MP: Crusaders - Mod Heavy Ea game [Game Over - Kietsensei wins!]

[llamabeast]

Hello! Many apologies for my silence, I meant to respond here straight away but have had a hectic few days with little time near my computer.

Kietsensei - you have indeed clearly won. Congratulations, and very well played. I hope you enjoyed the game.

Everyone - this was by far the longest game of Dom3 I have ever played, and I have played a lot of games. So if you found that it dragged, don't be put off! It was quite an extraordinary long stalemate at the end there, in which I believe several of us were simply sitting there biding our time.

Apologies to have put up no resistance at the end. Believe it or not, I had essentially nothing to throw at you. Really. Actually, I have never ever played so catastrophically poorly in a game before. At almost every stage after the beginning I was appalling. I shall elaborate.

The beginning went well enough. I expanded quite fast, using parties of double blessed S9A9 Tuatha sacreds. I met and made an NAP with Abysia to the north, and then encountered Arcoscephale to the east. I planned to attack Arco, but before I could do so he was overwhelmed by Yomi. I decided to attack Yomi, and I think did quite a good job of crippling his economy without a single fair fight. I had little parties of Tuatha all through his land, constantly taking provinces and then moving on. I would very probably have lost in a fair fight, but soon enough Yomi was reduced to a few scattered troops and a handful of provinces, while still fighting Arco who was also down to a couple of provinces.

Then came a ghastly, ghastly land-war-in-Russia period of twenty turns or more(!!), in which I tried to stamp out the last remnants of Yomi and Arcoscephale. In the hands of any competent player it would have been trivial, but I kept on bungling attacks, failing to storm forts despite having greatly superior forces (leading to the troops inside bursting out to capture land once again) and so on. Catastrophic. By the time that was over my development was a mess.

However I had developed very effective Sidhe thugs (that I had never tried before) and I was a world power in terms of income. Arrogantly I decided I could take down T'ien Ch'i, so I set about doing so. I poured huge amounts of resources into kitting and cloud trapezing thugs onto T'ien Chi's land - maybe as many as twenty in the end, with eight taking part in the initial surprise attack. The initial attack went very well indeed, with most provinces captured, and I was sure T'ien Ch'i was doomed. At this point a new player took over and I felt sorry for him. However he quickly took decisive action and hunted down my "invincible" thugs, killing them off one by one. I had failed to provide any effective backup for them, and soon my attack was a mess. However I finally managed to research Gateway and brought in a huge army to the very north of the map. Seeing the failure of my war on T'ien Ch'i I diverted the army to Helheim's unguarded capital (his last remaining province) and laid siege to it. A couple of turns later I tried to storm the castle. I forget exactly what went wrong now, but it was a catastrophe of epic proportions and horribly frustrating (also completely my own fault). My entire northern army was lost to a man, including tens of irreplaceable Tuatha Sorceresses.

Then, back in the south, bad things happened. I forget exactly how it went, but it was something along the lines of Oceania and Lanka teaming up to stomp me. Lanka invaded me with a huge army of many hundreds of undead, while Oceania managed to nick Arcoscephale's capital literally a turn before I was about to _finally_ capture it, reducing me nearly to tears. Somehow I managed some rather pleasing diplomatic turnaround (I think logic was on my side to be fair) and Oceania changed sides. With Oceania attacking his homeland Lanka was unable to properly support his invading army, which I gradually killed off, while my Sidhe Lord thugs proved easily able to kill his (Devala?) thugs with Cleansing Bells. The Lankan attack was repelled, Arcoscephale was transferred from Oceanian hands, and all the land claimed by Tir na n'Og since about turn 20 was finally restored.

It was clear now that I couldn't win in any fair way. My wars had been a series of shambles, and I had nothing like the strength expected for that stage of the game. My only remaining option was to be a complete weasel. So, I decided to go for Arcane Nexus (which, for future reference, I now think should be banned). A ridiculously overpowered spell, once I had it up I had ~100 pearls coming in from it a turn. Via wishes for gems, this translated to an extra turnly income of 25 of each gem type.

I could see it would still take me a long time to convert my gems into power, so I set about creating an invincible fortress. Choosing a random castle in what used to be Arcoscephale, where my pretender had ended up during the war against Lanka, I dug in. I put up all the domes apart from the blood one, brought in literally all my mages, and trained about 1000 troops to occupy it. I also had ~20-30 engineers from a nearby site, adding 30 more siege resistance each. As far as I was concerned I was invincible there.

I then set about systematically putting up all the most powerful globals I could. Gift of Health, Well of Misery, Forge of the Ancients, and finally Burden of Time. This last one I was hoping would cause huge problems for everyone but me, but in fact it seems to have been a bit disappointing.

I funnelled all my new gems into building up a decent magical setup. I summoned three Ether Lords and empowered two of them to be able to cast Wish. I also got five Demiliches summoned, and began equipping them to cast Tartarian Gate. I Wished for the Chalice, so as to have a monopoly on Tartarian healing. I used the Forge to start mass-producing clams. I got to about 20 when the final disaster happened.

Abysia must have had a LOT of gems. When he put two of his globals up (which I think I had been responsible for dispelling before) he knocked out both Arcane Nexus and the Forge. On the same turn I had had a huge spending spree, and used up my entire stock of pearls, mainly on empowerments. So in order to try to put it back up, I alchemisted literally all my remaining gems, recasting the Nexus with 400 gems. It failed.

I was now in the position of having a colossal horde of mages stuck in a fort, with a load of mundane troops, but no late game power to speak of. A had a single Tartarian, a manticore, and a load of Ether soldiers. I could cast Mass Protection and Fog Warriors, but little else, as I still hadn't finished research. In the meantime Oceania had started pouring into my lands (having conquered most of the rest of the world). So I guess when a few busy days happened, the motivation to take my turns wasn't quite there...

Well played again everyone, especially Kietsensei, and many props to everyone for sticking out the long late game. Hope to meet you again in-game sometime.