Thinking about starting an all-white game, and have a quick question: Can I stack these retorts to make my enchantments really hard to dispel (x3.5 if additive stacking or x5 if multiplicative)?

I'm thinking about the bottom tier normal units and maybe the problem isn't that they are weak (they are supposed to be), but the price? The price is fair if you compare it to other units like halberdiers, but compare it to your production availability at the time these units actually are useful and...you get :

2 cavalry, or 3 swordsmen for the price of a Marketplace, Magic Market, 2.5 cavalry for a sawmill etc

suddenly not so hot investment, are they? But there is more, you don't automatically get them - you need a Smithy, or Smithy plus stables to build some. (Or smithy and sawmill for bowmen but everyone has the sawmill anyway)
And you better have an alchemist guild and a barracks too if you want them to do any real damage to anything so you're already looking at fighter's guild tier costs just on those two buildings - might as well go for halberdiers which are better than swordsmen even without barracks and alchemist...

So I wonder if a lower cost, taking into account these units get outdated fast, compete with basic buildings, and even require a fairly expensive (for early game) building infrastructure to use, would work better?

Something like
Swordsmen 15-20
Bowmen 20-25
Cavalry 25-30

Another big problem I see is the high cost of Alchemist Guilds - you absolutely need one to make these units useful and if you already invested 60+150 for the AG, you might as well do the 250 Fighter's Guild.
So maybe the AG should cost 80-100 as well - now it no longer produces power and still has a fairly high maintenance?


While these units are generally better in human hands than AI so this benefits humans only, the AI has their summoned creature advantage to prevent getting overwhelmed by them too easily, and overusing these does make you stay behind in economy.

Well hello everyone. Been awhile 

My 15 y/o son has recorded a few videos of him on his phone playing different games and was wanting to possibly start a gaming channel.  We're not expecting any kind of millions of dollars or anything - just something to do for fun.

I Googled around for different advice on how / where / what to start with but most of the things that come back are things written to promote affiliate links and/or not that helpful

I wondered if there might be anyone here that would have any advice.  I know Sullla had his own gaming channel but I figured there were probably others as well

Thanks and Merry Christmas everyone :-P

I'll run a few dozen "self playing" games where only the AI players get turns to see if the Myrran wizard performs as they should or are "out of control" all the time. I'll post the graphs for those games here (each game takes 1-2 hours to execute so this will take a while)

Game 1.

   
Red is the Myrran wizard,  with Sorcery+Chaos.
Purple and Yellow are both Life+Nature, purple has Astral Gate, Yellow has Stream of life. Purple started with lizardmen, Yellow with Gnolls, the latter likely broke towers early? They are allied (same book realms).

Myrran AI in 1412 wasn't stronger than Arcanus AI at all, merely equal, and they play Draconians.
The eliminated wizard was Sorcery+Death with Gnolls.

...more tomorrow.

(if anyone is interested in helping, let me know and I'll put up the "self-playing" exe for download.)

If a level 1 normal unit has heroism cast on it during battle, and then dies to a unit with create undead, it's undead self has the stats of a level 3 normal unit. Even though if it lived it's stats would've reverted back to level 1, also as far as I can tell the heroism spell no longer effects the unit (because it's no longer normal) and it has no upkeep (despite having the benefit of heroism).

This is probably working as intended, I just wanted to check, it's helping me out a lot in my current war and seems like an odd interaction.

I think it's still a little early to be making a spoiler thread.  Ah well, might as well, since PB37 seems to have run into a Christmas-related slowdown.

Things you should know:

• If you're still active in PB37, but aren't playing here, it should be okay to read this.
  
• I do not yet have a naming scheme.  I'd love to use Order of the Stick, if it weren't for that scheme likely running out of names unless I do badly.  It's also probably not the most auspicious thing in the world to name my capital "Azure City", anyway.
  
• Using the American Wizardry games likely would also have me run out of names too quickly.  It does have the benefit that "Llylgamyn" isn't that inauspicious.
  
• ipecac probably isn't going to be coming along for the ride this time -- I think I can do at least a mediocre job on my own now.
  
• I'm expecting basically no one else to post here, but I'll report anyway.  It helps organize my thoughts.
  

This is the recording of my recent test game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF3Cq0NM...e=youtu.be

- 4 way "alliances" still happen, and they still make you lose. Not because you can't fight against 4 people at once (albeit it's hard) but because those 4 people are not losing any resources on fighting anyone else. It doesn't have to be an actual alliance, if they simply are peaceful and never attack each other or have a wizard's pact, that is bad enough - their troops will pile up and eventually you have to fight them all.
-Myrran wizard hasn't even filled all the land available, yet was 3-4 times more powerful than anyone else. So land size might not be the real problem. They had 14 cities vs my 10 and red/yellow's 8 each. I have to assume Myrran races are simply this much better.
-Expert is hard enough that one can't get away with fighting everyone, even if playing a strong strategy and having a good start. I used to be able to do this on Extreme before (or maybe Nature simply isn't as strong as Death, I wonder).
-Based on this game I still think Peaceful is the worst personality to fight against. I shouldn't have let my guard down and should have avoided any wars until I had an alliance with one of the two wizards I first met. That is literally the only way to not lose a game full of peaceful (or lawful or charismatic) wizards. I thought I don't need that with this strategy on this difficulty level but it seems I was wrong. Doomstacks make this a lot worse and peaceful wizards have plenty of opportunity to build them because they are not fighting anyone unless they are at war with you.
-Astral Gate is nasty - things like mithril minotaurs, beastmen magicians and whatever else keeps popping out of nowhere and you can't do anything against it. (I guess I should have tried to find the tiles for the gates and put stacks of units there...but they need to be large stacks otherwise they just get killed by the enemy stacks.
-Game is a lot harder now that the AI is smarter on attacking things with their stacks.
-I wonder if I should have built more troops (longbowmen? Elven Lords?) instead of economy buildings like mechanician's guild and sage/wizard's guilds. The defenses in the Arcanus enemy cities weren't that strong.

If I kept playing I could have been the first with a rare summoning spell but with only 60 casting skill I'm not sure that's enough. Even if it is, the Myrran wizard is too far ahead, by the time I clean Arcanus, they'll be like 10 times stronger than I am.

Gimmie the good picks!

edit: password is "big"

Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, then it's just all downhill from here



PASSWORD IS:

Civ password is "williamlp".

I'm going to have to get in the habit again, of seeing all these juicy threads and not clicking on any of them.

I found this game by accidentally clicking on an old bookmark to Realms Beyond while drunk and signed up on a whim. The next day I realized in horror what I'd done and nearly quit. Then the next day after that I realized in horror what I'd done and nearly quit. Hi everyone.

Probably the most impressive Civ achievement of mine is surviving to the final turn of PB 11, 13, and 18. Rusty would be an understatement. I haven't looked at a Civ 4 start in years and I have no clue what the key changes are in RtR.   I used to have really strong feelings about some parts of the game, but I can't remember the details of what or why.

What I still remember is that the most important factor in the game is who you start next to and in what circumstances. I'm not sure how engaged I am going to be in this game but how that start plays out will affect that a lot. Another thing I know is, based on the game size, nobody is going to be relevant in this game unless they manage to conquer a neighbour or two.