MP: YARG3, non newb MA+ENP2 RAND game. Executor's Ulm winner on turn 76

[WraithLord]

Valerius, now you know why I do all in my power not to need a sub


Executor: I admire how you managed all that MM. Not sure whether I could.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Valerius

"Supposedly Valerius is something of an idiot savant when it comes to glamour nations. I can now confirm the idiot portion of that description is accurate. Let's start with the W4 bless. This was probably taken because it will be a big help defensively when the thugs get swarmed. Or maybe because it will help the elite sacred troops Eriu doesn't have. After all, why take some S magic or even better scales when you can waste points on a useless bless? But through some fluke you may actually reach Constr. 8 first. Of course forging somewhat useful things like the chalice or gate stone will be out of the question since you've done nothing to diversify from your national magic. And even the things you can forge will have to wait a few turns since why bother forging the requisite boosters ahead of time so you're ready to go when you reach Constr. 8? Speaking of research, why have all your mages that aren't otherwise occupied actually research? Just for fun leave some of them on 'defend' orders. I've seen worse positions in my time - by newbs. Actually, many newbs play better than the incompetence on display here."

Lol, thanks for that Valerius, and it's duly been copied, pasted and saved for when I do one day sub for you. Yuo know, I could get used to this 'players writing my rants in advance' thing. As it'll save me a load of time if nothing else. Maybe from now on I'll start stipulating that as a requirement for me subbing... "Hi I'll sub for you if you like. Can you please give me a brief run-down on what's happening, oh and of course the obligatory rant that I would write five minutes after checking the position out. Thanks."

Also haven't forgotten about the PM's Val. Not had free Dom time for a while to get back to you properly (recently there seems to be a never ending flow of people who need ranting at which gets high priority for my free Dom time ). Two weeks is the usual turn around though isn't it? so I still have some time to play with

Originally Posted by Korwin

One thing I need to say:
Holy **** that was an impressive ~18 pages introduction to the game I got.

About 50% of those pages were guilt from YARG1, as I had to sub-out there in a very tricky position and promised rdonj a full write-up for my incoming sub on how to deal with it all. (as otherwise a quick death was certain). But RL took over and I didn't manage to provide even a single word of advice, so thought I'd make up for it this time The other 50% was trying to cover every angle of the position and the forthcoming Ulm war, as there was a lot going on when I left that needed mentioning. (plus rdonj told me my sub was a bit green, so thought the more info I could provide the better, which is why there is a lot of obvious stuff mentioned)

Not sure how relevant what I wrote was when you took over though, as it was written for my immediate successor, and I'm probably right in guessing a LOT changed between me leaving and you arriving.

--------------------------------------

RE: Mod nations often being a bit OP.

I've found that one regular problem with mod nations ending up OP is that the creators pick bad choices for comparisons. ie. "This unit/summon was priced on nation X's unit/summon". As the tendency then is to pick 'one of the best' unit/summon to copy. Which ends up with the mod nation having the best value archers, best value HI, best value mages, best value summon etc etc, cherry picked from all the standard nations. With the obvious result being the nation becomes OP and with far too many good 'things' at their disposal. But maybe it's only me that's noticed that trend.

Originally Posted by rdonj

Calahan isn't so subtle... he's all about manifesting that vitriol

Yep, I no do subtle. I was forced to for a few years of my life. Never again. Hated every moment of it and it certainly wasn't 'me' at all. Vitriol is a type of cake isn't it? Hhhhhmmmmmm, cake

[Valerius]

Rdonj, I took a quick look at the current Itza (just recruitables, didn't have time to check out the summons) and I agree it's much better. In addition to the magic weapon changes (which are very significant) I see the cold-blooded tag has been extended to the Kroxigor as well (and I'm not sure that I realized just how severe the cold-blooded penalties were when we played Tourmaline). At a glance I'd agree they certainly have plenty of strengths but are much more reasonable.

Interesting observations regarding mod nation power. I think Cal's comment re: picking the best units from various nations as comparisons without necessarily considering the cumulative effect of this (and not necessarily having offsetting weaknesses) is also a good point. And it occurs to me that probably most nation modders are looking to create a strong nation rather than an average, let alone weak, nation. For one thing, they'd like their nation to be played and more people will shy away from playing an underpowered nation than a strong one.

I also wonder if other mod nations are used as a baseline and if those nations are strong you want yours to be competitive with them? I guess this would apply more to the Warhammer nations since they have shared theme but could apply to historical-themed nations as well.

Btw, aside from wariness about power level I'm not at all against mod nations and am actually quite impressed with many of them from the sprite work, to the imaginative themes, to the technical approaches to accomplish things (retinues, etc.).

All this is a bit off-topic but not horribly so since YARG 3 did include mod nations. And I've actually been meaning to ask about this for a while so I'm glad it came up.

Originally Posted by Calahan

Yep, I no do subtle. I was forced to for a few years of my life. Never again. Hated every moment of it and it certainly wasn't 'me' at all. Vitriol is a type of cake isn't it? Hhhhhmmmmmm, cake

Good point regarding sarcasm vs. vitriol. I probably put too much of my own personality in that post rather than staying in character.

Originally Posted by Calahan

Lol, thanks for that Valerius, and it's duly been copied, pasted and saved for when I do one day sub for you.

Yuo know, I could get used to this 'players writing my rants in advance' thing. As it'll save me a load of time if nothing else. Maybe from now on I'll start stipulating that as a requirement for me subbing... "Hi I'll sub for you if you like. Can you please give me a brief run-down on what's happening, oh and of course the obligatory rant that I would write five minutes after checking the position out. Thanks."

Glad you enjoyed it. Though it occurred to me afterwards that I might have had better material to work with if I'd gone with my FoB "Blood Elves" build. What? You don't think it's practical to turn Eriu into a blood powerhouse? Just think, during the endgame you might up to a half dozen empowered Claws-casting Bean Sidhe!

Also, I wonder how many people's self-assessment would match your verdict.

Originally Posted by Calahan

Also haven't forgotten about the PM's Val. Not had free Dom time for a while to get back to you properly (recently there seems to be a never ending flow of people who need ranting at which gets high priority for my free Dom time ).

Two weeks is the usual turn around though isn't it? so I still have some time to play with

No problem; given my rather relaxed responses to PMs I'm quite patient in return. And rants do need to be posted promptly - just doesn't have the same effect if you only post a few days later.

[Mightypeon]

Originally Posted by Executor

Rejoice! A true God has ascended!
Thank God (me ) for that. The mirco started to became a real issue for me around turn 60ish. I started to lose interest in the game somewhere along my war with Shiny. The last few turns were critical too, was ready to leave the game at one point but decided against it as it would be really ****ing unfair.

Well I think this game is a perfect example to how ridiculous Ulm with the Forge is. I hope this will be enough to convince people to remove it from Ulm. A random no diplo game was probably the best circumstance to test it under.

WL, I assume you're Vanheim? I recognized your play style. I'm wondering what made you cast AC finally?
I'm pretty certain I could have rolled over any one of you without loses at that point in the game, and could have fought the rest of you with relative ease. The AC changed that considerably.
I was forging 50 items a turn for quite some time. Those 3 large army of mine possessed about 500 items between them total. Every turn was enough to equip a strong army of mine with good items and add a few SCs and thugs.

As for those thugs I think I had about 30-40 banes total. You completely screwed me over when casting AC btw.
I planned to use the gate stone to teleport a huge army on top oif one of your forts and hide 40 banes among the troops which would arrive in the regular phase with flying bots. The next turn would have been all your provinces captured in a single turn. I planned to have you completly defeated in about 4-5 tuns time. Kinda pissed off I never had the change to do that.

All in all I think game was pretty insane for me. I hit the 32000 research around turn 45. I could have done it faster but there was no point since I was the clear leader in research. Actually hit const 8 on turn 30 with hard research which I think stands for something. At one point I probably had over 100 lanterns. 100 gems for 600 research, another ridiculous thing.
Most of the items I could forge were laughably cheap. At one point I calculated that I could summon and equipped several thugs and a complete army with a load of stuff at the price of one your thugs or SCs.
It's quite possible that I forged over 1000 items over the course of the game. For a long time I recruited nothing but commander in every single province I could just so I could distribute bows, and other stuff to commanders. BTW, I could never recruit as many commanders as I could equip.

Best commanders to recruit was always spies. Give them bows and drag them along in hidding than reveal that at important battles. I think I won some major battle with Ashdod and Shiny that way. At one point I switched completely to them instead of mages. It was fun watching Vans and Svarogias income cut in half.

Anyway, it's been an interesting game to say the least. I hope all that transpired in it is enough to remove the Forge from Ulm.
I would also like to congratulate the rest of you all for joining up against the leader. I've never seen that happen in a no diplo game and wasn't really expecting it.

Rdonj, give me the names of my adversaries please!

Some tangents concerning CBM Ulm:
1 Gem items are totally sick. How much use did you make of Crystal Matrizes and Crystal shields? I am constantly forging 5 or so crystal shields per turn, this gives simply soo many options to further support large armies (Any Smith with a Crystal Shield can cast flaming arrows, warriors of Muspelheim, Heat from Hell etc. A random smiths can cast Wind Guide and Arrow Fend etc, S randoms add Antimagic...) especially if you lucked into some indies. Got an A2 from somwhere? Mass flight ftw! N2-N3ss with a crystal shields can also cast intersting things too.

Iron Angels are cool, but have the misfortune to cost E.

Did you preplan for the dreaded "magic is fading" event?
I lost an insane amount of gems to it in a goongame, it happened about 3 times and wiped about 50-100 gems per happening.

[Executor]

I used matrixes but I didn't use too many since you need a mage to carry them and mages weren't major parts of my army. Besides, I also had the problem of the 50 item per turn limit and only 15 or so astral smiths, so other stuff took priority.
Things I mostly used astral for were astral caps, coins, eyes of void, spell focus, lucky pendant, crystal ords, AMA, and herald lances.
Had 11 fully equipped mind hunters when AC broke out. Shiny had the pleasure of meeting most of them. Each one of those costs 50-60 gems without hammers now days.

As for crystal shields, I forged those like crazy.
An S1 smith with a crystal shield + astral cap + crystal coin (11 gems total I think) and you can cast WotF.
An A1 mage with helmet + wind bag + crystal shield + matrix (around 25 gems total I think) and you can cast for warriors, mass flight, etc.
A F2 smith with it for flaming arrows.
Earth 3 smith for army of lead, earthquakes and such.
You could pretty much cast any spell A/S/F/E with little to no trouble.

Most of the items forged were used for thugs and SCs though.

I mostly used mages for support and buff spells. Items were used for spells and bows/crossbows for troop support. And of course every army had at least some SCs and thugs. Each army was well rounded and prepared to deal with just about anything.

A typical army which took over Shiny consisted of;

Lighting bows and spirit helms for lightning damage, rods of incineration for fire (I was a BIG fan of those for only 5F gems!), staff of numbness for cold (stun, fatigue) damage.
Herald lances for undead, massed bows of war under flaming arrows, boosted mages for first round flaming arrows, WotF, antimagic, blessings of iron and army of lead. When need arose there was a mage for fog warriors and mass flight as well.
Armies consisted of heavy flail infantry under weapons of sharpness and strength of giants along with the regular battle wide buffs.
Along side those there were always some Treants, Grendels and banes.

The craziest thing for me were probably the 8-15 gem banes which had some pretty insane stats and uses. Banes with 40 defense, anti SC banes, raiding banes, etc. They came in pretty much every variety.

Never had the magic is fading event happen to me in all my Dominions games.

[rdonj]

About mods some more :P

I think it is definitely true that in the case of new modders, they have a tendency to do exactly that. A number of mods were originally made by people with little experience with the game, particularly in multiplayer. And these people do often get sucked into comparing vs iconic units. Some of these nations eventually were taken over by more... sane modders who had a better idea of what sensible balance was and were willing to make changes to them. One of those is Chaos, which started off in crazy town and has been getting slowly pulled back ever since. I'm still not sure if they're balanced yet, but I've not played the most recent version :P They've come a long way though.

With more experienced modders, they do sometimes make mistakes, but I don't think this is really one of them. I know for example that sombre uses a unit balance point that strives for consistency with the rest of the game. However, he likes to experiment with unusual mechanics and abilities that may not exist in vanilla nations. And warhammer nations need to be thematic for the source material, which sometimes makes for a tricky crossover into dominions. Let's look at Warhammer Empire for a moment. In the warhammer universe, they have access to all generic magic paths, but not to race-specific magic paths. If they didn't have access to basically every path in dominions, then it would be highly contrary to the source material. This in itself is a major difficulty for balance as complete diversity is a huge strength in itself. In order to try and lessen the strength of their diversity and prevent the recruitment screen from being excessively cluttered, he made all of the empire's mages into summons, and gave them only incredibly useless 1 path mages for recruits. Initially, people were thinking that if anything being forced to summon their mages using gems would make the empire weaker due to not having many gems for other things. However when people actually got the empire into MP games it was realized that it in fact was a unique and powerful strength for the empire. Despite the fact that they had reasonable upkeep prices, it mostly allowed the empire to divorce itself from having a real gold economy and traditional for time concerns, and their ability to mass mages was eventually deemed too strong. The empire still has amazing magic diversity (all paths but blood), but they now buy their basic mages normally and their military strength has been weakened significantly from its former levels.

There are a number of similar examples in mods where the effect of a unique national ability was decided to be unexpectedly powerful, only to be put in its place later :P Most mod nations start with at least one thing that turns out to fit in this category, but when they are discovered they are usually changed pretty quickly.

Now, with Amos mods, he was open about his lack of worry over balance, and was only concerned with the internal balance between his different nations, ignoring vanilla nations altogether :P


Executor - Ugh, it's ridiculous when it's cheaper to turn a level 1 mage into a level 4 caster than it is to get EDM summons. It sounds like your nation got extremely silly by the end there. That was sounding pretty similar to play under a clamming environment. Except you're the only guy who has them.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by rdonj

About mods some more :P

Thanks for the feedback! This conversation actually has me wanting to start a mod nations game. The Warhammer nations are of course excellent but I tend to be drawn to the Dominions-style nations based on real world cultures. I very briefly subbed as Al-Nadim in one of Exec's games and I really like their theme so maybe I'll organize an ENP2 game once my current game advances a bit more.

[Mightypeon]

Originally Posted by Executor

I used matrixes but I didn't use too many since you need a mage to carry them and mages weren't major parts of my army. Besides, I also had the problem of the 50 item per turn limit and only 15 or so astral smiths, so other stuff took priority.
Things I mostly used astral for were astral caps, coins, eyes of void, spell focus, lucky pendant, crystal ords, AMA, and herald lances.
Had 11 fully equipped mind hunters when AC broke out. Shiny had the pleasure of meeting most of them. Each one of those costs 50-60 gems without hammers now days.

As for crystal shields, I forged those like crazy.
An S1 smith with a crystal shield + astral cap + crystal coin (11 gems total I think) and you can cast WotF.
An A1 mage with helmet + wind bag + crystal shield + matrix (around 25 gems total I think) and you can cast for warriors, mass flight, etc.
A F2 smith with it for flaming arrows.
Earth 3 smith for army of lead, earthquakes and such.
You could pretty much cast any spell A/S/F/E with little to no trouble.

Most of the items forged were used for thugs and SCs though.

I mostly used mages for support and buff spells. Items were used for spells and bows/crossbows for troop support. And of course every army had at least some SCs and thugs. Each army was well rounded and prepared to deal with just about anything.

A typical army which took over Shiny consisted of;

Lighting bows and spirit helms for lightning damage, rods of incineration for fire (I was a BIG fan of those for only 5F gems!), staff of numbness for cold (stun, fatigue) damage.
Herald lances for undead, massed bows of war under flaming arrows, boosted mages for first round flaming arrows, WotF, antimagic, blessings of iron and army of lead. When need arose there was a mage for fog warriors and mass flight as well.
Armies consisted of heavy flail infantry under weapons of sharpness and strength of giants along with the regular battle wide buffs.
Along side those there were always some Treants, Grendels and banes.

The craziest thing for me were probably the 8-15 gem banes which had some pretty insane stats and uses. Banes with 40 defense, anti SC banes, raiding banes, etc. They came in pretty much every variety.

Never had the magic is fading event happen to me in all my Dominions games.

I actually use Smiths in battle, but often, only 50 Smiths can forge items per turn, and if you ahve that number (it may be less if you have some cursed artificats in storage), you will propably still have an excess number of smiths capable of playing battle assist. Strength of Giants, Eart Meld, Destruction and ofc Magma eruption are all usefull spells.
I also like weapons of sharpness a lot, there is not a lot of things that are immune to weapons of sharpness Strength of gianted Flail troops.