Abusing Spectres to the Maximum - Sheaim Succession Game

[Mardoc]

Been a busy couple of days; I haven't forgotten about this but can't get to it until tomorrow at best. Harder to just slip in a turnset anymore.

I'm sure that MilState would save us a good deal of gpt, I'm just not sure it's worth losing all the Slavery hammers. Ought to be able to make enough Markets/Gambling Houses/etc/so on with the whip to pay 50 gpt, right?

[Aurorarcher]

Yeah, I wouldn't get out of Slavery either. New cities will benefit from it a lot, and that should make our economy a bit better.

This game is at the point when turns start to take a lot of time. 5 turns from now on per set sounds reasonable for me (feel free to play 10 if any of you still want to do so).

[jalepeno]

[Mardoc]

Sorry for the delay!

First up, I press enter. Holy cow, no wonder the economy is a wreck! We popped so many units that our income actually went down in between turns. Looks like my first priority has got to be feeding units into the meatgrinder in the west, to keep their number and cost down.

We've got a great situation to start with that .

Ars is not nearly as scary as he looks when assaulted with undead and demons who can ignore his Death strength; we have just enough units in the area to finish him off.





That makes things a little bit tight against the Malakim/Calabim, but fortunately a Succubus Charm takes 2/3 of the Tigers out of commission. We survive the interturn, only losing one Succubus. Reinforcements are streaming in, so we should be fine.




T262: Actually...reinforcements come streaming down from the north. After razing another Calabim city, our main Witch stack is in range of Kithra. Str 10 Spectres clean up the area pretty well.

T263:
Late is better than never, I guess. Not sure Basium will be that huge a threat, coming in after we've wrecked half the world, but he might be an interesting challenge anyway:



T264: We kill the Calabim, and meet the Kuriotates.

T265: We scrape our economy back into the black! + 30 gpt isn't a whole lot, but it sure beats losing money. I go ahead and turn on research, now that I know we won't need the bankroll to avoid strike. I go for Taxation instead of Priesthood. I'm pretty sure we'll be wanting Tax Offices to go with our Money Changers; there's no way our slider ever gets too high. Speaking of which - I don't go at 100%, either, since we need that Gambling happiness.

T267: Kill the Clan. Turned out they were already mostly dead, most of the cities we saw were killed by Malakim and/or Luch.

T270: Consolidation! We've got Taxation in, so we can put up Tax Offices to continue the progress - but we've now made it to positive cash flow at 10% science.

We should abandon Binary research now that we're leaning on gambling houses for happiness, I think.

I did not manage to found many new cities, although I did manage to repair most of the Raging Seas damage that was left.




The Save is Here

[Mardoc]

A little more of a summary:

Our military is dominant. So dominant that I wasn't very efficient with its use. Probably half of the quality units are sitting somewhere as garrisons or fogbusting, insurance against an unknown attack, that sort of thing. Many of the rest are just walking forward. I did take the Prophecy Mark warriors from a central location to disperse to be garrisons; some are still walking. Still, if you want to, you could build a dozen or two warriors to take the places of succubi and marauders.






We certainly have enough to kill Varn, and I think at this point the only limit on how many wars we fight in parallel is the turnplayer's energy level. We could fight the rest of the world combined, so long as the next player is cautious with his tactics - or we could keep doing one war at a time sloppily, using the overwhelming forces to prevent that sloppiness from hurting us.




Demographically, we're doing pretty well on anything but GNP. It seems to me that improving our GNP is mostly a matter of growing the cities and building their infrastructure. No silver bullet - just more worked tiles, more multiplier buildings, and more courthouses/markets/gambling houses.

I think generally new cities will pay back pretty quickly, too. We're certainly at the conqueror's plateau, new cities will only add their own maintenance, not anything to the rest of the empire. They seem to cost 10-12 gpt (time 150% for inflation) depending on location, and make 4 gpt from trade + city tile. Which means that if they make it to the point of a courthouse plus 2 farms worked, they'll break even; any bigger and they'll become profitable, from both income and unit support.

At this point, the military is spawning faster than we can really use it. More gates would make us spawn even faster, but that seems like overkill to me. I'd change gate-building from high priority to 'once the city has most everything else it needs'.

[Tasunke]

what civics are you running.

[Mardoc]

Aristocracy/Slavery/Agrarianism/Consumption/No Council

[Aurorarcher]

Can't comment too much with phone but it's looking good. Should probably just use our mass and fight as much as possible from now on. We spawn so many units that it can easily kill our economy unless some bunch of them just die on the battlefield . I personally wouldn't mind declaring war against rest of the world at this point.

[Tasunke]

Hmm, it might help your GNP to switch from Consumption/No Council to Sac the Weak/ Undercouncil.

---> Could feed more specialists, for instance, etc. Would make Slavery more efficient too.

I think it would need the Poisons Tech and Infernal Tech.

(City States + Mil State + Mercantilism) could be used, if bankrupcy becomes an issue in the future. Mercantilism/Sac the Weak/Slavery/Undercouncil works quite well when not in Aristocracy.

[DaveV]

Civics don't matter, Tasunke. This game is over, except for grinding the last few AIs into the dust.

The first thing I did was declare war on Basium and the Kurios. Basium can become annoying with his Raiders trait and free angels. I found Yersina hanging out near the Kurios (just east of Naggarund):




Basium already had pretty good defense:




But not so good after a bunch of Rust spells:




And even worse after a round of spectres:




I kiiled him next turn, although apparently the Basium unit can't be killed by a demon [Edit: unit using evil magic?]. I sent in some mobius witches against him at about 39% odds to pick up some massive XP, and killed him three times. Each time he came back to life. Finally I killed him with a spectre. But I probably lost about 6-8 witches and I doubt the exchange was worth it.

Cardith had a respectable stack that he was moving into position for a counterattack, but maelstrom, rust, spectre spam and it melted away like snow in July.




My set is probably best summed up by the minimap:




I only played 5 turns because there were a lot of units to move around. I had to deal with hellfire and barb champions all over the map at AC 80; the next player will have to deal with Wrath.