NvV3: Pre-game Discussion

melnorjr wrote:

Skinu wrote:Heres my best plan to date, any advice would be appreciated.

Awake Great Sage

Dom4 Or3 Pr0 Co3 Gr0 Lu0 Ma3

F1 A4 S4 E1 D1

My expansion is alright, but a bit slow, ive got a few raiding parties of about 20 fliers, about two dozen elephants expanding, 60 rp a turn with three forts by the start of the second year.

The only thing I'm really worried about there is your dominion. In a multiplayer game you want 6+ dominion if at all possible. Mainly atm, it would save you from being accidentally squished by allied dom.

Allright, Changed it to dom 6 or3 sl1 co3 lu0 ma3, same magic

Squirrelloid wrote:So, I'm wondering what Pangaea, Bandar, and Agartha are planning on for the early game? Because i figure by the end of year 1 i'm going to have around 100 dai-bakemono archers on the nearest vet's borders, with 40-60+ new ones and suitable (2-4) mage support all headed that direction each turn. That should be enough to keep a vet fairly busy i'd imagine. The named four of us are the upper half brute-squad, so some support (especially from the other side to keep the vet occupied elsewhere) would be appreciated.

Also, with Agartha opposite me it sounds like we're splitting the ocean, bar whatever Ermor manages to eek out. I'm thinking if Ermor is kept suitably occupied, I might be able to help swarm someone under fairly easily with a continuous stream of dai-bakemono and mages.

The plan at the moment is for the top two and bottom two noob nations to attack the vet in between them while the rest of the noobs converge towards the center and attempt to overrun one or more of the vets there. The noob nations at the tips are theoretically the strongest and should theoretically at least be able to hold the tip vets and maybe do enough damage to force the vets to reinforce their end positions.

You and agartha are supposed to get into the water, and your job is to kill enemy SCs dead.

If the turmoil/luck works for you just stick with it, it's fine. The most important thing is that you're able to produce bakemono sorcerers from as many forts as possible each and every turn. If you can accomplish this your build has succeeded.

Speaking of which, there's no way I'm getting farther than Constr 2 for awhile. My research priorities look like

Alt 2/Evoc 3/Conj 3 then Conj to 4/Ench 5/Evoc to 6 in some order (probably that one). Constr 2 I can slip in there if absolutely vital, but more than that is a pretty big detour. And I really need to get fire arrows, tiamat's, and magma eruption/banefires online asap. So i'll probably be asking for some fire boosters to help with that fire arrows goal because I can't even natively forge the constr 4 booster before i get to constr 6.

On the other hand, my nature gems are likely going to be free for whatever purposes people want them for, as my native nature magic is not exciting.

rdonj wrote:
If the turmoil/luck works for you just stick with it, it's fine. The most important thing is that you're able to produce bakemono sorcerers from as many forts as possible each and every turn. If you can accomplish this your build has succeeded.

Eh, I figure I can turn excess cash into more fortresses either way.

The GK is ideal for water expansion. Ok, i haven't tried running him into amber tritons yet, but he handles everything else just fine. (as opposed to land where heavy cavalry are a problem, and massed archers can result in afflictions).

melnorjr wrote:Right now I'm looking at an awake titan research god with 35 research points, 6S1N magic 3order/1sloth/1cold/1magic/7 dom strength. My expansion is a little slower than I'd like, but by the middle of year two I'm becoming a major magic powerhouse - by the end of year two I could probably take on Ashdod solo without major worries. The thing I'd be weakest to at the moment would probably be air raiding.

I'm half tempted to name them "DormantSC" or "Imprisonedbless" to see if I can confuse the vets. Hey, a noob might make that mistake, right? since they haven't played any MP they might forget that the other players can find out their God's name.

I know you like super scales, twobits, but elephants are my main troop, and at 120/20 gold to resource cost, sloth doesn't hurt me at all. my power is in my mages anyway.

Thoughts?

You're Arco, right? So one thing, that means you're on "point" - is your build sufficient for dealing with the Vets ASAP? Elephants of course are good, but with "easy" research, counters might come early, and if I recall, Arco's other units are pretty resource intensive (at least for the "good" ones?). Then again, with extra cash from Order-3, maybe you can just crank out extra forts.

Certainly Arco does have lots of magic power potential, with high-end Astral + E/F/W in various combos, all communion-able. You just have to stay alive long enough to enjoy it

Squirrelloid wrote:

rdonj wrote:
If the turmoil/luck works for you just stick with it, it's fine. The most important thing is that you're able to produce bakemono sorcerers from as many forts as possible each and every turn. If you can accomplish this your build has succeeded.

Eh, I figure I can turn excess cash into more fortresses either way.

The GK is ideal for water expansion. Ok, i haven't tried running him into amber tritons yet, but he handles everything else just fine. (as opposed to land where heavy cavalry are a problem, and massed archers can result in afflictions).

Well, if you're really swimming in cash with an Order-3 build, you could always share some with your teammates

O-Bakemono can work fine in expansion, if you use arrow decoys - at first, your crappy club-bakemono can act as catchers, then it's easy enough to scrape up some indie-infantry with shields to do the job more efficiently.

The Dai-Bakemono longbow archers are great, but once you have Flaming Arrows, I think you can get 3-4 times as many of the short-bow archers at the same price. And from FA, quantity definitely has a quality all its own

Regarding operating outside your dominion to avoid your Drain scales, that's great, if it can be done, but don't count on the Vets to let that situation happen easily.

And I still think Shinuyama has no need for an Awake combat pretender (or heck, any pretender at all ), but it's your call.

My Pythium pretender:

Imprisoned White Bull, N4, O3 P3 H/C0 G3 L/M0 M3.

Expansion is incredible, cash is abundant, and research is very rapid. Zero need for an awake pretender

TwoBits wrote:

melnorjr wrote:Right now I'm looking at an awake titan research god with 35 research points, 6S1N magic 3order/1sloth/1cold/1magic/7 dom strength. My expansion is a little slower than I'd like, but by the middle of year two I'm becoming a major magic powerhouse - by the end of year two I could probably take on Ashdod solo without major worries. The thing I'd be weakest to at the moment would probably be air raiding.

I'm half tempted to name them "DormantSC" or "Imprisonedbless" to see if I can confuse the vets. Hey, a noob might make that mistake, right? since they haven't played any MP they might forget that the other players can find out their God's name.

I know you like super scales, twobits, but elephants are my main troop, and at 120/20 gold to resource cost, sloth doesn't hurt me at all. my power is in my mages anyway.

Thoughts?

You're Arco, right? So one thing, that means you're on "point" - is your build sufficient for dealing with the Vets ASAP? Elephants of course are good, but with "easy" research, counters might come early, and if I recall, Arco's other units are pretty resource intensive (at least for the "good" ones?). Then again, with extra cash from Order-3, maybe you can just crank out extra forts.

Certainly Arco does have lots of magic power potential, with high-end Astral + E/F/W in various combos, all communion-able. You just have to stay alive long enough to enjoy it

Yes, I'm arco.

My biggest danger early I believe is vanheim or eriu - particularly van. Ashdod would have to bum rush me on turn 3 or 4 to hit me before I have any counters. Ermor would be vulnerable to elephants really early on, and if they start trying to use mages I can start doing mind war/magic duel spam - and my mages have better astral than theirs, and cost less than 1/2 theirs - unless they spam their 1S guys for 40 gold less than my level 3-4S guys. If they use shadow vestals, I can research solar rays in one turn, and cleansing waters in another 3 or 4

And I'm betting I've got a 50/50 chance of fighting ermor. Ermor is almost gauranteed to be on one of their tips so they have water access.


And aside from that, it would be really pushing it for someone to kill me in less than 2 years. If they take longer than that, I'm golden.

Twobits, may I ask the reasoning on your Pretender? Scales and the bless? If you took the lord of fertility for 9 more points with the same n4 bless, you would have a probably stronger SC - the white bull is probably stronger early, but since the lord of fertility has more useful equipment slots, and has awe, it would probably win out as the late-game SC. You would lose 1 dominion for it though. Taking the bull for the dominion?

I'm eventually going to be getting construction as well. Probably can't count on it early game, but late game I can start forging some good stuff.

Oh right, research plans.

As Machaka has some rather good combat magic, I think I'll be grabbing things in the following order:

evocation 3 (fireball, sleep cloud, magma bolts, flames from afar)
construction 2 (legions of steel, fever fetishes, hammers)
thaumaturgy 2 (site searching, dust to dust, bonds of fire)
conjuration 2 (dark knowledge, some high-attack units like horned serpents or scorpion beasts who can also be arrow blockers with high protection)
enchantment 3 (raise skeletons, dragon master, strength of giants)
construction 4 (thug equipment)
conjuration 3 (path boosting spells, revive bane)
evocation 5 (blade wind, breath of the dragon, falling fires, flame eruption, shadow blast, poison cloud)
etc.

comments?

TwoBits wrote:
The Dai-Bakemono longbow archers are great, but once you have Flaming Arrows, I think you can get 3-4 times as many of the short-bow archers at the same price. And from FA, quantity definitely has a quality all its own

Regarding operating outside your dominion to avoid your Drain scales, that's great, if it can be done, but don't count on the Vets to let that situation happen easily.

And I still think Shinuyama has no need for an Awake combat pretender (or heck, any pretender at all ), but it's your call.

Oh, once I have FA I fully intend to darken the skies with arrows. But until then, dai-bakemono make very efficient indie expanders who won't need constant reinforcements.

And its not that I need a combat pretender, but that having one really improves my tempo. About the only alternative I'd consider is a research pretender to jumpstart my magic.

melnorjr wrote: Twobits, may I ask the reasoning on your Pretender? Scales and the bless? If you took the lord of fertility for 9 more points with the same n4 bless, you would have a probably stronger SC - the white bull is probably stronger early, but since the lord of fertility has more useful equipment slots, and has awe, it would probably win out as the late-game SC. You would lose 1 dominion for it though. Taking the bull for the dominion?

Yep, the Bull was much more efficient, worth one more point of dominion or another scale than the Lord of Fertility, and only 1 point left over. No, he wont be much of an SC chassis, but I can slap a Moonvine bracelet on him, and he can cast nature buffs and such until the cows come home

N4 is for the Shrouds.

O3 P3 G3 = crazy levels of cash (castles, mages, hydras), and a resource base that may eventually be less useful, but should still give me loads of flexibility (a heavy infantry meat-shield, serpent riders, etc.).

M3 = +2 research of course, but also 30% less fatigue from spell casting, and I believe a -1 to MR, which is like a free penetration magic item on all my mages when they're casting things like Soul Slay.

Forgot to mention, a starting Dominion of 7, which is not exactly stellar, but I'll have plenty of priest for preaching if necessary

I have decided to switch to an awake (sort of) SC.

My awake immortal rainbow was great against indies but once I boosted the AIs up I realised that once I started fighting proper troops the low attack really starts to hurt. It was just embarressing watching all my Giants swish and miss against the smaller Vanheim Hirdman opponents (not even the Vans!) with their 14 defence. Giant attack is just too low to hit reliably. Adding Vaetti helps but they keep dying.

An awake SC should have enough Buffs to help hold up a Vet rush against me. And I need Alteration for my Skrattis in any case. He's a Titan so not really a solo SC unbuffed, but he's good by the second half of the year. And with air & earth he can support my armies later. Plus the minor air/earth bless is good for my Woodsmen which I need early on.

This will slow any move in to forging and lessen my magic variety later. But I think it will make me much more dureable until I can get my Thugs going.

We're just waiting for Caelum's pretender to be submitted, right? Lets get this thing going.

Right once that happens this monster of a thread will be locked. Lets move any leftover pre-game discussion to the Turn 1 thread. May the gods grant us luck in our just and mighty struggle and good luck to all of you.

So one last thing then. I've got CBM 1.5. Anything else I need? Where can I get the map? Are there things I don't need/want for this game - I've got some Standards and Streamers thing going on, will I need that turned off when I load up this game?

That might be a useful tutorial for some of us Noobs - regarding mods, do we have to enable/disable each and every various mod before we load our game turns every time, or is that somehow done automatically? Just don't want any cock-ups once we get started...

TwoBits wrote:So one last thing then. I've got CBM 1.5. Anything else I need? Where can I get the map? Are there things I don't need/want for this game - I've got some Standards and Streamers thing going on, will I need that turned off when I load up this game?

That might be a useful tutorial for some of us Noobs - regarding mods, do we have to enable/disable each and every various mod before we load our game turns every time, or is that somehow done automatically? Just don't want any cock-ups once we get started...

I don't think you need anything else but the CBM and the map.

Get map from here http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=43195

As for the other mods, I think I read from somewhere that all but the mods the game had on when it started are disabled automatically when you load a game.

Joelz wrote:
I don't think you need anything else but the CBM and the map.

Get map from here http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=43195

As for the other mods, I think I read from somewhere that all but the mods the game had on when it started are disabled automatically when you load a game.

That is correct, you only need the map and CBM. When you create a game whatever mods were enabled at that time will be used, everyhing else will be disabled. I believe the same goes for pretender creation. When we start, the game should use the settings on Llamaserver by default, that is CBM 1.5 will be enabled, everything else will be disabled. But you may want to check and make sure only CBM is enabled when either creating the pretender (if 1.5 makes any changes to pretenders) and/or before loading up your first turn.