MP: Retold - CBM (Dom3minions blitz game), started

[iRFNA]

I liked your thug MIRV, though. I tried to hit it with ritual summons before it happened but somehow you evaded!

[Tryfan]

Lavren crosses the 300 kill plateau, and C'tis's capital is beseiged!

[iRFNA]

Lavren has AIDS.

[Tryfan]

I'll be domkilled before he dies, so IMO he will find a cure and live out his days happy in obscurity somewhere.

[iRFNA]

There is no cure for AIDS.

[Tryfan]

You just ain't gonna kill him C'tis...

Can you imagine how much fun you would have had had I been given enough time to make more than seven of those guys total?

[Tryfan]

Aaaand there's the domkill. Eriu capital withstood every attempt to capture it, from Vanheim's turn 4 or 5 rush to the huge toad and snake armies later on. Might have held on longer but the god was killed by something silly (a horror maybe?) because she was scripted for large battle fighting rather than a one on one fight and that was a big dominion hit.

So, postmortem for Eriu:

The situation was realistically hopeless from the fourth turn on. Abysia rejected the NAP offer and took Utonshire on turn 3 (with its construction bonus), and Vanheim took the NW province to my capital on the same turn. I think a lucky provincial defense random event helped defeat Vanheim's rush attack because Eriu's regular troops certainly aren't capable of doing so on their own (Eriu was at 53 PD in the early going).

Vanheim stopped its attacks to concentrate on Abysia but the damage was done. Realistically I HAD to be the one to fight C'tis, no one else could even reach him, and severely crippling me with an early game double rush while failing to actually finish me off effectively should have handed the game to him on the spot as he had something like 20 turns or more to build up unopposed. Failing to kill me, a reasonably close second option would have been to finish off Abysia fast too; by that point Vanheim would have been at a disadvantage, but not a decisive one. But Abysia held out too. I never saw the battles at Abysia's capital, just the results, and they were flabbergasting; it must have occurred to Vanheim at some point that they needed to start using anti-mage tactics rather than just throw army after army of shapeshifters at it but I never saw it.

I'm happy to have held on this long but after C'tis declared war I should have been dead a dozen turns later at most. C'tis's armies moved very, very slowly. He also had an incredible reluctance to take my outlying territories; at one point I held territories inside his own island area with no defense for something like six or eight turns. I made a bad tactical mistake early on when the four thugs I had available moved in front of his main army; they routed because the PD routed and one died the rest scattered. I was careful not to let them fight in provinces with that much PD after that but that was a costly defeat. Luckily for me it was also the ONLY defeat any of my major forces had and that kept me in the game.

Twice, huge armies were butchered at my capital. Winds of Death won the first one while two thugs and the elemental summons held the hole in the wall. Wrathful Skies won the second though I forgot to script my mages for defending from it and a half dozen or so died.

All in all it was an entertaining game even if I was reduced to role of spoiler. I don't think I would want to play Eriu again, though. I dunno if I mismanaged their strategy but they played like a weak version of Vanheim to me.

That game might have been a LOT different if my capital had been just one or two provinces removed to the east...

[iRFNA]

Just out of curiosity, did the death curse horror marks ever yield horrors?

And I was afraid of committing to battles in random, extraneous provinces because there could be a thug hiding behind any rock, any tree... I should have just went to your capital and preached you to death with my first army, honestly. Without that gate as a chokepoint, breaking sieges would have given the day to the snakes and frogs.

And hey, at least give me credit, I could have smashed you when you were all beaten down. I waited until your score graphs looked above average before I declared war, but I certainly wasn't going to let you build up forever until you overran me with thugs.

[Tryfan]

Originally Posted by iRFNA

Just out of curiosity, did the death curse horror marks ever yield horrors?

Occasionally... because I didn't have much in the way of regular troops I maybe got a skewed look at them. I think one killed my weakened and counterscripted pretender at one point, but the thugs and mages usually just laughed them off. Not very often though.

And I was afraid of committing to battles in random, extraneous provinces because there could be a thug hiding behind any rock, any tree...

Very true but I never had very many of them. Perhaps I should have half-arsed equipped more rather than full equipped just a few, but I never had the gem income to ramp up.

Still it was cool having a bunch of guys rockin the 33 or 34 defense and 24 or so protection, mistformed and blessed. Maybe I should have not bothered with shields and just dual wielded my way through the frogs.

I should have just went to your capital and preached you to death with my first army, honestly. Without that gate as a chokepoint, breaking sieges would have given the day to the snakes and frogs.

Yeah, probably. There was no defense against your dominion, which is why the other players, Vanheim especially, needed to turn on you a lot sooner.

I fried every temple of yours I could get at but of course that is not nearly enough.

And hey, at least give me credit, I could have smashed you when you were all beaten down. I waited until your score graphs looked above average before I declared war, but I certainly wasn't going to let you build up forever until you overran me with thugs.

Sure sure, play with the mouse before eating it...

See you in the next game.

[attackdrone]

I started out strong but by the time I was heading towards Abysia Vanheim got caught with its pants down... well more accurately it was revealed that the skinshifters wear no pants!

Wearing no pants results in some pretty severe third degree burns, it seems.

It took me a while to scrape up a counter for Abysia's flying fire mage + demon squads. By the time I had done so, it was apparent exactly how threatening C'Tis had become. This meant that most of my resources went towards temples, priests, and hurricane / blights to try and hold off C'Tis, with a token force of six ungeared vanjarls plus two or three fire immune vanjarls (fire brand + shield of gleaming gold) to hold off Abysia. Every now and again I'd scrape up a few skinshifters to take a few provinces and rank up the tax to 200. In the last few turns I did wander a random pack of mages around, mostly for fun.

Those three stale turns certainly didn't help either! My other two games I am playing have moved to 72 hour turns, and this one is on a 24 hour timer, so I'd miss turns occasionally. Whoops!