whit infernal you can go for cultural victory ( I won cultural only one time and it was whit infernals) go for republic,liberty,caste and whatever you want in economy civic and see the result lol
For the culture victory, I think the guilds civic would be better as you're got unlimited bards (+4 culture) whereas with caste system, you're looking at unemployed citizens (+2 culture).
In my recent game I was able to defeat a drastically numerically superior opponent using similar tactics. I picked off cities behind the stack of doom, causing it to march back and forth, getting near my cities before turning back to re-take its own. I was able to wear the SoD down over the course of 15 turns or so (Nox Noctis was helpful, of course) and crushed him once the SoD was gone. If he had split the stack into three and defended with one while the other two razed my cities, he could have destroyed me.Is there anything in the code that tells the AI to upgrade their defending units? They are pretty good at making large stacks of the latest and greatest, but most of their towns will still be defended by warriors. Makes for some very cheesy rush tactics to be scarily effective, like blitzing in with mobile troops and razing everything in sight.
There's also the matter of troop dispersal. Big stacks of 30 chariots will kill most things they can get their hands on, having all your good troops in one place can be a bad idea. If an opposing army is threatening your towns, some number of troops should be breaking off to form defensive stacks. Instead, they will often divert their entire army, ignoring my weakly defended towns and being picked off by cultists/stygian guards hanging out off the coast.
In my recent game I was able to defeat a drastically numerically superior opponent using similar tactics. I picked off cities behind the stack of doom, causing it to march back and forth, getting near my cities before having to turn around back to his own territory. I was able to wear the SoD down over the course of 15 turns or so (Nox Noctis was helpful, of course) and crushed him once the SoD was gone. If he had split the stack into three and defended with one while the other two razed my cities, he could have destroyed me.
Well, that's definitely better in terms of awesomeness, but it doesn't seem like such a bad thing from the perspective of how the AI is doing. The only thing the AI did there that was bad was leave its stack next to water at the wrong time... which is a bad thing to do, but the sort of mistake that even a human player will make from time to time. I guess you could code a "try not to hang out next to the water with a big stack when the Lanun still have their world spell", but that's a pretty narrow thing.Better one here: I had a 20-25 unit stack of doom marching against Sheelba, aiming at capturing one of her big, coastal cities. On a hill nearby, not in my immediate field of view, was Rhoanna's 128-unit stack of doom, including Magnadine. I know a biiiiig problem when I see one, and looked at losing Saverous, Guybrush and Hemah in one fell swoop, plus a few archmages and cultists...
Rhoanna's stack happened to be next to a lake. My cultists grinned. A triple-tsunami followed up by Raging Seas drowned 100 units, plus badly hit Sheelba's forces.
I had no casualties, and the power graph two turns later was simply breathtaking.
I believe liberty allows unlimited bards.
Edit: ohyay400postsaren'tiamazing
Sorry, I got this backwards. Regular units can take items from HN units, but not the other way around. The best workaround I can find is summoning a skeleton, having it take the item, then unsummoning it to drop it. But allowing items to be dropped would be a nicer workaround.I'm not sure if there's a reasonable way to implement this, but it would be nice if items could easily be passed between Hidden Nationality units and other units. Even just giving HN units the ability to drop the item would be nice.
. Diplomacy sucks ass too with them being stubborn pricks.
For the unit art: make sure you don't have frozen animations enabled. Some of the older art doesn't work with it and will revert to the base model rather than the one intended.
To wit: In the scenario I was describing above, Rhoanna and Sheelba were in a Permanent Alliance. After drowning Rhoanna's mega-stack and raiding Sheelba's empire, the orcs were down to their last city. To sue for peace, I'd have to give Sheelba a city and something to the order of 6000 gold. Simple enough: I took her out of the game -- causing Hafgan the Purger and Varn Gossam to break away as Rhoanna's vassal and make peace concessions with me (I gave back Varn Gossam's city; too far away to be of any use)!
On another note; I was exploring with my initial settler, and on turn 2 I noticed Sheaim had popped an epic dungeon with his initial scout. Looking at the epic monster stack I just restarted and deleted all the explorable unique features on turn 1 (already play with no lairs).