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

[Mardoc]

And, come to think of it, we should probably just settle in with AV for a while, no fancy Empy plans. Rosy, Mardero (maybe), Beasts and Eidolons - let's do it all. Summon Balor would be an awfully pretty spell, too, and we'd have access to it much sooner than Crown of Flames.

[Mardoc]

So, what is Mr. Chillingworth's current status, anyway?

He's up on us:
Fishing
Alteration
Cartography
Currency
Fanaticism
Smelting
Iron Working
Way of the Forests
Trade
Sorcery
Arcane Lore


We are up on him
Feral Bond
Poisons
Animal Mastery
Corruption of Spirit
Arete

So, all in all...we're pretty close. He's got a bit more tech still, I think, but hasn't made it to Tier 4 yet. Ellimist entering ought to be our cue to surge ahead (well, that and the Bazaar).

Also, I don't know how I missed seeing this before:

Maybe not the strongest site I ever did see - but two cows, rice, and wines, still makes a pretty decent city. Make that two for the 'take as soon as practicable' list .

[Thoth]

Commune with Nature?

WTF?

I hope that's just a placeholder.

[Mardoc]

Commune with Nature?

WTF?

I hope that's just a placeholder.

More than that - it's a placeholder on a turn we've already played and passed. . I had just opened that turn since it was our latest, to check on Bob and look around.

Apparently the current understanding of Basium is that he has to be AI for a turn, so Bob sent me the T136 and I played this morning. We should have another significant delay, but this time the situation might match T-Hawk's expectations, so it might not be as bad.

Discovered that ravenous werewolves, although 'controlled by the AI and extremely aggressive', won't actually suicide. I'm still going to take Myrean, it's a size 5 city nearly on our road network with decent stuff, but it won't be killing baby WW's in the interim. And I took the barb city just noticed, called it TMNT. It's only size 1 after capture, but it's an excellent position for a forward base on Selrahcia.

We've got 7 Ravenous WW's wandering around; I hope they find their way to barbs soon . It's sad, but...17 werewolves out in the wilderness is still not quite enough for me to feel confident in taking out all but token garrisons from our cities. Although part of that is a distribution issue; we still need many more wolves in the east, and could stand to lose a few from the core. So I'm backing off from the extremely forward deployments near our core, and will keep wolves drifting eastward along our roads, to take up the slack in Hippus-land. Still, I feel they need to keep multiplying to get to the numbers we need.

Switched from Religious Law to Alteration. I'm debating what to do afterward - each school is 600 beakers, and saves about 400 beakers on Sorcery due to prereq bonuses. So they're effectively really cheap, if and only if you research them first. OTOH, we might need Sorcery pronto. Still, I'm thinking I'll pick up all the schools first, we can't do a lot with Sorcery until we have time to build nodes and adepts anyway.

Also discovered that minor issue of trying to build horsemen without horses; I guess that makes the Black Road completion an even higher priority than I'd thought. It's a tough balance; I do also really want the Markets you have in queue, in addition to the troops. I ended turn mostly on infrastructure, but we can swap to troops soon.

[Mardoc]

Ok, consider that last report to be an alternate reality - between T-Hawk being able to inject Ellimist earlier, and Thoth playing the turn instead of me, things are a bit different. In particular - we don't own the barb cities yet.

T167 starts off...auspiciously, given that we're about to enter an era of war:


I finally got around to renaming the wolves, too.




For reference purposes, later on:

WW1:
Uberfish (Lynched Day 3, Werewolf)
Sciz (Lynched Day 4, Werewolf)
Bobchillingworth (Lynched Day 7, Werewolf)
Ilios (Lynched Day 8, Devil)

WW2:
1. scooter Werewolf
3. Serdoa Possesed
6. Selrahc Devil
7. Irgy Werewolf
10. uberfish Werewolf
15. Sandover Werewolf
16. Rowain Werewolf
20. luddite Masson

WW3:
...game thread no longer exists? Going by memory:
Gold Ergo Sum
Selrahc
scooter
zakalwe

In more...relevant...news, Bambur settled down to Merchandise:


and promptly enabled us to turn the slider up to 70% - 20 GNP effective from him alone.

Finally, the last vital piece is in place:


Next turn, we concentrate enough forces to conquer Myrean and Ahrpetr. After that, we concentrate enough forces to start in on Bob himself.

[Tatan]

Sorry I came between you and getting back your precious Asteroids earlier... For the record though I still think that your proposal of helping Serdoa against Bob in exchange for Asteriods was an unfavorable deal at best. Just look at how well you guys did with ONE city, and think of how much better you could have done with two.

Anyway, fantastic thread, and good luck hunting elves!

[Selrahc]

WW3:
...game thread no longer exists?

Here it is.

[Mardoc]

Sorry I came between you and getting back your precious Asteroids earlier... For the record though I still think that your proposal of helping Serdoa against Bob in exchange for Asteriods was an unfavorable deal at best. Just look at how well you guys did with ONE city, and think of how much better you could have done with two.

Anyway, fantastic thread, and good luck hunting elves!

It's hard to say, isn't it? It would certainly have boosted us up, but making an expeditionary force would have been a significant cost. Serdoa might have done better against us if our focus was Bob, not him.

Plus, of course, most of our income came from Wanes, which doesn't exactly scale with #cities. We got basically all the XP we could have from Asteroids' defense anyway.

In more...relevant...news, Bambur settled down to Merchandise:
and promptly enabled us to turn the slider up to 70% - 20 GNP effective from him alone.

On further thought - as long as we have expenses that aren't fully paid, I want to be working on some Wanabes. Being able to run that 7gpt through +150% multipliers, and then take the raw commerce through a ~+25% beaker multiplier instead, is just a huge difference in our total GNP. Since most of our slider commerce comes from places that aren't Pacman, any time we can run it through libraries and academies instead of, well, nothing, we come out way ahead.


That said - our current military is something like 60 units. I'm thinking of our Wanabe force being something like 5-10 units at a time, less than half of our new unit production and essentially none of our currently existing forces(probably the Axe...and that's about it...maybe whichever unit category Bob finds a counter to, if that happens). And...the Wanabes would be mostly playing defense against barbs, which needs to happen either way - but I'll be happier doing that with Wanabes than our mainline units anyway.

Just enough Wanes that we're sure that building (and biting) our army from now until the end of the game can't bankrupt us, and that we can afford to do some conquering. The payoff will decline as soon as we're talking GSages again, so it's not worth pushing harder than that. And of course any Waned unit is a unit that can't kill Elfs and simply go for game over.

[Mardoc]

Well, not a whole lot to say about this turn. Gained a barb city, lost a Greater Werewolf (90% odds aren't good enough, apparently ), no new Ravenous ones, although one did upgrade to Blooded.


Just need to get some werewolves or axes out this way, so the Beastmasters can go on to bigger and better things.

Rosier was born, and I finally figured out why you had so many buildings in queue, Thoth. With the Black Road completing, we have lots and lots of room in our happy caps, and every reason to try to fill them. Set most cities to max growth, therefore. Pacman will most likely just 1-turn Ritualists for a goodly long while, but the other cities will fill in some infra while they try to grow.

Oh, and we found which city is now Angelic:

[Thoth]

Rosier was born, and I finally figured out why you had so many buildings in queue, Thoth. With the Black Road completing, we have lots and lots of room in our happy caps, and every reason to try to fill them.

"though this be madness, yet there is a method in it"


Here's a mad thought for you: Have you considered building The Prophecy of Ragnarok in Pacman?

+2 Priest GPPs would be nice and Blight will seriously hurt Bob with his huge cities.