I still cannot relax after the game was suddenly over so decided to put some AAR at least...
First of all, congratulations to Calahan & DrP, you played well and deserved the victory. Also, thanks to our admins for their work and to Zeldor for interesting map.
Some pre-game stuff: initially I was contacted by Zeldor who offered me to join his new big team game, I was interested but I had 3 big games at that time so decided to skip it. Then one day I saw a message that the game was ready to start for several days but one of the teams disappeared, so IH was looking for sub. I talked with Kuritza by ICQ and we decided to take it. We were given strange combination of nations, MA Arco + Kailasa. I can understand the reasoning for this team with clams, but without them, it makes no sense. No blood no death. Average start. So I asked IH if we can change one of the nations, and since there were no objections I decided to take a nation I know well enough, LA Ctis. Now, probably we could’ve changed the second nation as well to something more familiar to Kuritza, but the other teams were choosing their nation with the possibility of not getting what they wanted so we decided that changing only one nation will be fair enough. Anyway LA Ctis + MA Arco was much better combo in my opinion, with strong death, potential wish caster without empowerment, forge lord available, etc.
Here I have to say that we hadn’t much time to do the pretender design really, considering the fact that we agreed to play just before going to sleep and were asked to submit pretenders in 24h (so for example I had about 2 hours to actually do it). So I didn’t even looked at the map or considered other teams when doing it, I just took my favorite Lord of Rebirth 4x4 (earth nature air death 4), set d to 2 and gave him also s4 for access to golems and some nice arts. Kuritza took Forge Lord to do rings and stuff later and to help with initial expansion.
Now I seriously think LA Ctis is underrated by many, and the score of 4 is just wrong. I agree it’s not top LA power, but it has strong position during all game phases and worth at least 6 or 7 imo. Also their research is very good, with recruitable anywhere good researchers, mentors and lamps easily accessible. My pretender design 1) gives minibless to the sacred mages 2) allows to search for vital nature and earth 3) allows forging of hammers and boosters. Also good SC chassis for early wars and mobile early RoS caster. Air was necessary as it was the only source of high air for our team, and as I said I added S for the chalice and gatestone.
My research plan for the game (again, without looking at map or teams) was I think standard for LA Ctis – some ench for skellies, constr all the way to 8, with branching into evoc for banefire or alt for lowlevel buffs, drain and darkness in case of need, then conj for tarts and embers. Kuritza wanted to put the fire global asap to have enough fire for many embers as it was sort of hard to go into tarts for him, while fighting with communions before he gets to them.
OK, so the initial part is more or less over I think, so to the game itself.
First of all, when I looked onto the map for the first time, I was really confused
Actually we planned for me to do initial fighting and Kuritza to build our backs, but I started near the caves and he was in the inner part. My initial expansion went pretty well (all the game I was hiring only desert rangers from cap and I only hired a group of falchioneers once when I still hadn’t enough chariots, desert rangers are very cool) and the initial search also went well, on turn 10 I had: 4 reanimators, +8 d/turn, ench 20 site and library next to the cap. Ench site was really important as it allowed summoning more reanimators. So I started to move into the caves.
The cave part of my expansion also went relatively well, as I already had a good stream of chariots and desert rangers to deal with preset indies without mage support, so most of the mages were researching, also I found 5n 20 thaum site on turn 15 with my pretender which was clearly made for my tarts strategy. I met my first neighbor, EA Arco, when I took one of the provinces next to gateway. Honestly, I didn’t know about preset sites before I did it, but as soon as I saw it I understood that it’s time to look into map a bit more. So I understood that I will gain more by continuing into the caves than by attacking arco that already had the oak at that time. Also at that time I made “map import” feature in my dom3xTester, which allowed me to test the battles with preset indies much faster. By turn 20 I was first on the province graphs, second on research and was going to take the gateway province. Then I took another side of the gateway, and went for another one on the opposite side of my caves. Also I started to capture underwater caves that I had access to, so on turn 30 I had pretty big empire without fighting with anybody.
On turn 31 I finally hit constr 8, and it was the beginning of the end:
turn 32: Failed creating The Chalice, Tome of Gaia, dimensional rod, etc.
turn 33: Failed creating Sickle, etc
turn 34: Failed creating Gate Stone, etc
So we lost most of the gems we accumulated this way. In the end we had the +3d scepter, sword of Aurgelmer, the Ankh and several lesser ones. And the Tart strategy suddenly became 10 times harder. At that time Kuritza saw the opportunity to attack one of our neighbors, Sauro, I didn’t have much to help him there so just continued with my cave expansion. I made several golems however and aided him a few turns later, and I killed 30+ sauro mages with RoS by my pretender, so soon Sauro was crushed except for one big army in the center of Arco lands and Kuritza continued to move into their valley. After some debate we decided that I need access to the battlefield so I stormed the central island and invaded machaka caves.
At that phase (most of the spells researched) my strategy of playing LA Ctis consists of deploying “standard armies” of 100-150 chariots + some rangers, 15-20 sauromancers, buffers for AM, Army of Gold, LaD. These armies are strong enough to kill ordinary enemy groups while their loss, painful in itself, can be replenished in 2-3 turns. I deployed several armies against Machaka and started to slowly move into his lands, he castled all his caves and used RoS and quakes on first round to kill my mages, also they all became deceased due to his poison golems in sieged castles, but anyway I managed to capture most of his castles (his poison golems were really hard to kill, somehow my mages didn’t like to banefire them so I needed to put them all in front to spam disintegrate, fortunately 20 mages spamming disintegrate for 50 rounds were enough to kill mr26 golems even with bottles). At that time Aby started to invade TC, I knew it was the final chance to stop them but didn’t have enough forces to actually do it as the tarts were not ready yet and standard armies were not enough to deal with Aby/Jotun demon armies. We decided to keep the nature to put unbeatable GoH so I had practically no tarts at all (only 2 were commanders & not stupid out of 20+). Also all the game we had problems with the air (for example, in the end before raidings I had +13 A while the next lowest one N was +24) so we weren’t able to forge enough storm staffs to deal with flying demons. So after our twins EA Arco + EA Ctis invaded everyone we had the choice to attack J/A and die, do nothing or attack someone else so we attacked Mictlan and Man. At that time J/A started raiding us and the game ended.
At the end I had 5 standard armies with the addition of grendelkins and ember lords, very powerful group at the central island and 700+ gems GoH. I was hoping for some interesting fights (although I agree that we had no chances alone). Anyway, it was pretty interesting game. Thanks everyone.
PS Also I attach the last trn file here.
Re: Preponderance 2 [epic team game returns!]
Linear Mode
