A Very Perpy SG

[Bobchillingworth]

I played my round in two sessions, so I'll make this two reports.


First Part:

This was a hell of a set. I have never played a game of Civ this intense before, mod or not. Games just aren't supposed to get this badly out of hand!


Suggested music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c98gIxCe1...ideo_title



The turn starts with the standard Reviewing of Civ. No point in checking the event log, it goes on for forever and a list of great people and events isn't going to help at all at this point.


Hell terrain has been banished from large areas of the empire, restoring our old resources but preserving stuff like Nightmares, but we have no life adepts set up to keep it from returning. I'm guessing that Thoth first drove it away, and Pin and Brian decided to use the adepts for other stuff.


Speaking of Arcane units, most of ours seem to be... gone. I guess we lost most of our mages in some terrible battle or other? That's a shame. I'll come to heavily regret their absence during my set.


We are yet again short on Ritualists. First thing I do is cue up more in several cities. Every attack stack needs to have at least four, preferably at this stage seven or eight, and several of our cities also could additionally use Veil spreads to deal with happy issues.


Regarding attack stacks, we have three in various places on the Calabim border, and one large one facing off against the Sheaim. We have captured a single Calabim city yet are at peace with them, and while our army does not seem to be badly diminished (except for Ritualists and Mages apparently), the Calabim also retain their full host of forces, which are simply terrifying. Lots of them also have the Blood of the Phoenix.


We also have the Nexus, and we are running a large gold surplus. I turned science down to 0% for my entire set; we need mass-hirings of mercs, not more T4 units we'll never get much use out of.



Continuing the first turn analysis with pictures...






The diplo modifiers with Alexis don't make a whole lot of sense to me. Why the heck did we ever gift her a city? Weird.

Also holy crap look at that WW rating





One of our four main stacks, and the massive Calabim army. She actually has plenty more troops than are visible, but this is by far her deadliest group, and our comparatively puny force is absolutely no match for it. I immediately send our south-western force to abandon its assault position on the Calabim border, and link up with this army. We badly need more forces here, and dividing up into task forces isn't going to cut it if Alexis just annihilates each of them separately. Sadly I didn't take a picture of the SW army, but it was about 2/3 of the size of the one pictured above, similar composition.





We simply can't produce enough troops and move them to the soon-to-be frontlines quickly enough, so I'm going to have to rely very heavily on mass-hired Mercenaries.





Moving to another part of the empire for a second- what the heck is going on here? This is not a good city to build the ToM, considering we can't rush it :|

For the moment I decide to leave it as-is, and I direct about a dozen workers over to workshop most of that city's land. I'm hoping we can win Dom before it matters, only need like 5% more of the land.




With all of that stuff finally out of the way, it's time to end the first turn. I ended up moving very few units outside of the large SW stack.







Oh yeah. ToM = War




At this point the computer spends half-an-hour computing roughly ten trazillion unit moves.



When I finally get my hands on the turn, I find that the damage isn't too bad at all.





Tebby has moved what appears to be roughly the entirety of his army in to threaten our eastern force, but he has made no attacks except a casting of Wonder which annoyingly rolled Snowfall, but thankfully did little actual damage.





After many RoF + Plauge, his stack is dramatically weakened, and I easily pick it to pieces with minimal losses. All of his current cohort of Eaters of Dreams are wiped out.





On the much more worrisome Calabim front, Alexis has hardly moved anything at all. My response it to finally combine the southern stacks, and hire a large number of new mercs.


With the Sheaim driven back, and everyone bunkered up in the west in preparation for moving on the Calabim next turn, I hit Enter.


...



The computer takes about 10 minutes before anything happens. I figure that it's thinking over moves, same as before.


But then, unexpectedly, I start hearing the Horns of Battle. No animations are showing up, so I have no idea what's happening, but it starts with the standard victory fare.


But then I start hearing losses. And the horns are getting loud, and I have the sound almost muted, which means that the "unit defeat" clip is getting overlapped many times at once.



And then the game starts slowly stuttering to life. The graphics are mostly frozen, but the area outside of Vorgal erupts in the red spectre / pitbeast summon animation. And the combat log suddenly starts to update on the top of the screen and

it

is

all

red.



The game is a cacophony now, screams and howling summons and Vampires warning me about the evidently unpleasant things I can expect to find in my dreams.


Finally the EoT cycle finishes, and I have control over my civ. I immediately look for my army at Vorgal- how badly did we take it?


But there is no army.



[SIZE="5"]NOTHING SURVIVED[/SIZE]




Vorgal is back in Calabim hands. Our entire western border is overrun with summons and vampires and 500 other miscellaneous units. The Great Artist, Warhorse, our Beasts, our Knights, all of our units with the Hero promotion are gone. And the combat log shows that we didn't kill any permanent units.



This was the only time I've actually had to get up and walk away from a game of Civ for a while.







I didn't take any pictures or write any notes for the next turn. I spent it gating everything not engaged on the east over to the various threatened western towns, and then hiring mercenaries using the new arrivals.



Astoundingly, Alexis decided to hold position and shore up her defenses at Vorgal, after pulling back most of her forces from the border. She kept sending in stacks of specters, but with only +1 turn duration they weren't an issue.







Since our north-western army is still alive, I decide to grab a little revenge. I can't possibly hold anything I take from Alexis, so everything gets razed. This move ended up being the best thing I did this set (not that that's saying much ), since it drew the Alexis Super Stack up north to respond to the threat, where I was able to do what I should have done in the first place & hit her with RoF, locking her into the AI "stand still / retreat and heal" cycle.



In case anyone was ever curious what losing an endgame FFH army in a single battle will do to your WW:



And that was with Mercenaries not even adding to WW when they die


This was absolutely crippling. None of our present civics have any impact on WW, and very few cities had dungeons. I was too busy spending gold on mercs to cash-rush any buildings, so most cities simply starved.



After I quit feeling sorry for myself and wondering whether I should excuse myself from the game, I put together a new plan. The eastern army was actually in a good position to crush the Sheaim and then advance on the Calabim, possibly securing us the land needed for Dom, so I planned for it to do exactly that.



With the Calabim distracted in the NW by our last remaining original army, I quickly formed several ad-hoc armies consisting of a large quantity of Mercs, whatever Mimics I could get to the area, and then several gated-in Ritualists and a haste adept. Here's a typical one:





I sent these mostly disposable armies straight into Calabim territory, each intended to raze as many cities in a given sector as possible before eventually getting overwhelmed by the ludicrous mage / vampire stacks Alexis had wandering throughout her territory.


Here's another, looking to reclaim [raze] Vorgal:





Advancing further:





(It took me longer than I would care to admit to realize that I needed to be enchanting the Merc's blades. Lacking Mages for mutations also hurt).


Finally, at turn 183 I had some real vengeance:





Burn.


This one I kept, though-





The Perpy Empire had managed to bloody the Calabim-Sheaim Doomsday Pact after suffering a most grievous loss, but little did they suspect that their greatest travails were yet to occur.



THUS ENDS PART 1


STAY TUNED FOR THE THRILLING CONCLUSION!

[Tasunke]

for Bob (and lurkers)

What civics are you using? due to no commerce on the farms I'm guessing no longer in Aristocracy ... City States perhaps? Would it be more worth it to switch to Nationhood/Despotism in order to combat WW, or is it less expensive to just let the cities starve. (hehe, possibly not worth risking until the WW annihilates the entire economy, eh?)

Also, can't wait for the next turn report!

[Ichabod]

for Bob:

Great turnset. I remember some games where some pretty big stacks of mine were smashed by billions of AI units. But I had never seen such big stacks before. Man, Alexis must have Hyborem-like power right now...

[Mardoc]

Bob - great report, so far! I like your style.

[Bobchillingworth]

Part 2-

First off, thanks for the compliments, guys! To answer Tasunke's question, while I don't remember all of our civics, we are definitely in Theo and Sacrifice the Weak. I wanted to revolt to Despotism & the other civic which reduces WW, but apparently somebody revolted right before my set began, so nothing doing. Plus I couldn't have afforded to give up probably two turn's worth of income and production anyway. The only thing which kept Alexis from destroying the empire utterly is that the AI was distracted by the Mercenaries I kept either stockpiling on our border or throwing into her lands.



This will be a shorter report than the last one, since it covers fewer turns and I took less screencaps. But, incredibly enough, it covers even more momentous turns than the first.



We began where we left off, with Perpy armies carrying out a bloody campaign of scorched-earth total war vengeance across the East Calabim Frontier.





Alexis typically has an elite vampire or two, a handful of LB and mounted units, several skeletons and adepts / mages, and one miscellaneous T4 unit per city. Mercs generally get odds on everything but the super vamp or T4 trooper after all the RoF hit, so I'm only having to sacrifice a few of them for every city razing. Alexis refuses to attack the stacks directly (although she has enough forces on hand in every part of her empire to conceivably wipe out or cripple all of my stacks at any given time), but she will eliminate any single, isolated unit left within striking distance with extreme prejudice. The end result is that this doesn't play so much like combat as an odd, deadly tactical dance.





Tebby is crumbling before my semi-stoppable onslaught. Alexis is sending over some forces which theoretically could be very dangerous (vamps, CV Eidolon, High Priests of Leaves), but for now she has been content to square off vs. poor Cassiel.


Oh, you'll also note that the AC has jumped a bit between pictures. That would be the impact of all city razings from the last turn (I haven't been posting all of these pictures in the order I took them). That means that on EoT 284, barbarian champions spawned from Hellfire all across the Perpy empire; thankfully none of them moved on the turn they appeared, and I was able to hire mercs in all threatened cities, plus destroy a couple Hellfires with Beastmasters and similar units I had on hand (Mercs, suffering from the Champion +25% bonus vs. Melee, get even odds at best). But when you see black dots across the empire in the next couple pics, that's what's going on.






Alexis should be worried. If she doesn't use her giant stack to actually start wiping out my Merc strike bands, Dave could raze her capital during his set. Could the tide of war actually be beginning to shift?






The Sheaim are in the midst of an all-out collapse. We still have one Great Artist left- bombing the Sheaim capital might able to secure us enough land for the win. I actually razed this city after taking the picture, though- too close to Alexis for comfort.













....................













Say, did you notice something odd about that last picture, compared to the one before it?







Did the AC just jump up by 13 points within the same turn?


Why yes, it did!



For reasons unknowable to Man, the city of Nubia has profound significance for the various Gods of Erebus. Perhaps it occupies a meta-dimensional nexus of unstable cosmic energies of incalculable, devastating magical power, which the city somehow contains. Or maybe the town commemorates an incredible deed from an age long-since forgotten. It could even be that the Gods, cruel and incomprehensible though they may often seem, cannot stand to see a city of tens of millions put to the sword and ravaged by fire. Whatever the case, the Gods are [SIZE="5"]Enraged[/SIZE]



And with them, so to are almost all of our units.




I can't actually tell you what happened at the EoT, because I honestly don't rightly know. The AC was at 99 when I ended the turn, having increased further from razing Kuldevind- based on the sounds the game played and the events which followed, I believe it then hit 100 during the AI's turn. All I can report is what I saw, and that was



[SIZE="4"]Absolute Chaos[/SIZE]




The turn astoundingly took only about 4 minutes to resolve, but I still only saw animations at about 2 frames per year. The game played about every sound clip at once. The event log looked like Christmas. Units everywhere in every nation went mad, fought, died, won, and in very many cases apparently simply vanished altogether. Barbarians erupted forth from their Hellfire lairs and captured now-empty cities. The cities themselves saw their populations halved. The Avatar of Wrath itself appeared at the nexus of four civilizations fighting for control of Erebus and, not caring to pick sides, began to immediately lay waste to all parties involved.



This picture only sums up a very small fraction of the madness:







Looking over the turn, I found the the game had simply become an incomprehensible disaster. Most of our cities are empty, one has been taken over by the barbarians and several are poised to immediately fall next, Calabim forces appear to not have been affected as heavily as ours and are streaming across the border in droves, and what few soldiers of ours which remain are almost all engaged and running off in random directions.



Worst of all, our progress on the ToM, now likely our best (if not only) hope for victory, has been set back substantially due to population loss:






It has kind of been a running gag that I leave Dave with at least one bad situation or impending catastrophe when I hand over the save, but this is taking that trend to an extreme which is really almost surreal.


I just hope that he has fun with the turn while everything crashes down around him




END REPORT.

[DaveV]

Status report: downloaded the save, poked around, but didn't play any turns yet. There are a lot of decisions to be made. I'm hoping everyone will be patient; I should be able to play some turns tonight.

Eeek! I'm up against this guy:

Oops, I mean this guy:

[Ellimist]

Epic.

[Ichabod]

Epic.²

[Darkmantle]

I'm reading this at work and trying not to giggle to loudly :D

For me, this is how is FFH was supposed to be, a gigantic cluster fuck of death in a dying world.

[nabaxo]

Wow. Just wow. That's one of the most epic stuff I've read when it comes to this game. Maybe someone should contact Kael? ;D