Turn 13: Revised.
Welcome back after our long hiatus. It seems we all have taken a break from this thread for various reasons. But now that the game is mostly over I see no reasons why we can not start it up again. We do have more time now after all.
Music for the turn.
Oh yea. First. Lets make it clear that the things I posted last turn did not actually happen. This is because I changed my mind at the last moment. My plans were too precious to not write down in this thread so I had to fool you a bit.
What follows is the correct retelling of turn 13.
A strange sight greets me as I contemplates my invasion. A solitary angelic figure towers over the central fields of Arco. Last turn I sent my sneaking army in to the one remaining indy province outside Arcos capitol in order to get a look at the eventual opposition if he were to attack it.
They saw the following.
This horrific being is Arcos pretender, the Virtue “White Wedding” by Billy Idol. It is the first Super Combatant we have seen in the game thus far and its represents a completely different kind of challenge than the rest of Arcos forces.
Its just one guy, but never the less it dominates the heavy cavalry indies that opposes it. How? It can do this because it has great stats and a huge number of special properties. Both innate and from spells it buffed itself with in the beginning of the battle.
If someone was to attack it, they would first have to overcome a long list of hurdles. Like its Awe +7, witch means you have to make a morale save vs 17 or 19. (I'm uncertain). Indies have an average morale of 10. After that you'd need to get past the Virtues Luck and Etherealness attributes that it gave itself through self-buffing spells. Both effects combined will allow it to ignore 7/8 of all non magic attacks and ½ of all the magical ones. Indies, naturally dont have magic weapons. Nor do they have mages in this case. But if they would nevertheless succeed with these hard feats and also overcome 15 points of defense, they would still only do 1 point of damage per hit. This because it also self-buffed with mistform, witch makes it so that every hit that strike it will only do 1 point of damage unless it is an instant kill attack like soulslay. If it is a magic attack, or if it would have caused more than 25 points of damage after protection, the spell will dissipate. But the attack that caused it to dissipate will still only cause 1 point of damage.
Each of these abilities on their own are beatable, but together they mean that the indies never had a chance. I don think the Virtue even took any damage.
Another thing of note it that it have Astral 9. Something tells me that my opponent was really paranoid about getting magic dueled during pretender creation. S9 does also provide a decent bless of course and access to some neat globals and rituals like Arcane Nexus and Wish. But his sacred units requires a lot of resources and are cap only, so I dont think the bless will see much use.
Some people likes to simulate wars and battles in single player before they do something. I am not that patient that I can run an entire SP game just for that kind of thing, so I just do some quick and dirty calculations in my head or with pen and paper.
Killing this thing is not impossible. But it will require that I rethink my strategies. I dont think the giants would be able to do much against it due to the etherealness and mistform, but my Nemedian Warriors might stand a chance. They have magical golden spears that are totally bling. The Awe would still be a problem, but they have morale 14 base witch could become 16 with Sermon of Courage. That means that they will manage to launch an attack somewhere between 1 time in 3, or 2 in 5. If I attack it with the 10 guys I have standing in the province, that means maybe 0.75 hits per turn after accounting for enemy defense with fatigue and after luck. The warriors do 17 hp damage vs its 5 points of protection. So more like 12 damage *0.75 = 9 points of damage per turn on average. First hit does not count due to mistform. This means I would need 10-11 turns to bring it down. Although it would flee before that.
However this calculation is only true if it does not strike back. Its unlikely to be that pacifist. The flamberge that it wields is both armor piercing and adds 4 extra points of attack skill. Although my nemedian warriors have 16 points of defense, 5 of those points are because of the golden shields they wield. For practical purposes, those shields wont do much difference vs a damage 18 (+18) armor piercing flamberge. I will assume that an attack would be deadly to the warriors 75-80% of the time after accounting for defense, shields, protection and hitpoints. However, the warriors also have glamor, witch means that all melee attacks have a flat 50% chance of missing. So the Virtue will have a 37.5-40% chance of killing one of my dudes each turn.
This is dour statistics because I cant even be certain to face it alone and I only have 10 Warriors ready for attack right now. My chances with it would be rather mediocre right now even should I catch it. I rather hold my troops in reserve and monitor the situation.
Well, you know how LiDCesare is always whining about how Abysia is ruining the game for both of them? Well he is largely correct. Unless you have no other choice, attacking someone without a realistic plan for how to kill your opponent quickly is suicide. Because although you (I) might have enough power to win the war, you (I) will probably not have enough power to do that and also fight off all your opportunistic neighbors. This means that you must either leave a sizable force in reserve and fight a slow, grindy war. Or you attack with all you got and hope that you other neighbors are nice enough to ignore you or that you can finish the war before they can strike at you. Or rely on diplomacy I guess. Though diplomacy have never been my strong point.
For me that is doubly troublesome because not only am I the biggest player by a good margin, I also have three close neighbors compared to the two that just about everyone else get. So thats three fronts I have to guard compared to, say, Abysia.
You know that Desmond guy? Yea it turns out he listened to the bad omens of the previous turns and decided that he rather wanted to sitesearch while he exercised his troops a little. Many other mages continue to sitesearch across the lands, while the ones in the capitol continues to transform air gems in to owl quills.
An expedition of unmarked is sent to the horse tribe lands to the east to determine were the mercenaries I sent there earlier disappeared to.
Meanwhile, more Nemedian warriors are recruited for a “mysterious” purpose. I now also have enough money to recruit a king almost every turn. Or at least when I'm not building a fort.
A strange and awkward singing stone has also been found. It is immediately moved to a nearby pub were it is put to use. Drunk people find it to be hilarious apparently.
Turn 14
A bunch of new sites are uncovered.
The totem collection I already knew was there but the others were a pleasant surprise. We now have enough astral that we can remote site search once every turn. I dont have the research for it yet, but arcane probing will prove to be a continuous and massive waste of pearls for a long while in the future.
The owl quills also allow us to reach construction 2 this turn. The new trinkets are cool and all but we have not quite gained the level of proficiency were we can start mass-producing things other than quills.
The horse tribals were forever mournful of their sins, and we sent them to the land of the dead so they could apologize to the late mercs in person. No casualties.
Meanwhile, a fort has been completed in Nardago and several more forts are being planned or constructed around the lands with the help of my prodigious gold income.
Nothing much else happens because living in a land with Order 3, luck 0 scales is really peaceful.
(Future me: With the exception of the, like, four-five times that I have been invaded by barbarians due to other peoples scales.) A couple of kings join the group of mages responsible for manually searching for magic sites.
Turn 15
On the surface of things nothing much happens this turn either.
A magical air site is found in the land of the obstinate horse tribe . And to celebrate that I get an events that give me air gems.
Nothing else much of note is happening in my lands, so I must spy upon other lands to get some excitement. Looking around a bit I can see that Marverni have taken the city of Ermor from Rlyeh.
I doubt they are actually at war as I can't see how Marv would get down under water and I doubt he would invade someone without the means to finish them of. Still, that Marv would have the guts to boss around not just one, but two nations that are bigger than himself and get away with it... Is impressive. Thats one brave bastard.
The construction of a fortified city was started in the plains of Hesperia last turn. Normally I build cheaper forts, but there is something to be said for an admin 50 fort with lots of neighboring provinces sometimes.
An expedition force is also sent to greet the barbarians living in the Dragon ridge Pass. Their weird gods and traditions should be no match for giants. I will show them once and for all that magical larping is no basis for a proper religion.
Despite having the biggest empire out of all the players I have not found a single scout province! This means that my only source of information from outside my lands are the score graphs.
So here are some of the current ones.
On the Province graph we can see two important thing. 1) Damn I'm big! And 2) Abysia and Pan is losing lands while Arco is growing rapidly. This can only mean that Arco have attacked Abysia in the back as he in turn was busy attacking Pan.
On the fort graph we can see that the first forts are coming online for several of the players. R'lyeh lacks underwater capable enemies and seem to be determine to fort up the entire ocean before he get any.
On the income graph I am equally monstrous as I was on the province graph. But I did not get this way until I started overtaxing my capitol. As far as I can tell I am the only one who is utilizing this short term strategy.
The army graph is also interesting, as not only does it show that I have bypassed freespawn Pan in army size, it also shows that Aby just destroyed most of Pans armies with relatively light losses of his own. And might therefore be able to dedicate a large part of his forces towards fighting Arco, as Pan just got a lot less dangerous.
But the big thing to take away from these graphs is of course that Arco followed my suggestion of attacking Abysia.
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!
Re: Multi-Player After Action Report (Now Discussing Turns up to 13-16)
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