A newbs first game of CoM

[Yorrick09]

Greetings, all. 

Being suddenly unemployed (thanks, COVID, and the printer's union. fat lot of good you did me after sucking my paycheck) I now have time to dive into a game that I first discovered years ago when the insecticide patch first came out.

After a short vanilla game on the intro difficulty as Ariel to get myself familiar with the game again, 
I decided to play a fresh game in CoM as Merlin, High Men. I didn't take a screenshot of the setup screen but I'm pretty sure I'm on normal difficulty and all the settings except landmass set to "fair".

I wound up on a goodly-sized continent all by my lonesome, but it wasn't too long before red lizardmen settlers came pouring from across the sea. I didn't feel like making enemies just yet, so I let Raven have the settlements around the periphery of my continent while I built up the inner core.

There were only a couple of neutral towns, two being Men and one orc.

I tried to keep friends with Raven (Red), hoping that I could use him to exchange spells while I played a peaceful builder/research game, but I didn't know how the diplomacy worked.

Soon enough I figured out that I couldn't be friends with him, as his settlements all over my continent meant I couldn't even move settlers or engineers around without tripping over his settlements, triggering the "Y u move ur d00ds next to me" messages and his Lawful personality made it worse.

So I started putting his cities to the torch and began a fresh wave of settlers. Of course this meant war and it see-sawed back and forth for quite a while.

I split my attention between sending ships and cheap (swords, bows, and crusaders) soldier's over to Raven's continent and trying to tech up to magicians/paladins and using heroes to plunder what small neutrals I could.

Time passed and I made contact with my other opponents: Ariel (yellow) and Freya (green).




Freya turned out to be the big problem, as you can see! Chaotic-Militarist. Frankly I just didn't take her seriously. All I wanted was to have my continent to myself, build up my cities, explore with my heroes and research my way to victory. My already large gold income skyrocketed when I discovered Prosperity, and I thought if I just subsisted Ariel and Raven (who had already gotten into long-standing wars with Freyja) I'd be left well enough alone.

It was when Freyja started sending multiple large stacks of barbarian 'zerkers, backed up by a steady stream of cockatrices, sprites, and water walking giant lizards, coupled with my finally looking at the rest of the map with the nature reveal spell, that I realized just how much of a runaway Freyja was.

and for the past eight years or so I've been barely hanging on against wave after wave after wave after wave of lizards, barbarians, orcs, summons, and the occasional hero. I've had a couple cities wiped out, or simply taken, but I've always rebuilt them and I am hanging on.

My mana and gold income is great, it's just she has 3X the cities I do and at first I insisted on going magician heavy back up by paladins, but that combo didn't work when she started throwing resistence-buffed flyers at me. I started throwing earthquakes at her cities but it doesn't seem to slow her production down, much.

Ariel and Freyja allied for a number of turns, and so Ariel DoW'd me, but I just now noticed they were at war with eachother again, managed to make peace with Ariel for some gold and Disjunction.

I have finally, FINALLY been able to bring the war to Freyja. Not on her home continent, but Ariel's. I've managed to take a single high elf city that I'm guessing used to belong to Ariel, and ye gods and little catfish, that has redirected every last green soldier and then some.

nothing but stack after stack after stack marching up to the walls of Gatewood and..


Nothing. sitting there.



That hero on the outside is Torin with a halfstack; a couple elite halberdiers, magicians, and priests.

[Yorrick09]

Currently researching Call to Arms. More paladins seems like a good idea to me!

Whatever you did to the AI, Seravy, it was a hell of a job! This is alot more challenging than the games I played on vanilla, Freyja just won't quit throwing stacks at me. I don't have much of a plan atm, I've simply been trying to survive for so long keeping the AI off my continent I haven't put much thought into how I'm going to win. Feels like my 'sit back and peacefully research to victory" idea is dead.

[Anskiy]

One thing you will quickly realize is that you simply can't afford to underestimate the value of scouting and AI personalities. It always pays to take these seriously. Just recently I let Lo Pan get strong because I thought he was on my side. I was so wrong. The militaristic personality and opposing spellbooks meant that he cancelled the wizard's pact abruptly and declared war on me, just as I was researching Haste! While I did have strong armies one look at his cities made it quite obvious it would be a slugfest.

[Yorrick09]

“All right. They’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us … They can’t get away this time.”
-Torin the Chosen

after several battles Torin and his stack have been whittled down to Him, the Windmage and some Elite War mammoth(!!) mercs, but the damage has been done. Three Freyja cities have been turned to naught but rubble and ash, and waves of barbarian warriors of all types have been gored on mammoth tusks, ground to paste beneath their feet, butchered by Torin, or simply laid down and died shuddering when the Windmage waved his wand of despair.

That last one makes me grin every time I use it    

To be fair, I have save scummed a couple of times when Crack's call took out the windmage or Torin. Not the noblest of reactions, buuut. I like these two!!

Freyja's stacks continue to be ineffective against my captured city of Eastgate, and I have a human settler slowly moving a bit south to setup an advance base deeper into Freyja territory.

I believe I am slowly but surely turning this game around, unless something drastic happens. Freyja's been throwing up seismic mastery and that global buff to summons, but I've been disjuncting them as much as I can. pretty pricey, though, I've blown through my 3k reserves over the last 15 or so turns.

My poor capital has been the one getting earthquakes when seismic mastery is up, and it has multiple rebels. good thing flipping cities aren't a mechanic, here (right?)

[Anskiy]

Yeah I dislike Crack's Call thoroughly. Atleast in CoM you can "soft counter" it by having more than 21 HP and using Exaltation, but imo the design of the spell is just wrong. It should be like a better web that kills something if nobody is near the target to lift them out and everything has been incapacitated by it or killed, and do low or no damage at all.

[Yorrick09]

The remnants of the routed green fleets have reached the shores of Freyja's continent.

Warships, Fang, the Windmage, and a continual stream of galleys and triremes sent water-walkers and ships alike straight to the bottom. After ferrying over more troops and summoning my first Very Rare of CoM, the power graphs look like this:





With Divine Order from Ariel in play, however, that makes mass summoning of them prohibitive, imo.

The war slowly but surely grinds southward as I march my super-stack of mercs and heroes towards Freyja's home continent. Crack's Call eventually gets rid of my wind-mage. I shoulda kept him on ferry duty, but at least I got this out of it:



I now have a forward base just four squares away from Freyja's Tower, but she's been summoning Colossi for the past 30 or so turns. Ariel's stacked her tower with Life-buffed angels, and atm I don't have any sort of mass dispel. I think Fang or Torin could solo 2 or even 3 of these summons, but not a whole squad, plus heroes.

The question now is, since I can't blitz into their towers and decapitate them as is, who do I try to take out first after a build-up? Ariel is Manaical and currently Neutral with me, and she only has 7 settlements total, 3 of them being small hamlets on Myrror. She would be alot easier to eliminate, and it's probably only a matter of time before she betrays me.

Otoh, Freyja is obviously the biggest competitor here, and she's destroyed every single building in my capital with seismic mastery earthquakes.

Though I am putting the cart before the horse, here. I don't think my single super stack can handle a bunch of buffed angels or colossi. Maybe if I had multiple Great Wyrms or Paladins or Elven Lords, but that would take time.