[Eitb spoilers] Miguelito's fortune hangs on a thread

[DaveV]

coldrain accepted peace and surrounded Deluoc with four warriors. Our stack teleported right where I expected it to, in fireball range of Deluoc. There were four warriors defending Deluoc, I killed one with a fireball, two with adepts (Oliver Wood is now at 9 XP), and the final one with a hasted swordsman.

So now we have three new cities to improve. I'm moving Ron to Deluoc to cast Hope. Demon Ruins has Leaves religion, so will generate 1 culture and pop borders eventually.

The big question now is, what next? War against Auro, or try to catch up? I guess I favor the former; your whole game has been bent toward early mages, and they're still the best units on the board.

[Miguelito]

Yes, war against Auror sounds like the thing to do. Setting up a surprise to alphastrike seems rather difficult without HBR and a new batch of swords, which I guess we can't really wait for... how many turns would the research need? And at the some time, how long to switch the mana node to Sun? I guess the issue is mostly how fast Hermione can run...

[DaveV]

We can have HBR in one more turn, it will also take that long to move workers into position.

Here's the big picture:

[Miguelito]

Hm, so how many fireballs and how many str 5 units could deliver the punch on Erebor? How many of the latter from the fog/summons? (I don't think it's overly suspicious to position a few one move swords in Godric's Hollow now that the elven war is over). With and without spellstaves?
And I guess in the west we'd be naked?
And I wouldn't mind leaving a few cities, like the new ones, just building warriors for now to be upgraded.

[DaveV]

I don't have an end of turn save, but there should be five fireball-throwing mages (+1 spellstaff), and three Host summoners (+2 spellstaff). Oliver Wood is at 9XP, so he might add an extra mage with spellstaff if the RNG is kind. Ron would provide another fireball, but I have him in Deluoc popping borders with Hope. Ron could also scamper down to provide some fireball support to the west if necessary.

Roughly 10 swordsmen, about half of whom can take a mobility promotion and attack from the fog.

[DaveV]

Since my play of turn 88 will apparently stand, here are the screenies I took:



Note that most of this stack is dwarven, and can move two tiles through hills. This is before I decided to send Sybil from the attack stack to reinforce the west, and abused haste to pull the swordsmen into range of both cities. His best move is probably to move the stack 1N, join the trailing warrior to it, and fork the two cities.



Not much change here, except the extremely disheartening Metamagic I promo. Odds of the adepts evacuating the city are high. Or does he launch his own attack?

[Miguelito]

Auror finished the Mines wonder and has iron now, sporting some chariots already (there was a floating eye which I deleted), and a lot of other nasty stuff.
Things are not going to get better though if we wait, so we fired the world spell which should at least render all those adepts useless for a good while, and also gave all adepts a bunch of XP so they can all be promoted once we find the gold for it .
The Erebor stack is so heave though that for now we could only bombard and throw some C3 fireballs in. Caught a wood golem with one, and then another with a throwaway Host at pretty low odds.
Probably Auror will build a lot of catapults now (he has the workshops already) and fend us off with that. I'm trying to draw Q in, who should be equally concerned by the Arc Luchuirp guy getting dominant, but he has little power.
Beforeour worldspell is up peace with coldrain will end. Maybe at that point we'll even have a choice of defending there or keep attacking Luchuirp. The Mines are in Belegost btw...

[mackoti]

How much experience did gain your units? I didnt knew you gain experience when casted... How much experience did you gain?

[DaveV]

From what Miguelito told me, +7 XP on adepts/mages. Looking at the python code, it seems to be based on the number of improved magic nodes on the map, plus maybe the unique features that give mana.

[Jabah]

How fast/slow could the golem being repaired during your World Spell activation ?