[SPOILERS] DaveV: The vampire bites! Goodbye level 9.

[DaveV]

Turn 129. Thoth picked off my exposed Moroi, plako generated yet another great sage, and Thoth switched to Final War civics.



I only attacked one city, BC Bud. I sent in a (now strength 5) spectre and redlined the defender, then captured the city with a vampire. I then dry-rushed a galley for a naval invasion of the islands next turn.




Other than that, I did lots of pillaging to pump up my rush-buy fund.



Here's my dwindling army:




And here's what he has in Maple Syrup:



City list:




Lots of production after ending turn.

[DaveV]

Oh, and plako has the Bowyers tech now. Will he send his firebows against me, or Serdoa?

[DaveV]

Turn 130. Someone popped a great merchant.



Now it's time for some abuse of game mechanics. I rushed a galley in BC Bud last turn so I could attack his island cities. Now I can fill it with vampires:



But that uses up all their movement. If only there were some way to give them an extra movement point!



And, of course, there is. Spells work on all units on the same tile, even if they're on board a ship.

Once the galley moves into position, the vampires can summon as many units as needed, even though there's no more room in the hold.



Despite all this planning, I forgot to wait for my third death node and wasted two spectres attacking his pyre zombie in Northern Lights. Fortunately, I won a 60% battle with a vampire and killed his galley in port at Moose Lovin, proving once again it's better to be lucky than good. That means he can't pillage out all my new fishing nets. It also means he's down to three cities.




I sent my brand-new hawk to find that third city:




Next turn is a setup turn, then I attack Maple Syrup on turn 132. I doubt I'll be able to take out Yankee Baiting on the same turn, but that would make my life a lot easier. The final domino to fall will be Dog Sled Racing a couple turns after that.



Ichabod is doing his best to prop up Thoth (short of pillaging roads, which I'm certainly not going to suggest). He has zero gold, which I'm going to assume means he gifted it all to Thoth for rush-buys.



Demos, since I haven't shown them in a while:



-18 GNP is pretty impressive. I assume that means Thoth will have to deal with striking units. Edit: never mind, I just said Ichabod is gifting gold to him.

[Mardoc]

Despite all this planning, I forgot to wait for my third death node and wasted two spectres attacking his pyre zombie in Northern Lights.

Pretty sure another death node would have exactly zero effect on spectre vs zombie, because of Undead.

[DaveV]

Despite all this planning, I forgot to wait for my third death node and wasted two spectres attacking his pyre zombie in Northern Lights.

Pretty sure another death node would have exactly zero effect on spectre vs zombie, because of Undead.

Yeah, I explained that poorly. In the first city, he had a zombie and a warrior. I got a good roll against the zombie, damaging him to the point where a vampire had something like 97% odds on him. Then I softened up the warrior with a spectre (more death would have been helpful here). Here's where I got (even more) stupid: I sent in another spectre against the zombie in an attempt to minimize the splash damage when my vampires killed him. I should have saved the spectres for the second city (which turned out to have two warriors in addition to the galley); even a badly damaged vampire could have cleaned up pretty easily after a 6-strength spectre attack.

This is the reason why Thoth was my first target (part of the reason, anyway; his empire was a nice fit geographically): boosted spectres can heavily damage or outright kill most defenders, but they lose all their extra death strength when facing other undead. Dwarves have 20% resistance to death damage, but that's not nearly as daunting as 100% resistance.

[DaveV]

Turn 131: plako declares war on Serdoa. This is really, really good news for me. Unless it leads one of them to pop his worldspell. I opened the turn in fear of losing a bunch of units to Raging Seas, but there was just one notification in the log:



New relations screen:



War weariness for plako:



The city lists seem to show that no cities have changed hands. A bloody stalemate would be ideal for me.

I sent my hawk down south to see what's going on with plako's new cities.




Lots of interesting things here: Ichabod captured an elephant; there are barb borders in the south; Ichabod is building roads in plako's territory; someone sent a spider into my territory.

Speaking of out-of-place workers, Thoth has sent some refugees into Ichabod's territory.



Meanwhile, back in the war zone, Dog Sled Racing is still starving:



I completed my pillaging and am set up to attack Maple Syrup next turn. I moved lots of units away from the water.




Here's the garrison:



Ichabod's GNP is dropping quite a bit.



City list. Siege workshops are for catapults. Sometimes the low-tech solution is the right one.




At end of turn, I finished Smelting, revealing exactly two iron sources in my vast territory.





Note that the flames 2S1E of Seal Hunting finally went out. I've been building another bypass road for my bypass road in case both of the current roads were blocked by flames.

Oh, and I killed the spider. It would have been cute to capture it, but the spectre had 73% odds and won.

[DaveV]

Copied from the EitB pitboss thread, for my reference:

One thing I forgot to note: our defacto allies, Warbaxia, have Arcane Lore now. Govannan can't be far behind.

I've been doing some research on Blinding Light, and its odds are pretty bad. Base resistance is 50%, +10% in cities, +5% per level of unit, +20% for hero. So Gibbon would be at 95% resistance outside cities, 100% in cities. One more promo needed for 100% resistance outside cities. If that's their plan for counterattack against us, I think I'll take those odds.

For my own reference, I'm adding a list of promotions on the caster that will alter the resistance of units being attacked (Rathas/Radiant Guards don't start with any of these ):
Avatar -50
Channelling II/III -10 each
Potency -10
Metamagic I/II/III -5 each
Puppet +20
Tower of Alteration -20

Spell damage:
Combat I/II/III/IV/V +5 each
Metamagic I/II/III +5 each
Puppet -10
Unholy Taint +10

On defense, units get a base resistance of defense*2 + level*2 + (city cultural defense)/4. Any type resistance (death, fire, lightning, etc.) is added to this base number.
Nominal damage is the base damage of the spell (40 for Snowfall) plus any modifiers. Two random numbers in the range (0-nominal) are generated, and added together. This
sum is multiplied by (100-resistance)/100.
If this modified damage is greater than the spell max damage (80 for Snowfall), it is limited to the maximum.

tl;dr: two snowfalls should, on average, do the max damage. The variance on damage is very high, so there may be a few lightly damaged units.

Snowfall will turn all land tiles surrounding the caster to Snow for 3-8 turns, and has a 2% chance per tile of spawning a Blizzard. It will put out smoke or flames.

So, nominal damage for Tsunami is 30, +5 for Combat I on my Cultist. Defensively, Maple Syrup has 45% cultural defense; the garrison units are level 1-6, defense 4 or 5. So resistance will be anywhere from 21 to 33. Expected damage will be about 35HP * resistance, or about 23-28 HP, but, as I said above, it's highly variable. Still, being able to remove an average of 1/4 of the hitpoints of all the units in Maple Syrup should make the attack a lot easier.

[DaveV]

Turn 132. The big showdown at Maple Syrup, starting with my cultist.



Results were good (see the bottom of the second log dump): a minimum of 3% damage, maximum of 33%. Good damage on the Pyre Zombies, which was my main concern. My first vampire attack was at about 80%, then the carnage started. I had lots more chances than I expected to attack warriors as top defenders with my spectres.




As you might notice, I declared war on Ichabod and killed his intrusive boar rider once the battle was effectively over and I knew I'd have leftover units.

Here's the aftermath. Lots of units are exposed to Raging Seas damage, unfortunately.




Thoth has two cities left. That should be reduced to one after next turn.





Here's the setup against Ichabod. Next turn I move my workers onto the tile 3N1W of Stoville. Depending on how much effort it takes to conquer Yankee Baiting, I might be able to take a shot at Stoville next turn.




Hawks reveal that plako has a great sage sitting around in his capital.



plako captured two of Serdoa's cities, and his war weariness continues to climb.



Demos:



Cities:

[DaveV]

Turn 133. The log shows that Ichabod and Serdoa both switched to Final War civics, and Ichabod fired off a Golden Age. I hadn't noticed that Ichabod has Engineering; he used the extra road movement to snipe the vampire that was sitting on the "to be roaded" tile.



In Yankee Baiting, I won a 90% battle against the Pyre Zombie, killed two warriors with spectres at 80% and 75%, then barely won with a vampire at 90%. That's what I get for trying to do things on the cheap.



But it turns out I couldn't afford to spend too many resources on Yankee Baiting, since I barely had enough to take out Stoville.




A hawk flight gives me a pretty good idea of what Ichabod has. It looks as though I caught him setting up to take out the barb city to his west. Heh.




Thoth is down to one city. I'm not trying to troll you here, Thoth, but you've made your city very difficult to take. For now, I can live with the anger and my army has better things to do than hammer itself against your walls.



My city list now has a scroll bar. If this were a single player game, I'd probably quit now. My opponents in this game are much more competent than AIs, but I think plako has one more chance to screw me with his worldspell. Things are shaping up for a climactic combat with Ichabod next turn.






Power graph, since I haven't shown it for a while.



Demos:

[DaveV]

Turn 133 addendum. plako grabbed three more of Serdoa's cities. Ouch. They started out with 12 cities each; now Serdoa is at 7, plako at 17.



plako still doesn't have any of the four prereq techs for Sorcery.