Completed Dominions 6 - Rise of the Pantokrator: The New Decline a.k.a ProfessionalThroneSitters MP Match (Polish Victory!)

[InD_ImaginE]

Unfortunately, something bad happened immediately afterwards.

They are heeding my advice well on sea dwellers. Respekt to the Slingers

 

[InD_ImaginE]

So while we have Tien Chi bowl (more like TC butchering shop with how it is going) here in the center of the map, what are the Elves, Amazons, Abysia, and friendly giant sqeecoo doing?

 

[Demo.Graph]

Did summoned air units always default to landing on commanders? That's quite powerful.

In previous games flyers homed in on random group. They could "attack rear", but, IIRC, had to pass morale test to fly over everything inbetween. So they usually failed it and attacked some random heavy inf box.

we definitely couldn't have won against *checks notes* 7 archers and a light infantry with no commander.

You should've brought some indep shield chaff. Or placed fat armored guys forward as arrow catchers. Your troops are notoriously vulnerable to archer spam.

 

[coldcrow]

Ok I don't mind spilling some beans about my nation here, it's for fun anyways. The experiment gone awry (disease spreading) hit a province, which was quite a lucky find for me. ~30k pop. and library site (scholar S1 mage, 17RP), which singelhandedly carries all my research. Now I can picture the situation to the fullest: at the research institute a delicate magical experiment went out of control, everyone screaming and running, but it still works.. only every researcher has a terminal illness a few months after hiring. The RNG giveth, the RNG taketh. AARRGH.

 

[Dayyālu]

In previous games flyers homed in on random group. They could "attack rear", but, IIRC, had to pass morale test to fly over everything inbetween. So they usually failed it and attacked some random heavy inf box.

Ah, I do remember the good old times when mind-controlling the Heroes you could get the famed "attack commanders" (or it was something like that) and copy&paste the order.

 

[Malakal]

In previous games flyers homed in on random group. They could "attack rear", but, IIRC, had to pass morale test to fly over everything inbetween. So they usually failed it and attacked some random heavy inf box.

Ah, I do remember the good old times when mind-controlling the Heroes you could get the famed "attack commanders" (or it was something like that) and copy&paste the order.

Yes the adventure party with the troll guy. Good classic meme.

Ok I don't mind spilling some beans about my nation here, it's for fun anyways. The experiment gone awry (disease spreading) hit a province, which was quite a lucky find for me. ~30k pop. and library site (scholar S1 mage, 17RP), which singelhandedly carries all my research. Now I can picture the situation to the fullest: at the research institute a delicate magical experiment went out of control, everyone screaming and running, but it still works.. only every researcher has a terminal illness a few months after hiring. The RNG giveth, the RNG taketh. AARRGH.

Lucky, I haven't found anything good.

 

[Johannes]

2 gems a turn is still a nice consolation price, you can still hire mages, just gotta move them elsewhere which is a 1 turn research delay. Annoying but you still get some use of the province

 

[Damned Registrations]

You should've brought some indep shield chaff. Or placed fat armored guys forward as arrow catchers. Your troops are notoriously vulnerable to archer spam.

It wasn't even a matter of archer spam really. They got all of 5 kills. It was partly a misplay on my part, giving too many formations to the indie commander resulting in painfully low morale for the militia, and the new morale system, which allow individual units to rout. The mage routed before his troops even got hit really because he saw the indie militia routed from essentially nothing. Pretty sure this wouldn't have happened in the old system. The PD had 17 kills on my army of 98, and half of those were lobo guards that have 50 morale. I would have won the fight if I'd left the indie troops behind.

Honestly it makes me leery of using the mindless units at all; losing all of them because the commanders fled is much, much easier now than it used to be. It was bad enough worrying about them getting sniped, now I have to worry about them shitting their pants too? Maybe I should give them berserker items....

 

[Popot]

Around elves, watch yourselves!

 

[Dayyālu]

It's Elves. it's what they do, they elf.

Also I never got Ur to work, best of luck my Earth Magic Friend

 

[InD_ImaginE]

It's Elves. it's what they do, they elf.

Now that Illusion magic is a distinct path with the blessings to counter them and spells to counter them being part of the path itself I am wondering if it's worth it to take them during Pretender creation just in case you have a game with Elves

 

[Johannes]

you can't really stop sneakers from sneaking, whether you have glamour magic yourself or not

 

[Catacombs]

Sneakers no sneaking!

 

[Dayyālu]

I have played this shit for years and the sight of a smattering of Lion Tribe PD killing an (admittedly small and with poor morale) Merfolk raiding party was for sure something.

What Pantokrator did you anger for such shit luck, Damned Registrations ?

Also, Pyrene, this time are you going to go in? Don't you fear the Olms, they're cute af

Spoiler

 

[Tanaka]

I have played this shit for years and the sight of a smattering of Lion Tribe PD killing an (admittedly small and with poor morale) Merfolk raiding party was for sure something.

What Pantokrator did you anger for such shit luck, Damned Registrations ?

Also, Pyrene, this time are you going to go in? Don't you fear the Olms, they're cute af

That battle was a thing of beauty. I have never seen such a heavily outnumbered battle won either. I see the fishy people want my mushrooms as well. War it is then!

Agartha I am enjoying our dancing in the dark!

 

[Optimist]

Well, folks, gg - I think I am on my way out. Only thing I can probably do now, with Mekone taking over more and more ground, and neighbors deciding to help divide up my corpse, is to recruit some chaff to make fort sieging a bit more annoying. Hopefully, their neighbors will avenge me!

Dumping some of my thoughts and plans in the spoiler below, but overall thanks for the game; let's do another one ASAP.

blah blah blah

I like playing as Marv, I really do. They have a problem of being a human-centric nation in EA, but their gimmicks are fairly versatile and fun to leverage. Their infantry is very OK, with berserking, tattoo-activated carnutes being almost like rec-anywhere mini-sacreds. You get easy access to huge communions, druids bring fairly wide path access, and you can mindhunt to your heart's content with solid bodies combined with easily-craftable S boosters. And then there are the boars - you can do a lot with large, trampling sacreds that you can effectively freespawn at C6.

So yeah, I planned to go prod-heavy, expand and fort myself wherever possible, go to Thaum 1 -> Ench 3 -> Conj 6 -> Evo/Thaum X, start summoning great boars and boost myself up to global rituals. To this effect I went with a light bless for the boars which was supposed to make them perfect tramplers (LARGER + swiftness) and used a full-slot body with wide-ish paths to craft most of the boosters/ artifacts I had in my mind .

And then sqeecoo made sure that the humanity received a grim reminder.

My game wasn't going too badly, though. I think I was the first one to take two throne provinces (although I didn't claim the other throne as it'd tank my productivity...), and I don't think my situation was hopeless at the beginning of the war, far from it. Mekone was able to bring many more hoplites to the table than I thought feasible, but what really brought me under the water was that I
- Didn't realize that Mek1's weapons are magical and thus will tear right through my carnutes invulnerability, and
- Didn't bring enough bodies to the table! I didn't really have that many more human warriors available before the critical battle, but I could've ferried many, many more druids and Sequanis to the front line and/or summon a few sounders of boars. I honestly thought I had an advantage in (in)human capital, right until I received the battle report - overconfidence is indeed a slow and insidious killer. Sadly, I didn't take screenshots - with llama I'd just reload an old save, but I don't think this is an option now. As it was, it was a massacre, though, with @squeeco losing about 15% (I think?) of his army and me getting demolished. From there on I retried a siege break with more mages and a bunch of boars, and it felt like I had much more success there, despite lack of heavy-hitting axemen. So yea, mage support, I guess.

It feels as though expansion got noticeably more difficult, and the next time I'll do EA Marv I'll go for an expansion pretender. The standard strats of massed javelineers and flanking eponis seemed work much worse than they did in the past, I had to bring small armies against most of the provinces. This slowed down my expansion noticeably - once we're done with the game I'd be keen to hear how many other players were under 10 provs at the end of y1.

I'm on the fence regarding the new diplomacy system. It feels like NAP-3 is waaaay too much time, and it feels like everyone might try to NAP every single of their neighbours to focus on a single opponent - with lack of NAP being effectively a declaration of future war.

 

[Dayyālu]

You got sqeecoo'ed, there's no dishonour in that. Always remember not to believe his lies.

I did not notice you going out, but my scouting web in that area is nothing short of horrendous. Regarding expansion it needs a lot of planning this time, Cave expansion in particular is flat-out murderous and I barely hit the 12 provinces by year 1.

Can you even break a NAP? I did binding diplomacy mostly for testing purposes, but three turns aren't a lot, maybe the next game we can do the standard non-binding. About another game, maybe when we reach the point that the majority of players want a 48 h turns. We're still managing a brisky 24h-turn, and I honestly fear a lot burning out on lategame.

 

[Optimist]

You got sqeecoo'ed, there's no dishonour in that. Always remember not to believe his lies

Eh, no lies here, just a few turns of nonaggression followed by mutual understanding that violence is unavoidable. I was actually planning to hit Ulm, as my big stack was right on his border the turn squeecoo informed me that he's itching for a fight.

Can you even break a NAP? I did binding diplomacy mostly for testing purposes, but three turns aren't a lot, maybe the next game we can do the standard non-binding. About another game, maybe when we reach the point that the majority of players want a 48 h turns. We're still managing a brisky 24h-turn, and I honestly fear a lot burning out on lategame.

That what I was interested in finding out! I think that as long as diplomacy is set to binding, you can't move your units into enemy territory (I.e. you can give an order, but it will be ignored). This doesn't seem to apply to scouts or stealthy armies (from what I've been told), so I'm interested in how those interact - would be funny if patrollers politely ignored armies of nations you have NAP with.

And NAP-3 actually seems to last a bit longer than expected - i.e. turn 1 you declare war on another nation, turn 2 the other player receives the message, turns 3 and 4 have NAP counting down. You can't give attack orders on turn 4 though, need to wait until the next one. All in all it seems like enough time to wrap up a siege someplace else, and then transfer your stacks to another border. This, in turn, makes situations where players are not willing to fully commit to invasion due to someone else being able to leverage that much less likely to occur.

 

[Popot]

I see Agartha closing in on Pyrene capital, did the big underground battle happen?

 

[Dayyālu]

I see Agartha closing in on Pyrene capital, did the big underground battle happen?

No

Pyrene has done nothing bar running around in circles for the last 6 turns with a 350+ strong army. I got tired of waiting and started raiding, he pretty much refused to meet my raids head-on, kept running around with his gigastack and I'm raiding his capcircle while his 350+ strong army is still running around in circles. I'm not exactly sure why a hellbless build is giving a scale Agartha time to research and summon shit by the dozens, but there must be a plan, I guess

Yes I'm salty I play this for the joy of smashing huge numbers or pixelmen and I am being refused

I just want to see the pixelmen die

 

[Tanaka]

I see Agartha closing in on Pyrene capital, did the big underground battle happen?

No

Pyrene has done nothing bar running around in circles for the last 6 turns with a 350+ strong army. I got tired of waiting and started raiding, he pretty much refused to meet my raids head-on, kept running around with his gigastack and I'm raiding his capcircle while his 350+ strong army is still running around in circles. I'm not exactly sure why a hellbless build is giving a scale Agartha time to research and summon shit by the dozens, but there must be a plan, I guess

Yes I'm salty I play this for the joy of smashing huge numbers or pixelmen and I am being refused

I just want to see the pixelmen die

You declared war on me and am salty I am not attacking you? Isn't this supposed to be the other way around? Hehehe I'm too busy chasing mushrooms mannn...

 

[Malakal]

I see Agartha closing in on Pyrene capital, did the big underground battle happen?

No

Pyrene has done nothing bar running around in circles for the last 6 turns with a 350+ strong army. I got tired of waiting and started raiding, he pretty much refused to meet my raids head-on, kept running around with his gigastack and I'm raiding his capcircle while his 350+ strong army is still running around in circles. I'm not exactly sure why a hellbless build is giving a scale Agartha time to research and summon shit by the dozens, but there must be a plan, I guess

Yes I'm salty I play this for the joy of smashing huge numbers or pixelmen and I am being refused

I just want to see the pixelmen die

You declared war on me and am salty I am not attacking you? Isn't this supposed to be the other way around? Hehehe I'm too busy chasing mushrooms mannn...

Sooner or later one doom stack will stumble into enemy EQ casters and its going to be over...

On a unrelated note Ulm is selling cheap rings of floating.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Sooner or later one doom stack will stumble into enemy EQ casters and its going to be over...

On a unrelated note Ulm is selling cheap rings of floating.

What, to reduce the carnage? Ryleh is selling cheap earth boots and gems!

 

[Malakal]

Well its actually an interesting match up and dance.

Giants can nuke with EQ without big risk to themselves but they will get paralyzed by olms.

Oracles could perhaps survive an EQ but agarthan troops would get obliterated.

We'll see who outplays who.

 

[Hag]

Well its actually an interesting match up and dance.

Giants can nuke with EQ without big risk to themselves but they will get paralyzed by olms.

Oracles could perhaps survive an EQ but agarthan troops would get obliterated.

We'll see who outplays who.

This problem would be solved elegantly if there was a way to flood the caves (I think you can do it in CoE actually).