Tsathoggua
Warlord
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2009
- Messages
- 127
- D'Tesh is even more easy-mode now.
Yeah, you know, they really are. Several things that need to change because they affect everyone, are *highly* exploitable when playing D'Tesh (some previously mentioned, but I'm just listing them all while I have them in mind):
-Invisible recon / dungeons & ruins, combined with unweighted dungeon results, means spamming scouts early on is *always* a winning stragegy. Always.
-Subordinate to the above, early Great Commander + fort spam = win.
-As well, an early Assassin is a guaranteed Chosen and will pretty much wipe out the rest of the civs single-handed because...
-The AI does not cope well at all with the new growth restrictions. It just doesn't. Granting that the players will adapt, and that there are some changes already being made, I feel a little guilty using two units to cleanse an entire continent while simultaneously driving my population through the roof.
-Subordinate to that, there needs to be a meta-cap to cities as D'Tesh (beyond the no-building-vessels-after-4 cap). Razing cities right now is always the right thing to do, especially when populations stay so low for so long. At least consider driving up the maintainance cost on vessels, because at the moment part of my winning strategy is razing every city that doesn't have an attractive wonder in it and parking it in the Spire until I have 4 slaves to go found a workable city near some resources I like. Those 4 slaves are guaranteed to come soon because...
-OMGSOMUCHASH. Seriously. 1% per ash sounds like not very much, but coupled with the research bonus, the lack of need for the health bonus from bio resources, and the lack of needing to trade them off to make peace with your struggling, unhealthy, mortal neighbors, I just burn everything. EVERYTHING. Things ramp up really quickly.
-Partial to that, KELP. As D'Tesh, I LOVE that kelp grows like dandelions and will fill all the ocean squares in my BFC within 50 turns or so. Because I burn it all, and a route is immediately set up, and holy goodness that is a lot of ash. Think radius-3 coastal cities on peninsulae, which I don't have yet, but I will when I can build Towers.
Probably the only thing keeping me from winning conquest games by Epic turn 300 as D'Tesh is the fact that I seem to routinely spawn as far away from every other civilization as conceivably possible, and that's probably just my bad luck and not something that needs changing. But everything I listed above is happening in my current game. The only thing my early Chosen's skeletons can't kill are fortified archers and those lovely Stoneskin Ogres.