ROTQM13: Rolling Over The Quintet's Magic

[pholkhero]

Well Mr pholk, as you're up you can decide which one we go for. The Baron is definitely more fun as spawning endless werewolves is great but is probably further away.

sorry all, i didn't realize it was up to me already. if my name's not bolded, then i'm blind to it i've got it!

 

[King Bulrush]

Agree, a culture, altar or tower victory are more difficult to achieve.

Last time I checked, our current map has very few mana sources, so going for a tower victory would have been extremely difficult and/or tedious (although getting palace mana from vassals/puppets might have helped a bit. I personally regard tower victories as an alternative to conquest/domination on very large maps where you are already winning but are too lazy to fight the most distant rivals.

Altar on the other hand is easy (if you focus on this from the start) but boring. It seems to me that the AI loves this victory type though. I even lost games to capitulated vassals who built the tower while I was distracted by other things.

I think conquest/domination can be made a bit more difficult by increasing the difficulty level, map size, number of enemies or tweaking some other settings.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Also having a map with more water. This mapscript made it just too easy to walk around conquering stuff. So basically we have:
- higher difficulty
- larger map with more AI's (I vote max size)
- different mapscript with more mana and water to make blobing harder
- enable puppet states

Than again we don't want to make the game last too long.

 

[pholkhero]

Dearest Madam,

it is with the greatest regret and heartfelt sympathy that I must inform you that your son, Mr. Swordsman #4, gave his life so that the evil scourge that is magic could be eradicated from this land.



And thus was the only unit we lost. I made some headway on all fronts, and we're at the tedium phase of the endgame.

This purplewine-colored country only has a couple of off-shore cities that need to be dealt with.


This green, pointy-eared fella is ready to give up the ghost, but our army is spread thin. And if i'm saying that, then you know you need to be ready to shuffle things around up there.


That being said, we're not in any real danger, and when we consolidate back into one stack, we'll finish him off in no time.

Got a stack getting ready for yellow person here. Seems the mercurians stopped the war? idk.


They'll need a bit of reinforcements to do anything really.

finally, we're moving back to where it all began:


moved our army back from the Amurite lands and they are on the way to deal w the Svart. A few turns before we moved out, we had a great battle north of our city.


Theology came in > went with Righteousness. We're at 100% Sci so we'll have that in 11 turns. not sure we'll see many paladins. maybe storming the beaches.

What else is there to say?


smashy-smashy

edit: against all etiquette, i put workers on automate. we're really at that point in the game imo. those not doing that are scouting or fog-busting.

 

[pholkhero]

Roster

Ozbenno >> On Deck
King Bulrush
pholkhero
Tinadafish >> just played
PPQ Purple >> UP NOW

it will probably get back to me once more, but maybe not twice!

 

[Ozbenno]

Yep won't be too much longer. Seems Faeryl beat us to the Baron to no great benefit.

If Theology has come in, we should look to promoting some confessors as well.

 

[Tinadafish]

Pretty sure you just played not me pholk

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Yep, it's your turn not mine.

 

[pholkhero]

for as long as i've been on here, i thought this was a bong



sorry bout that

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Speaking of things. Would you mind if after we capture the elven queen I have her sacrificed to my self by boiling her alive in a vat of purple dye? It's kind of a tradition.

 

[Tinadafish]

Clean up duty goes harder than expected, turns out elves are a very defensive bunch indeed, made all the harder now that our siege trains have been ransacked and no one in our empire knows how to cast fireball. No matter, plenty of cities got burned down...

Spoiler :

I kept Thariss because it had Sirona's Beacon, might make this go a bit quicker, I used the sleeping great artist to start a golden age with the same idea in mind. All our plans for priors went out the window when I realised we have no incense, and worse, the only incense I can find on the map is right next to the ruins of an infernal city we razed not that long ago, oh well, Paladins don't require incense right?

The most annoying thing is the amurites settled two islands so I guess we're taking a tech detour through optics and astronomy unless anyone wants to ship an army over a few galleys, should be the last bump in the road.

 

[Tinadafish]

I very conveniently got to copy paste the roster from pholk's last post
Roster

Ozbenno >> On Deck
King Bulrush
pholkhero
Tinadafish >> just played
PPQ Purple >> UP NOW

 

[King Bulrush]

The most annoying thing is the amurites settled two islands so I guess we're taking a tech detour through optics and astronomy unless anyone wants to ship an army over a few galleys, should be the last bump in the road.

Oh, I love naval combat. Time to research Galleons and build our invincible armada to crush those last islands.

Alternatively, if we are in a hurry we can convert to octopus overlords for clerics with water waliking + tsunami = no need for shore bombardment. We would loose Valin and probably the crusaders too, in that case (but not the confessors). Which means we can only do this after there are no more enemies on the continent.
And no, Palladins don't need incense. And for extra cheesiness, OO cultists can be upgraded to palladins for palladins that can cast water walk and tsunami before stroming the enemy city. But then, you need to be good to build palladins so that would require us to convert back to order for the allignment change. So this means it is probably easier to just build the fleet.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

No, we must remain true to junil. I'll check if we can just take galleys over since we only need to take our 3 heroes anyway.

 

[Ozbenno]

Speaking of things. Would you mind if after we capture the elven queen I have her sacrificed to my self by boiling her alive in a vat of purple dye? It's kind of a tradition.

Feel free. Traditions are important.

 

[King Bulrush]

Speaking of things. Would you mind if after we capture the elven queen I have her sacrificed to my self by boiling her alive in a vat of purple dye? It's kind of a tradition.

Which elven queen? There are two of them. You should capture both of them and trow them in the vat together. This will heal the rift between the dark elves and light elves by making them both purple elves, thus restoring order for the glory of Junil.

And to answer your other question: No, we can't capture ships, at least, not with any unit we have access to. We will have to build at least one galley.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I'll try and get a turn in today.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Sorry for the delay. My hue was being disrupted by a combination of work and temperatures approaching 40C which lead to an overall inability to focus on much.

Speaking of focus frankly when it came to these 14 turns I just didn't. I noticed we were producing a whole lot of units that we didn't need, our cities were mismanaged and the empire as a whole resembled 4th century Rome more than it had any right to.

I didn't care about any of that though. Nor did I care about keeping our armies carefully managed and moving together. Or about the paladins and siege units you guys were building for no good reason.

I didn't even care that our "ally" stole our glory by beating us to Splender the angel.

I didn't need to. I had the heroes.

Long story short Turn 564 saw the end of the first of the two elven factions. They resisted at first, but in the end their cities were razed, their people butchered, their monuments dedicated to ruination and their queen boiled alive in a vat of bubbling purple dye as is custom.

Spoiler :

Not once did the Bannor pause to think about what they were doing, to consider the morality of their actions or contemplate their implications.

Who has time for that when there are still forests to burn?

A similar story was unfolding to the east where Valin had finally gotten fed up with being dragged down by the rest of his army. One morning right after the after breakfast prayer (not to be confused with the before breakfast prayer and the fist thing in the morning prayer) he jumped on his horse and rode off strait at the wood elves.

What followed was a string of victories during which Valin completely unsupported took all 5 elven cities in as many turns leaving behind mercenaries as a garrison and a miffed army of footmen lead by Brigit lumbering behind ineffectually.

Spoiler Cooking is fun, cooking is cool, no wait it's hot! :

To add insult to injury Valin than proceeded to go south and do the same thing to the king of clowns leading to a most unusual exchange.

Spoiler :

We kept him on as our Court Jester for he knew too much.

As this was going on Donal took a hike north, boarded a galleon and took care of the two remaining Amurite settlements. I wish there was more to say about this but honestly it was just a two garbage cities protected by warriors.

And that concludes our adventure. With the last of the foul magic lovers defeated, the hordes of hell slain, elven genolcide achieved and the world plunged only 1/3 toward becoming hell the great crusade comes to an end.

Spoiler :

I have included a save file just in case any of you wants to watch the victory cinematic.

 

[Tinadafish]

Everlasting victory! (Until the Late Bannor Empire gets conquered by massing barbarian orcs after our economy goes down the toilet)

 

[Ozbenno]

Well done everyone, a great victory. Any ideas for a repeat performance?