spells on offense
against you, nor will I use any of their spells to boost units I
expect to be going on offense. I consider them fair game to use on
defense should you make that necessary. I'm unsure what's reasonable
in the event of things like fighting you in neutral ground, or leaving
the Sons as the primary defense against a counterattack if I'm the
aggressor, but I will try to avoid the situation. I think it would be
ridiculous to apply to things like units trained at cities that were
captured by the Sons. Certainly the Sons are the only remaining units
that were gained with the worldspell.

Similarly, I see no objection to you defending with any Hidden units,
but I would have serious problems with you invading with them.

With the Axe - I've made a good faith effort to recover it, but it
seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. I'm thinking that
either Bob deleted it, or it was lost when Keelyn's trireme was sunk
by Acheron's Sons. The only other possibility is that he somehow
managed to sneak it back to his homeland, which I do intend to invade
as soon as practicable - but I think your Hawk would have noticed that
if it happened. The agreement was made in good faith, but with the
assumption that Bob would be actually using it to defend himself and
that therefore recovering it was part and parcel of winning the war.

Still - I've been shadowing the trireme that I thought contained the
axe but not attacking it, on the chance that it would be destroyed (as
seems to have happened). I've got three triremes combing the area
where I last saw the axe. I will use Hawks to search anywhere I can
think it might possibly be. And of course the clan attempted to take
it when Bob first invaded our island. If I find any sign of it, then
I will grab it and send it directly to you; it's just that I'm losing
hope of that being possible. If anything, I think I've gone above
and beyond what was required. There's nothing preventing you from
sending your own forces to recover the Axe if it still exists, and if
it doesn't, it wasn't because of anything I did. I don't know the
exact wording of the agreement, but I think it was something on the
order of 'The Sidar get the axe', not 'The Clan will find and deliver
the axe'.

I completely disagree with your analogy to refusing to send troops -
that would apply much more to me having the axe but refusing to hand
it over. Or maybe at a stretch to refusing to look for the axe. This
seems exactly like not keeping a city because it was impossible to do
so and still win the war. It was impossible to catch up to the axe
until after Bob decided to get rid of it. The Clan lost a
well-established city as a result of Bob's decision, too. At most,
this is on the level of withdrawing from the war after Bob's
resistance was broken but before the Balseraphs were destroyed.

Wow, that seems like a rant. It's mostly because I'm frustrated with
the situation; aside from not being able to solve the problem of the
axe, I'm enjoying the game and I hope you are too.

- Mardoc[/COLOR]

In other news, Priesthood has arrived . All my western cities are now working on one form of soldier or another, except Braduk which is still Templing. We're starting to pile up a stack of axes, lizardmen, and shamans. Lizardmen were a bit of a fortuitous accident, actually - I built the Hunter's Lodge for the Hawks, and only after it was built in a Warrens city with no Training Yard did I realize that +50% vs animals will be huge when fighting a Priest of Leaves army

Started another Balseraph city on its Warrens; those are coming along nicely.

Refounded the island city, and am now shipping over a worker; it's not quite profitable, but as soon as it grows and/or starts working the gold, it'll be profitable again. Starting off with 4 commerce from trade routes certainly helps. (actually, it might be profitable if you count the improved route on the mainland city into the calculation).

Balseraph island is looking like a nice place to own, and a relatively easy place to own once we have boats in the area. Rosier is the only significant threat; Keelyn also trained a bunch of swords, but has no metal for them. You wouldn't catch Bob doing that I think I'm going to aim to land a force adjacent to Rosier and Ring of Fire him to minimum before he has a chance to react; I don't want to build even more triremes so I'll be limited to 6 units on the first turn. Rosier will still probably be able to take out a unit turn 1, but if he's wounded enough I'll be able to wear him down with numbers.

We started on Smelting; several other techs were tempting, but I think Ogres sooner outweighs just about everything else. Of course - it was a 4 turn tech, I hit end turn, and it was a 4 turn tech still. The golden age is over . It'll probably end up taking even longer, actually, since I expect to have to turn down the tech slider as well. And then Iron Working, and then awesomeness . Drafting axes may feel slightly useless, but I bet drafting Ogres is fun. It was a well-used GA, I think; we gained AH, Way of the Wicked, Corruption of Spirit, and Priesthood, and put up enough Courthouses/elder councils/markets to leave us with a good tech rate going forward. The next significant boost will be once we start putting up Temples of the Veil everywhere; we'll trickle improve as courthouses finish and pop grows, I suppose.

I'm considering whether it makes any sense to build forges, and I'm actually thinking the answer will be no; we intend the game to end soon after Smelting, so they won't have time to pay back the hammers.

[Tredje]

Some thoughts:

Also arguing with Iskender about the Axe, but I did tell him he's safe from the Sons unless he invades me.

Not sure why you would tell him that. The less certain he is about our army composition and morals (or lack thereof), the better.

Had a look at the save. I see Priesthood is in. Time to train some Ritualists I suppose. Smelting -> IW next?

Looking at the Demographics I see that Iskender is close to us in GNP (while both are in a GA), that we are ahead in Mfg and way ahead in food. SL is far behind.

You have lots of highly promoted Warriors/Axemen in the east. When you finish a Warren in the area, train some Warriors for guard duty, so that the experienced units can be moved to the front.

Grottiburg is size 1 and working a Horse tile. I think you should let it work the Pigs instead to let it grow in one turn.

Braduk could use a couple of farms. Maybe going Construction before heading for IW would be best. That would also benefit the former Sheaim lands.

I also think we should start planning our Sidar campaign. I would advise you to think this carefully through, as Iskender is a shrewd tactician. Here is a screenshot of the front:

Since we only see a handful of units, I'm guessing Iskender is hiding his main force out of range of our Hawks. That way he can reinforce both of his border cities. What is your plan for the first turns of the war? Due to our numerical advantage it would be possible to form two stacks and threaten both cities, so that Iskender is forced to move his main stack in one direction. Then the lightly defended city can be captured, while the other stack retreats. After that we can merge our stacks or we can try to threaten several cities again.

Don't be afraid to raze cities, we have all the production power we need.

How do you plan to siege cities? Without the Sons you have no way of reducing city defenses, and your only source of collateral will be Ritualists. I see Iskender has converted to Ashen Veil, so he is probably aiming for Ritualists as well. If you can get more of them up before he can, the collateral advantage should be yours.

[Mardoc]

Hmm, some interesting points

Not sure why you would tell him that. The less certain he is about our army composition and morals (or lack thereof), the better.

I just want to be liked, I suppose.

Had a look at the save. I see Priesthood is in. Time to train some Ritualists I suppose. Smelting -> IW next?

Braduk could use a couple of farms. Maybe going Construction before heading for IW would be best. That would also benefit the former Sheaim lands.

I think at this point what makes sense is straight to IW. Braduk is getting its cottages vitalized while the Sons twiddle their thumbs, and former Sheaim is so low in population that I don't expect it to be able to make a significant contribution before the game is over anyway. Paying for itself would be good enough, I think. True, Construction would help, and would help with army mobility as well, but it would also delay Iron Working by 2-3 turns.

Looking at the Demographics I see that Iskender is close to us in GNP (while both are in a GA), that we are ahead in Mfg and way ahead in food. SL is far behind.

Yes; I'm especially pleased to be ahead in Mfg despite Warrens not counting for that and Iskender running Conquest. Of course SL behind is partly non-GA and partly the transfer, but he's definitely been demoted to secondary threat status.

You have lots of highly promoted Warriors/Axemen in the east. When you finish a Warren in the area, train some Warriors for guard duty, so that the experienced units can be moved to the front

Grottiburg is size 1 and working a Horse tile. I think you should let it work the Pigs instead to let it grow in one turn.

Good catches. I'll work on both of these. I wanted Grottiburg to work the horse initially to get the Courthouse finished fast, as it was something like 12 gpt maintenance, but I must have forgotten to swap back off.

I also think we should start planning our Sidar campaign. I would advise you to think this carefully through, as Iskender is a shrewd tactician. Here is a screenshot of the front:


Since we only see a handful of units, I'm guessing Iskender is hiding his main force out of range of our Hawks. That way he can reinforce both of his border cities. What is your plan for the first turns of the war? Due to our numerical advantage it would be possible to form two stacks and threaten both cities, so that Iskender is forced to move his main stack in one direction. Then the lightly defended city can be captured, while the other stack retreats. After that we can merge our stacks or we can try to threaten several cities again.

Don't be afraid to raze cities, we have all the production power we need.

How do you plan to siege cities? Without the Sons you have no way of reducing city defenses, and your only source of collateral will be Ritualists. I see Iskender has converted to Ashen Veil, so he is probably aiming for Ritualists as well. If you can get more of them up before he can, the collateral advantage should be yours.

Especially with Rantine, you're right, razing makes perfect sense at this point. There seem to be too many islands for domination to be a reasonable play.

Sieging cities - yes, I am essentially planning to rely on Ritualists + numbers. I'm thinking a pair of stacks, each with a bunch of Axes, a few Lizards, Ritualists, and enough Shamans for Haste, Rust, Treetop defense, and spares. That'll mean Iskender will be pretty much limited to Str 5 in cities, which after being flamed down is quite manageable. Meanwhile - he's been Leaves for a long time, and been Blooming quite a bit. Parking in a forest with Treetop ought to mean he has to accept casualties if he counterattacks, and I would certainly bet on us in attrition.

In fact, that's the main advantage to this stack comp - as long as we leave our blade enchanters home, there's nothing in an invading army that I fear to lose, so long as it takes Sidar soldiers with them as they die.

At the least, we should aim to pillage him into oblivion and force him to hide in cities, although of course winning would be better.

I'll look at the situation in more detail tonight; you use an image provider that's blocked at work, so I can't consider the screenshot in detail. I'm not sure that Iskender is actually hiding a stack; Priests add up pretty fast on the power graph. But maybe I ought to put a Hawk on a Lizard up at his borders and scout a bit further north. That would both give us more info and potentially convince him to back off a bit further; if I can get the first city razed before his counterattack hits, we're good; he can't afford to lose cities like we can.

[Mardoc]

Interesting news!


It was either Keelyn or Iskender, and Iskender could realistically only have managed it if he bulbed part of the way to the Pact, so I'm betting Keelyn finally finished up.

My first instinct was something along the lines of 'kill it with fire! kill it now!' But on second thought, I think this is actually good for me. Here's why:





Now, orcs are fire resistant, so could pass freely through a wall of flames. Sidar...aren't. They don't have Life mana, either, unless they can wheedle it out of Square Leg, and they are relying on ancient forest lumbermills for a large part of their economy. At the least, this would force them to swap out of Ashen Veil; at the most it would wreck quite a bit of their countryside. And we just have to boost the AC a bit more before they'd have to not just swap out of AV, but swap into Order or Empy.

Also - Hyborem ought to *hate* Square Leg, so he's likely to slow down further while I'm busy with Iskender. He likes me - we share a religion, I use Entropy mana; I'm tempted to declare early on Iskender just so I can feed Hyborem some manes

On that note - here's what Square Leg currently has, to the best of my knowledge:


Not going to be enough to finish Hyborem quickly, that's for sure. Might be enough for defense, but he's going to have to work at this.


I just need to get Ar'roog's borders to pop (by, say, spreading the Veil in ) and I can easily train a couple Life shamans to go around keeping my empire clean and productive.

Of course it may not end up mattering, we might be able to finish off Iskender before Hell spreads far enough to bother him.

I'm currently thinking D-day will be as soon as the first Ritualists make it to the front, which will be around T166. I'm worried that might be too late, actually; as it would only leave 5 turns before Square Leg could jump in to the war. Current thought is one stack moves from Cevedes to 1S of Afterthought, Treetop defensing and Ring of Firing, preparing to hit in turn 2. The other stack would move from the vicinity of Renegade Hill to 2S of Nowhere.

[Tredje]

Well I'll be damned! The Infernals are here, and just on our Luchuirp border.

What's the fire you are talking about? Do you mean the hell terrain that spreads from Dis? I've only summoned the Infernals once in my games, so I haven't really noticed all that they bring. What would force Iskender to swap out of AV?

I am inclined to agree that having the Infernals between us and SL should be a good thing. The fact that SL is Good should make him Hyborem's worst enemy, and his power rating is also rather low. I'm not sure if FFH2 weighs power the same way BTS does for AI war declarations, but if it does Hyborem should prefer to declare on SL over us just because of our army size.

How do you intend to defend our extended eastern border against the Luchuirp? My initial thought is to keep the Sons close to Sorodh, so that they can defend our core areas, while keeping mostly static defense in former Sheaim lands (Warriors.) Gradually you can reinforce the east with Ritualists, Axemen etc and threaten his hinterlands, but to begin with I think that our focus should be on the defense. The most important thing is to put the hurt on Iskender. Having at least one Shaman with Haste in the east would be smart imo, but it is only needed from T171 and after.

[Mardoc]

Well I'll be damned! The Infernals are here, and just on our Luchuirp border.

What's the fire you are talking about? Do you mean the hell terrain that spreads from Dis? I've only summoned the Infernals once in my games, so I haven't really noticed all that they bring. What would force Iskender to swap out of AV?

Yes, I'm referring to Hell terrain - two pieces in particular. First, it spreads to all AV lands regardless of the armageddon counter, and Evil civs at 25 - so it should be unavoidable unless he swaps out of AV, and probably he has to make his civ Good as well. Second, Iskender's empire is relatively vulnerable to Hell, due to two specific things. Hell terrain always burns down forests/jungles, which he seems to be relying on for most of his production; it would negate a primary benefit of running Fellowship of Leaves for so long. Also - it turns deserts into 'Flames of Perdition', which are permanent fires, impassible to all units except those with fire resistance (and destroys floodplains in the process). Orcs are fire resistant (although lizardmen aren't), so essentially Sidar lands would have a moat around them that we can pass at will and he can't.

The only way for him to deal with Hell without leaving AV (and probably also swapping to RoK, Order or Empy to become not-Evil) would be to get an adept with Water mana to go with his forces, but I don't think he has Water mana and can't get it easily. He probably doesn't have the ability to train a lot of quick adepts, either. Life mana could let him remove any Hell terrain he can enter, but again he'd have to borrow Life mana and train new adepts (and it's likely we can make it spread faster than he can eradicate, and the adepts couldn't clear the Flames anyway).

The only trouble is, I'm not sure how fast Hell spreads, if it will be in time to matter for the war. But if it does, then he'll have the simple choice of either accepting Hell terrain and its consequences (he may not realize that orcs can ignore it [I should test this in worldbuilder to make sure I'm not imagining it]), or swapping to a religion that's not his preference. Probably a swap would require him to stop training Priests until he researches the appropriate tech, too, and maybe even a turn of anarchy.

How do you intend to defend our extended eastern border against the Luchuirp? My initial thought is to keep the Sons close to Sorodh, so that they can defend our core areas, while keeping mostly static defense in former Sheaim lands (Warriors.) Gradually you can reinforce the east with Ritualists, Axemen etc and threaten his hinterlands, but to begin with I think that our focus should be on the defense. The most important thing is to put the hurt on Iskender. Having at least one Shaman with Haste in the east would be smart imo, but it is only needed from T171 and after.

That's approximately what I was thinking, yes - the Sons, with their pet shaman, with the Elementals and roads, can cover really a lot of distance. Balseraph lands ought to be spamming Ritualists soon, although I plan to turn the initial wave into temples, we'll likely have at least 5 cities with Warrens/temple building only Ritualists for a while. So Ritualists ought to stack up very quickly once they stop being happiness and beakers.

The alternative, though, is to grab Square Leg's attention by invading with the Sons (or just the elementals), and to not worry much about anything he tries to conquer; this also seems a decent option. We can afford to lose a few cities (particularly if they're ex-Sheaim and temporary), but he can't. His golems are slow enough that he has to try to form a stack of doom and hit a main target (presumably with Rathas to fix the target in place while they approach), but that's the perfect thing for a set of Fire Elementals to hit.

If we give him a threat he can't ignore, then I would be surprised to see much invading our lands. It wouldn't do him any good to conquer a bunch of our cities and build warriors, while losing his core and its sculptor's studios.

[Mardoc]

My apologies for missing the past couple turns; things have just been hectic for me. There's not much to report, except that I keep stacking up Axemen, and Iskender seems to be stacking Divided Souls. Ritualists will be due shortly, after which we'll try our luck against the Sidar.

Why Divided Souls? Seems to me there's two options - either he's counting on their mobility to oppose a split push strategy, or he's en route to Rangers or Assassins and plans to mass upgrade. I think therefore we'll have to invade as soon as the Ritualists arrive.

Edit: just looked at Sidar in the manual again - I'd forgotten that both their hero and their UU are Assassins. I would bet that's the way he's going.

Anyone know, is Hidden something that Hawks can see? If so, then Sidar assassins lose most of their intimidation, although of course it'll make it harder to actually use my shamans.

[Mardoc]

I declared war and razed Braduk. No invisible units were involved, just mobile Divided Souls. Good luck in the incoming war.

I've only had time to glance around - this is going to take careful handling. At least it means he's not on the verge of Poisons, if he's willing to throw out Divided souls for this - but we're knocked down to 20% science due to the idiocy of our new Palace placement - our Capital is now Cevedes, at the far western end of the empire.

Obviously without Braduk we're not going to get Ritualist support anytime soon. We might manage to accomplish things with pure numbers, though? I'm tempted to go ahead and move in, aiming to see if we can't raze a city or two in revenge. And draft more defenders at our other backlines cities.

[Gaspar]

I'm trying to take a look at the game to help but I'm just baffled by the situation. Did we have OB? Several Souls aren't HN I don't think, so he'd have had to been in our territory for a few turns invisibly to get to Braduk, unless I'm missing an access point. Or was the area between Dis and the copper mine not covered by our culture? I suppose it doesn't matter, but it is perplexing. Also - did we have a no RoP for enemies passage inserted to the SL NAP? Because I would assume that's where those Souls came from. If he broke the NAP, could always start curbstomping him with the Sons immediately, which would likely force Iskender to draw his forces east. Just a thought.

I'm not sure how doable it is, but my instinct is we don't really have enough to attack minus the Sons. It looks like he has Walls in his border cities, and we'd need a lot of units to churn through those defenses without Collateral and/or Siege. This is the downside to the Sons here - we've only just started to consider things like Collateral and Siege because we had them to handle this stuff for us with everyone else.

I think we need to find a way to hold him off until we can get some Ritualists in the field while teching IW and see where we can go from there. But I might be wrong.

EDIT: And pick a backline city somewhere and get the Summer Palace up pronto - that maintenance is ridiculous with the Palace in Cevedes. Coombe View would be ideal but I assume its in harm's way too much.