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

[Mardoc]

Oy, we're down to 20% beakers. 10 Ravenous WW's out hunting...

I went ahead and queued up Courthouses in Serdoaland, therefore.

Also, found another big chunk of Bob - and he's definitely continuing the theme of penny packets. I'm attempting to accelerate the concentration of our forces, therefore, so we can have local superiority and just smash him up. It'd be nice if we could kill Basium, too, take away Ellimist's traits

[Thoth]

Oh, even better. Will probably abort the 2nd mage guild, then, in favor of axemen and horsemen.

Or possibly another Hunting Lodge. More Ghosts/Rangers on the board would also be nice. Though Axes make for cheap garrison troops in our new aquisitions.

DC's? Really? They're slow....

I'd much rather use Rangers and Werewolves

DC's make for fine local defense units, but they are more expensive than Axes and can't be hasted. You're probably right...not worth investing hammers in.

As for waning Ritualists - looks like you're right on Unholy Taint. And Channelling II is 30%. So Ritualists have 40%/turn - only EitB adjusts that to the good because of Quick, making it essentially 60%/turn. Starting with 7 XP, that means a Ritualist can wane in about oh...15 turns, as you said .

And we want to be making our strike(s) within 15 turns (preferably sooner if we can manage it)

Makes me regret growing Asteroids the past few turns, I probably would be happier with 4 ritualists on hand than the market and gambling house I ended up with.

Asteroids? or PacMan? I didn't think we had a GH queued in Asteroids?

The Market/GH in PacMan are well worthwhile....6pt x 150% = 15 gpt + lots of happy.

I do think we need some Wanes. I really do. I don't want to have to even think about 'do we kill that last defender and risk paying maintenance on this city' or anything along those lines. And we're back down to 40-50% slider for breakeven - I really really don't want to have to think about strikes or disbanding military.

We can hire some Merchant Specs if needs be (at 4gpt base). If we're going to spend hammers on economy then Courthouses in Selrachia are a decent investment at this point. Each CH is worth ~5-6 base gpt saved x inflation (currently around 152% and climbing).

Wanes would be nice, but each Wane takes a very valuable combat unit off the board at a time when we're gearing up for war.

If we're *really* pinched and are headed for strike we can build Wealth as a last resort. But we aren't there yet.

We may also want some more cottages around the Brewery City. As much as they suck this late in the game, they do get the +30% multiplier from the Brewery which helps them not suck quite so much. We will need to keep our road links intact to maintain the bonus though.

[Thoth]

Oy, we're down to 20% beakers. 10 Ravenous WW's out hunting...

I went ahead and queued up Courthouses in Serdoaland, therefore.

Sounds good.

Also, found another big chunk of Bob - and he's definitely continuing the theme of penny packets. I'm attempting to accelerate the concentration of our forces, therefore, so we can have local superiority and just smash him up. It'd be nice if we could kill Basium, too, take away Ellimist's traits

Sounds like a two pronged strike is in order:

1) Strike at Ellimist with the intent of elliminating him. We'll want 3 Beastmasters, Ghosts, Rangers and plenty of WWs plus Body Adept and Ritualist support.

2) A strike at Selrahcia with the remaining Beastmaster, WWs, Ghosts, Rangers. Preferably with Ritualist/Adept support and possibly the Nether Blade if Bassium is hanging about (remember the NB gives +80% vs Hero Units).

If we can spare the forces, then a raid on Bob's southern Barb conquests is also in order.

Didn't have time today to look at the save very closely, but hopefully we can hammer out some detailed plans on Saturday.

[Mardoc]

Sounds about right. Except that I'm strongly tempted to kick the festivities off early in Selrahcia; Bob does not have enough forces there to kill the Beastmaster/Ranger/Ghosts we already have, if we're smart. I'd like to stop his Blooming progress, too, and try to convince him to reinforce, before our blow at Ellimist has a chance to land. And frankly our econ is hurting enough that we need to force either Bob to keep up, or we need to accept an exchange of casualties. Some pillage gold wouldn't go amiss, either

Played T174 (today's one of my off Fridays )

They've picked up Feral Bond, Animal Mastery is 'Can research'. Presumably that's meant to thwart WW's (unless they've also noticed that it's a cheap T4). I think we can handle that, but it's one more thing to worry about.

I'm a tad frustrated with the effect of Ravenous WW's - it's nice to get the new troops, but they're spread all over creation. I'm mostly working on bringing them back to the cores; we need about 5-8 more in Serdoia to free up the last of the rangers/ghosts, and other than that every new WW can join a strike force. Which...we have all the WW's we need already, it's just a question of getting them to the right place. Been promoting a lot of them with Mobility.

And at the 'oh noz, Sidar are broken' crowd - look, everything I've gotten this game scales with barbs, not with cities. This has been true from T0, almost. Bob seems to have partially realized this, with his swap to Undercouncil, but the barbs are a tremendous resource. One that I'm best suited to extract.

On a normal map, that simply wouldn't happen.

Oh, and @Serdoa "should have had more Wanes" - I couldn't really farm them until I had Conquest and hence could actually get odds. And shortly afterward, if I'd Waned any more, they'd have all been Hippus citizens. You don't see me whining 'oh, the Hippus are broken, there's no way to stop a horseman rush', do you? Granted, Kilmorph was probably a distraction, in hindsight.

But, well, you could have taken me out the first go round, anyway. You didn't because I could delay you, and Selrahc was starting to look scary - but you could have had me if you'd been willing to accept not winning. And the reason I stopped you had nothing to do with Wanes, everything to do with building troops flat out from the time I initially saw your power start to rise.

[Thoth]

um.

Not sure if you've played t175 yet or not....

but we need to chat ASAP.

[Mardoc]

I'm afraid I didn't get as much time as I thought I would, so you get a quick report with no pictures.

Played a couple turns - we've now got a force inside Bob's lands, in an awkward spot for him. He can reach us with a Satyr, Basium, Kithra, 2 Priests and a handful of Tigers....and potentially 5+ Treants, if he pops the spell. But...we've got the Netherblade Beastmaster here, and good support, so that would be probably good odds for us without Treants, and still pretty decent with them. It's at Sludgehome, one of Selrahc's conquered barb cities, so Bob may or may not want to actually pop the WS - if he does, a lot of his cities will riot and starve. OTOH - Netherblade is a nice prize.

In any case, our goal at the moment is to force Bob to react, and to hopefully kill off some of his high quality troops then run away. We don't yet have the strength to crush him, but if we can get on the winning side of attrition, things will be happy.

In other news, we're planning a nefarious plan . Planning to trigger Blight and swap into Sacrifice the Weak at about the same time; ideally without having to spend 335 hammers on Ragnarok. Again, won't crush Bob, but it'll hurt him more than it'll hurt us.

We're trying to keep coming up with plans along those lines. We've got the initiative, so the goal is to try to keep him off balance and whittle down his forces until we've gotten enough advantage to go for the heart.

[Mardoc]

Checked the save briefly before coming in. Net result - I've got to stop running units around unstacked! Even if I think they're safe, Bob's got some pretty mobile units at the moment. Things might change once we manage to kill off Kithra/Basium and his Mages.

We lost two Ranger/Hawk pairs, but our main stack is unmolested. Didn't provoke March yet. I think we should kill Basium, restack with the reinforcments, and look for a new target this turn. Bob managed to get enough bodies into Sludgehome that it's not falling this turn, and I know he has Kithra/3 Champs/Mage/Satyr in the area; that might be enough to kill our stack if we just charge blindly at the walls and take some wounds.

That said - I plan to take all the good odds shots I can, before we back out. Might as well collect the XP; it might set up an opportunity next turn, too. And force him to keep piling units into Sludgehome for the time being, units that aren't elite or mobile (and therefore don't matter when we head elsewhere, except as a drain on his GNP and production).

[Mardoc]

Did that. Killed a Basium, four warriors, a Priest of Leaves, and a couple Tigers. No casualties, except later a werewolf died versus the barbs.

Here's what our stack looks like after that murder (and reinforcements arriving)


Also, various and sundry bits of good news:


A great prophet was also born . And we ended the turn positive cashflow, athough I don't know how long that'll last.

I'm seriously tempted to put in an Alchemists Lab into Pacman, +25% science means quite a bit when you have 10 settled sages, an elder council, a Temple of the Veil, and of course the lab comes with +4 beakers of its own. It's expensive, would take two turns to build, but it's probably worth it. Soon. Still spamming Ritualists like there's no tomorrow.

[Gaspar]

Just curious, how much XP did you get from Basium?

[Tasunke]

how many bothans died in the killing of Basium?


Edit: Was it Elfs Suck or NiP that killed Basium? I originally assumed it was the assassin that killed him, but realize that this was a flawed assumption