Test games played

[jsb]

Good points, I unfortunately don't have the time to play out all four games, but I will try to continue the most promising of my mono games and compare it to the rainbow, mid- and late-game.

My feeling is that Life fits poorly with High Men given that their strength is late-game, where Life is also strong. It feels like realms that cover a races weaknesses or synergize early game is usually the best, but I will try to survive to late-game and see what I can do.

Rainbow SHOULD be weaker after mid-game, but there's so much snowballing that it's difficult to see how mono would overcome it TBH.

I'll report my findings. 

Until then, any ideas on offensive unit combinations for mono Life when fighting Nature/Death? My Magicians are ok when defending, but pushing offensively against Ghouls and Spiders is pretty rough.

Nelphine will be glad to know I have a barbarian city producing Berserkers, probably the sole reason I survived without the AI actually attacking and razing me so far in game three.

But what about High Men units, what do you guys use?

[namad]

You're always going to be behind the ai when the ai cheats and has 200% bonus to all resources. The thing is, you're smarter, so you can get in a 1on1 war and kill an AI twice your size, double your territory, then catch up and supress the other ai. (unless you're lizardmen or whatever it's hard to get a super early lead on expert or higher).

Also the fact that high men already have a bunch of holy themed and holy bonus units IMO makes them a bad combination for life in terms of synergy, they already have the ability to gain holy bonus and decent access to units that can heal, which makes some of the life spells and abilities that do the same thing less good, at least imo.

Also I think rainbow is gonna be far better in 5.11 than it was in 5.05 because very rares come so much later in the game now, missing a few in exchange for more cheap research options is probably not as penalizing.

[crusader.mike]

Yup - graph power doesn't mean much. Its all about what you can actually fight. Admittedly ghouls are rough for high men to deal with early on. 

I dunno... If on turn 100 myrran sorcerer has double of your power and 50% more casting skill -- game could be pretty much over. At best it will be a very slow exhausting grind with 50 stacks of best non-summoned and non-buffed units you can afford.

I had a game like that (on Advanced) -- ended up transmuting all his crystals, earthquaking every non-flying city, selling all artefacts and pumping cash into ~4 cities to produce adamantium pegasai. All other cities were simply trading. Very slowly I managed to turn tide around -- there was no way to summon anything of value, have any enchant, my heroes were most of the time frozen in stasis and etc. But it also involved a lot of save/load. There was no way for me to win that without cheating with save/load. I was lucky he didn't have time stop, drakes and suppress magic yet.

The treasure from lairs and nodes also helped finance some early economic expansion, but in comparison to the first two games at least, I really just spammed military units from my cities to keep my rivals at bay this game.

Not only that -- when your army graph is bigger then theirs, diplomacy actually starts working :-). I remember milking weaker wizards for spells and money by threatening them for no good reason.

Trick is to get to your top tier unit in one city (one with adamantium/orihalcon) asap, build stack of doom, knock off few neighbors and take their well-developed cities. That is why early lairs/nodes are very important -- because resources you get there are huge compared to your empire output at that stage of the game (and don't depend on current tax rate). Especially nodes. Nelphine's wraith-ship is very important here as it dramatically cuts travel time for your doom stacks.

Another thing to pay attention to is breaking to Myrran -- has to be done asap to keep tabs on the guy over there.

[jsb]

I also think my third mono game is already a loss (Myrran wizard has double next AI power, around triple my power or more) but I will try to get to late game anyway.

I also play without any reloads, so it's over when it's over. I actually have kind of a feature request to make regarding that, but I think I'll start a separate thread for it later.

Limiting your range of tactics to one realm is kind of a handicap to be honest, and right now I don't feel Expert really needs a boost - still, this is sort of an experiment for the future. If I can figure out how to play each mono color then I will be in a good position for playing from any position later (I have my reasons).

I think the diplomacy system is working very well. I have managed to intimidate peaceful wizards and even placate powerful enemies with bribes. Maniacal and chaotic personalities are a bit tricky, but they can be dealt with. I'm good with it anyway.

[jsb]

My third mono-game came to an effective close around turn 130 to no great surprise. From the position of seven strong and well-defended cities, but no nodes or external srurces of power, my aim was to quickly build up my forces and conquer nodes and lairs to finance an offensive.

I managed to take out two dungeons using magicians and berserkers. One full of Great lizards/Sprites and another full of Hydras and Gargoyles. These were the easiest dungeons I had on my continent btw. Other classics included a node guarded by 7 Giant spiders and 2 War bears (how the hell do you counter spiders with Life and High men? Anyone?) and another with just 8 total Great lizards, easy peasy. I also had a ruin with 8 Wraiths (wonderful for low-resistance units) and of course Gorgons, lot's and lot's of Gorgons!

The only upside of having really powerful dungeons was that the rewards for taking them out was very decent. I got around 800 crystals and 800 gold + a Enlightenment spell and for a moment I thought maybe I could turn things around.

I had finished casting Stream of Life on all my cities. Double Divine Order from me and Ariel really helped. I had a full stack of Magicians waiting to go take out that scouted 8 wraith temple, while my second stack of Berserkers and Magicians was buffing in order to take out the Great lizard node (a previous attempt using Pikemen and Berserkers took out all but two lizards, but yeah - regeneration is a bitch).

That's the time when my dear friend Tlaloc decided to invade my north using deathballs of Ghouls. Our relationship had been a bit strained before since I destroyed one of his settlements on my shores, but I had bribed him off with spells (he was death+life) so I thought I was safe for a little while at least, and that my garrisoned Berserkers would scare him off my northern, barbarian, city.

Nope. He marched right in, casting Dark prayer and Black sleeping all my troops before they could close. I have no idea how he became so militarily powerful, but he had around 150% of Ariels military strenght and she was more than double his power generation.

My city had a guardian spirit and I was summoning Unicorns to bolster resistance, still didn't miss a single Black sleep, and the Ghouls did the rest. 4 undead Berserkers and 4 Heroism Bowmen added to his army - great.

My stack of Magicians was in the south and could just scramble in time to meet his forces marching on my northern cities. I won two engagements before loosing an army of pure Magicians to Ghouls ... 6 undead Magicians instantly added to my troubles.

At the same time, Ariel was powering ahead on Myrror, undisturbed and still more than three times as powerful as me. She has six heroes and a ton of resurces. I had a single hero, Meathead the Barbarian, no offensive forces and was about to loose my next town, the financial heart of my empire with one gold and silver mine. At this point I felt it pointless to continue. I think a comeback at this juncture is only possible through save-scumming.

I will try to play out my rainbow game and then try to figure out how to conquer nodes and lairs with early High men + Life ... there HAS to be a way.

[Suriname]

I think the diplomacy system is working very well. I have managed to intimidate peaceful wizards and even placate powerful enemies with bribes. Maniacal and chaotic personalities are a bit tricky, but they can be dealt with. I'm good with it anyway.

Try that at lunatic - even with charismatic

[Nelphine]

Lunstic isn't meant as a 'this is harder than hard' difficulty. Its lunatic. Things aren't meant to work, unless you play a very strong wizard AND good luck. (So charismatic + aura of majesty, and even then that might not be enough if you're mostly nature life and they're mostly death/chaos, or vice versa.)

I'd be much more interested in how diplomacy works on master, with or without charismatic or aura of majesty.

[Kiwi]

Greetings gentlemen.
With my first post on this forum I would like to tell you guys about my game I'm playing now, luckily i don't have to write walls of text to explain whats going on in my game, screenshots should be enough.
Difficulty-Advanced, all map settings are set to fair.
Me: 4 black 3 blue books, beastman, cult leader, myrran, astrologer and spellweaver.
Aura: 6 blue 4 green 1 white books, beastman, myrran.
Suika: 8 red books, probably draconians, channeler, myrran, artificer.
   
   
   
I'm sure I'm gonna have much fun when she decides to pay me a visit with her new pets.

[Seravy]

o_O
That must be from treasure!

[crusader.mike]

she is spreading across myrran right now, bunch of new ouposts were built recently. I suggest making a visit asap while her cities are small.