Strategy and Tactics of the Enemy

He was probably given money by teammates and built it on turn 2 or 3. Hill forts take only 3 turns to build.

Well that's the good spin on what is happening Squirrel

The bad one is that he has been using Sidhe Lords etc as expansion army leaders but he now has something like Cloud Trapeze researched - and last turn moved most of his Thugable leaders back home to his Labs so he can jump this turn. Hence little expansion last turn....

At over 200 reserach he has enough for both Cloud Trapeze and Mistform probably. Plus he (or team mates) might have forged him some very zero or Construction 2 stuff. Snake Bladder Stick (Con 2 Nature 1) and Snake Ring (Con 0, Nature 1) are a very cheap, very early and very nasty combination as area effect poison of the SBS is pretty deadly on a hard to hit Thug. Luck Pendents are Const 2 as well.

Are any of us reseraching Construction? We could really do with some hammers. It will be hard to fight Thugs without some of our own. And there are simply no MA recruitables that are really Thugs without some equipment.

I hope they haven't forged up too much. They wont have so many gems by turn six, and if they spend time forging, they weren't using mages for research or anything else. Hopefully...

Anyhow, we'll find out soon enough.

The long awaited Turn 6 vet review here. But i'm going to change things up a bit. Instead of just reviewing the vets, I'm going to reorganize those tables llamaserver spits out into a more useable form, and then divide them into three tiers. Some might be simplified depending on how much variation there is.

Vets are in bold.

Now in own thread!

Bandar Log has 900 income, and yet we only need to spend around 200-300 a turn at minimum. Atleast that means I have enough gold for the forts and temples I'm planning over the next couple turns

Abysia lost something like 4 gem income this turn from what it had last turn. Not sure what happened there. Barbarian attack?

TURN 7

Large Vanheim army spotted. He has 60+ decent troops in White Forest (34). He attacked with 20 Einheir & 20 Huskarls in the centre. With two flanking forces of 9 & 13 Skinshifters on each side. There were 3 Heavy Infantry indies following behind and a Indie Commander and Herse Commander.

This force is much stronger than anything I have after my earlier disaster. But it seems to be reasonably vulnerable to archers as neither Skinshifters or Einheir have shields, all though the latter have Prot 14. And even the Huskarls only have Parry 4 on theirs. No visible mage support - so no mist or other anti archery spells (but he lacks reserach anyway).

But his army can cause a huge amount of damage quickly. My Giants would be swarmed and go down fast. It should be vulnerable to numbers of tramplers but they would need critical mass due to the high damage this army would cause.

Wow Squirrelloid that was a great review post

Thanks!

As long as I'm arrived at my parents place and not tired, while I don't have access to my game I *do* have access to the llamaserver summary data!

Now moved to its own thread...

Squirrelloid wrote:Please also note the explosive growth in T'ien Ch'i's income.

Yeah, this is one of those things I was referring to in the turn thread. TC went from a very average 997 last turn to a rather inspiring 1764. That's quite the jump. And considering his province count I'm not quite sure how he did it. Another thing happened that I think is worth noticing... vanheim's gem income just tripled over what it was last turn. That's pretty damn impressive.

rdonj wrote:

Squirrelloid wrote:Please also note the explosive growth in T'ien Ch'i's income.

Yeah, this is one of those things I was referring to in the turn thread. TC went from a very average 997 last turn to a rather inspiring 1764. That's quite the jump. And considering his province count I'm not quite sure how he did it. Another thing happened that I think is worth noticing... vanheim's gem income just tripled over what it was last turn. That's pretty damn impressive.

A few lucky searches will do that for you (the gem spike - i don't know how you spike income like that without taxing everywhere like crazy). I mean, admittedly finding like 10 gems/turn in one turn is a little obscene, but finding multiple sites and a good site included per searcher and I can see it with 3-4 searchers. Ridiculous luck though.

I don't know how you can plan on expanding gem income like that. I've had SP games where i've gotten a great province or two right away (3-4 sites from one search), and other games where finding gem sites is like pulling teeth.

Well, you can't really plan on it, it's pretty much pure luck on these settings. TC does have good multi-path mages, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to see them pull that off with several researches scoring on one turn. For vanheim it's a bit weirder. He has mostly air and earth that can score sites with actual incomes. So it's pretty impressive. He probably got lucky and found the whirlwind of cyclon or something.

I had a game once as ma c'tis... I searched my entire empire with dark knowledge and found ONE extra gem. So I know what you mean.

rdonj wrote:

Squirrelloid wrote:Please also note the explosive growth in T'ien Ch'i's income.

Yeah, this is one of those things I was referring to in the turn thread. TC went from a very average 997 last turn to a rather inspiring 1764. That's quite the jump. And considering his province count I'm not quite sure how he did it. Another thing happened that I think is worth noticing... vanheim's gem income just tripled over what it was last turn. That's pretty damn impressive.

Like C'tis, I suspect T'ien Ch'i has cranked up taxes at his capital (and maybe elsewhere) to 200% - if I did that, I'd add about 900 extra gold to my score.

As far as Vanheim, dang, I don't know, aside from massive luck (found 10,000 Things site or some such).

Turn 8 in review has been moved to its own thread.

Battle Tactics of vanheim so far:

Not sure this shows much. It's not sophisticated as there is no magery involved and the enemy just wants to get close quickly. So everything just charges forward apart from the arrow catchers and the Commanders (only one shown but there is an indie commander too).

Not sure if there are any hidden Vans Stealthing along with them to provide mage (Vandrott/VanJarl) support.

Also this is set up against indies. Probably would change if Elephants were involved.



[img][/img]

If marignon is using fire arrows as it looked like based on his massed crossbowman, would it be worth considering bringing in abysia to fight him from the right side(fire arrows won't help much on abysia), or caelum from the left(air shield ruins archers)?

I'm starting to worry about remote unrest and other territory attacking spells, especially with my pretender design - if the Vets manage to shut down my capital, I'll be hurting in a major way.

My original plan this turn was to recruit 40 slingers to patrol my capital to deal with minor to moderate unrest events, but I changed my recruitment to have gold to send to Arco. I still plan on doing that soon though, as my initial defensive method. Hopefully, we'll have a couple more turns before the nukes start flying.

Everyone might want to consider how they will protect valuable territory from these kind of attacks, especially races that require a lot from their capital. Eventually, I'll be aiming for Dome spells, but those will be a while off for me.

TwoBits wrote:I'm starting to worry about remote unrest and other territory attacking spells, especially with my pretender design - if the Vets manage to shut down my capital, I'll be hurting in a major way.

My original plan this turn was to recruit 40 slingers to patrol my capital to deal with minor to moderate unrest events, but I changed my recruitment to have gold to send to Arco. I still plan on doing that soon though, as my initial defensive method. Hopefully, we'll have a couple more turns before the nukes start flying.

Everyone might want to consider how they will protect valuable territory from these kind of attacks, especially races that require a lot from their capital. Eventually, I'll be aiming for Dome spells, but those will be a while off for me.

I suppose my correct answer to that is to withdraw Pipsqueak, hand off his dai-bakemono to another army, and use my starting troops (only lost 2 of them so far) to patrol my capitol.

Hmm, at first I thought the vets might try a north/south strategy due to their placements, ganging up on the weakest in either hemisphere. But also possible I suppose is an east/west push.

Our placements are very good offensively and also pretty good defensively, though there are some chinks in our armor. The vets could conceivably lean or push either east or west at the same time using the bulk of their attack/damage troops on own side of the map whilst concentrating only on defense on the other side.

In that situtation, the 8 noobs in the center could expect help from their noob neighbors to the north and south even if they were to come under attack from two vets at a time. Additionally any noob could ask for the noob on the other side of the map to apply pressure on the opposite front.

Our point noobs, however, would only have a single neighbor to the north or south in addition to the neighbor accross the way to help out immediately, so they might be at a bit of a disadvantage if the vets are following such a strategy.

Nothing to really worry about mind you, I'm just wondering what their overall strategy is. Are we getting more contacts/activity in the west that might prove this? Or will the vets take advantage of a percieved weakness in the south or north perhaps to try a north/south coordinated assault. I guess we will know soon enough.

Hoplosternum wrote:Battle Tactics of vanheim so far:

Not sure this shows much. It's not sophisticated as there is no magery involved and the enemy just wants to get close quickly. So everything just charges forward apart from the arrow catchers and the Commanders (only one shown but there is an indie commander too).

Not sure if there are any hidden Vans Stealthing along with them to provide mage (Vandrott/VanJarl) support.

Also this is set up against indies. Probably would change if Elephants were involved.



[img][/img]

Interesting, was this the enemy setup before anyone moved? Were the skinshifters staggered as they are in the picture, some forward, some in the back? Or is it just near/far distortion?

I got some excellent scouting information this turn, since I saw Eriu expand into a province. Baalz is using an expansion force of a single Sidhe Lord and a "Fianna", which I assume is some sort of national hero.

Turn 1: Sidhe Lord blesses (prot +4, reinvig +4, regen +10%... Earth 9, Nature 6 or 7), Fianna waits
Turn 2: Sidhe Lord casts air shield, Fianna waits
Turn 3: Sidhe Lord casts mistform (!), Fiana waits
Turn 4: Sidhe Lord casts barkskin (prot 21 now), Fiana waits
Turn 5+: Sidhe Lord and Fiana rape indies.

Would anyone happen to have some tips how to deal with Eriu? He will probably be using lots of thunder strike to counter my very heavily armored infantry.

I'm sure someone will get back to you on Eriu more fully but apparently they've got no cavalry or missle troops other than commanders and slingers. I believe someone mentioned something about lightning protection and such.

For TC, with their long speared or pikewielding infantry, I suppose high morale units would be good against their infantry.

I think I've figured out what Baalz did...

First research priority was Alt 3 for barkskin/mistform. Alt 3 would account for ~120 of his RPs thus far, which might mean no thunderstrike *yet*.

He's thugging with Sidhe lords and light on troops. His pretender is probably giving him a rainbow bless like F4E4N4S4 and some other stuff. (F and S are easy with a Great Sage, E and N are desirable).

(if i were him, i'd also have beelined Constr 2)

His army size is also rising very slowly. By 6 or so a turn for the last couple of turns. I am guessing he is buying only Thugs at this point. So I suspect he will fight you with only those rather than his national troops.