Hi there :)

Found some time to continue my Merlin game (tiny map, 5 opponents). Here's the current situation:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=55282&stc=1

9. The Age of Colonization

After the defeat of Mordja, I actually had the time to build up my economy. The other mages were rather peaceful with the exception of Tlaloc, who declared war on me for the second and third time. However since Freya's realm stretches a long way between Tlaloc and me, he never actually attacked me.

During one of these "wars" I shipped my Champions to the island west of my mainland (the "promised land" where I found the goblins), on the northern tip of which Tlaloc founded a city. Capturing the city seemed easy, but exactly one turn before I started my attack, Tlaloc built the Firewall. I still won the battle, but lost one of my four Chanpions in the process. Also Tlaloc had reduced the city from size 2 to 1, so that I couldn't take it, but destroyed it instead.

His other cities were defended by Ents and mostly built on hills - too tough for my champions, so I left them alone and extorted 6 gold per turn from Tlaloc for peace. This was more than I expected, because I didn't have any possibility to attack him on his mainland, where he ran around with elves.

In this period of relative peace, all mages started to expand onto the still unsettled islands. Most of them are unfriendly blobs of tundra, but probably better than nothing. It was very interesting to see the AI aggressively hunt for empty islands.

To my surprise, one of Ariels cities (which was bordering Lifemound) suddenly fell to Freya. I don't know what happened. A cultural flip from a life mage seems unlikely, and I haven't seen Freya using other units than Ents and half-gnolls either (which are weaker than the sorcerers with which Ariel guarded her cities). But no matter how it happened, it gave me some room to cram another city in some now-free space to the north. This also lead to some interesting borders, e.g. Freya owning a stretch of land right between Vlad's mainland and four of his "colony cities" on another island.

Nearly every space of the world is settled now, and I wonder what will happen now. I built up my economy and continuously produced hammerhands in one city, so I feel pretty safe. I lead in score and culture, Tlaloc is second, Freya and Vlad follow. However Tlaloc grabbed several wonders, so he might be stronger than he looks. I think about a mutual protection pact with Freya, because if Tlaloc delares war on me, he then would face Freya on two fronts. However Freya might also get into a war with Ariel, and I don't want to lose Ariel as a trading partner. Presently I sell her three luxuries for 19 gold per turn.

Tlaloc is generally doing well. Freya is a little out-teched, but I'm still astonished how she wrenched this city from Ariel. Ariel is falling behind, but now has a (yet unconnected) resource of trolls in her territory, I wonder whether she'll use it. Vlad still holds his ground.

I think I'll take a defensive stand now, try to outproduce the others and see how they do. For me this is a new and very interesting way of playing a tiny map. Usually on tiny maps I rush-build offensive units early and just overrun my opponents. With the strengthened defensive in MoM, and being a life mage, this isn't as easy, so other strategies might be better.

Freya game report (continued)

We last left off with peaceful conditions and a period of infrastructure building and consolidation for Freya and her two neighbors, Oberic and Ariel.

I finally have the ability to produce corps now and have one under construction. My best producing town is around 23 after corruption and I am trying to optimize output by getting rid of the ancient forests and putting in regular forests or mines as appropriate. I am currently working on Ascendency on spells.

Lo Pan finally made contact and after doing some trading for maps, contacts and etc, I have a clear picture of the world and it is not a pretty sight. Lo Pan basically dominates the other continet with Merlin apparently the big looser (along with Morja who was blown out earlier). I had hope it would be a bit more even, but such as it goes. Other players include Tlaloc and Rjak. Merlin is down to 1 city on a remote island and Rjak is spread out and obviously has been on the losing end of a war. Tlaloc seems to be in fair shape considering his start location. Lo Pan has 55K for VP then Oberic, Freya, and Ariel are grouped together and then the rest.

Ariel proves not be much of a trusting neighbor and decides to get agressive with me. I managed to get a mutual defence pact with Oberic (why he did it, not sure) so now it is Oberic and I against Ariel. Ariel comes at me with over 100 units and the break down is basically as follows: 56 sorcerers, 29 clerics, 19 white riders, 1 champion, and 6 spiders. Ariel's mounted units take a beating against my units in good terrain, but she manages to get them out of the way, despite losses.

My best units are the centar, troll (6-3-1) and Gnoll ranger for the most part. The centars just don't have the offensive edge anymore to do anything against the sorcerers with reliability. (I loose 3 centars in a counter offensive against the loss of 1 sorcerer in open terrain). This will be a very defensive war for me as I try to hold and weather the storm of units and hope that Ariel exhausts herself on my heavily defended positions as I really can't do a lot offensively. My usual mode of operation is to typically counter attack on friendly territory, but I don't have the offensive units to make this work and be economical, so will have to depend on her attacking my good defenders. (sorcerer against Gnoll rangers in good spots are not a good match up).

She is trying to infiltrate past my southern city to the north, so I will have to do some attacking there sooner or later, but at least it is towards my production centers.

I did manage to trade for the nature summons spell from the other nature mage and have built a couple of the birds. Nice thing that I have been using them for is to rush troops to trouble spots in a hurry using the rebasing mission.

How long I will play this out just kind of depends. So far, it is interesting. If Oberic can put some real pressure on Ariel, it will help.

Hi Klyden :)

I like reading your game reports, especially the economic data you provide and the breakdown of large armies. One thing struck me as odd: Ariel is attacking with an army of 75% defensive forces? Is this normal, or is does your game have the upgrade chain Protector -> Sorcerer? If the latter is the case, consider yourself lucky. You might have faced dozens of white riders instead of the sorcerers otherwise. ;)

However I have absolutely no experience with troop movements of these proportions. Does the AI still defend its cities properly under these circumstances?

Does the AI defend it's cities properly under any circumstances?

To hopefully explain/clarify a couple things:

When Oberic attacked earlier, he sent in his offensive units first and then came in with both Sorcerers and the clerics (not sure what he expected to do with the clerics as they are 1-3-1's). Oberic took very heavy losses against both Ariel and I and lost most of his offensive forces. At the moment, he does have Wizards (4-6-2's) and also White Riders. Paladins are right around the corner I am sure, so my life will be really miserable. At any rate, he did attack Ariel with some White Riders (Did not have a lot I am sure after being reduced to 8 cities and having to rebuild some defensive units).

Freya joined the war late against Oberic. She sent in most of her offensive units against the city next to her and captured it. She then sent a ton of units at Oberic's capital, but it held and I speculate that Freya's white riders took heavy casualties. She never got a chance to really send in her foot units, although she was moving them that way when she made peace with Oberic. For me, I took balanced losses but probably lost more Centars than anything else taking the three cities from Oberic. My casualties soared when I had to start dealing with Sorcerers and while at war, I actually shut down being agressive to rebuild my forces. It takes most of my cities 6-7 turns or so to produce one centar.

To sum things up after the first war, Oberic was shattered as a military power, but had enough to dig in and hold. Of help to him was the fact he had just gotten the wizards and Freya just did not have the offense to dig a lot of those out. My military was ground down from losses, but in ok shape. Tech started to tell against me as my gnolls and centars went from facing 4-2-2's to dealing with more 3-4-1's and 5-3-2's. Freya lost much of her mounted army trying to dig out Oberic, but the vast majority of her foot remain unengaged. There was probably a period of 20 turns or so of peace. Freya used that time to rebuild her mounted troops, but they still remain smaller compared to her foot troops.

Both life mages had no issue using the sorcerers on attack along with moving clerics through enemy territory. (Not sure what the clerics are supposed to accomplish). Sorcerers with 3 point attack are not that bad of units to use on offensive. My best defenders right now are my gnoll rangers as 4 point defenders, so we shall see how they hold up. I have a tendancy to ignore the clerics as I don't think they can do much offensively.

As far as defense goes, I guess part of the question is what is considered an adequate defense? I have seen the AI typically hoard units in its capital and have it be in a relatively safe place and have the city at the front not have much in the way of defenses. I have also seen cities be jammed full of units too. To answer the question in this game, the cities that I took from Oberic had no less than 3 defenders in each of them. (think it might have been 5 in one, 4 in another and 3 in the other). For myself, I have a tendancy to put minimal weak units in my interior cities to maximise garrison happiness benefits, put a couple strong defenders in "front line" and "coastal" cities and also try to have a offensive "fire brigade" with perhaps a mobile defensive unit or two (gnoll rangers in this game would fall under that category) in reserve to deal with incursions.

Hope this helps clarify, etc. :)

Thank you both for the game reports. Lots of things that caught my interest in terms of future balancing. I'm too busy now to reply in length though. :(

Sorcerers are 2.4.1 in the latest patch BTW. I felt there was no point in the 3 attack.

Keep on playing. :)

I may note that the Life mages never used Sorcerers offensively in my game.

As for the AI's lack of adequate defenses, I don't mean they put too few defenders in their cities, but their fairly consistent failure to reinforce threatened cities properly when they're threatened. The AI understands concentration of force when it comes to attacking, but when it comes to defending, it tends to spread its troops all over the place, instead of concentrating where I'm actually attacking.

That's not really a bad strategy on their part. They force you to spread yourself when takinga city, then having to wonder where their next stacked offensive strike will be. They can easily retake a city that isn't defended well enough. At least they do this on higher difficulties. A real pain. It sort of forces you on the defensive after taking a city. You still have to send an adequate number of units to take the next city while leaving enough behind to quell the resistance.

Thing is, if I plop down sufficient force to take a city next to it, they won't take troops from currently undefended cities to assemble a force strong enough to defeat mine and not lose the city in the first place, despite having the opportunity to do this.

Double post removed

Update on Vlad game: I got attacked by Sss'ra, and after some ridiculously bad luck with the RNG, I was happy to get away with only two cities lost. Damn! Getting back from this is gonna be tough, since everyon is now bigger than me.

Oh, and there's a pile of trailing blanks in the city name Iron Wall.

2nd update: Got attacked by Lo Pan, and after another round of RNG evil - two Clansmen fortified in a city went down to two Chaos Warriors attacking across a river, for a start - it went pretty much downhill, so I retired the game. I'll start a new one shortly.

OK, started up a new game as Vlad.

The start didn't look very nice at first, with alot of desert and swamp just around my capital. I however again had several race resources close by - Lizardmen just beside my capital, and Orcs and Goblins a bit to the SW. I was also able to pump out Settlers quite quickly early on, thanks to a flood plain tile next to my start (no standard tile penalty rocks when rexing!).

After a super-early war with Lo Pan, in which I stole his starting worker, I settled in for peaceful rexing and building for a while. I even became the leading cultural power, which is rare for me.

Then I pounced on Sss'ra, who had been beaten up by Tauron, and took tow of his cities, incl the capital, and securing a second source of Lizardmen.

I'm now the biggest civ I know of, with Tauron as a strong 2nd. The next target is probably my ol' nemesis Lo Pan, who against started close to the south of me.

With some help of embryodead, I dug out his resources thread in the C3C forum. Can be found here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=69502). Very useful. There's still room for further study of course, but it's probably not necessary unless we get results radically differing from what embryodead's formula predicts. Will check that when I have some time.

@TLC: 122 turns, including wars, in 100 minutes? You're quick. :)

@TLC: 122 turns, including wars, in 100 minutes? You're quick. :)
So I've been told; Klyden commented on it in the ACW C3C thread.

Freya game continued:

Things are a bit tough for awhile as I try to hold against Ariel's onslaught of units. I managed to destroy a good size stack of white riders and spiders near my southern city and this takes a lot of steam out of Ariel's attacks on me and I am able to reenforce my other garrisons. Oberic decides the time is ripe to get one of his cities back and I loose my farthest city up the coast to him on a bribe, even tho the city has the Oblisk and is in a "celebrate the nature mage" mode. I loose a few units there, but not much I can do about it. A couple of turns later, Ariel takes it from him anyway.

Ariel continues to try to assault Oberic's capital and even gets several alliances going on the far islands to help her. The other nature mage is soon at war with several people and looses a couple cities to Lo Pan.

Ariel finally offers me a peace, which I take to get out of the war and continue to rebuild my forces and upgrade my infrastructure. Ariel and Oberic are just pounding each other silly and I don't have a problem with that. Lo Pan is going to win this game on points and not much I can do about it, but will continue to play anyway.

I have started to like the bird transport the life mage has. It allowed me to shuttle units around to threaten spots by doing the redeploy. Very handy.

I finally get Trolls 3 (what I have been waiting for) and go for Nature 6. I now have some offensive power restored and continue to build up. I have many cities over 20 now for production, but none over 30. I build up for about 15 turns and prepare to go to war with Ariel when I get nature 6.

On the eve of the war with Ariel, I have 171 unit army (allowed 56). Break down is as follows:

15 workers, 1 warrior, 4 raiders, 3 etten (in first army), 39 giants, 3 army, 16 Gnoll, 40 Gnoll ranger, 13 ents, 6 earth elementals, 8 Pterodactals, 4 catapults, 9 ships, 6 lighting spells, 9 centars.

As you can see, centars have almost disappeared from my force pool due to attrition and no upgrade for them. Giants are now my premere offensive unit.

Econ is 399 with 147 to sci, 32 corrup, 131 maint, 115 to units.

The upgrades to giants were cheap, but the upgrades from ent to earth elementals are expensive.

Some side notes:

Could not fast build a spell with a leader I had. Would think you could (Be nice to have completed that transmute spell right off the bat).

Consideration to making wizards 3-6-1's. At 4-6-2's, they are very powerful. There are two issues with them. 4 point attacker on a very powerful defensive unit (you were looking at reducing the sorcerers anyway). The fact that they move 2 means that faster units can't escape from them, causing their casualties to be higher.

I have run one attack so far in the opening of my war with Ariel. I took the city that she established early up along my west coast (a thorn in my side). There were 12 defenders, including 3 monk units. We will see what she has in her other cities as she has been pretty committed to attacking Oberic.

I'm not certain that embryodead is correct about unique resources being possible in C3C. I have several resources set to an appearance ratio of 1, which with his formula should give 0.09 per map with 12 players - but I still get 2 of them. My mod's playable (though not released) now, so I'll see how well his formula works out as I tweak my resources.

Anyway, on topic: I played a bit of 1.10, and it went pretty well. I definately wasn't feeling as much like I was trying to push a boulder uphill as a nature mage, so that's a definate improvement.

Someone told me that there'll always be a minimum of two of each resource on random maps. No idea how reliable that is - there's been reports of maps with no on the basic SRs too.

Edit: Checked out Embryo's article again, and turns out he says the minimun was 2 in PTW, but is 1 in C3C. So I guess this post was completely unhelpful.

Edit2: Set the appearance ratio of Iron to 1, and generated a bunch of maps. Sure enough, they all had exactly one Iron resource. Loaded up the MoM.biq, and changed the appearance ratio of Death Nodes to 1, and generated a much of maps - again, they all had precisely one Death Node.

This, of course, disagrees rather with Zurai's experience. I have not idea to explain the discrepancy.

All maps generated where standard size with standard climate and age.

I've been testing on 256x256 maps, which probably affects it to some degree. I used maps that huge because, at the start, I had somewhere around 60 resources and only the biggest maps would actually have enough tiles to use that many :crazyeye: I've since reduced the number of resources (more because of bugs than map size - I was getting phantom resources, ie I'd found a city and it would think it had access to a resource that wasn't even linked to any terrain) and thus I've reduced the map size. I havn't had the chance to see if that reduced the minimum back down to 1 though.

completely OT: Zurai, I think there's an old bug if you have more than 32(?) resources giving you those weird effects.
As it is now I'm too drnk to help anyone. ;)

Freya report continued:

City number 2 and 3 of Ariel fall to the Freyan armies. Both had around 10 defenders including 4-5 of the monk units. Those were a pain and I took enough casualites at it was with giants (8-4-1). I don't want to even think of what it would be like trying to take those out with just the earth elementals (6-4-1). My army remains in good shape, despite taking some losses. I have 3 armies of giants now and one of Ettins.

The pressure is off of Oberic from Ariel now, but Oberic is still at war with several civs including Lo Pan, who has been massing quite the armada of ships including the fire ship, so I know he has Chaos 9 for tech. (I am still working on the 6's). Oberic and Ariel have been skirmishing a bit, but nothing like they were before. Oberic is now trying to fend off Lo Pan's piecemeal landings while Ariel is dealing with me.

Ariel is still not fielding the wizards (lucky for me) so the toughest defenders she has are 4 pointers and my giants have been able to play "batter up" with them and in general, give a good account of themselves. I am more sold on the air transport now as it is very useful in shuttling troops around to hot spots and I am now using them offensively by dropping units into good terrain next to enemy cities. I don't know if the AI would use these effectively or not, but a player can find several uses for them.

On the other hand, I find the men units to be about worthless. I could do Men 3 and get a 5-5-1 4 pip unit, or I can do earth elementals at 6-4-1 that have 5 pips. Granted, the 5-5-1 is 60 and the elemental is 80, but still. The men, although amphibious, are too weak to deal with any type of city defence. They seem to be something that you build en-mass and try to swamp an opponent with and while you take your losses, there are so many of them, that eventually you win. Perhaps they don't fit my style of play that well so I don't know that I have any suggestions for them.

Thank you everyone for the resource discussion and tests. Especially big 'thank you' goes to Psyringe for hunting down that article by embryodead. Based on his formula, my earlier 240 gave 1.8 nodes per player. With 300 it became 1.95. I'm now looking at reducing that number. Since less units require nodes now, it might not be a bad idea to go back to the earlier 240.

@TLC
- I checked all city names for extra spaces and there are none of those left now.
- Two lizardmen. Nice to see what AI offers for the other. :)

@Klyden

- Redeployment for the bird units is problematic when it eliminates the need for ships... It will probably have to go.
- I'm going to make Centaurs upgrade to Griffins and turn the latter into an offensive unit. My current, tentative stats are 8.3.3 ignores movement penalty on mountains, hills and swamps. However, this unit would be very high in the tech tree so it may not help at all with the cents as the player doesn't have any of them left when he reaches the Griffin. I'll have to reconsider this a bit more.
- Wizards will probably end up as 3.5.2 units with 10 shields shaved off the pricetag.
- Rushing wonders with great leaders has been disabled in C3C. Only scientific leaders can rush wonders. Great leaders can rush other stuff though. Or was it a sci leader you had?
- Nice to see the Warrior Monks in action. It would be interesting to know if their stats feel right.

@Everyone

Thank you again for your activity. I have found it hard to keep up at times and that's definitely a good sign. :lol: I will probably release a tweak patch next week, but it's still uncertain.

@Klyden

So, the monks are strong? Do you recommend something for them?

Men have new stats in the Beta 10 prerelease 1:
Tribesman (2.2.1 - 20)
Warrior (4.3.1 - 40)
Raider (5.4.1 - 60)
Executioner (6.5.1 - 80)
Longblade (7.5.1 - 100)

All of them are amphibious, but non-draftable. :)

I guess the Men are gonna be popular on archi maps ...

Did I overdo them? I was a little worried about making them too good, but then I figured that in order for there to be a point in owning a race resource, the resource has to be useful. We can tweak them very easily, so if they feel too powerful, just give me a heads up. :)

Maybe you could have some race specific sea units too? :)

@mrtn

I considered them at some point, but I was a little obsessed with all resources giving as many units. That's of course a bit ridiculous and I really should reconsider it. I might even make race specific bombarders.

I won't add them just for the fun of it though. Maybe spice up some races that don't offer as much as others. :)

Couple quick notes:

I don't think the redeployment scheme will replace ships. Typically, you are still going to need ships for making landings (out of range for the paradrop) and also need ships to contest the enemy in most cases. Look at my force mix and you will see that I have increased the number of ships I have and I continue to build them on occasion as well. I still use them a bit as transports, but for the most part, they are there to try to hit isolated pockets of enemy shipping. (Although, as I have documented, this has been less than successful as I have had rough going against the wind riders, despite having 6 attack against 4 defense). This is a rather unique unit that most people don't see in many mods and it is interesting.

Leaving wizards as a 2 mover, imho, is a mistake. It means that they can freely attack cav units and those units can't get away from a "foot" unit. Also, it means that when attacking the wizards, cav will be unable to escape if they are on a losing end of a fight. This is part of what makes attacking them so expensive. I think the 6 point defense is fine as it is generally the biggest defensive unit and if anyone should favor defense slightly, it should be life. 3-6-1 would be my suggestion.

On the subject of men. I don't know what to tell you other than to suggest they probably don't fit my play style. That does not mean they are broken, but I find them weak and a waste, even at their cheaper prices. I typically look to build things that will have a high percentage chance of success and wear my opponent out with attrition in that they take a lot of losses and I take very few. It is something I am comfortable with. Men seem to go the other way and the strategy with them seems to be more of economics in that I can send a wave of men over and while some die, I make headway because they are killing things more expensive than they are. It is a quality vs quantity issue and there is no real right or wrong in the use of them. Indeed, history is generally full of battles between quality and quantity and there will always be an arguement for what is more important.

For the monks. Do they stop at some point? I see where they get them every 10 turns, so based on that, Ariel has had the advancement for close to 50 turns. I also see they are maint free. If they don't stop after a certain point, I can see it being very brutal to get anyplace against a civ with units like that. As I mentioned, they basically doubled Ariel's defenders and made the cities tougher to take, but then again, it made Ariel more agressive too, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know if a tweak to 1-3 with an extra hp might not be bad. As 1-4's, I seem to have more problems with them than the sorcerers.

I will try to get you a couple saved games.

Did I overdo them? I was a little worried about making them too good, but then I figured that in order for there to be a point in owning a race resource, the resource has to be useful. We can tweak them very easily, so if they feel too powerful, just give me a heads up. :)
I meant they won't be very popular on non-Archipelago maps, since equivalent tech level units from other races sport significantly better attack values. I think they're tolerably well-balanced with the stats you suggest, but their usefulness will be highly dependent on geography.

Freya report continued.

This is where the game is at now. I have just captured Pyre and Hialanth and my forces are poised to capture Midnight. I have already captured a city to the north as mentioned earlier.

This is my second time to visit Midnight. I sent a stack in earlier and proceeded to get blasted by 19 spells that basically trashed the assault forces. They were able to make a fighting withdrawl without loss and regroup and come back.

In the small map, the huge red area is Lo Pan. He has fire ships, so is at least to Chaos 9 while I am still working on the level 6 techs. Lo Pan also has over 70k in VP, so this game is about over.

@Klyden

I'll give the birds some thought. I still feel they may step too much on the turf of ships as units can be shuffled between continents as long as there's a friendly city on both. Also, armies can be relocated very quickly with them. They were meant as paradrop units so the reloc strategy is an added bonus at the moment. Like I said, I'll have to think about it. :)

I was going to make the Wizards one-movers, but then I though of their use offensively. They can't support offensive units as well when they are one-movers, but you do raise valid points. Maybe I'll go with your suggestion after all.

I'm happy with men as they are in the latest patch. Amphibious fills a niche and they are pretty good footmen with their updated stats. Nothing special though. If I make race specific ships, a longboat for them is practically given.

Monks are a bit problematic. They don't stop so a life mage left alone will get a lot of them. Maybe push the monastery a bit back in the tech tree and lower their stats. I didn't mean for them to very good defenders, more like an added problem for the opponents of life mages so reducing the defence to 3 is a good option. I could also increase the support cost of the monastery from 1 to 2 and/or increase the spawning time. I'll do something about 'em. :)

I'm going to check out the savegames later tonight. Waiting with interest. :)

Freya (Final report)

Well, the game past the above point was short. I took Midnight after another hard fight (10 defenders and 5 of them monks).

Lo Pan and Oberic made peace.

The AI deemed fit to have Hialanth flip on me back to Ariel. This not only compromised much of my lines, but destroyed 22 military units that were in Hialanth, including a giant army and 8 giants. Words can't really describe what BS this is and my feelings of frustration and hard work put into a hard fought campaign only to have it end like this.

I will be downloading the latest version and see about starting another game.

Oh the madness of the flips... :mad: I personally consider it a perfectly viable strategy to load an autosave and withdraw the army before the flip. I wonder if I could do something about them (I don't know what my options are, but I'm betting they are extra slim).

You could ban flips, altho I for one would hate it.

I think race-specifc naval units would be nice. aaglo has some nice Orc ships ...

Edit: The impact of flips could be reduced by increasing assimilation rates. With the current rates of 4% for Life and 2% for the rest, foreign nationals, and thereby flip risks, remain very long.

@TLC

Good idea with the assimilation rates. I'll probably try it. :)

Orcs could use a ship, but I'm not sure about the ones aaglo has made for WH-mod. They are amazing ships, but they don't feel quite right in MoM. We'll see, I may still turn around. Currently I'm thinking of adding Longship for Men and the Turtle Transport for Lizardmen.

Didn't someone make a Tolkienesque Swanship that could go well for the Elves?

@TLC

aaglo's Numenor (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65755) ?

I was just thinking of whether I could use it as an elven ship. I haven't yet thought of stats that would make it really worth adding though. I'll try to think of something original, but I won't probably be adding any race specific ships unless they have a purpose.

That wasn't what I was thinking of, and doesn't look very Elvish, does it?

Typically in a case like that flip, it is go into auto save and do something about it. I usually get pretty infuriated when something like that happens, because I look at it as AI BS. Its losing, so it will do whatever to try to balance things out. I did not bother with this game as Lo Pan was going to win in a couple of turns anyway.

I downloaded the lastest and started a couple of new games as a life mage. First game, awesome starting position and had a nature mage and a life mage right next to me. Had tobbaco as a close resource and also spice. Just as I was about to drop a settler on the spice, the life mage beat me to it. I also lost a couple protectors to the mad barbarian kitties. I tried to trade some tech only to find out that the nature mage had all the level 1's already about 30 turns into the game and I had nothing to offer. The life mage had level 2 already (I was not even close), so I could see how this was going to go. I did have a life resource next to me.

Game start number 2. Terrible starting position with just about zip for resources close and no water. Moved up and found another mage close to me and able to close me off. Not worth my time this game.

@TLC

Doesn't it? I can't remember seeing a swanship of anykind made (I did wonder whether I had guessed right with the Numenor as it doesn't look at all like a swan :lol: )

I think it's ok for the elves as it's all sleek and pretty. However, high elves would be more fitting and the elves of MoM are more like wood elves... I'm interested in seeing that swanship (if it exists that is).

Edit:

@Klyden

Alarming with the research speeds of the other mages. Hopefully that won't become a trend.

Third try starting as Oberic

Good starting position with a life node close by. I expand on my portion of the island and find a choke point that should be easily defendable from my neighbor so I rush a settler up with some troops and set up Ailearth. I get 1 set of luxaries and no racial stuff, so not in the best of positions but at least I have water and a fair area to set up in.

SSs'ra is not in a good spot, but does have dwarfs and no Luxaries. He tries an early war with me that I basically hold off because of my better position. I finally get a barracks to heal units in Ailearth and a cleric or two and he gives it up.

I manage to send a ship exploring a bit before it gets eaten by sea monsters. I have a good advantage on SSs'ra and seem to be ahead a bit on the science race (which I expect). I get my 3-2-2's and get a couple built just in time to have him try to land a settler and beast on my side of the island. I send a couple 3-2-2's to get rid of the unwanted guest and a second war starts. I take out the rogue city and basically stand on the defensive in the north. The screen shot shows the current situation. (We are still at war). He has taken heavy losses as he tries to slip around my defenses. My 3-2-2's have been cleaning him up in the open for the most part. No sign of dwarven units or of chaos warriors yet. So far, I am able to prosecute the war and expand my economy position at the same time. I am up to 9 cities while SSs'ra has 6. Be nice to get the spell of knowledge to keep me in the tech race, but I doubt I get it. I have an important decision to make and that is should I try to continue to develope and deal with SSRa later or try to take him out early before he can get his chaos warriors combined with the nasty dwarves on defense. He has some pretty rugged terrian on his own and my best attacker (for a long time) will be a 3 pointer.

@Klyden

Nasty terrain and dwarves. And Champions come at next era while Chaos Knights come at Chaos V... Well, at least this should be interesting stuff regarding game balance. Good luck - I have a feeling you may need it. ;)

Rjak just bought Lizardmen for 220 gold and 5 gpt. I think he'd given more if he'd had it.

I'm about to hook up a second resource of Orcs ...

The game just took an interesting turn. I had declared war on Lo Pan, and taken one of his cities when Tauron turned up with some outrageous demands. I told him to sod off, and he promptly declared war. Lo Pan wouldn't talk with me, so I bribed Oberic and Rjak to declare war on him, and Rjak also on Lo Pan. Now we'll see how the two-front war goes ...

Edit: As benefits an evil Necromancer, I abandoned Rjak to fight Lo Pan alone as soon as the later came to his senses and wanted to talk peace. OTOH, Rjak paid Oberic to declare on Lo Pan. This can become a real mess ...

Edit2Things aren't going to well; Rjak is getting ripped apart by the Chaos Mages, and Tauron has the Great Wall-style wonder, which, thanks to a bug, renders his cities close to immune to bombardment.

Nice to see the race resources being traded. That was one of the things I wanted to achieve with the higher appearance ratio for them. :) Hopefully the AI understands their worth though and won't buy them at any price.

Nice looking game you've got going there. Tell me if any balance problems are raised by the war. :)

After beating myself bloody against the same Tauron city for ages, I finally accepted peace with the bastard. Let's hope he won't conquer Oberic ...

There's one big balance issue - the Firewall. The bug means I effectively cannot touch his defenders with artillery, and when his best defenders - Clansmen - have a defense value equal to the attack value of my best attackers - Black Orcs and Death Knights - taking his cities is impossibly expensive. It's rather worse than in the Epic game, because A/D ratios are on the whole lower, and, even worse, the damn thing won't ever get obsolete. Oh, and the bug allowed me to destroy his Dark Tower with bombardment, too ...

I guess my plan now is to build up my army and try and crush Lo Pan before he to grows too powerful. That, and staying away from renewed war with Tauron.

Balance-wise, Chaos Mages seem to do very well in my games. Those Chaos Knights are very good value.

@TLC

What's the bug you are talking about? Is it just about 'walls in all cities' wonders or walls in general? Firewall is good value, but I've never heard of this bug associated with it. Dwarves can be annoying. I was considering removing their +1 hp at one point. I may go through with it in the end.

Let's watch those chaos mages. They may well have gotten too powerful in the last patch, but let's not get the verdict in yet.

@Klyden

I did some espionage and got the army numbers from the Freya game you sent me (I didn't list minor numbers):

Lo Pan
126 Maulers
24 Chaos Ettins
18 Beholders
11 Toad Mages
11 Dark Horsemen
10 Chaos Knights
48 Cannons
43 Galleasses
12 Fire Ships
5 Cogs
6 Caravels
22 Inferno spells

Rjak
71 Necromancers
59 Cursed Legionaries
41 Death Knights
16 Skeleton Guards
4 Fire Catapults
6 Cogs

Ariel
69 Sorcerers
55 Warrior Monks
12 Clerics
6 White Riders
13 Fire Catapults
16 Hawk Ships
4 Cogs
20 Fireblast Spells

Oberic
92 Wizards
7 White Riders
6 Fire Catapults
2 Hawk Ships
1 Cog

Tlaloc
21 Gnoll Rangers
17 Ents
4 Centaurs

- Lo Pan really likes his navy and artillery.
- Vlad doesn't have any spells. Has he fired them away or hasn't he built his own spellforge? Or doesn't he have a death node (forgot to check but sounds probable)?
- Ariel has 55 Warrior Monks while Oberic has none. Oberic has nothing but Wizards while Ariel doesn't have a single wizard. Oberic has also probably fired away his arsenal of spells.

Strange, but interesting stuff. Thank you. :)

I never did see Oberic fire off any spells. Which game turn was this? I had Ariel blast me with like 19 spells in a row at one point.

At one point, Oberic had a very strong navy. I am guessing Lo Pan put an end to that. Also note the very few offensive units of Ariel and Oberic. This because basically new production heads for the front and dies either trying to kill something or in counter attacks.

I don't know on Vlad except he is all over the map. My guess is that he has been at war in one form or another for a long time and does not have it. I am guessing that Oberic, who also has been at war almost continuously, does not have one either. Only when a nation is at peace will they consider building it apparently.

Tlaloc was also behind on the technical curve (I had sold him tech from time to time) and took another pounding from Lo Pan.

@TLC

What's the bug you are talking about? Is it just about 'walls in all cities' wonders or walls in general? Firewall is good value, but I've never heard of this bug associated with it. Dwarves can be annoying. I was considering removing their +1 hp at one point. I may go through with it in the end.It's a bug with wonders that put walls in all cities. I forget the details, but here's chief issues:

i) The free walls are indestructible. This may or may not be intended.

ii) Instead of targeting first the walls and then the garrison, and only then improvements and population, bombardment against cities with a such wall in them takes out all non-wall improvements first.

iii) For these purposes, wonders (and palaces) count as improvements. That's why I could bombard Tauron's Dark Tower away.

iv) Once the improvements are gone, most shots against the cities simply have no effect - you don't even get a "bombardment failed" notification.

The result is that, except for ruining improvments, bombarding cities with wonder-granted walls is pretty pointless. The bug is in the epic game, but doesn't cause much trouble, since attackers tend not to rely on artillery during the era in which the Great Wall is effective, and since A/D ratios genereally are higher than in MoM.

@Klyden

It was the earlier of the saves (1650 AD if I remember correctly) so the 19 spells Ariel launched at you were from those 20. I guess it could be that they don't build spellforges during wartime. Maybe the same thing explains the lack of monasteries on Oberic's part.

@TLC

Thank you for this information. Maybe I should take Firewall out for now and add it back in if that promised patch ever comes and fixes this.

ATM, I'm all for removing the Firewall, but perhaps leave it alone till someone who's not very pissed of by it right now has weighed in.

I went up against a Firewall-equipped Tauron in my beta 9 game and only in the capital did I encounter any problems at all. In the capital I destroyed a couple random improvements (but NOT all of their improvements, and no citizens) before my catapults started hitting troops. In the other half dozen cities I besieged, the catapults all struck units immediately. I don't really see a problem with it, personally - it's still better than artillery was pre-Conquests.

That's odd. After destroying all improvements, incl the Dark Tower, I got like one hit per ten shots (should be like one hit per three shots).

@Drift, Dwarves are fine as they are. In a previous game, i had Dwarves fortifyed in citys with the Dwarven fortress and protected by the Firewall, and they kept on dying!

If i can find it i'll post the save file of that game.

I'm currently in a game where i'm about to be destroyed by Tlaloc who have all but destroyed one of the choas mages already before making peace with them (Left them with 1 city, Tauron i think it was), and with the exception of Rjak who must be on really good terms with the other mages, the Death mages are again the most backwards (including me, and i'm playing as Vlad again, i thnik i'll go back to playing as Rjak)

Heres the save game from that earlier game of mine. Unfortunatly i had deleted saves from eariler in that game, so i've currently got no enemy units on my island, and i'm only at war with Merlin & Tauron, with spys in everyone but Tauron.

I've also uploaded that latest save from my current game where i'm about to be destroyed by Tlaloc

Got a few turns in more in my Vlad game. Declared war on Lo Pan, and swept his part of former Rjakistan with surprising little resistance. He sent a continuous trickle of Chaos Knights against my southern border, but now having Death Knights and Necromancers, I've been able to kill them off with only light losses. Still, I'm having more non-arty units on defense duties than in my assault stack ...

Next goal, of course, is ravaging Lo Pan's homelands.

Oh, and soon as the culture border expands on one of the former Rjak cities, I'll have a second sources of Goblins, too.

What's not gone so well is that Oberic was badly mauled by Tauron, and subsequently lost a couple of cities to a resurgent Sss'ra. He's the only excuse for an ally I have .... Oh well, Sss'ra has earned the next place on the kill list. Hopefully I can let him be till I'm finished with Lo Pan, tho. I'm giving Oberic a bunch of Nodes to keep him in a bit better shape. Should have given him race resources too, but sold them to Tauron for luxuries.

And sometime I'll have to attack Tauron again. Hate that Firewall.

Whoa! Lots of activity here. :)

Seems I'm the last one to finish his beta 9 (update 2) game. Here's the rest of the story:

10. Flexing the muscles

After the world was fully colonized, all mages continued their peaceful buildup for a while. Then Tlaloc declared war on me for the fourth time. Again he didn't have many units in strike range, so there was not much fighting going on. We never reached each other's mainland, but instead fought over two larger islands. With my champions upgraded to White Riders, I managed to take three cities from him; the "promised land" was mine now. (Tlaloc had resettled the city there that I destroyed in an earlier war, however I blocked this hills when I saw his settler arrive, so that he had to settle on the grassland. The city was much easier to take that way. With the stronger defense in MoM, enemy border cities on hills are to be avoided.)

Showering his last city on another larger island with Fireblasts (which would have put his mainland in range of my Fireblasts), I was one step away from taking it, when Tlaloc signed a mutual protection pact with Ariel. That was a smart move, because I didn't want to lose my trade with Ariel. I still sent her three or even four luxuries for 30+ gold per turn.

I built up my military a little, until I had some Thunderers defending my cities and a handful of Paladins near the city I wanted to take from Tlaloc. I waited for his next declaration of war, but my small but high-tech strike force seemed to frighten him. Instead he decided to bugger Vlad. I don't know whether they actually engaged in combat (no cities were conquered), but soon after Tlaloc declared waron him, Vlad did what I considered before: He signed an MPP with Freya. Freya had two borders with Tlaloc and was the only one who could attack his mainland directly. Tlaloc responded by capturing the two Freya cities north of him, then made peace to rebuild. Vlad had effectively turned Tlaloc's attention away by dragging Freya into the war.

A period of peace followed, but as turned out, it was just the silence before the storm ...


11. The World at War

To my total surprise, it was Vlad who started the ball rolling by attacking my northeastmost city (the one which I crammed into the empty space when Freya took a city from Ariel). I had neglected my defenses there, and the road to that city lead across Freya's territory. So I made a RoP with Freya and managed to get a Thunderer into the city. This seemed to impress Vlad, as he never actually attacked the city again. However it didn't stop him from flooding the city perimeter with his cursed legionaries and necromancers. But one or two Angels and Paladins were enough to deal with those, one by one.

In the meantime, Tlaloc had started a major offense against Freya's mainland. He left the two cities in the south alone, but rolled westward with Earth Elementals. Within ten turns, he captured two of her cities and destroyed another, which left her shattered - Freya was reduced to the two cities in the south of her mainland and the one that she took from Ariel before, which was behind one of my cities and therefore out of reach for Tlaloc.

Since Tlaloc was still at war with Vlad, an interesting situation emerged. We met at a mountainous spot where three bottlenecks met - I came from southwest, Tlaloc from southeast, and Vlad's mainland was north. Coincidentally, Tlaloc (who declared war on me four times before) and me were fighting side by side against the forces that Vlad sent to both of us.

After some time, Vlad seemed to run out of units, and I managed to position some units in a good position in his mainland. (This wasn't as easy as I expected as Vlad made use of his Death spells against my Thunderers; it's nice to see that the AI actually uses them. I've never seen the AI using cruise missiles in my unmodded games.)

As I was ready to stike, I noticed two Earth Elementals of Freya nearing my city. I wondered whether she used our RoP to send them across to her cities to attack Tlaloc, but she had other plans - the nature of which I found out when she attacked me. (I'm still not sure whether she RoP-raped me or whether I somehow triggered the MPP that Vlad and she still had, but I didn't attack Vlad on his own Turf yet and she declared war in her turn, not mine, so it really looks like a RoP rape.)

Freyas two Earth Elementals died by attacking the thunderer I fortified in the city. By then i had a handful of Angels in Vlad's territory, I sent them back and took Freya's city (the Ex-Ariel city) with little resistance, Freya still defended with Rangers.

In the meantime Tlaloc had managed to bring a small strike force into Vlad's territory and attack two of his cities. Vlad's defenses (necromancers) held, but I knew that Tlaloc had lots of Earth Elemental running around to the southwest, and I feared that he might get to strong when he managed to overrun Vlad. So I sealed the access to Vlad's territory by fortifying two units on the choke point that lead to his lands. Seeing this, Tlaloc's army of Earth Elementals immediately turned back. The small strike force that he already had inside Vlad's territory died while trying to attack a city.

I then had some time to rebuild units and overran Vlad's mainland. He still defended with necromancers, whereas I attacked with Angels, and most of his army had died before anyways. I made peace and started to build up my economy again.

The World War left Tlaloc and me as the only two significant powers. Freya was shattered (reduced to two cities), and Vlad only had the four cities on an island he colonized before. Ariel stayed neutral and remained at 8 cities (still getting four luxuries from me for now 40-50 gpt), Tlaloc now had 16 cities and I had 31.

During the war and shortly after it, I had two rebellions of cities who flipped back to Vlad. This was somewhat unexpected, as both cities were far away from his capital (okay, even farer from mine), and he had only half the culture that I had. I tend to favour culture buildings and only very rarely experience rebellions in unmodded Civ3. I'm not sure whether this change is a bad thing though.


12. The Runes of Mastery

While I was building up, Tlaloc remained aggressive. Together with Ariel(!) he vanquished Vlad's remaining cities. Tlaloc then declared war on me for the fifth time.

By now he defended with Gnoll champions, and my handful of Angels was enough to win one or two battles in the field, but I could not effectively theaten his cities. I had to decide whether to build up a large army and destroy him, or to just defend and win by space race. I opted for the space race, partly because I could achieve it quicker than mounting a large military offensive, partly because I wanted to see what Drit had done with it. ;)

Tlaloc continuously tried to attack me, but wasn't very smart. An army of some gnollish units and a few earth elementals ran circles near our border. The army was large enough to take a city or two - I abandoned a newly founded city there because the sheer mass of the attackers would have killed my defenders. But the passage to the rest of my territory was blocked by a single Thunderer (later four of them) in a fort on mountains. Tlaloc didn't even try to attack me there - which actually was the wiser decision. What wasn't so wise was that his whole army ran circles in front of my Thunderers, while my barely defended heartlands lay just two sea tiles across; Tlaloc just needed to build a some ships, but never did (at least not there).

On the two islands we fought on before, Tlaloc continuously sent a sea serpent, escortet by two sea drakes, and landed two units near one my cities. Sometimes he tried Earth Elementals, sometimes Gnolls, in the end he even had Elven Lords. However a single Paladin and an Angel were enough to thwart all these attacks. Despite having a larger army, Tlaloc just didn't manage to mount a significant offense against me. Bad AI. :(

So I kept defending my cities, until I researched everything and built the ten runes (nice idea Drift :) ).


All in all, it was a very interesting game. I'm looking forward to my next one. :) Unfortunately I won't have much time during the next two weeks, so I probably won't be able to post here very often. But I'll still be around and start my beta 10 game soon. :)

Thanks for reading. :)

I actually like the Firewall and the dwarves as strong defensive elements. In my first game, I attacked Sssra (who had the Firewall) and Tauron (who had dwarves). I lost many units. But it still was fun for me. I like the possibility that one or two of the other mages are so strong in their defensive that you really have to think twice whether you attack them. In my C3C games, once I'm in the tech lead I can build good offensive units (cavalry, tanks) and just know that I can overun one or two neighbours with them. In MoM, it isn't that easy. There may be a situation where brute force may not work, where you have to think of something else. And I like that.

Firewall: Let's keep it as it is for now. If it starts to give more trouble, I can remove it then.

Dwarves: I'm still a little tempted by taking away their extra hitpoint, but I'll restrain myself for now :) It is true that they bring a great twist to the game, but I was a little worried about the way Thunderers acted as a deterrent in Psyringe's game. 8 defense is so much that only Chaos, Trolls and Dark Elves can field a stronger attacker...

Defense in general: Next patch will have all defense bonuses cut by 20%. That includes several terrain types (none of the 10% ones), all city sizes, citizens. Even walls. River bonus remains same though. If someone sees something I'm missing with this plan, please speak up. It could well be that I'm ruining the combat system if I fail to see something crucial about this.

Savegames and game reports: Thank you everyone. :) I've been reading the reports and checking out the savegames - retiring and watching the events and spying other mage military forces. Good stuff.

--

As death mages have been suffering on the science front, I'm tempted to add a +50% research improvement for them. I don't think it would be such a problem as death mages are poorer and can't invest as much in the science and also, their cities seem to remain small as they seem to whip their citizens quite a bit. I noticed that chaos mage city sizes have also come down after they got forced labour, but at least they have the trade bonus.

Death mages also seem to be very slow in expansion. I'll try some little tricks first, like adding settlers to their "build often" list. Also, what mrtn said earlier about death mage cities rarely reaching 12 (under AI that is) seems to be true. This is a problem as they can't utilize their maximum support. I may have to raise the support of towns and cities. Maybe even make equal support for all city sizes.

Also, I'm curious of how much the halved mood penalties for forced labour and draft affect things. Maybe the 10 turn mood penalty doesn't restrain the death mages and chaos mages enough and they end up whipping their citizens so much that it cripples their pop growth.

Is that a reduction of 20 percent (50% bonus -> 40%) or by 20% percentage points (50%-30%)?

I think giving Death mage some sort of help with Science would be good. In my game, I'm struggling to keep up in research, despite being the biggest civ. It's partly my own fault, since I essentially wrecked my ability to buy tech for gpt or resources by abandoning Rjak, but getting out-researched by Oberic is kinda pathetic when I'm a few times larger.

Reduction is 20 percent (50% -> 40%)

Yeah, I believe I'm going to go through with the +50% research bonus improvement for death mages. Also, I think making Firewall become obsolete at some point might be a good idea considering the troubles it has caused. Being able to destroy dark towers and palaces is enough to warrant its removal actually, but I'm a little undecided.

Letting the Firewall go obsolete after an era or so is probably a good idea.

I've not tested this, but it may be possible to avoid the bugs via a building that puts a Civil Defense-style improvement in each city; the Civil Defense counts as any old improvement for the purposes of bombardment. Of course, the bonus would then apply to cities of all sizes, and so better be made fairly modest to keep metropoleis capturable.

Its not that Death mages expand slowly, its that the other mages expand too quickly. Also Death mages seem to be the weekest of the four magi, not only do they fall behind in the tech race, but their units seem to be underpowered and over expensive, compared to similler units of the other magi.

Firewall should be obsolete with Assension atleast, afterall not even the greatwall lasts forever

@TLC

I don't think I'm going to add a new improvement just for Firewall or modify the walls so that they can be built to any city size - I don't want to risk screwing the combat balance. Idea is good though. :)

@Phant

It's true that Death mages probably fell behind in more ways than just one when the other mages got the trade bonus. One thing I'm probably going to try is wrapping +50% tax bonus to the improvement giving +50% research. I'll look at the units as well. :)

Would it unbalance the governments if Death was imunes to propaganda?

No, it probably wouldn't but I'm not sure I want to add it. I've naturally thought of giving the governments immunities to some forms of espionage, but so far I've decided against it.

Oberic game report continued:

Well, after giving it a lot of thought, I have decided to be agressive and push the issue with SSS'ra. My plan is basically to keep him at war and hope he continues to send units where I can kill them and minimize my own losses. He somewhat helps in this regard in giving me an excuse to start our third war. I continue to do good research and improve my economy and infrastructure while killing off Sssra's troops. At one time, I have quite the number of elite troops, but this changes as some of them get attritioned out. I can't describe how huge it is to have those bowhunters retreat if they are losing. Sometimes they don't, but even when I loose a fight and they retreat, I still win as I have weaken the other unit and have enough to finish it off.

I finally research the sorcerer unit (new version 2-4-1) as I am not sure on SSSra's status and want them ready if Chaos Warriors show up. SSsra has a particularly brutal turn when he sends 6 units in and they die in my counter attacks. He offers peace and I see what he is willing to part with and decide to clean out his treasury.

After going to peace, I discover he is not nearly as far along on the science as I thought. This is to be expected as the area he occupies is not very good. Most of it has no water.

The peace is somewhat short lived as I consider ways to get around his dwarven defenders. I decide to hold at the bottle neck like I have been doing and launch an amphibious invasion on a town I can reach with my ships. After building up a fleet of 4 ships and 14 bowhunters, I send them in for an amphibious invasion. I manage to take the city (only two healthy bowhunters left and lost 4 of them taking it). Defenders were 2 dwarfs, 1 beast, 2 fanatics. I ship in more troops to face what appears to be his main army of 2 dwarfs, 7 beast, 4 fanatics. With my sorcerers in the area, he elects to pull back towards his capital and it appears he will consider sending them to the bottle neck area. I decide to pull some troops from the bottle neck area and with a little new construction, I take the next city up the coast. SSsra is now down to 5 cities. The two cities towards his rear are now open and that is also where the dwarves are at. I will probably try to take them and force a peace and then go for one more war to finish him off.

The thing that has really saved me is the fact my bow hunters have a chance to break off the attack if things go badly for them. I have enough defenders/other units that SSsra can't take advantage of my wounded units to finish them. With his strongest attackers being 2 pointers, he won't try my 3 and 4 point defenders in the hills and mountain areas.

The thing on this game will be how the rest of the world is doing. I should be able to secure the island soon, but what is the status on the rest of the world? I just missed getting the spell of knowledge by 1 stinking turn.. (grats me on very expensive market).

@Klyden

Send me some savegames when you are further down that game, looks like a great game. :)

- -

I've been designing the next patch during the last few days and just played a quick test game with debug on. I've just advanced to second era and so far, none of the civs have fallen too badly behind. Death mages are hanging in there although I can't understand their building priorities - cheap improvement with no upkeep giving +50% tax, +50% science and +25% production gets built at the end of the first era. Anyway, Rjak especially is doing ok as a midsized bully, Vlad is second weakest and Mordja somewhere between the two other death mages.

In terms of power, the leading civ has ~400 points and the weakest civ ~200 points so it has been an even game. Wars have started to break out, but they have been slugging contests with very few cities trading owners. Nature mages are the strongest and it seems to be a trend of sorts.

Changes I've made regarding the death mages:
- Support: 6/10/10
- Well of Souls improvement: upkeep 0, cost 20 shields, +50% tax, +50% research, +25% production. (Amazing bargain according to everyone else but the death mages themselves)
- Essence of Death makes 3 citizens content in each city instead of 2.
- Hurry and draft mood penalties raised to normal 20 turns.
- Some death mage units come with a cheaper pricetag.
- Cog taken away from the death mages and replaced with a combined warship and transport. Tentative name Cursed Ship (4.4.4 transports 3, costs 50, enslaves into new Cursed Ships, sinks at ocean) Gonna rethink that name as it sounds so corny.

New race specific ships:
- Turtle (4.4.4 transports 6, costs 40, sinks at ocean, requires lizardmen) comes around the same time with Cogs.
- Longship (4.2.4 transports 3, costs 30, sinks at ocean, requires men) comes around the same time with Galleys (seas accessible earlier for civs with men)
- Sunhawk (8.4.5, costs 60, sinks at ocean, requires elves) comes around the same time with Galleasses/Hawk Ships.

Some changes to the units:
- Griffins turned into offensive units: 8.3.3, costs 120, ignores movement penalties on mountains, hills and swamps.
- Carrying capacity of the bird units reduced with 1. Relocating is still possible.
- Warrior Monks produced by monasteries are now 1.3.0

Some improvement and wonder balancing.
- Monasteries pushed a bit further down the tech tree and their upkeep changed to 2.
- Small balancing here and there.

Government assimilation rates are as follows:
Death 12% (they kill the citizens)
Life 8%
Nature 4%
Chaos 4%

Node appearance ratios dropped back to 240 from 300.

Most defense bonuses reduced by 20%. (for example, mountains give 80% def bonus instead of 100%)

Must be more, but I believe I've covered the major ones.


I'll release the patch in the near future. It's again a test patch and doesn't yet contain new graphics for the new units apart from the Longship that comes from Conquests. It also requires the Beta 10 Prerelease 1.

Now is your time to voice your opinions, objections to the stuff going into the patch. :)

Hi :)

Can't give much feedback unfortunately as I'm short on free time and haven't gotten around to playing beta 10 yet. I think I'll hold off until the next patch comes out.

- Changes to Death mages:
Sound reasonable, however I find it astonishing what an impact it has that Death mages don't have the trade bonus. Seems that you have to throw in a lot of bonuses just to balance this single deficit. I've thought a little about governments lately and pondered whether there might be a different solution. However this would require a more radical change, which may not be appropriate because the mod headed for another direction for a while now.

If I understood correctly, the reasoning behind your giving the trade bonus to most mages was that a) something had to be done against the dominance of life mages which was based on the fact that they (and only they) had the trade bonus, and b) you didn't want to make it harder for life mages to maintain a reasonable military force because you wanted them as active "warriors of the good side", who are able to fight battles against the "dark side".

While this is perfectly reasonable, I keep thinking about a differect approach. Perhaps the combination of trade bonus *and* military force is just too much, so that you have to give too much bonuses to the other mages to make up for it. Another approach might be to diversify the strategies of each magic type a little. For example we don't have to have one single "life government" for all life mages. We could as well give each of them his/her own government. Ariel (for example) could maintain the trade bonus, but have very low military support (1/2/4 or something like that), whereas Oberic could have a larger military, but no trade bonus. Merlin could take a more balanced approach (perhaps no standard trade bonus, but bonuses to money and research). The some could be applied to the other mages, so that in the end we have (at *each* magic type) one builder, one militaristic type and one balanced type.

I'm not sure whether this is actually a good idea, and I feel that I'm a little late to tell it now, because as I said, the mod has headed in another direction, and implementing this idea might make a lot of the tweaking and balancing that has been done during the last week invalid, because (for example) science progress would slow down when less mages have the trade bonus, so we'd have to look at research costs again, etc. So there are probably good reasons *not* to follow the path I laid out above, but I wanted throw the idea in nevertheless, perhps something useful comes out of it. :)


- Turtle unit:
Nice to have that one in, wakes memories about the turtle unit in Master of Magic. :)


- Cursed Ships and their name:
If you don't mind having earthbound legends in a fantasy world, "Flying Dutchman" might fit as a name?

- Carrying capacity of the bird units reduced with 1. Relocating is still possible.
I'm not sure how this will turn out. Limiting the carrying capacity does not only limit the unit's use as a troop transport (the desired effect), I fear it will also limit its uses as an airdropper (no a desired effect). The alternative (carrying power 3, no relocation, speed reduced to 4) sounds better for me. Maybe I'm missing something?

- Most defense bonuses reduced by 20%
I do like the stronger defense in MoM, but nevertheless I think this reduction is worth a try. Even if I like meetinmg strong defenses - and can cope with it -, the AI can't cope with them as good (as my last game shows), so the reduction of defensive bonuses might actually help the AI. I'm not sure though ... well, let's have a look. :)

Have to do some work now, but I'll be able to monitor the forum. Unfortunately I won't have time to play MoM until the weekend. :(

@Psyringe

Trade bonus is so important because it affects everything - economy, science, military...

At the moment, only the death mages are the exception to the rule regarding the trade bonus - all other have the combination of trade bonus and military power. I want to keep it this way, but it does require quite a bit of counterbalancing to keep the death mages in the race.

Individual governments is an interesting idea and would definitely allow a lot of diversity, but the civ3 government system doesn't go really well with it. There are shunned governments, government specific improvements... Like you said yourself, it's also a bit too much away from the mod's current course. I'm starting to feel the pressure of the deadline and I've already invested too much time to the project. My current aim is to just get the current setup balanced, hopefully get Angel from Kinboat and two death mage ships from aaglo and wrap it up. There are some other units in production as well, but I'm going to add them later in a patch to the 1.0 version.

Flying Dutchman crossed my mind too, but it's probably a bit too specific. :)

Birds are problematic because I can't take away their relocation or they are bound to stay in the city they are built. They have to be air units and air units can't move in a regular fashion. Reducing their capacity reduces their effectiveness as airdroppers, but they were IMO too strong with their reloc. Player just has to build more of them. I feel they will still fill out a niche, but we'll see when I release the patch. :)

Reduced defense values have worked fine in my test game. As I play with debug on, I've witnessed every single fight fought during the game and it has worked pretty good.

Gotta go now, already in a rush. :) Thank you again for the feedback and don't worry about not getting any playtime in before the weekend. :)

Re: Death Mages' apparent hesitancy to build that improvement, tried fooling around with the Build Often settings?

Random suggestions for name of new Death ship:
Zombie Ship, Death Barge, Phantasmal Mariner, Fog Cog, Tombship, Man'O'War, Man'O'Death, Plague Ship, Nightship.

Of if you've got the graphics - Zombie Leviathan!

Some economic/military information to go along with my last post.

This is the picture at turn 138:

10 cities: Inc 176, -95 Sci, -12 ent, -21 corrup, -21 maint, -24 unit costs.
Army is 21 allowed and 45 units total.

8 Workers, 11 Bowmaster, 13 acolyte, 13 cleric.

Currently (turn 178)

12 cities (2 from SSsr'a)
Income is 268 -97 Sci, -17 ent, -33 corrupt, -41 maint, -69 unit.
Army is 28 allowed with 97 units total.

1 Settler, 10 worker, 38 bowmaster, 12 acolyte, 17 scorcer, 5 great galley, 13 cleric, 1 catapult (hey, every army needs one ;) ).

*Edit* Changes you propose look good Drift.

Alternate names for the new Death Ship:
Skull Cruiser, Mist Sailors, Jolly Roger, Ghost ship (renaming the Ghost ship, the Wraith ship), Floating Death, Brains, Phantom Cruiser, Shadowliner, Shadow Galley.

The changes look ok.

Edit About the bird units, instead of having them act like helicoptors, why not remove the airdrop abillity, keep the transport capacity of 3, and have them act as an alternative railroad? I dont know if the AI could handle them that way tho.

Also, the Ghost - Wraith upgrade path, is broaken, or is it intentional.
Aditionally Ghost enslave to Ghosts, and Wraiths enslave to Wraiths or Ghosts?

...
Death mages are hanging in there although I can't understand their building priorities - cheap improvement with no upkeep giving +50% tax, +50% science and +25% production gets built at the end of the first era
...


I have dealt with this problem during betatesting DYP.The AI tends to build especially production increasing improvements only if it considers them as "valuable" (means a decent base shield production) and it generally starts building improvments most of the time after the expansion phase is over.
Making them cheap, cutting maintenance or adding additional benefits hasn't a great impact on this flaw.
After doing some intensive testing in DEBUG mode I finally found a way to make the AI build them a lot more - I simply make them giving 1 culture per turn.I don't know if it works for your scenario and adding culture may be a bit odd, but it may be worth a try...if you are interested, i can run a test with it after you realease the next version and send you the save.

I like "Shadow Galley".

Current army strength in my Vlad game:

10 Workers
10 Pike Saurus
16 Black Orcs
1 Skeleton Warrior
1 Skeleton Spearman
3 Zombies
8 Necromancers
8 Shadowmen
6 Death Knights
14 Catapults
6 Fire Catapults
And a multitude of Zombie Workers.

Economy:
Income: 231
From cities: 226
From other civs: 5

Costs: 192
Science: 98
Corruption: 46
Maintainance: 48

17 Cities.

:wallbash: Me being an idiot, I managed to lose my capital to one of Lo Pan's raidng parties. Damn.

Oh well, the city is back in my hands now, and Lo Pan's homeland defense is disintegrating. He won't be alive to see the end of this war.

Military strength reports:
Thank you. It's nice to see the breakdown between units and the military relation to economy.

Death mage ship names:
Thank you for the suggestions. Really good ones. :) I like Shadow Galley too - that's for the level 1 ship. I was thinking of calling the level 2 ship Dreadship. :)

I don't have a zombie leviathan, but Kinboat was interested in doing a regular leviathan at some point. It's for a future version of MoM though. :)

@Pfeffersack

Thank you for this information and thank you for your offer. :) However, I think I can test it myself as I would like to clear the issue before releasing the patch. My only worry about giving them 1 culture is that culture increases over time and they would be racking quite a bit of culture by the end of the game...

@TLC

I don't think the "build often" helps here. :(

@Phant

I don't think the AI could handle it and I'm not that excited about the reloc feature myself. I meant the units as paradroppers and the reloc was something of a side-effect. I'm glad people like it though, but I'm not going to make the units pure relocators. :)

Thank you for the Ghost-Wraith upgrade bug report. I'm not sure what you mean with the enslavement bit though. I checked the latest version biq and Ghosts and Wraiths enslave into Crypt Skeletons. It's as it should be. :) If you meant it as a suggestion, I feel it might be a bit too strong for the already pretty strong defenders to create new equally strong defenders.

And there Lo Pan bit the dust. He earns the questionable honour of being the first mage to go, since Rjak is holding out on the traditional arctic island.

Next target's Sss'ra ...

Edit: OK, crusade against Sss'ra cancelled; Tauron declared war for not apparent reason.

Well, I've now stopped Tauron's initial assault, with some help from Sss'ra (!), who I bribed into an alliance by giving him one of my Orcs resources. I've lost one of Rjak's old cities, but in return snatched an ex-Oberic city, to the result that we've now both got more defendable borders. Of course, carrying the war into Tauron's homelands is gonna be tough.

That's partly due to the Firewall - something is wrong; I fired twelve shots at a city and got one result, and that's counting "bombardment failed" as a result - but also due to the hordes of Chaos Ettins he's fielding. With my best defenders being Necromancers, they're pretty tough to stop. Nothing's been made better by the fact that he smashed a stack of my catapults early on either.

I'm kind of giving up on keeping up in Science - I'm falling further and further behind currently. Well, throw enough Grunts and Fire Catapults at anything, and it'll break.

@TLC

I'll probably have to do something to the Firewall after all. +30% def improvement with no bombardment defense value for all cities? Not as strong as the old Firewall, but it would be brutal in cities if it was 50%.

I've also decided to drop one attack point from the Chaos Ettins.

- -

Nature mages have been so strong (Triple lead in a 12 mage game) in my test game that I've decided to try them with problematic corruption (used to be nuisance).

My debug game has continued to be interesting although watching all fights in a world war has now worn me down and I probably won't go much further with it. I played the power balancer and weaved a few alliances against the nature mages and life mages who were pummeling the poor death mages. My sympathies had always been on Mordja who was being punished by Merlin and when Merlin decided it was a good idea to join in an alliance against me, I wasted no time shipping a strike force of Champions and Sorcerers to his peninsula and taking away all his cities. Senile fool had all his armies in south fighting Mordja so it was easy pickings. Debug naturally helped as I knew what I was against. Felt like cheating, but I wanted to do some fighting instead of just watching things go by.

Rjak who was earlier the strongest death mage overextended himself and got into a war with all his neighbours. My interference of turning the two nature mages facing him against each other pretty much saved him. Lo Pan, Sss'ra and Oberic joined the fun and I have no idea who is fighting who. Probably Raven against everyone else although Sss'ra and Lo Pan have a subwar going on. They are on another continent so I haven't really cared about their alliances against me. I lead in power and run on fourth place in culture and score. No one from my own continent apart from Merlin has dared to fight me. It has been a while since I played a life mage and it has been fun. Fast units really help a lot and production/economy/research are all top notch.

Apart from the death mages dropping a little behind and nature mages being a bit too strong, faction balance has felt pretty good. Chaos mages aren't leading, but they are doing ok. Tauron is my next-door neighbour and even though I could have easily destroyed him in early game, he has since that built up his army and is now a force to be reckoned. Lo Pan and Sss'ra have held their own against Raven although their infrastructure and population aren't very impressive.

I'll see what the increased corruption for the nature mages and tweaking the Well of Souls so that the death mages build it, does for the situation.

@Drift:

- individual governments:
I see ... so when we had individual governments, we would (for example) need one life shrine for Merlin, one for Ariel, and so on ... it can be done, but requires some workarounds to make it work, it would also mess up the civilopedia a little and make it harder to tweak things (because it's easier to make mistakes when you have to apply a change to 9 buildings instead of just 3). As you said, too much hassle for MoM in its current state. I'll stash the idea somewhere for further use. :)

- relocating birds:
I see (again ;) ). So as a rule, it is not possible in Civ3 to have a powerful airdropping unit that can not be misused as a troop transport. Or, more exactly: The more poerful an airdropper is (because of its carrying capacity), the better it can be abused as a troop transport. Seen in this light, reducing the carrying capacity indeed looks like the best solution ... making them stationary units would probably take them out of the game for the most part, because in the front line and especially in newly conquered cities you usually have other build priorities.

Your reduction of the carrying capacity makes it less attractive to use the birds instead of the ships, while we still are able to airdrop a small strike force near an underdefended enemy city.

- raising corruption for nature mages:
Sounds very reasonable to me. In both of my games, nature mages would have dominated if I had let them; in your test game too, and there was another game where Raven stomped two death mages and conquered his continent. They can bear the little tweaking you intend to do. :)

@TLC

I'll probably have to do something to the Firewall after all. +30% def improvement with no bombardment defense value for all cities? Not as strong as the old Firewall, but it would be brutal in cities if it was 50%.
Sounds good, I think. It'll be combinable with walls, so in some situations it will actually be better than the old versions (namely, when you've got the time to build a Wall in the city, and the enemy is relying on frontal assaults rather than artillery).
I've also decided to drop one attack point from the Chaos Ettins.

Have they been overpowering in other games? I imagine they'd be causing me less trouble if I hadn't been about a tech level behind the leading mages.

@TLC
I've also decided to drop one attack point from the Chaos Ettins.

Sounds good. It feels strange when chaos has 7/3/1 units, when life has very good defense: 4/6/2, but really crappy attack: 5/3/2
And those +2 HP's on the ettin make them lethal, they defended successfully against my hellspawns' 6 attack most of the times.

Just had the time to browse a little through the beta 10 biq and found that Sss'ra is flagged as female. That came as a surprise, he was male in Master of Magic. :)

Side note: Why did you name the third life mage Oberic, not Horus? Oberic was Chaos/Nature in the original MoM. However I have to admit that the leaderhead looks a lot like Oberic. :) I've also seen that the leaderheads and wizards have been shifted around during the first betas, so there are probably good reasons for the naming as it is now. :)

Chaos Ettins: I don't know if they have been overpowering really, but I feel they fit in better in the unit system as 6.3.1. As a compensation, their price will be lowered by 10 points.

Nature mages: In addition to problematic corruption, I'm thinking of reducing their military police from 2 to 1 after all. This idea met some resistance when I introduced it earlier, but I feel it should be ok considering the strong form of the current nature mages.

@Psyringe

Sss'ra being female was a mistake. I may have thought of making him female at some point and I've forgotten to change it. :) Fixed now.

Oberic was chosen purely on looks. When I added him I was under the impression that Oberic was in half a life mage and I was somewhat surprised when I learned he was chaos/nature. However, I already had good leaderheads for nature and chaos and didn't have a good alternative for life. Horus would've been a nice one, but I didn't have graphics for him.

Beta Patch 10 - pre-release version 2 (0.5MB) (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/MoM_beta_patch10_pre-release2.zip)
Extract to Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\ after installing Beta 9 AND Beta Patch 10 - pre-release version 1 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/MoM_beta_patch10_pre-release1.zip) successfully.

Last minute additions include:
- removal of "pays maintenance of trade installations" from essence of chaos. Replaced with "city growth causes +2 instead of +1". Chaos population was hurting due to forced labour and I felt it needed a boost.
- Lizardmen special building changed to act as a free Granary.
- Nature mages have problematic corruption and 1 military police
- In addition to all the other good stuff Well of Souls does for death mages, it also adds 1 culture, acts as free granary and costs nothing. This is easily the weirdest improvement I've ever added, but if it's what it takes to balance death mages, I'm ok with it. :)
- Firewall adds +30% defense to all cities. Becomes obsolete at the end of the second era.
- Mutual Protection pacts, Communication trades and Trade Embargoes moved to Life VIII from Ascendance.
- Chaos Ettins are 6.3.1 from 7.3.1 and 10 shields cheaper
- Fixed Energy Drain so that it actually does what it's supposed to do.

Changes that have already been announced in the earlier changelist:
- Support: 6/10/10
- Well of Souls improvement: upkeep 0, cost 20 shields, +50% tax, +50% research, +25% production. (Amazing bargain according to everyone else but the death mages themselves)
- Essence of Death makes 3 citizens content in each city instead of 2.
- Hurry and draft mood penalties raised to normal 20 turns.
- Some death mage units come with a cheaper pricetag.
- Cog taken away from the death mages and replaced with a combined warship and transport called Dreadhship (4.4.4 transports 3, costs 50, enslaves into new Dreadships, sinks at ocean)

New race specific ships:
- Turtle (4.4.4 transports 6, costs 40, sinks at ocean, requires lizardmen) comes around the same time with Cogs.
- Longship (4.2.4 transports 3, costs 30, sinks at ocean, requires men) comes around the same time with Galleys (seas accessible earlier for civs with men)
- Sunhawk (8.4.5, costs 60, sinks at ocean, requires elves) comes around the same time with Galleasses/Hawk Ships.

Some changes to the units:
- Griffins turned into offensive units: 8.3.3, costs 120, ignores movement penalties on mountains, hills and swamps.
- Carrying capacity of the bird units reduced with 1. Relocating is still possible.
- Warrior Monks produced by monasteries are now 1.3.0

Some improvement and wonder balancing.
- Monasteries pushed a bit further down the tech tree and their upkeep changed to 2.
- Small balancing here and there.

Government assimilation rates are as follows:
Death 12% (they kill the citizens)
Life 8%
Nature 4%
Chaos 4%

Node appearance ratios dropped back to 240 from 300.

Most defense bonuses reduced by 20%. (for example, mountains give 80% def bonus instead of 100%)

- -

Whew. Finally it's out of my hands. :) I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this being one of the last steps leading to MoM 1.0. Deadline is creeping closer and I really want to release 1.0 within two weeks of time - preferably earlier. As I've mentioned here earlier, I'm getting married 12th of June and then we cruise United States for six weeks so I won't be around to fix any of the problems 1.0 may have. So, my hope is that I'll release 1.0 next week and have one week to release a fix if some bug got through after all. However, with the wedding and the trip drawing closer I have less and less time to dedicate to the project so all the niceties like changing science advisor's lines or diplomatic responses from leaders will have to wait for a future patch.

Happy playing everyone. Hope to hear from you. :)

Hmmmmm, you really are pilling the bonus into Well of Souls, but it looks like its going to become too easy for Death to now get a culture victory, so if you havent how about reducing the culture of thier shrine by 1?

Going to start a game a Rjak now

Good idea Phant. :)

AI wouldn't get a culture victory as a death mage no matter what - death mages are always at the bottom of the pack in culture and Well of Souls isn't enought to bring them up from there. However, player would probably benefit from it more. I'll do it for the next (which is hopefully 1.0) version.

I feel a little sorry for having to rush the 1.0 like this. If I had the time, I would let the testing a bit more time, but time is one thing I don't have at the moment. :(

Some things i just spotted in the game i'm curently in.

Well of Souls - 2 culture per turn
Palace - 2 culture per turn

And the civlopedia for the Death shrine says 1 culture per turn, but i dont know if thats true as i havent built one yet

Culture producing buildings start producing more culture as the game progresses. Hopefully the WoS won't become too powerful culturewise. I just checked the civilopedia in game and it says that death shrines produce 2 culture per turn - maybe you looked at a wrong figure or something?

Just remembered that when i saw some producing 1 culture/turn

As for the civlopedia entry, i must still be half asleep

That's ok. :) BTW I may well remove that 1 culture after I run some tests without it. If death mages build WoS sufficiently early without it, it's gone. :)

I think no cost on the Well of Souls is a bit over (under?) the top. Ten shields, perhaps?

I wanted to make sure it got built by AI and ten shields was so minimal cost that there wasn't really a point in it having a cost at all. It does feel a bit stupid and artificial though, I grant you that. :)

I'll try to test it with other setups. Maybe I can do something about it. It's just that because death mages get dropped behind right from the start, they need the boost right away, not at the end of the first era when they are already hurting.

'Nother idea: Up the culture of the VoS to two, give it a happiness boost, and kill the Death Shrine. Up cost to about what the Death Shrine used to cost.

Hmm. Definitely a good idea. Death shrines are usually built quite early as they are culture producers. I believe it's early enough so that the death mages receive the push they've been needing in early game. This is my number #1 option at the moment. :)

Here's a quick fix patch that combines Death Shrine into Well of Souls (+1 happiness, +2 culture, 1 upkeep). Costs 60 shields (30 after death mage religious trait). Comes at Death Magic II. Just extract the zip to Civ3\Conquests\Scenarios\ after installing Pre-release 2.

In my current game, after the Age of expansion, Mordja were in 3rd, Rjak(me) were in 5th, and Vlad was in 9th.

At the current point in time, we've just finished the first round of wars, where Rjak wiped out the Sss'ra, and Tlaloc, Raven and Tauron, with maybe a 4th mage i've forgotten about, grouped up to destroy Mordja.
With only 10 magi left, Rjak are in second, and Vlad are in 8th. Tlaloc (again) are in 1st
Rjak are currently rebuilding thier army after lossing 95% of it, in destroying Sss'ra, in preperation for an assult on Ariel.

edit The Weel Of Souls, is brilliant. I dont know if the others were building it, but its injected new life into Death mages, and i'm managing to keep up with the AI in the tech race (helped out somewhat by the spell of knowledge, but even without it, i wouldnt be too far behind)

Vlad update:

For reasons I do not entirely understand, Tauron eventually concentrated almost all his effort on the northernmost bit of the front, repeatedly trying to get at Breslau, the only exceptions being some half-hearted attempts in Rjakistan, and the odd naval landing. After having assambled a sufficiently big force (and having cornered the market for Ettin burgers), I went over to the offensive, and smacked Firepeak, which he'd been using as the base for the attacks. Losses were horrendous, however (damn Firewall!), and since my alliance with Sss'ra had just run out, I accepted peace in return for a tech (had to pay the bastard some gpt to make him swallow it, but it at least should decrease the risk he attacks me again all to soon).

Net result of the 2nd Tauronian War; I lost one city in Rjakistan, captured two in the North, and one on a big island next to our continent (where I already owned two former Lo Pan cities). Merlin's brief involvement in the war cost him a further city on the same island.

I figure it's time for some reconstruction now. Next target, as usual, would be Sss'ra.

Edit: Might add that Tauron had built both an Orc Camp and a Barracks in Firepeak. That, of course, pretty much defeats the prupose of the Camp, so perhaps consider changing its effect to something the AI understands.

Oberic game continued:

The end comes for SSs'ra rather quickly as I use another amphibious invasion up the coast to capture a city. I then bring in fresh troops and combine those with the troops still in good shape to take the city that has his dwarves. That leaves him with his capital and another city in the desert. I take the city in the desert as well and send what I have left that is fresh to be ready to assault his capital.

I have been playing games with the AI as he shuttles units around, probing for a soft spot to take something back or generally make a pest of himself. The defenders in each city I took had at least 2 dwarves and the dwarven city had 3. He has about 14 units outside his capital and if he leaves them outside, he is going to be sorry.

He does leave them outside and I manage to sack the capital with it having 3 defenders. I get rid of having to fight 14 other units (mix of mostly dwarfs and beastmen with a few fanatics), so I am quite happy. SSs'ra was doomed by his start position (mostly rough terrain, no luxuaries, no water for the most part).

I make contact with Morja and Vlad, who are on an island to the west of me. I also have a Merlin ship make an appearance. I find out I am losing to Merlin and that Merlin has a pretty good tech lead on me. (He has at least the 6 techs and working higher as I am just now starting on the 6 techs). I have a good edge on Morja and Vlad. Both are intertwined with each other with Morja having a slight edge.

Morja has Dyes and elves. His capital produces 10 shields a turn and has around 21 units there. Morja's capital is very exposed at the end of a strip of land.

Vlad has Dark Elves and Lizards along with Dyes as well. His capital has around 20 units and produces 12 a turn.

I establish an Embassy with Merlin and figure out he is way to the NE of me. His capital has 7 lux in the trade box and elves. Part of his empire also has men. Gonna be tough.

It is currently turn 199:

Oberic Econ: Inc 342 -95 sci, -23 ent, -48 corruption, -56 maint, -84 units.

My army continues to feel very powerful at this point: 120 units total, 36 allowed:

1 Settler, 10 workers, 36 bowmasters, 12 acolytes, 12 cleric, 24 sorcerers, 11 champions, 2 great galley, 1 catapult, 6 cogs, 5 hawkships

I have been running around 40 science or so and I have slowed a bit on science to build the treasurey up. The best units I generally see the death mages with are the 1-3-1 spear units and of course, the 3-3-1 guys. I have the navy built up a bit and I will produce more champions and also look to upgrade my bowmasters. At 30 each for an upgrade, its pretty cheap. With 4 pointers with an extra pip on the offensive and good defenders, I should hopefully get a beach head. The question is which one do I go after? Idealy, I would like to land and get the city that has the luxuary items as that is what is slowing me down on developement right now. Of course, I need overseas communication to be able to link it all together.

I also have to get the former SSsra cities up to speed as well and that is sort of tough with no water, the corruption and also the fact that many of them were at 1 pop and had basically nothing when I captured them. I have expended some cash to help speed construction of items to get them on line faster. I will probably build my dark tower on the far end of the island as one of the cities has good resources around it and that end of the island happens to be near the death mage islands as well.

I do also know Merlin has been fighting with Rjak and Tauron from the stand point that he has captured workers from them. I have not made contact with either of those two yet.

Latest Vlad save attached.

Oberic report continued:

Turn 233.

After crushing SSs'ra, I go through a short period of consolidation, building, and getting ready for the invasion of the island of death next to me. I have decided Morja is going to get it first as his capital is very exposed and most of the coast facing me has his cities on them.

The initial invasion goes extremely well and I do a direct amphibious assault on the city and take it. I then pour in more troops and after killing probably close to 100 units of Morja's army over the next 6 turns, I am left with 2 armies and a lot of elite units. Morja at one time shoved 27 units at me on the same turn and I managed to kill them all in the same turn. He was using a mix of skele spearmen, skeleton guards, and the usual shadowmen. A lot of his troops were regulars, not vets and this helped me a lot as I had at least vets and quite a few elites. The terrain was very favorable for me as well and he had to come at me in the open.

After Morja seemed to shoot his standing army, I then proceeded to do amphibious invasions all the way down the coast and have basically taken away 8 of Morja's cities including his capital. I also have a 3rd army to show for my efforts. Vlad has done nothing this entire time and he is going to be sorry at one point because I think I have Morja down to about 3 cities. I will try to finish him off as he has nothing I want. I find myself short of garrison troops and it has tied down a lot of my assault forces to guard cities and such. Will be fixing that as fast as I can, but basically, Morja is helpless against the champions. I take some losses, but it is not much, especially for the amount of damage I am doing.

Elsewhere, I see a report that Rjak is destroyed by Tauron. I also finally locate not only Tauron and Merlin but also Lo Pan. Lo Pan is on a smallish island to the east of a huge island that Tauron and Merlin share. Both Tauron and Merlin are ahead of me in science and both have considerable resources at their disposal. I can't trade with either of them for luxuaries, so I continue to have extra and can't get anything for them.

Tauron and Merlin are going at it and it looks like Tauron is slowly getting the upper hand. Tauron has a ton of Ettin units that he is pounding Merlin with and Merlin is responding with orcs. Looks like a real slugfest and as long as they keep each other busy and both continue to take huge losses, I will be happy.

For the overall strategic situation, I should be able to conquer the island next to me, but it is going to be a bit. That should put me in good shape as far as points go as I will have conquered 3 other positions. Hopefully, being that big will also help on the tech front as well. I should have access to lizards, elves, and dark elves to go along with my dwarfs.

Current econ is 514 with -186 sci, 34 ent, 70 corruption, 109 maint, 89 units.

Army is 147 units with 58 allowed.

1 Settler, 6 workers, 12 bowmasters, 3 armies, 12 acolytes, 40 scorcers, 39 champions, 1 catapult, 9 cogs, 2 giant spiders, 12 clerics, 12 hawk ships.

Some observations:

Death mages do need some help as while they probably had weak starts in my game, they are basically outclassed badly in the army department. The thing that has been huge against them for me (and was for the wars against SSs'ra) was that neither of them employed/got mounted troops. I was able to attack at will and have a good chance my troops would retreat rather than be destroyed, which helps cut my casualties down.

The other thing that has been extremely deadly is the amphibious assault ability of the life units. Again, I can use my champions for amphib and if the combat goes bad, they stand a chance to retreat to the ships. Honestly, I think the amphib ability of life needs to go. In combination with their ships, it is extremely deadly. The other thing is that I don't think the AI is that hot with it. I saw Merlin try to do a 1 unit amphib against a Tauron city that had a wall up.. not a pretty sight.

Long term, I hope to finish off both death mages and get the island consolidated and built up. There will be a lot of reconstruction and such as I get the infrastructure put together, so I don't know how I will stand in the science race. I will have to double check where the bigger transport is so I can get my armies into play when I go decide to have some fun someplace or even if it is to redeploy back to my home island as that is a bit closer to the action.

@TLC

I'll think about the Orc Camp. I've also suspeceted that AI doesn't understand it.

Thanks for reports and the savegame. Too busy to check it out right now though (schools end today and we have couple of graduation parties to go to).

@Klyden

Thanks for the reports.

Lack of mounted units on the death mages' part. It's intentional to have them at a disadvantage in this respect, but I could do something about their early military. Maybe drop Necromancer from Death VI to Death V. Skeleton Spearmen would become obsolete pretty quickly though. I may reconsider the Death Knights as well.

Amphibious life. Hmmm. I would hate to get rid of it, but maybe the combination of 2 move units and amphibious is too strong as the units can escape back to the ships.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Gotta run now. :)

Another remark re: Death mages; despite, except for Death Knights, pretty much only using Orc units for offense, I've by now assambled a fairly obscene number of zombie workers. There only being so much terrain improvement to be done (esp as most units can't pillage), they get fairly pointless after a certain point, so I was thinking you could make them sacrificeable. Could help Death mages in the culture department too.

A patch! A patch! :) :clap: :) :clap: :)

Started a Freya game yesterday. Upped difficulty to Mopnarch to get a challenge and actually got one, partially due to stupid planning on my side (playing Civ while at work isn't easy ;) ). More later.

- Sacrificable zombie workers:
Don't know, might make them too strong. A Death mage can get truckloads of those if he wages some wars. However IIRC the amount of culture that a sacrifice gives can be tweaked in the editor, setting it to a low value might work.

But do the Death mages need some help for culture? In my current game, Rjak is second in culture (behind me).

Also, I remember that implementing sacrifices is a little complicated, as you have to make the right settings in about three unrelated places without the editor help helping you much ... nothing that can't be solved though.

- Orc camp:
I can confirm that the AI doesn't understand it, in my game Rjak has Orcs and he, too, builds barracks and orc camps. Unfortunately I don't see much alternatives for giving a military bonus (which is fitting for the orcs and shouldn't be changed imho). Perhaps letting the orc camp spawn an orc military unit every 20 turns or such?

That period of peaceful rebuilding didn't turn out to be very long ...

First I fought a short war against Ariel, and acquired her city on the aforementioned island.

Then I noticed that Sss'ra was falling to Tauron with worrying speed, so I declare war on him (Sss'ra) and occupied two of his cities, incl the one with his Dark Elf resource. I also took his town on the island, leaving it entirely in my hands.

This split Sss'raland in two, and Tauron proceeded to march a huge stack of Ettins into my territory, apparently to get at the other half it. I didn't trust him with that sort of force on my turf, however, so I demanded he withdraw. Sure enough, he declared war, and I proceeded to wipe out the Ettin stack. Apart from stopping him from invading my homeland, I guess the next goal is to take over his recent conquests in Sss'raland.

I've signed up Freya and Ariel against him. I do not expect them to do much, but with some luck they'll deal with his fleet.

Drift, I sent you a couple saved games.

Part of the thing about life being amphibious is the AI won't take full advantage of it like a player will. Men being amphibious is not that big of a deal because they are generally weak (no extra pip of health and won't retreat). Having the position with probably the best naval units early and mid game along with troops to take advantage of it (good attackers that have an extra pip of health and the ability to retreat from combat if they are losing) is a very powerful combination. It gives the AI defender no chance to mount any real counter attack or basically work on any defense.

The city I attacked was pretty well defended. It had 4-5 defenders and considering I could have struck about anyplace with the fleet I had, I was a bit suprised.

I also have to emphasis in this case that I went in with many elite units while Morja had mostly regulars. I bombarded any vet I could to reduce their hps.

I think the only thing that really needs to be done is to remove the amphibious ability at least from the faster units.