continued from http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid649225

(copy of that post)
One problem here might be that city troops you can get early such as swordsmen are not a huge investment, they are cheap. So they are weak. Summoned creatures on the other hand are huge investments, thus stronger.
That's balanced. Why is it not working out anyway?
Because the starting conditions are uneven.
Your city has ~10 production, but you have ~20 power and casting skill. Despite the inherent assumption that skill is a less available resource than production. So creatures are overweight 4 times compared to how it should be in early troop availability.(2 production = 1 casting skill)
But it's worse - your production is competing with settlers which are essential in most cases, and buildings (which are also essential to unlock troops or to have better economy). Meanwhile your power is not competing with anything - your early spells will be 90% summons (or buffs if you play Life but that's the same deal, it's military spending). There simply aren't economy or similar choices at common spells - at least not enough to invest the majority of your skill into them (and this is actually true for a large part of the game, probably only at the "rare" tier can economic spells outweight creatures in all but the Chaos realm.)

So yeah, we might be onto something here. The problem is we raised starting power (and the original game raised starting skill in one of their patches - it wasn't always this high, 1.0 you had a skill of, like, 5 to start with!) but starting production, even with the sawmill, lags behind while the demand for production is higher than the demand for skill. So production can't compete with skill until like turn 30-40 after which it outweights skill as intended and it stays that way until the end of the game.

But if production gets more available at start, early races just steamroll the map...that merely trades one problem for another. We would need to completely rework the cost of settlers, military buildings and (racial) units.

...to be continued

I didn't want to fill the sticky thread with general conversation so I'm talking about it here:

This is just a fun little strategy to play with.  It takes too long to really get rolling and you end up giving up any retorts.  5C, 5N and 2S books lets you grab flame blade, chaos channels, land link and focus magic.

Once you have yourself some high elves, make sure they have access to adamantium before equipping your lords.  Of course, being snotty little upstarts, they are too good to ride -horses-, so it's time to get them some dragons.

Flame blade->chaos channels until you have fire breathing elven lords.  This is simply too weak to be useful though, practically no better than waving a torch in your opponent's face.  The answer, as is typical for any chaos mage worth their salt, is more fire!

Take your flaming elven lords, and refine their elviness with Land Link and add in a dash of Focus Magic to really power up that flame (and flamboyancy!)

By now you've really earned your elven lord's loyalty, by turning their horses into Dragons!  Even so, this is only the start...  As you research more, give them iron skin, regeneration, or even bring chaos to the plane itself with chaos surge, just to give them more fire!
----

So yeah, it was a lot of fun to run around with near-unstoppable elven lords.  9 fire breath, which seemed to be affected by their innate armor piercing, on top of first strike, all with a bonus to hit simply due to being elves let them charge in and mow down anything they came across.  More enhancements (immolation, iron skin, regeneration, flight, survival instinct) just made the gap that much larger.  The best non-ensured enchantment is flight, since it lets them be the 'attacker' in almost every situation

The only things you really have to worry about are storm giants due to high-power armor piercing ranged attacks.  Even the biggest summons (Great Wyrm, Collossus, Great Drake) only get one counter attack, unless you're lucky with fire breath - and with adamantium and iron skin they take minimal damage from it.

Welcome all to my hopefully succesful entry into pbem 5!

New game to play! Crossing my fingers for a good leader to try.

I just realized that I have neglected to think about the most important thing of all: what will my naming scheme be?




Old version:

No, it will not be slavery themed.

I found a map that I think will work. I had to move all the starting locations since they were originally all clustered together. Screenshots coming in a following post or two. This map started with a narrow 2 tile strait in the northeast connecting the inner sea to the outer ocean. I filled that in to complete the circle. Other than that the only edits I made was to add in some additional strategic resources and a few edits to the starting locations.

Any dedlurkers are welcome, it was bit lonely in PBEM 2 without someone to discuss strategy in depth.

I am not joking. I don't know how to play this game.

As the next step in my Python studies, I have thrown together a small app which helps out with visualizing attack outcomes in Warhammer 40K tabletop. It takes some statistics in a form, and uses matplotlib to make a png histogram of the damage dealt against likelihood. I wanted to show the app here to get some feedback before distributing among Warhammer communities. Interested in anything that breaks it, of course, and any calculations strangeness that you guys can identify: http://b4cchus.pythonanywhere.com.

As an aside, programming has gotten really easy, we live in an amazing world. The modals that are used here for Specials pop-up are pure CSS, I am so stunned.

Are there other people interested in starting a new Civ6 pbem? I saw some people express interest in the general civ 6 thread. I've been having a blast ded-lurking Ichabod in pbem3 and following along in 4, it's only made me more eager to give MP a shot with Civ6.

Game Details

Quote:Player List:
Pindicator: America
Krill: Greece (Gorgo)
Alhambram: Arabia
Japper007: Rome
CFCJesterFool: China