family vs family, the rematch

[Zooko]

Ctis had never planned to invade Vanheim. In fact, he didn't even count on surviving until the end of the war. But he *had* planned to survive a lot longer than he did. If I hadn't made several blunders and thrown away valuable assassins and Poison Slingers, then I might have defeated the first wave of Vanheim (since Vanheim didn't choose to allocate powerful troops to bodyguard duty, except for two Fey Boars, both of which were dead by the end).

My questions for Vanheim are: 1. Were you earning substantial income from the formerly-Ctissian provinces before you banished Bwoony, or did the Miasma successfully suppress your income from those provinces? It was Bwoony's strategy to soak up both your time and your money (where diseasing your magical super cavalry counts as soaking up both). 2. Were you earning substantial income from the formerly-Ctissian provinces after banishing Bwoony? I would guess so. 3. Was this added income, in your opinion, necessary for your successful team attack on Caelum?

Any other general pointers?

[Zooko]

Maybe I should have hired flying troops to keep the devils and fiends away from my Seraphs for a few turns, instead of hoping to build Staves of Storms. But by the end-game there, I had little gold income after upkeep. Hm.

Another thing is that perhaps Caelum should have studied Evocation before Conjuration. It was great fun having the Elementals, but the Lightning Bolts could have started flying earlier and helped Caelum expand wider.

In general, both Ctis and Caelum expanded too slowly due to holding back from attacking independents when they should've attacked, and due to attacking independents when they shouldn't have. ;-) (The latter error was more common when I was the military secretary of Caelum.)

Neither of us ever properly scouted Vanheim, so I don't know how many provinces he controlled before invading Ctis.

[Zooko]

Good game, you guys. I really enjoyed playing against you because I felt like I had to do my best if I wanted to have a fighting chance. I enjoyed seeing the two of you cooperate, such as when a Jotun army including his prophet headed for Ctis before turning back when his Vanheimish partner reported that Ctis was already helpless.

Thanks for the game!

I'm sorry for the numerous and extensive delays. If we ever play against one another again, you can be sure that:

1. My primary computer for e-mail, dom2, and most other things won't experience filesystem corruption and go out of service for a month, forcing me to set up a replacement.
2. My server that hosts my e-mail, web site, and mailing lists won't be hacked, forcing me to set up a replacement.
3. My brother won't do all his final exams, write an undergraduate thesis and graduate Magna Cum Laude. Hooray for arc!

So anyway, next time arc and I play dom2, things will probably go a lot smoother.

[Zooko]

The two-vs-two format is excellent! The games are fast as furious. You get to chat with your partner so that you are socializing with your friend or relative instead of playing a computer game all by yourself. If one player is unable to play his turns his partner can do them for him. Strategies can be more varied since one team member can help the other one out on his weak points.

In general, the two-vs-two format is a superb format. The only drawback that I can think of right now is that there aren't very many maps that are the right size and shape for 2-v-2.

[Zooko]

I like the Chandrea2 map. It is okay to look at, although not as pretty as the Cradle of Dominion map. It is also small enough and densely connected enough to be suitable for the 2-v-2 format.

It could stand some improvement, though, on "intuitive province connections".

In particular the various kinds of "lines" -- province boundaries, roads, rivers, shipping lanes prevent me from easily seeing the relations between provinces. And in general it isn't intuitive to me which provinces connect to which other ones, and in fact my biggest blunder of the game was perhaps partially due to my not thinking of the fact that province 81 connected directly to province 71. (Although I was certainly aware of that fact and had in fact moved a scout from 81 to 71 earlier in the same move!)

Another example question is why Altdorf City connects to Wasser Marsh but not to Bruh Rogg or Oxmoor.

For comparison, when I earlier played a game on the Cradle of Dominion map, I played the entire game with the "province connector arrows" turned off, except for the occasional double-check. In Cradle of Dominion, once you have looked at the province connect arrows a couple of times, you can confidently remember most of the connections, because those provinces "look" like they should be connected when looking at the map.

[Zooko]

Did you think that your prophet Voldemort and your other commanders were in danger of assassination? Did you consider allocating more troops to bodyguard duty but then decide not to do it?

I remind you that when Voldemort conquered Ctis's home castle, he had 3 hit points due to the extreme fervour of the local Ctissian worshippers.

It was really my blunder that I didn't assassinate all three of your commanders, thus breaking the siege, by sending seven assassins. Instead I sent only two assassins (having thrown five under the hoofs of your cavalry and having accidentally left one to guard the fort). Those two assassins killed one of your commanders and the remaining Fey Boar bodyguard of Voldemort.

However, I think if you had allocated four or five heavy infantry to each of those commanders then even my seven assassins might have failed to kill all of them.

[The Panther]

Oh vanquished foes Bwoony & Ambrosia:

Let's see, where do we begin?

1. I think your first mistake with the lizards was the choice of castle. Playing Miasmi, you want a fort with huge defense. The 50 admin and 500 supply on the Fortified City was not near as important as the too-low 100 defense. Had you taken the Hill Fortress or Dark Citadel, I might still be seiging it. And for sure, every single troop on the seige would have been poisoned before it was all over. I would have been vectoring in troops non-stop to maintain the seige and it would have been a far, far longer time before I sailed onto Caelum's island.

2. Your next mistake was compounded by the castle choice. Because it was 5 turns and 750 gold, you could not build one for a long, long time. This may have influenced your decision to build 3 uprotected temples. That 600 gold could have been far better used for nearly anything else. I know the dominion spread was your goal, but it is abysmally hard to spread dominion (even at the 10 level), into enemy provinces. You did spread your dominion slightly into my territory, but it was only 1 province deep and I concentrated hard on preaching it away since I had found a Devil's Den there. Thus, your dominion never impacted my territory at all and there was practically no income loss, as the Devil's Den requires a tax rate of 50 anyway to maintain order. As for spreading your dominion into Jontunheim, he was just too far away to have much of an impact there.

3. Losing the 5 empoisoners to the vans was nothing but a big fat blunder. Everybody makes blunders in every game. Some big, some minor, but mistakes will always happen over the course of a long game. That happened to be a big one as you already noted.

4. As for the assination strategy, I am not certain it would have worked. My prophet and Einhere both got skull talismans from the first encounters and thus could spam just as many skeletons as were you. Plus the level 4 prophet banishment was a huge factor in my favor as well as was the summoning of the ghost wolves. Even with only 3 HP, I don't think you could have assinated him with 10 or more empoisoners. The hero Einhere with the skull talisman would have been even harder to kill than the prophet. However, had they become diseased and afflicted from the Miasmi, that would have been a totally different story. Again, this goes back to the initial castle choice.

5. Your Caelum design was well-conceived. You used the improved elementals under Zen's mods to very good effect. When I first saw the Caelum pretender with the four elemental paths, I could not understand what the heck was going on with him. But when I saw him in action spamming elementals, I was very impressed. So was Tauren, since he was on the receiving end big time agian and again.

6. Flying your pretender into enemy territory alone was eventually going to catch up to you. But you were desperate by that time and had to take risks. It is hard to fault that plan, even when it crashed and burned.

7. My pretender never did truly die. When you see a pretender with 3 deaths at the top of the HoF on turn 15, that can only mean immortal. And when you see Vans with Fire 9 + Air 5 bless, that must be a Phoenix. In fact, Fawkes is the name of the phoenix in the Harry Potter books, so I thought it was obvious. I lost my bird twice trying to stubbornly take a vine province. The phoenix simply cannot kill Dark Vines, for they have too many HPs. I lost him the third time because he was feeble-minded and I did not notice when I sent him in. I was more careful after that and Fawkes was taking territory unterrupted at the end, solidly at the top of the HoF.

8. You could have had a better searching strategy, but that is kind of minor on such a fast map. Both Tauren and I had a huge stockpile of gems at the end that we could not spend.

9. Vanheim has a huge advantage on this particular map. The sailing ability is almost unstoppable. I can strike practically anywhere with no risk of retaliation. In fact, I just checked the current turn and I had 31 vans, 8 Huskarls, 4 devils, 8 horned serpents, 5 cave drakes, and 4 wyverns which would be arriving on your island over the next several turns. And many more to come after those. All with no worry about losing provinces on my homeland since fliers cannot go over water. My son and I agonized over taking Jontunheim instead of Vanheim with our first chioce but eventually decided you two were far more likely to grab the giants instead of the sailors. It worked out for us in the end. Plus Tauren discovered the Frost Fiend strategy and was highly enamored with it. In Cold 3, Frost Fiends are even superior to devils!

10. The map Chandra still needs some work. The iron mines in every city is probably a mistake, especially sonce you cannot play Mictlan with that. The C'tis starting spot was horribly inferior to the other three nations. Plus, as you said, there are still province connections that are not intuitive. And four players is probably all the map can handle.


I really like this 2v2 format a lot. It radically changes your thinking knowing that you are totally at war on the very first move. You MUST build armies as soon as you can or you will get overrun. Level 1 and 2 summons are important to supplement your army! Magic is not the dominating force like it is in the big FFAs. And having a partner talk over things makes for a better overall strategy. My son and I discussed this game endlessly over many a lunch in the past few months. It was too bad that your brother was so busy with school that he did not play much. I think that he would have throughly enjoyed this game too had he the time to do so.

And if you guys want a rematch, we are game. Different map, though, for this map is still not quite right.


Finally, I want to really thank Alneyan for hosting this game. As always, he was a superb host. I do hope to meet up with him when I am in France in June so I can buy a lunch for him! In a very interesting coincidence, my daughter happens to be an exchange student at the very same school in France which Alneyan attends!!! Odd, but true.


Fawkes of Vanheim (aka, The Panther)

[Alneyan]

The Panther said:
1. Playing Miasmi, you want a fort with huge defense. The 50 admin and 500 supply on the Fortified City was not near as important as the too-low 100 defense. Had you taken the Hill Fortress or Dark Citadel, I might still be seiging it. And for sure, every single troop on the seige would have been poisoned before it was all over. I would have been vectoring in troops non-stop to maintain the seige and it would have been a far, far longer time before I sailed onto Caelum's island.

*Takes notes* Lovely! I so love being besieged that I should go with Miasma and a big fortress; getting the Iron Walls/Arcane Masonry spells to work would only make it twice as fun. Thanks for the tip Panther; now I merely need to grow fond of everything else in C'tis.

[Zooko]

Thanks a lot for the tips! I hadn't really noticed that the Fortified City had significantly weaker walls than the others.

I would love to play you guys again, and I'll bet arc would too. But what map would we use?

[The_Tauren13]

The fortified city completely fails. The 5 turns and huge cost to build is hardly worth the little extra admin you get. The 500 supply is not really worth much, either. Nobody needs that much supply... I think taking the fortified city was my single biggest blunder in KotH. (Well, maybe not. I had some pretty big blunders. Like not even knowing what a dome was and how important they are.)

I agree with Panther that the temples were a bad idea. With 10 base dominion, as long as you keep your God and prophet alive (and your God was immoble so that wasnt a problem), your dominion will spread well enough. Alternatively, I would have taken a watch tower and built one for every temple. For 2.5 times the cost, you can make your temple *much* harder to destroy, not to mention having another location to build troops and mages, and the extra pretender points so you wouldnt have had to take that drain. Also then, with your nice order and productivity scales, you could have built those troops with the castle defense bonus (whatever theyre called) and stuck about 10 them in every tower. Vans are not very good at seiging, so that would have made your territory take forever to capture, meaning more deseased Vans.

I had some serious expanding issues this game as well. My god died early on to a lucky sleep-casting indy druid, and I had no priests to recall him. I didnt get him back untill like 2 turns before you resigned... Also, I sacked my prophet, a couple niefel giants, and a few HoF herses to about 40 heavy cavalry... certainly was NOT expecting that many... and so between losing my god and losing my army, my expansion came to a complete halt. I had better luck in test games; I was able to take 1 province/turn starting on turn 1 (yes, my god and starting troops could actually win 90% attacking blind against level 9 indys) and continuing indefinitely. No such luck here, though.

I was also doing a poor job of spending gems. I was using all my mage-time to blood hunt and summon frost fiends, so I had no research. IIRC, at the end, I had about 100 death and water gems piled up, and had just sent about 50 nature gems to Panther so he could start making horned serpents.

The elemental strategy was pretty painfull; I found that even my niefel giants had no hope of getting anywhere near the mages. So I just went all-out frost fiends, figuring flight was what I really needed. I really fell in love with frost fiends in my test games. Not only do they look really cool, in cold 3 they become stronger than devils for less the cost. They get +1 protection, strength, attack, and defense for every cold level, and in a Jotunheim vs. Caelum war, there will be cold everywhere. However, If you would have gotten staffs of storms out, I would have had no answer. But I guess its kind of hard to get that research when your mages are all busy fighting...

Looking at how well Panther was doing, I think he may have been able to win all by himself. His gem income was going through the roof from all the dark knowledge and gnome lore, he had huge Gold income after capturing Ctis's capitol (it had like 350 income!), and the sailing was a major advantage on this map. Not to mention Vans cost about half of what theyre worth. I think with a fire 9 bless theyre worth more like 150 gold. Also, Panther had the best starting spot out of all of us by quite a long shot. I dont think that map is too well balanced. I actually liked the older version better, where you started outside of the cities, and they didnt have the mines. But that version had a couple terrain and neighbor problems.

Anyway, Im game for a rematch. Hopefully Arc could actually get a chance to play it.