The Haunted Forest: Mardoc puts the Sidar to the test.

[Selrahc]

Any grand evil plans for the destruction of the elves?

Wow, you should see it. The screenshots show Mardoc totally catching Bob unprepared with teleporting recon units, and occupying Evermore and Hyll.

[Thoth]

Why must you torture me?

My work blocks all of your pictures

Any grand evil plans for the destruction of the elves?

We're working on some.

Wow, you should see it. The screenshots show Mardoc totally catching Bob unprepared with teleporting recon units, and occupying Evermore and Hyll.

Not quite yet.....

[Mardoc]

I suppose I'll give you some text to go with the pictures, then. As tempting as it is to follow Selrahc's lead.

We got our first Great Prophet, who became an Altar piece, allowing us to hire a fourth priest. Meanwhile, we're progressing on Religious Law, Bambur is getting close to his 17 XP to settle down for moneymaking.

I played T165 this morning, in hopes of giving Bob and T-Hawk maximum time to work out the Ellimist business. Did prove that Ravenous werewolves aren't limited to four; unfortunately this is going to be brief, as three of them look to be suiciding on the walls of Myrean. Still, at the moment those 335 hammers for Baron have become Baron himself, 1 Greater Werewolf (as yet unnamed), 15 Blooded WW's, and 5 Ravenous ones. The process shows no signs of slowing.

Bazaar of Mammon came in at EOT, catapulting us from about 50 gpt in the hole to +8gpt, at 50% science. I intend Bambur to become a Merchant as well - our best multiplier is gold, we still have room to fuss with the slider, and frankly Pacman needs all the food it can get.

Anyone know, will Bambur's Shade desert us when we change religion?

If not, next turn, whenever that comes in, we'll revolt to AV, pick up Rosier for also waning, and then pump Ritualists for a good long while. They're our best collateral, can become Temples of the Veil in our new acquisitions for more beakers and happiness, and are also our best potential non-barb-killing Wane, with their boost to XP gain and their Altar-boosted starting XP. However many we train, I guarantee we'll wish it had been more

As for longer term plans...don't got any. Planning to keep multiplying wolves, and to build a bunch of Ritualists. Meanwhile research Religious Law and Grimoire Theology. Finally probably end up in Empyrean, for those High Priests, Rathas, Radiant Guards. And pumping Altar pieces as we go.

Now that we have Courthouses and GK + Bazaar, we ought to be able to pay the rent on any conquests we can manage. I think Myrean is going to come very soon, for that reason, and to eliminate it as a Ravenous WW killing ground . We need to try to catch up to Bob's hammers and build queues; granted the wolves are a nice start on that, but I think we're still behind. Although our Power has now, finally, gotten and stayed ahead of his.

Meanwhile, at some point we need to plan on crashing Bob's party. He's made it up to Arcane Lore. No towers built yet, which means he's done with all the tech but the last couple magic schools, and just needs to put in the production and node-flipping. Therefore...we've got to reduce his node-count, and ultimately him, to the dustbin of history.

First thought along those lines is to liberate Selrahcia, while threatening Bob's core. We've got the more mobile force; we need to use that to make Bob try to defend everywhere. Some combination of WW's, Ritualists, and Rangers is probably the best bet for the former task, while we'd want to use those plus the Beastmasters in the direct war.

When I rejected the NAP with Bob, he did say something along the lines of 'although I'm willing to go for Tower, I'm not promising I will'. So we may not need to take nodes, if we can put enough pressure on him that he needs all his hammers for military.

So...yeah. All in all, we've got some vague notions, but nothing you could call a plan. Still trying to get used to the idea of not dying the the ravening horse hordes

[Selrahc]

We got our first Great Prophet, who became an Altar piece, allowing us to hire a fourth priest. Meanwhile, we're progressing on Religious Law, Bambur is getting close to his 17 XP to settle down for moneymaking.

If not, next turn, whenever that comes in, we'll revolt to AV, pick up Rosier for also waning, and then pump Ritualists for a good long while.

Do those two statements go together? I heard somewhere that adopting AV wipes out existing altar pieces.

[Mardoc]

Do those two statements go together? I heard somewhere that adopting AV wipes out existing altar pieces.

Gosh, I hope you're wrong; if true, then we should have just saved the GProphet to settle later. My previous understanding was that you can't make new altar pieces under Evil, but those you have you keep.

But...at this point, AV isn't optional for us. We need the Ritualists too badly; there's no other reasonable collateral approach that we can get up and running in time. We can't go back to Bob and sign a forever-NAP, he can build the tower before we can finish Altar. We can't retroactively build a dozen mages 50 turns ago. Catapults are just too slow and too weak anymore. And we can't really win against champions/longbows without collateral; we had enough trouble breaking Serdoa's horsemen/warrior spam defenses.

If that means slowing Altar by another GPro - well, so be it. The game's probably going to devolve into mutual attempts at Conquest, anyway, unless Bob is doing well enough to fight us with one hand behind his back, making towers.

[Thoth]

Do those two statements go together? I heard somewhere that adopting AV wipes out existing altar pieces.

That is what I used to think up until XI....TRD built several Altar pieces in that game and then swapped to AV. AFAIK, the existing pieces remain but you can't build any new pieces unless you later become Neutral/Good.

Gosh, I hope you're wrong; if true, then we should have just saved the GProphet to settle later. My previous understanding was that you can't make new altar pieces under Evil, but those you have you keep.

But...at this point, AV isn't optional for us. We need the Ritualists too badly; there's no other reasonable collateral approach that we can get up and running in time. We can't go back to Bob and sign a forever-NAP, he can build the tower before we can finish Altar. We can't retroactively build a dozen mages 50 turns ago. Catapults are just too slow and too weak anymore. And we can't really win against champions/longbows without collateral; we had enough trouble breaking Serdoa's horsemen/warrior spam defenses.

If that means slowing Altar by another GPro - well, so be it. The game's probably going to devolve into mutual attempts at Conquest, anyway, unless Bob is doing well enough to fight us with one hand behind his back, making towers.

Time for a bit of a re-think on our plans.

If we can't beat Bob via Altar vs Tower, we only have two choices: Culture or Thumpy-Thumpy.

If we go Cultch, we need the NAP with Bob in order to Wane *all* of our Wanable units as GArtists. Plus we need Drama (Theatre of Dreams) and Feudalism (the other cultch Wonder). And a bunch of turns which we probably don't have.

Which leaves Thumpy-Thumpy. :hat:


In which case, sod the Priest specs, keep Rosey once built and we need a War Plan ASAP.

Last save I got was t165, has anything been played since then?

I've got some ideas cooking re: war plans, but I'll need an accurate picture of where we're at to fine tune the details.

Note that Bob *needs* an absolute minimum of 4 mana nodes in order to do the lesser Towers.

[Mardoc]

T165 itself was played, as described above. Not much in the way of significant changes, just a little more werewolfing, and getting our Bizarre Bazaar built.

Nothing since. Although we know Ellimist will enter as soon as T-Hawk/Sareln come to a mutual understanding.

And...Bob needs a minimum of 4 nodes for some of the towers, not for those his and Ellimist's palaces provide.

It occurs to me that it might be possible to deny him towers merely by pillaging the roads between his mana sites and construction sites, as a beginner's gambit.

[Mardoc]

And...Bob needs a minimum of 4 nodes for some of the towers, not for those his and Ellimist's palaces provide.

Which is..Life, Earth, Iron (Basium) Air, Life, Nature (Ljo).

Towers are:

Alteration:
Body
Life
Enchantment
Nature

Bob needs: 2 nodes, Body and Enchantment

Divination:
Law
Mind
Spirit
Sun

Bob needs: 4 nodes

Necromancy:
Death
Entropy
Chaos
Shadow

Bob needs: 4 nodes

Elements:
Fire
Air
Water
Earth

Bob needs: 2 nodes, Water and Fire

It occurs to me that it might be possible to deny him towers merely by pillaging the roads between his mana sites and construction sites, as a beginner's gambit.

So if we're going to do this, we've got to hit his nodes and/or his roads before he gets the Necromancy and Divination towers built. And fill out our map well enough to know where all his nodes are. Keeping him from the Tower of Divination may also keep level 4 angels off the board. Given that we've just barely crossed his power, I don't think we can kill him yet, so this seems like the best first goal.

I need to check his tech tonight, see where he's at, precisely. I know he has Alteration, not sure about the other three. He has none of the towers currently built, but some might be in progress.

I suspect it'll be hard to keep him from having 2 nodes; there's probably one in his core and another close to it.

But that strikes me as a good first goal, and one that we'll have to try to do with werewolves, since Recon can't pillage. Make all roads that we don't want, disappear. We'll need to send out at least one Ranger to the east, with Hawk to follow, to actually learn the lay of the land in Selrahcia.

But, yes, our initial goal is to put Bob on the defensive, and prove to him that he's got to try to defend a ton of different things - roads and cities and nodes and basically half the map. We do that, and keep the initiative, and we can wear him down.

2nd goal - take away his nodes. Can't really plan this yet.

3rd goal - take away his ally. Guess who will have tons of Ancient Forests in his land, which can't March?

Last goal - kill Bob.

So what do we need to do, now, to support this? I actually do have some ideas!

First, of course, continue mass production of werewolves and units. With emphasis on getting our werewolf cloud extended out to the east, so that it's a quick jaunt to Selrahcia. I don't yet have targets in mind, which is the next goal

We need at least one Ranger/Hawk pair for scouting Bob's lands and Selrahcia. We also need to find Bob's main stacks and keep them under observation. And we need at least intermittant surveys of the likely approach vectors to our lands, in case he decides to go on the offense. I think all in all I won't be happy until we have 5-6 Hawks in use every turn.

We also need to consolidate the heavy hitters into two or maybe three stacks, with adept and priest support. Heavy hitters are all our Rangers, Beastmasters, and any wolves we're ready to remove from self-propagation duty. One force in our core (or to menace Bob's core), one in Hippus lands (or advancing on Selrachia), #3 either as a mobile reserve, or a third prong. This means building replacement garrison forces, or relying on the werewolves, and getting all our Rangers/Ghosts/Beastmasters retasked to offense.

We should go ahead and take any barb cities we want to own. Right now that's a real short list: Myrean. It might expand once we resume scouting; Bob claims there are barb cities popping up all over the place now.

But again, we need either wolves or homebuilt garrison troops, we can't let our Beastmasters and good Rangers get stuck in garrison duty. The idea of taking these places is that they be positives for our empire, not negatives .

We should seriously consider going for Alteration -> Sorcery to get Poison Blades.

Anything else to add, Thoth? Both short term and long term, and especially details?

[Thoth]

Which is..Life, Earth, Iron (Basium) Air, Life, Nature (Ljo).

Towers are:

Alteration:
Body
Life
Enchantment
Nature

Bob needs: 2 nodes, Body and Enchantment

Divination:
Law
Mind
Spirit
Sun

Bob needs: 4 nodes

Necromancy:
Death
Entropy
Chaos
Shadow

Bob needs: 4 nodes

Elements:
Fire
Air
Water
Earth

Bob needs: 2 nodes, Water and Fire


So if we're going to do this, we've got to hit his nodes and/or his roads before he gets the Necromancy and Divination towers built. And fill out our map well enough to know where all his nodes are. Keeping him from the Tower of Divination may also keep level 4 angels off the board. Given that we've just barely crossed his power, I don't think we can kill him yet, so this seems like the best first goal.

I need to check his tech tonight, see where he's at, precisely. I know he has Alteration, not sure about the other three. He has none of the towers currently built, but some might be in progress.

I suspect it'll be hard to keep him from having 2 nodes; there's probably one in his core and another close to it.

But that strikes me as a good first goal, and one that we'll have to try to do with werewolves, since Recon can't pillage. Make all roads that we don't want, disappear. We'll need to send out at least one Ranger to the east, with Hawk to follow, to actually learn the lay of the land in Selrahcia.

But, yes, our initial goal is to put Bob on the defensive, and prove to him that he's got to try to defend a ton of different things - roads and cities and nodes and basically half the map. We do that, and keep the initiative, and we can wear him down.

2nd goal - take away his nodes. Can't really plan this yet.

3rd goal - take away his ally. Guess who will have tons of Ancient Forests in his land, which can't March?

Last goal - kill Bob.

So what do we need to do, now, to support this? I actually do have some ideas!

First, of course, continue mass production of werewolves and units. With emphasis on getting our werewolf cloud extended out to the east, so that it's a quick jaunt to Selrahcia. I don't yet have targets in mind, which is the next goal

We need at least one Ranger/Hawk pair for scouting Bob's lands and Selrahcia. We also need to find Bob's main stacks and keep them under observation. And we need at least intermittant surveys of the likely approach vectors to our lands, in case he decides to go on the offense. I think all in all I won't be happy until we have 5-6 Hawks in use every turn.

We also need to consolidate the heavy hitters into two or maybe three stacks, with adept and priest support. Heavy hitters are all our Rangers, Beastmasters, and any wolves we're ready to remove from self-propagation duty. One force in our core (or to menace Bob's core), one in Hippus lands (or advancing on Selrachia), #3 either as a mobile reserve, or a third prong. This means building replacement garrison forces, or relying on the werewolves, and getting all our Rangers/Ghosts/Beastmasters retasked to offense.

We should go ahead and take any barb cities we want to own. Right now that's a real short list: Myrean. It might expand once we resume scouting; Bob claims there are barb cities popping up all over the place now.

But again, we need either wolves or homebuilt garrison troops, we can't let our Beastmasters and good Rangers get stuck in garrison duty. The idea of taking these places is that they be positives for our empire, not negatives .

We should seriously consider going for Alteration -> Sorcery to get Poison Blades.

Anything else to add, Thoth? Both short term and long term, and especially details?

Agreed in principle....I haven't had a chance to draw up detailed plans, but we're going to want a fair number of Ritualists (both for combat use and to spread the Veil to Serdoia), and at least one more Stonewarden (before we swap), plus a few horsemen. And that AV hero....

Horsemen? Yes. Priests, Beasts and Recon units can't pillage.

And some more Rangers, Body 1 Adepts, Nature 1 Adepts, Nature II Mage (more than one would be handy, but we can only count on the one), Ghosts.

Other than that....yes we need some Hawk scouting, especially of Selrachia. I'd really like to know how well that is defended before drawing up definitive war plans.

[Mardoc]

Horsemen? Yes. Priests, Beasts and Recon units can't pillage.

And some more Rangers, Body 1 Adepts, Nature 1 Adepts, Nature II Mage (more than one would be handy, but we can only count on the one), Ghosts.

Other than that....yes we need some Hawk scouting, especially of Selrachia. I'd really like to know how well that is defended before drawing up definitive war plans.

Ok, so yes, we're on the same page. The trick, of course, is getting all that, promptly enough that Bob can't just Tower on us. Or find a counter to the rest of our army. We want, what, 20 ritualists, a stonewarden, 5-10 horsemen, 3-4 each Body and Nature adepts, our Mage(s), 5-10 Ghosts, 5 Hawks, and infinite Rangers, right? All in the next three turns

Bonus on the counter part - we were chatting the other night, and apparently Ellimist's effect is to increase tech costs by 37%. Why that number, precisely? Who knows! But it means our GNP will be better than it appears in comparison, unless he's making cash for rushbuys and upgrades.

I had been thinking of maybe adding some mounted troops anyway, this just adds urgency. Like, right now! Planning to simply make them MobI/MobII, probably out of non-Shrine cities to avoid wasted hammers.

On the adept/mage subject - I think we should abandon Religious Law for now, and head for Alteration/Sorcery instead. They'll pay off sooner. Meanwhile, I think both Asteroids and ex-Conrond Mor need to work on horses for a couple turns, we really need to get Bob's wilderness roads cut ASAP. If we can deny him Tower of Divination, we can have Tier 4 units vs tier 2/3 units. Plus, of course, force him to fight rather than Tower.

Then swing back to something more directly relevant, probably one city heads toward hawks while the other works on axes for local defense to free up the Rangers and Ghosts from that duty.

I really need to open the save and browse around for a while. Figure out Bob's current tech situation, remind myself what the new cities are capable of, etc. Currently I'm planning Asteroids to be responsible for only Priests and Rangers (and probably Rosier), with all the auxilliary units from the others. I might be talked into building new adepts from Asteroids, too, but certainly no unit types that require more new buildings. Given the length of our wishlist, it's time to set our Heroic Epic/Shrine city to 1-turning units until the end of time.