Miguelito gets tricked by magicians, but Bob isn't fooled. Kaiser rules from behind.

[Miguelito]

on the other side I'm attacking though, so this might yet be 2 devastating defeats in 1 turn

[Miguelito]

Silly me had expected to maybe at least hold Idris for a turn, but no way:





At least this time we killed 2 real units on defense, amongst them Barnaxus , whom Dave also killed at least once before . If he attacked amphibiously, do the pieces still appear?

For once I had one fight where I had 70% odds:


Predictable result  
Also that other frigate was geniusly placed so that he could not reach it, but we could hit back at his ships... as long as the city on the cape was up

But last post I said that I was attacking in the west, so how about that?


Ok those are just summons, right? Surely that can be broken through?
Well for once I had reduced the tigers here in order to have more defending at Idris . Also while I expected spectres (I could see the mages with hawks), I did not account for the skellies to be a problem. I was just happy that this time he would not be able to collateral the stack. Fwiw this is his actual stack:



Here's where we arrived after sending in the tigers, plus the Alazkan illusion*:




uh...
I did send in a few more 2-move fawns to see if we could achieve anything with actual units, but the odds remained awful, below 5%. So I pulled the brake and retreated. Might still get wiped out mostly, somehow we don't have a single unit that can pillage roads .

Str 9 spectres are stupid. They even get defense boni. And look at their promos!

* that is a mixed blessing. Of course he is our strongest unit, but as an assassin he'll always just redline a weak unit. So maybe better to pass the mirro to a ranger? Not that it will matter...

He can wipe out the rest of our coastal cities in the next 2-3 turns. In fact I had to stack up at the capital. Not sure if it will hold even this turn.

Lesson learned: Even with technically high level tech, you can't fight magic without your own magic. He has the best promoted units, with the best mobility by far, unlimited collateral and summons which are stronger than our best regular units. Technically we have the higher base strength units, but it's worthless.
Part of his advantage of course is all the XP that he must have accumulated on adepts/mages while fighting Dave, while we were anxiously but peacefully facing Auror. He also perfected the mage training with the golden hammer, nice touch.


Addendum: Turn 135 just came in. He burned the cap.



Small victories though:




blockaded him. He's cut off. (Were it not for the 6 privateers in the city )

[Miguelito]

I had not expected to come back to reporting this game but for documenting our final collapse, but I have some good news for once.

First, an appetizer:


just look at the promos on that spectre! Besides the disgusting base strength I mean. But it turns out they can actually be beaten!


I could even send a tiger to safety afterwards. I had not expected anymore to ever get a kill against a unit of mack's on attack in this game, but here it was, actually, a real unit even and not just the summon.
You also see his army on its way to steamroll us

But that's not actually the news. I *think* mackoti made... an error? How out of character.


Why am I sacrificing one of my best units against a summon on terrible odds? Well I was going to sacrifice more in fact, to reconquer this city. Here's why:








Got the traitor Kithra, who fought for the dwarves instead of his elven kin, probably believing the lies that we are "evil". Just look how many forests we have* compared to mackoti and tell me who's the better treehugger!

*well, had.

He even got enslaved, how well deserved. Sadly, last turn when I loaded the galley I had no assassins around, so took my highest strength units at hand. With assassins we might have got three mages on top. The ranger had single digit odds on the spectre, so I just left it at that.
It's quite likely that he'll sink the galley. Spectres I think can't fly, but if he has a couple fire mages around that's it. But maybe they are all on his fleet fighting auror? Anyways worth it of course.

Kithra had taken the city last turn, and was then sitting there alone at 6.x strength. That was when I loaded the galley. This turn he was at 1.4 strength, probably having fought Auror's warrior and pillaged the fort N of rice. He had covered him with a spectre and 2 mages, but our hero is an assassin

So, this will be the last high we get in this game, in all likelihood. I will report on the final battle, unless it's just mack killing everything from the fog, in which case he has to do the job.



Btw the ranger attacking Aeleris's above actually won her 9% fight for once. I had expected to burn at least 2. Here she is, a shame that I can't cover her.

In other news I have to beg the dwarves for some beer, as mean mack has burnt our brewery.


Also trying to get gold from Cairo. Not that any of it matters.

[Bobchillingworth]

Congrats on getting at least a measure of revenge



You probably won't last long enough to make it, but I'd attempt to research my way to the Infernal Pact and then jump ship to Hyborem, just for shiggles.

[Miguelito]

The hope is that with the last game so long ago, everybody else is rusty. mackoti still wins. We have fun meanwhile.

Won the pregame prediction ! Reading the threads, all the vets save mack showed a few or a bit more signs of rust, mackoti won, and fun was had.

I guess overall I can be content with how the game went. Managed to not get rushed early, did not stumble over glaring misunderstandings of the mechanics (thanks Bob for your repeated clarifications :hat: ), and more or less played out the game as planned. Died miserably of course, but everybody else was losing to the same, so I don't feel bad about it.

Short analysis on how the game went (now that it's written, sorry. Short was a lie):

• We made a capital move which appears very beneficial, getting 2 metal happy into the cap.
  
• The start felt very slow, which for an elf is suspected. We had a huge swing of luck getting the refugee event early, when the extra pop very much mattered. Improving tiles like desert gold or floodplains made the start extra slow though, so that might have set us further back. Also it took a good while to get the metal happy online, as I felt obliged to take calendar first, for the agrarianism civic only. I felt like we were losing too many foodhammers otherwise, but it may have been an error, as it set back mining, god king, education and AH, which were vital techs for us as well. I see that mackoti played without agri, so that is evidently feasible, contrary to what I felt at the time.
  
• One thing still puzzling me is how we fell in such an economic hole, from which we only recovered when we started the very late GA around t110. Auror had like one or two cities less than us until he switched to Agristocracy and started to expand freely. Of course that matters with Immortal costs. More interestingly, mackoti expanded faster than us, but still had world top GNP by a margin, even outside his 2 early GAs. How's that possible, considering we also had better commerce resources? I guess on the one hand he just got them down earlier with his golems (and fast tech to Edu) compared to our lazy workers, meaning he also got to grow them earlier. The other issue I see is that however awesome forest cottages are, they lose a coin when on a river, and this added up to quite a lod during our midgame. We fell behind in tech by a lot, losing FoL and Kithra to mack, and missing the time when maybe we should have started on adepts to get them experienced.
  
• I planned very badly for great persons. I started on a scientist first with a vague idea of an academy, then switched to prophet at the cap, first with the idea to bulb hidden paths and steal Kithra, for which it turned out it was too late, then bulbing priesthood, which gave us security against Auror. Only afterwards I noticed that the mod makes every GP after the first one 50% more expensive than in vanilla . With a tight GP plan we could have had the first prophet the turn we researched Way of the Forest, probably netting Kithra (in my defense, I never anticipated for there to be competition for anything Leaves), get the second one some 16-18 turns later for priesthood if necessary, and the GA one still in time.
  
• The GA came late, because I wanted to start it with Foreign Trade. Which turned out great, afterwards our economy was suddenly world leading even after the GA. But maybe it would have been better to leave it to the end of the GA and have that a few turns earlier instead (note I didn't have present that FFH GAs last 9 turns on quick speed, and overall had a rather bad feeling for my tech speed).
  
• We spent a long time somewhat paranoid about Auror, and unable to attack Cairo because of his worldspell. It was still fun catching animals and developing the land, but meanwhile mack was accruing incredible amounts of XP fighting Dave. Of course it is super impressive that he managed to build the world top economy all the while being in a hot war while no one else was.
  
• When finally the economy was doing great and I even had raised a 50XP scout->huntress with perfect sight in order to answer Cairo's worldspell, mackoti impressively vanquished Dave within a turn (from my perspective, in reality it appears that it were 2) and was set to take over the world. I tried to fight him, with dire results. First try a medium sized stack got annihilated with magic collateral and very fast movers, on the second try, when I had taken care to stay out of his reach he just stuffed his city with summons. My assassins wouldn't even get odds on his skeletons. Meanwhile there was no way to fight him on the seas, as he had promoted ships with navigation (and air mana) carrying mages striking with collateral from 2 tiles away. Mackoti, if you are reading, you commented in the tech thread that I better had got myself a larger navy instead of the priests. I see the priests were useless*, but I don't see how more ships would have changed anything when you could just sail circles around them while bombarding. I also just could not get to optics any faster, although maybe I should have built more triremes for promotion. But again, just more free XP for you. I think at this point the game was just lost fair and square. mackoti could produce mages off the bat, and his spectres were so strong that our best units got about 10% odds on them. And he was so fast that spectres were the only thing that ever got into our reach.
  I am genuinely very interested how mackoti would think one should defense against units like his at this stage of the game. It is clear that it was hopeless to fight his mages without magic of our own.But I don't see how we would've gotten anything comaprable.
• I've been thinking whether magic of our own could have saved us then. First problem with that is, was it feasible? We would have needed to research KotE around t90 at the latest, when our breakeven rate was about 15% and I was really worried about Auror. Now, had we gotten a large number of Illusionists of course things would have looked different, but that was not going to be the case, at least not on the scale mack was doing it, because he used that loophole to build 10XP units (excellent play, not available to us anyways). Maybe should have risked it and gone for illusionists instead of priests? In hindsight maybe, but from the t80 perspective certainly not.
  
• Sadly it did not get to werevolves, although we were just 2 techs away.
  

* not anticipating satyrn is on me, not Bob. I was the one invested in the game after all. When we went for priests, they were meant for Cairo and Auror, and I still think that was a good decision. Also a clever move of yours, although I have to disappoint you in that I didn't even notice it. After Idris fell it was game over and I stopped paying attention (apart from assassinating Kithra, which I'm still happy about)


Several commentators including nauf himself pointed out that our land was above average with regards to luxuries. That makes the result extra embarassing (particularly the fact that I still managed to stall the economy early). Little to justify myself. At the time I was annoyed at not having an early calendar lux, but it appears I was just stubborn to still research calendar. Everybody else got happy from their civ, but that's civ balance of course. The dyes and second gems were jungled. The sugar and ivory should have been Cairo's or Auror's, that was a steal where I think we actually performed pretty well, also aided by the capital move just in that direction.

[Miguelito]

Mr. Cairo
... I do want to keep playing EitB PBEMs,...

Distortingly cropped to give my on wanting to play more EitB PBEMs.

I think we had some lurkers in this game who were just getting introduced to the magic - maybe a few could be recruited for a game?

[Miguelito]

Finally big thank you again to Bob and Kaiser for the support, and to naufragar for a map on which I had a lot of fun, even if there certainly are balance issues (honestly don't know what a nice looking but balanced map for 5 players could be like)

[Kaiser]

I am happy to hear that you enjoyed the game, it was definitively a good learning experience for me thanks for having me.

[mackoti]

I wanted to say you have an excelent thread Miguelito  and i realy hope you  ll keep one in next one so I have something nice to read.

I find courious that none of you or Cairo didnt considered setling on sugar and dyes respectvely to have a happines resource 30 turns earlier...

I supose i can tell my secreets as I am not playing anymore...

About fighting on the water you needed the air adeps and numbers, that was the solution you had way better ports and more then me, You could aforded 2 stack of privateers easily(I know what numbers means , i defended against Dave having a city full of units) You maybe lose one city but all the units done the atack are dead. Lose one stack of privateers the other came and take revenge, you builded those half harted insead to churn them like there is no tomorow.

Mages : there are units and no so expensive which are imune to death damage, but for that you should had guesed i go heavily for death magic. Having asasins with 5 speed would had secured your borders. Just dezband alzakan and get haste adepts there plenty of 5 speed asasins.Wasnt easy but dont forget if you had a huge navy I couldnt do a thing against Auror, becasue of that i felt you  will win that, but for some reason you stoped or build very few privateers.

[Qgqqqqq]

I would love to play more PBEMs, but I don't trust myself with a turn a day with where life is at. Always happy to map make or support in other ways.

Haven't read the thread, but it sounds like you played a good game. Well done!