SOD? yeah right....

[Vladesch]

So I thought I was doing pretty well as the calabim. I had a stack of about 7 vampired highly promoted, 3 mages, a confessor and some catapaults, and I was slowly taking the Amurite cities.
The khazad now declare war on me, but I figure my vampires should be able to deal with what they throw at me.

I was very very wrong

A stack of 91 champions, all with at least 3 promotions, and Iron(of course)
also 65 hunters.

Needless to say I just got annihilated in 1 turn. sheesh


Heres the save if anyone thinks I'm exaggerating
http://www.users.on.net/~vladesch/vladesch AD-0380.7z

 

[Senethro]

What difficulty? What game speed?

 

[Vladesch]

Just monarch normal speed.
Actually I should have read the AI thread before posting this. Apparently stacks of 100+ units are the norm now.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Played it for 8 turns. Got the Khazad on their back foot.

You've got mages and adepts sleeping in the boonies of your territory. I woke them up and sent them to the front line. I handed out law 2 and fire 2 to those who could get it.

First order of business was killing the amurite counterattack stack. There's one a bit SE of Ciriail that can put out about 20 fireballs a turn, which will fry you if you let it be. I lost a couple of your ultravamps killing it, but I couldn't afford to give it a single turn. The khazad army I let simply advance of udenarat and take it. (they also reinforced with ~80 slingers.) It had like 10 of your longbowmen (really well set up btw) which got a lot of kills, and left a bunch more khazad stranded and hurt a tile away from the city. The khazad army moved on towards cevedes despite its injuries.

Every turn, I sent fireballs, then the strongest vamps, then valin and losha, finally followed by weaker vamps, confessors and such at the main khazad army. By keeping this army regenerated and with medics constantly, and by having them end turns in cities, I made sure they never had to stop to heal. They kept taking udenarat, I kept taking it back with longbowmen (the unit I made the most of in your high production cities.) Every time they retook udenarat it left them with wounded stragglers which were picked off by Einherjar, which then drew attacks by surviving an extra turn, leaving even more hurt stragglers, etc etc. The main army made it to cevedes, smashed the garrison, then... stalled out. By the time they were on the move again I killed all but like 10 of their champions, and the stack turned tail and headed toward home.

This is def. winnable. I lost I think 5 really strong vamps but made some replacements, Valin is now a terrifying beast, and the khazad offensive failed at everything but griefing 2 of the old amurite cities.

Protips:

Governor's manors are #1 priority in all cites. I noticed some of your cities didn't have them.

Public baths are higher priority too.

Use mobility more often. That + haste lets your guys attack pretty far, then retreat to the safety/increased healing of a city in the same turn.

Upload your damn saves to CFC instead of putting them on personal webspace in ing 7z format. If you don't know how, the attachment manager is here:

And from there it's easy enough to figure.

 

[Emptiness]

Um, you forgot to make your screenshot family friendly with 's...

 

[WCH]

ing is family friendly. Actually it's a necessary precondition for most people's concept of family.

 

[Vladesch]

the khazad offensive failed

Thats pretty amazing, I didnt think it was remotely possible.
Guess Ill have another try using your tips, but I cant help feeling I'm going to get hammered.

Thanks for playing it out and the advice.

Just one question, why governers manor in every city. It seems a waste unless I want to build vampires there, and many of the cities have such poor production its hardly worth it (or is it?)

I wasnt bothering with public baths because I was keeping my cities lowish population anyway to speed up leveling my vampires, and health was an issue in some cities. (I always build them very early with other races)

 

[Tasunke]

Governors Manor GIVES you hammers ... trust me, its more hammers than it advertises xD

(at least Population+1 )

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Yeah, even if you don't want to build vampires in a city the extra hammers from manors are great for building other infrastructure.

Bigger cities = more XP per feast. You don't gain anything from keeping feasting cities small on purpose. Sure they regrow quicker, but you can just grow them huge then snack them down to the smaller size for a hundred or so extra XP.

 

[xalien]

Yeah, 10 pop city means 11 hammers from manor and up to 54 xp (when feasted down to 1 pop)

30 pop city means 31 hammers from manor and up to 464 xp.

So farm everything, run aristograrian and you'll be unstoppable.

 

[Vladesch]

I'm not seeing these extra hammers. It seems to be exactly as described, ie 1 base extra hammer for each unhappy person.
Here's a screenshot as an example.
You can see 1 red unhappy person on the right.
I am mousing over the production and it shows Base production of 7, +1 hammer for 1 unhappy person and then +25% for buildings which seems correct
(7+1)*1.25=10

Still a good building of course.

 

[Frozen-Vomit]

As you can see the total production is 32 hammers, not the 10 shown. The other 22 are also from the manor but not shown in the calculation list.

 

[Morlark]

You're missing the bit next to that where it says 32. The number next to the progress bar is always the actual correct production number. I asked this question in another thread, and apparently the tooltip is just bugged. (Even though I and everyone else I know agrees that the governor's manor is the most hilariously unbalanced UB there is.)

Edit: beaten

 

[UncleJJ]

Correct you are not "seeing" them because there is a display error in the mouse over pop up. Notice you are producing 32 hammers per turn and yet the display only shows 10. The Govenors Mansion will actually be giving you 19 hammers per turn.

So the display should show (19 + 7) * 125% = 32 which is what you are getting and this is what will be added as production at the end of the turn.

Edit, beaten by 2 people

 

[Nikis-Knight]

On the original topic, I find Nox Noctis extremely helpful for dealing with large invading stacks. Being able to pick off units as they march on cities without losing injured units to counter attacks is very valuable.

 

[Tasunke]

Nox Noctis also works well when combined with domination ... grrrr

 

[Vladesch]

You're missing the bit next to that where it says 32.

Oops, I missed that part. Hmm thats a crazy bonus for a building.
Guess Id be crazy not building them now, but it feels a bit overpowered.

Id consider the calabim one of the top races without this bonus.

 

[Brokenbone]

With Calabim cities, I guess my experience is that if you can keep them big, you get lots of hammers... for as long as you can resist snacking on them. Snacking on them means losing a lot of production, basically choosing to have nastier units out there, hopefully subjugating other cities to eat as well (possibly preserving your production centers).

 

[·Imhotep·]

With Monkeyfinger as player nothing is impossible .

 

[CurseUppl]

Guess Id be crazy not building them now, but it feels a bit overpowered.

Certainly not! Some of the other races are underpowered.

Also, as an above poster said, it's a choice between nom nom cities for experience or let them grow McHuge for production.

Plus, the unhappy face is annoying (can be nullified with social order though) and the manor itself isn't as good as a courthouse, thus Calabim will have smaller empires than other civs.

Hmm, a bit off topic.