Freezing the World below Absolute Zero - Illians Succession Game

[Miguelito]

Btw don't your rules ban conquering Mahala before the stir from slumber ritual?

[Mardoc]

Maybe technically? I don't remember exactly whether I said one conquest per ritual or per (White Hand/Drifa).

I think we're still well within the spirit of the ruleset, though. We're definitely showcasing the Illian uniques, pushing snow hard, and playing for the long game. If anything, taking Mahala out would let us shift some of our build queues back toward economic stuff, which would help us get to Divine Essence.

Actually, we're showing off Illian features I hadn't actually expected to: Javelin Throwers and Call Blizzard.

Still, I think I would argue against trying for kills on Falamar and Sheelba until we've got the dragon in hand. Fortunately, their Power ratings are still ridiculous so that's not likely to be a reasonable goal regardless.

[Miguelito]

Oh yeah it's lots of fun to watch and of course I didn't want to spoil anybody's fun. One sad thing about you getting iron from malakim is that you're not pushed towards gettimg IW and building wilboman... It send he's not very special of a hero anyways, but in my only illians game so far I lost him to a barb assassin at like 4xp, so would be interesting to see how he performs when managed actually sensibly ...

[DaveV]

Got it, by the way, but I'm traveling this week and probably won't have an opportunity to play until this weekend.

[Mardoc]

not pushed towards gettimg IW and building wilboman...

Hmm, maybe we should go ahead and do this now that we have Elementalism? It would make good insurance against Varn finally biting the dust, and it would be thematic. I don't know we have much else that's urgent anymore, other than working toward Drifa. You guys have been too good at solving our problems .

I guess the one thing that might be worth trying for, if it hasn't fallen yet, is the Guild of Hammers. Engineering would help our logistics, too, but that +25% hammers would be very, very nice.

[Qgqqqqq]

I think getting AL/Divination/SoW is too important, right now. We're not seeing them, but Sheelba and Falamar's armies are massive. They're going to come for us sometime properly, and we need to be ready. I don't think we can afford to fool around.

[Mardoc]

I guess I don't see a few archmages making that much difference. We'll have collateral from Air. Blizzard is better...but enough better to matter? Upgrading some of our summoners from Str. 5 summons to Str. 9 summons is handy, but again - enough to matter? What we need most of all is already in progress: building more adepts and getting them upgraded, along with support units. Plus, of course, killing what we can now.

And do bear in mind that Falamar is at war with Sheelba. It may not be any more real than our war with Sheelba, but it's something.

If you're really worried, the fastest bonus we can get would be to research Bowyers and upgrade our javelins to longbows. Str 10 on the defense, with Flaming Arrows and Iron, and also first strikes and city/hill defensive bonuses, and a lot of the javellins already have XP. And we already have ~40 throwers: 40 longbows could absorb an awful lot of tiger level units.

[jalepeno]

Longbows would certainly make us impenetrable, but I prefer the magic route. iirc the javelin -> longbow upgrade cost is quite a bit more than adept -> mage. Also, snowfall really is that much better than maelstorm. anyways, I'm actually ok diverting to some econ goodies. I just don't see the AI properly bringing its power to bear on us.

wrt attacking mahala, we're already at war, we might as well take a couple cities at the very least. if we want to follow the letter of the law, why not reduce her to a city-state with no improvements and use her as an adept training ground?

[Mardoc]

Longbows would certainly make us impenetrable, but I prefer the magic route. iirc the javelin -> longbow upgrade cost is quite a bit more than adept -> mage.

Probably. Upgrading 40 units to longbows is not something that would happen in a turn - and it would probably cost more than Bowyers does, in the end.

But cash is not the limiting factor in adept - mage upgrades - unit building and XP is the limit there. We can't speed up mage generation by spending money. Longbows, if we did that, would be in addition to what we're already doing on the arcane front.

Also, snowfall really is that much better than maelstorm. anyways, I'm actually ok diverting to some econ goodies.

Well, I do admit that Strength of Will is something we definitely want long term, and IIRC it's one of the paths toward Drifa and Ascension anyway. I'm not against it - just pointing out that it'll take a long time to research and use. Especially since we don't have enough nodes for a Tower of Divination just yet. Even with Law mana, we need at least three nodes to build a Tower - and that doesn't leave any extra for our fighting mages to get their promos.

So really it's a question of what we believe about this:

I just don't see the AI properly bringing its power to bear on us.

If we're worried in the short term, we can have Bowyers in ~5 turns IIRC, and we can start upgrading immediately. It would take a while to get the cash for full benefit, but it's still the quickest boost we can get.

If we're confident that the AI will continue to be stupid and scattered, then the tech and adept-building path we've been on should work just fine. In which case longer-term plans make more sense.

wrt attacking mahala, we're already at war, we might as well take a couple cities at the very least. if we want to follow the letter of the law, why not reduce her to a city-state with no improvements and use her as an adept training ground?

Personally I'd think killing her off is closer to the spirit of our game than doing this . But the main limit is just that, due to the terrain and her culture, any unit we send in is ~5 turns away from the western front. So we need to be confident in holding without whatever portion of our army goes to beat on her. Which comes back to the question of whether Q and I are right, or paranoid .

[Aurorarcher]

Well, I do admit that Strength of Will is something we definitely want long term, and IIRC it's one of the paths toward Drifa and Ascension anyway. I'm not against it - just pointing out that it'll take a long time to research and use. Especially since we don't have enough nodes for a Tower of Divination just yet. Even with Law mana, we need at least three nodes to build a Tower - and that doesn't leave any extra for our fighting mages to get their promos.

I actually went back to save and checked that we need to unlock Divine Essence for Drifa. That's not on the magic path we've been going so far but instead it requires Fanaticism (3150b) + Commune with the Nature (7735b). Should probably start heading this way because afterall, we need to finish Stir from Slumber first before finishing the Draw. Fanaticism also would give us 4 powerful Eidolons starting with two moves. Not that this is a whole lot but it's nice to get at least something along the way... Commune with the Nature is totally worthless tech for us, and that cost .

Longbows would definitely make our front a lot more safer and probably avoid paranoia regarding AIs high power. On the other hand, like Jale pointed out, it costs a big chunk of cash to upgrade javelin throwers to longbows, so I'd probably rather spend that money on research/upgrading adepts. I'm pretty confident we can hold out front basicially with just what we have right now (that is the units, not the amount), as long as we can keep pumping more mages out with a reasonable speed. Air/Fire collateral mages, having enough of them can deal with very scary stacks and make them a lot less scary. IIRC AI tends to not attack with units that are at 2/3 health or similar.

Also regarding ToD and our nodes, we can switch the same node to different manas many times during the same turn and still be able to keep building ToD. All that it takes is that the required manas are there when we end the turn. That of course takes a lot of adepts/mages from the front. But we can actually do that with only one node, by switching it to different manas every turn. Turning a node into mana takes something like 8 turns (?) so we'd need two mages (that'd use Meta 2) on the same tile and the rest can be adepts (fortunately mages can turn mana to a node even after creating a spell). I can't quite think right now how many adepts that'd be but probably around 8? This way it'd be possible to get new spells every turn for our fresh adepts and still keep finshing the ToD. Is this worth it? I'm not sure actually.

Also a less serious note: I'd also like to unleash the Wilboman "soonish" (I have no idea how soon it'd be possible tbh), even if the unit is terrible but thematically it's pretty cool unit to have.

Also another note: Has anyone considered Celestial Compass? It'd gives us +50% ritual production which could be handy when we're finshing rituals that are around 1000h each (actully 900 + 900 + 1200 for the last 3). That'd require us to research otherwise maybe rather useless tech, Astronomy.