Edit: current build:
4 life, warlord, alchemy, spellweaver, astrologer, tactician, specialist
Also note I find myself using cavalry against lairs/nodes more, and I don't worry about killing AI quite as fast. Getting amazing army strength virtually guarantees you control war declarations, so you can build until you have a stack capable of killing the next AI.

Original post: My current game is impossible.

4 opponents, huge land size, max power, fair minerals, fair climate. I'd probably do better with poor minerals.

4 life (endurance + very rares, but I'd consider switching to 2 life + channeler. However just cause and heroism are very strong off the bat so I'm not sure, and 7% gold is great later on. The main thing channeler would let me do is.. More skill and research, but less books means I wouldn't need as much of either.)
4 death (wraithform!!! Skeletons for unrest because food is a huge issue. And very rares because I love me some demon lords. And production production production. So good. I wish I could get 2 more death books.)

Warlord (because war college + warlord = +1 HP on all units.)
Alchemy (magic weapons for your first stack, super super super important, and alchemy later in the game is practically mandatory. I spent years with less than 200 mana and gold combined, so I would constantly switch to whichever I needed.)
Omniscient: production for that first stack is crucial. Helps later on, and extra gold from life is always good.

Barbarian.
Game plan: foresters guild for food, then stables, then 9 cavalry. Then marketplace -> granary -> farmers market -> ship wright -> ship yard -> maritime guild -> warship (endurance and wraithform) -> barracks -> war college -> fighters guild -> bezerkers forever more (with occasional extra warships).
The plan is to defeat the first AI you meet, before you even start building bezerkers. You should pick up some nodes and lairs on the way. You probably need to replace cavalry a few times, but as long as you defeat the first AI, cavalry did their job. You'll get extra cities too, but *shrug* they take forever to get online.

The second AI is far more helpful. Still can't stop 8 elite magic weapon bezerkers, but he has some nicely developed cities.

Third AI is causing problems by now (1404-1406) so you mess around with them until you get your second stack of bezerkers, which they can't beat. Probably can't defeat them for a long while though, they simply expand too fast. I defeated the third AI in 1408 or early 1409. 

The fourth AI... Will depend on how the game went. Do whatever you need. You should have most of arcanus under your control, although, you may have let the fourth AI get a foothold. Try to get cities on myrror, if you can, just one on his main continent. That way he's got something to focus on while you clean up arcanus. I used a planar travel hero super early to take some neutral cities, and get started on building adamantium beastman buffed halberdiers. That let me have a few nodes on myrror as the war broke out against the myrran AI. Myrran nodes are amazing.

I banished the fourth AI, for the first time, in 1410. At the time, he probably had a little over a thousand power production, efreets, other rares - fire storm was used against me at least once per turn starting in the middle of the war with the third AI (around 1407). By the time he was banished I already had life force cast, and during the first banish, I finished crusade. I'm researching demon lord and eternal night. With life force, and including city research, I'm up to about 2200 power production. I found crusade in treasure, and I think I found inspirations.

Guardian seems to be disliked as a purely defensive ability that costs 2 full picks, so I'm considering to reduce the cost to 1 pick.
There is no guarantee I will be able to do it (requires hacking magic.exe to allow 2 retort default wizards, otherwise there aren't enough 2 pick retorts in the game for example) but I'd like to know if there is demand for this change in the first place, so please vote.

Since Chaos needs testing, I'm playing an extreme chaos game. Please add your own games in here as well.

I choose lizardmen, warlord, tactician and specialist. I choose fire elemental and hell hounds on purpose and the other spells at random.

Started of in a good position. 21 population spot. two neutral barbarian towns nearby. I pushed for market and farmer's market first to get population growth. I started exploring with my sword and spearmen and created a magic spirit as well to scout. I dropped research to 0 and focused on getting skill to 18 (for casting fire elemental. I took both, but lost my initial spearman and swordsmen to the largest city. Barbarian cavalry is strong enough to harm fire elementals. The town's shamans put all their effort into healing the cavalry, but Tactician saved the day.

I meet my first opponent. Satori send a settler onto my island. I killed it risking early war. And it became early war... Turns out she's lizardmen as well and send three swordsmen and 1 sprites my way. Fire elemental and two barbarian swordsmen held up against both. Somehow she snuck in a settler and made an outpost next to a chaos node. I summoned a hell hound to patrol next to it untill it grew. The single swordsman died. I got a free city.
 
I created 2 lizard settlers and off to colonise. I meet vanilla. Two chaos and 8 nature. I get to trade shatter and warp creature in exchange for fire bolt and summoning circle. Not the best of trades but hopefully enough to maintain peace. And to quickly summon creatures in undefended cities

About 10 turns later. I met Flandre. Full chaos and 1 life. Ruthless perfectionist. First I thought I lost the game at that point. A full trireme came to my shore. I was able to create a wizard pact. This saved my game. A strong opponent turned into an ally.

The fire bolt I traded earlier came in handy against visiting water walking, war bears with resist magic. Enough to kill one figure and the two swordsmen finished it off. Working hard on reinforcing my cities with magic weapon javelineers. Research still at 2 from a single library. Skill and mana being pushed for expansion. Chaos is about taking risks early on. I could have lost a city already.

And one turn later. Vanilla has allied with satori and declares war on me... I decide to test chaos to the limits and hunt down new cities. I had a magic spirit I used for exploration and set it upon a lizardmen city. My spirit survived a psionic blast. The opponents 4 swordsman are weaker than my summoned fire elemental. I razed the town as I wouldn't have been able to keep it anyway. Next turn, I get attacked by two enemy spirits. I try fire elemental again. My spirit gets killed by psionic blast and the enemy spirits slaughter my fire elemental.

I notice a spot on my main island that is still available and hurry a settler unit before my ally settles it. I take the only ruins that I can handle and gain 244 gold. I have 4 nodes nearby. They will be for when I have a full stack. Great lizard, many hell hounds, doom bats or air elementals. The air elementals and doom bats will be hardest.

Vanilla attacks a lone veteran, magic javelineer with griffins and 3 magic spirits. I start of casting eldritch weapon. Second turn a fire elemental. Elemental gets slaughtered quickly. The enemy cast psionic blast and centaurs. Somehow, my javelineers survive in mellee against a 1 figure griffin and the lone figure picks of the spirits at range.

Conclusion so far. Fire elemental is quite good early on. I'm still at the bottom of magic power and power production at 1404. My army strenght is the second highest (likely due to warlord. My army feels like paper. 4 javelineers, 2 hell hounds and some swordsmen).

Hi everyone,

We're looking for someone to settle a problem in our PBEM. City trading is off, but one of my cities has revolted to Dreylin and he wants to know if he can keep it or if he has to raze it (he has already accepted to disband the free infantry he got with the city).

Does anyone use these? Because I don't (unless my army needs +1 resistance really badly - but not for the melding ability).

-I feel it's inadequate protection for my nodes - yes, there is a 80% chance it will prevent melding attempts but at the rate AI players send spirits that won't save the node. Being able to hold it a year more is of course nice but I don't plan for losing nodes - I rather put garrison on it so I have a 100% chance of keeping the node.
-It's also inadequate protection for the AI's nodes - to begin with, they garrison all nodes anyway (albeit some might have week garrisons), and once the garrison is defeated, taking the node away is just a matter of turns - summoning some additional spirits until one works.
-Despite being unless, it manages to be extremely annoying, when your 12th spirit fails to meld a node it's hard not to think "this is the most retarded game mechanic ever".
-Also, it's a random chance based spell in Life of all things, not Chaos.

There are plenty of things that could be done with this unit instead...

A. The node cannot be melded, period. However Disenchant Area can remove this effect just like Warp Node. (this would probably be bad for game balance and AI)
B. Other Guardian Spirits have a 100% chance to meld a node with a Guardian Spirit
C. Drop the melding ability altogether and come up with something more interesting, or just leave it as is for the resistance bonus.
D. Add "This creature can be summoned in combat when defending your cities only" as a new, more interesting ability.
E. At the end of every turn when there is a node with a Guardian Spirit with an enemy unit standing on the tile, materialize a Guardian Spirit unit and engage the army as the defender, allowing the wizard to cast spells to protect the node. (don't think I can do this one but might be worth a try)
F. something else?

So I wrote a module for Pathfinder/3.5. It's designed using the one-page-dungeon concept to build a complete beginning campaign module in a big sprawling sandbox of a peninsula. If you like D&D, tabletop RPGs, fantasy, or even if you've enjoyed my writing in my reports...download it and check it out. Whole thing's free.

I've overhauled the LBXManager utility that I wrote several years ago so that the code are more clean and has more comments.  I revamped the user interface so it should be more friendly and less buggy.  Unfortunately, importing bitmaps into LBX (aka modding) still don't work as I haven't had time to figure that out yet.  If you want to check it out, I've created a git repository over here: https://github.com/Zeraan/MoO1LBXManager

If any of you want to help out with figuring out the importing of bitmaps into LBX, feel free to do so (and make pull requests if you actually get it working!)  I'm not sure when I will revisit this again.

This is the first map I rolled using our agreed upon parameters:
Race: Psilon
Difficulty: Impossible
Galaxy Size: Medium
Races: 5
Variants: None

I’ll attach the starting save along with the Turn 20 save below.

Spoiler’d for length.

2300:
And here we go, off to the races!

Our starting neighborhood looks promising with lots of friendly star colors visible.

The only star in range is this one, so I send our colony ship there.

Our scouts depart for the two stars I deem to be most in danger of enemy encroachment.  I will hold off on building more scouts until our colony ship is used up and our production improves.

Here is the galactic map.  And look who we get to share the game with, a veritable  who’s who of MoO powerhouses.  Klackons to rush into a dominant position early, Sakkra to grow massive population numbers and battle for the council, Silicoids to settle every available piece of real estate on the map, Bulrathi to… have lots of picnics and look silly, and Darloks to mess up everyone’s diplomacy.  In truth I don’t have a lot of respect for the Bulrathi unless they are invading my planets looking for new picnic spots, but I’m confident that we can avoid that.  Otherwise this game looks to be decently challenging, particularly looking at the distribution of yellow stars.  Unless someone gets smashed into that corner directly above us all races should have plenty of room to expand.  We shall see how that plays out.
As far as infrastructure builds I toy with the idea of starting trickle research into Range 4 (hopefully) on the first turn, but Mentar can only produce 34RP, and that would slow down our factory construction more than I like, so for now I leave things as they are.  It looks like we could have a nice little core of 4 worlds south of Mentar reachable without increased range anyway, and Hydrogen Fuel Cells are really cheap anyway.

2301:
Nothing major to report.  Pop grows by 2, 2 factories built, ships move 1 parsec each.

2302:
All quiet.  Pop and factories increase by 3 and our colony ship will arrive next turn.  I decide that I can’t wait anymore and dump 42RP into Propulsion.

2303:

This move pays off as Range 4 is the only tech available.  

Well, I guess I can settle for this world if I have to.  As I expected the red and green stars to the south are both 3 parsecs away from Tauri, so I will start building more scouts, along with trickling 3RP into our research.  I should have four or 5 new Scouts next turn to start playing around with.  Mentar is currently at 47 population, and I will hold of on sending transports to Tauri until next turn so that it can reach an even 50 and I can be sure that the population won’t fluctuate as I start sending transports.

2304:

Incedius is a very nice world, and at only 4 parsecs I am already glad that I have started researching increased range.  I also have 4 new Scouts that I fan out to every star in range that isn’t the two directly south of Tauri.  I’ll build one more to check those two out.  Mentar grew to 51 pop, so I send 4 off to Tauri.  Even after our discussion during OSG-27 I find that I don’t understand population growth very well.  I guess that I just can’t get my head around those formulas.

2305:
Three more pop sent to Tauri, and our Propulsion lightbulb is almost 1/3 full already.  Trickle research is awesome!

2306:

Well this will be a nice world in about 100 years when it finishes building factories.  I hope very much that this corner is uninhabited which would allow us to grab the entire eastern edge of the map.  Fingers crossed!  I haven’t seen a single enemy ship yet so I hope that we are alone over here.
Tauri grew a pop point all by itself, and four more are due to arrive next turn.

2307:
Tauri has 8 pop already with more incoming.  I plan to send ~30 total before I let Mentar finish building so I can start my colonization push.  More scouting reports should start coming in next turn, and I hope that we get more good news!  I can see that we will need 4 more Scouts once Range 4 is discovered, and I all start building them in a few turns as our tech bulb fills more.  Mentar still only has 44 factories so I deem factory construction a higher priority for now.

2308:

Wow, these planets!  We are 4 for 4 on habitability so far with more worlds still to discover.  Yay!

2309:
Range 4 is ~3/4 full so I will start building a Scout per turn until I have enough for exploration.  Then we will need more colony ships to expand range further.

2310:

Well they can’t all be winners, but at least that one can’t be poached by the rocks.  And Kulthos is still a really solid planet.  We are going to be building colony ships for a really long time!  The other bit of positive news from this is that I have an extra Scout available, and already in place to explore the blue star directly north of the Obaca asteroid field once our research finishes.  That cuts down on my scout builds by a turn.

And at the halfway point of my turn set here is the galaxy so far.  Looking awfully green around here!
I send three more colonists toward Tauri, and that should do it for Tauri.  Counting those three Tauri has 29 pop either on board or incoming, and with natural pop growth it should be right around 1/3 full in about 3 turns, just where I want it.

2311:

Well I guess I need an extra scout after all…
I always like to check for the Guardian’s 10,000hp just to reassure myself that I am playing on Impossible.

Propulsion research should hit the percentages next turn and all scouts will be in position in 5 turns.  Just about perfect!

2312:

Ok, can we at least make this a BIT of a challenge?  At this rate we won’t need to research ANY planetology tech for a long time.  Range 4 is already at 9%.  I wish that I had kept a running tally of exactly how much RP I actually invested, but I didn’t think of it.  Colony ships are still 12 turns to build, so we have a way to go yet.

2313:
The last population transport arrives at Tauri bringing the population total to 37/95.  I definitely could have sent at least three fewer and been fine which slows down Mentar’s development by a bit, but we are going to need a LOT of transports in the near future for all of these big worlds.

2314: A quiet turn.

2315:

And there it is, hitting at 19% odds.  Wonderful!  Inertial Stabilizer is our only option forward which means that we are going to have to grab all of these worlds at warp 1.  Nuts!

Other good news is that this yellow star which is 7 parsecs from our core does not hold a home world, otherwise we would be in contact right now.  So we should have a really strong claim to most of this edge of the galaxy.  Now lets just hold onto it!  I still haven’t seen a single enemy ship yet.

In terms of research we are still a long way away from devoting ourselves to a strong research effort, so I split research equally between Construction and Planetology and give them both a decent shot of RP.  It isn’t anywhere near what I could give, but I don’t have a lot of spare production to devote to research right now, so I want to trickle enough to get our first tiers finished in a reasonable amount of time.  Thats my thinking anyway.

2316:

I take IIT9 over Reduced Waste 80% simply based on cost (280 vs 800).  It might be worth getting both since we lack Improved Eco.  Since we have no need for Controlled Barren I take IT10.

We also discover the worst planet so far, and even that one will be a good world whenever it finally finishes building its factories.

2317:
Nothing to report this turn.  The only thing that I will say is that Mentar has 68 pop and only 76 factories.  This is the single drawback to all of the extra spending I have been doing, although having to send all of those colonists off to Tauri didn’t help matters either.  Still colony ships are still a 10 turn build, so no colonization yet.

2318:

It looks like someone got a little carried away with a Stellar Converter during the fall of the Orion Empire up in this sector of space.

2319:

Well this is terrible news!  A well established Bear Den right next door.  That puts Incedius under intense pressure!  Looks like laser fighters are the order of the day!

Sadly I can only build 5 at a time at Mentar, but I will start building up a fleet to protect Incedius, and our next emperor can decide how far to take our build-up.  At this rate Tauri might be a better option to build colony ships…
I send the Scout at Toranor up to the Obaca asteroid field for lack of better options.  Best not to poke sleeping bears, at least until we have a bigger stick.

2320:
And so ends the benevolent reign of Ianus the first, first ruler of what will hopefully come to be known as the Psilon Empire.  I took the liberty of rerouting our newly produced Bear Spray fighters over to Incedius.  Of course that can be changed, but there really isn’t anything else to do with them.  Other than that we are still building infrastructure, and our trickle research is trickling along.  I’m ashamed that I didn’t manage to scout every single planet in range, but the last two scouting reports are due next turn.

Attached Files

  OSG-28_2300.GAM (Size: 57.65 KB / Downloads: 9)
  OSG-28_2320.GAM (Size: 57.65 KB / Downloads: 3)

Did you guys have a chance to try this? Craig Jones, the hero of arguably the most famous Magic: the Gathering video, has been speaking very highly about Faeria on Facebook the last few days. I tried it myself, and it seems impressive so far

Faeria is a CCG which is played on a hexagonal board, which is empty at the start, and players shape it by placing lands for their creatures. This adds a unique strategic layer unlike any other CCG I had experience with. Unlike many other games, mana doesn't disappear between turns, so unlike Magic or Hearthstone, you don't have to curve out - in fact, you're encouraged to hold on to your cards until they can have an immediate impact on the board

The game is free to play, and seems to be very generous - think I got a good dozen packs for free just for running through solo missions (and I'm not done with them yet!). For ladder mode (the structure of which is pretty much the same as in Hearthstone), tI had concerns that matchmaking would take a while, as the game is relatively new (just came out of beta), and doesn't have that many players. But I haven't had to wait more than 30 seconds so far

If you're in a mood to try a new CCG, I highly recommend this one You can name me if recruiter if you want - this would give benefits to you as well as to me (at the very least setting up a recruiter gives you 3 packs upon reaching level 15 - that's what I know about you do need to specify your recruiter before reaching level 15 you want that). Or at least add me as friend player name is yuris125

Official page: https://www.faeria.com/
Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/397060/Faeria/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/faeria/

It's been a few months since we led the Lumbering Rocks to their slow-but-inexhorable victory, and with a new player or two arriving recently, I thought it would be a good time to start up a new SG! We could try an easier game if we get enough less-experienced players (or if vets want a chance to try out some crazy gambits and unlikely strategies) or just go full trial-by-fire and see how we do on Impossible with a mixed roster and a variant! What do you guys think?