Suprise! Acounter 40 (warning spoilers)

[Nimai_R]

OUCH! AC hit 40 and talk about surprise buttseks. (sorry for language =P) So all my irrigation is gone, and there's deserts everywhere. And my cities are about to drop like it's nobodies business. Ugh, and all my resources and luxuries are gone. Gah! It's going to be a loooooong decade my friends. To make matters worse, everyone suddenly detests me, maybe I should switch to Ashen as state religion instead of Runes and give them a reason to hate me. So much for war

I assume the -4 penalty is because I'm the hold of the Ashen Veil holy city with it's shrine built?

And any tips and advice to help recover and staunch this? Actaully maybe it's time for my vampires to feed. Especially the Baron!

Oh one other thing. If it goes down to 39 and back up to 40 does this happen all over again?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The diplomatic malus is not based on owning the shrine, it is for having the entropy mana that it provides. Trade it to someone or give it away and people will like you better, especially whoever gets the free resource. I think that if you give it to a good civ he won't use it anyway, but I'm not sure. Giving away death mana to them is also a good idea if you aren't using it. It also has a health penalty, so it actually weakens your rivals.

 

[Nimai_R]

Haha good idea. Thanks =)
Anyone know if there's a level cap? My Baron has 300 xp wondering if he should dance in some more blood?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Units don't have a level cap, so long as you don't have all the possible promotions the unit can get yet. Also, a unit cannot keep more than 999 of its xp when it it is upgraded, but you probably would not get that much xp anyway unless you are cheating. Heroes don't keep getting free xp after 100, and you can't get over 100 by fighting barbarians (you can still get some from killing barbs with the raiders(?) trait or by attaching a great commander).

So long as there are more promotions available, keep fighting. Of course, some of you weaker units could probably use the experience more.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Blight will only happen once.

 

[Nimai_R]

Yea, found out Baron isn't like the other heros ; ; oh well. Now he has a surplus of useless xp. It's okay though.

I traded away the enthropy but everyone says I'm ending the world still. so I'm assuming it's the Ashen Veil city. Rats. I should give it away to Varn of the Malakim =P.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Do you really have to start a thread for each and every one of these?

 

[Nor'easter]

OUCH! AC hit 40 and talk about surprise buttseks. (sorry for language =P) So all my irrigation is gone, and there's deserts everywhere. And my cities are about to drop like it's nobodies business. Ugh, and all my resources and luxuries are gone. Gah! It's going to be a loooooong decade my friends. To make matters worse, everyone suddenly detests me, maybe I should switch to Ashen as state religion instead of Runes and give them a reason to hate me. So much for war

I assume the -4 penalty is because I'm the hold of the Ashen Veil holy city with it's shrine built?

And any tips and advice to help recover and staunch this? Actaully maybe it's time for my vampires to feed. Especially the Baron!

Oh one other thing. If it goes down to 39 and back up to 40 does this happen all over again?

Crank out workers to have them hook up your resources and rebuild your farms, plantations, pastures, etc.

If you have water mana, give your spellcasters the Water I promotion so they can cast the spell "Spring," which upgrades desert tiles to plains.

Someone else already posted that the Blight happens only once, so if the AC drops below 40 then rises again, you're fine.

 

[Nimai_R]

Thing is I'm not sure where to post it. Though, now that I think about it, I think I'll just delete threads once I've got the answer that way it doesn't spam the forums.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The 'destroying the world' malus, I believe, is based on how much you have contributed to the AC. The Veil could be part of it, but it also includes waging too many wars for too long, raising cities, building death/entropy nodes, ect. Sacrificing population, whether to rush a building of to feed a vampire, also on the list. It raises it more if the city had AV, because these souls go to Infernal (I think). I overlooked the vampire mention in your first post and you didn't say the text next to the malus or I would have thought of this sooner. If you are Calabim, there may be little you can do without sacrificing their greatest strengths.

Also, if a unit has too much xp you might consider grafting it and a High Priest with the Patriarch promotion into a Flesh Golem. The excess xp then can be used to start multiple holy wars. The golem will remain a powerful werewolf and gain all of the High priests spells, but it cannot use its xp to purchase promotions and it will not abandon you if you switch religions. That is not a problem if there are no available promotions anyway. The very turn you switch you already have the patriarch of your new religion, and can cause a holy war even before anarchy is over or you can get a new high priest. You can keep switching religions if you want to and make almost everyone declare war on almost everyone else(Cassiel and Auric are exceptions, of course). Having so many common enemies will give you a diplomatic boost with every warring civ, and they could weaken each other with long wars of attrition. You might be the only one that everyone can trade with, and these wars would cause other leader to possibly contribute more to the AC than you have. The problem with that, of course, is getting out of the wars quickly before you allies do. If only you could get Corindale...

 

[Gravage]

Vamp feeding doesn't raise the AC afaik. Playing calabim atm and feeding off my 32 pop growing per turn city for ages. (800 exp vamps who haven't ever fought ftw ;p) And most likely the spread of AV was blamed on you because you have the holy city.

 

[daladinn]

if you have the patience and enjoy toying with things do waht every calabim in thier right mind does ...

step 1 - remove the unhappies in your largest food producing city
step 2 - build alter , soulforge , and cauldron
step 3 - eat the population to get to the xp level you want , upgrade to vampire lords or liches
step 4 - sacrifice your vampire lord to gain and undead equivelent (sp) and gain enough hammers to build the next vampire and bonus research to boot
step 5 - send the new undead unit out to cause havoc

addendum - untested but if you build teh council your undead unit might be a hidden nationality.

as the calabim , have you tried the fun of a hidden nationality losha yet? nothing like a level 28 insanely massive hidden national vamp with immortal running aorudn pillaging.

 

[Gravage]

Step One: Build city
Step Two: Build only food improvements around it
Step Three: Get a Great Engineer
Step Four: Convert to OO and get Mind Stapling
Step Five: Build Tower of Complacency in your food city
Step Six: Convert to AV and build a Demon Altar, Mokka's Cauldron and Soulforge (and Council of Esus if you want to)
Step Seven: Get Vamp Lords, sacrifice em, and you'll get back:
Research
Hammers
Infernal Lords
And the same Vamp lord, reborn in your capital

This is the strat I'm following in my current game. Ofc you could get unyielding order instead of ToC, but ToC is faster, especially if you want to go heavy in the melee tree. Im using the Council aswell, using it to tear down Arthurus' defences, and having one Vamp Lord in my main land sacrificing himself over and over leaves me with an army of infernal lords (past the national limit)..
I really wished you could feast in foreign city's with HN Vamps tho

Btw, whats your guys' strat for vamp feasting? I usually keep feasting when the city takes more than one turn to grow.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Step One: Build city
Step Two: Build only food improvements around it
Step Three: Get a Great Engineer
Step Four: Convert to OO and get Mind Stapling
Step Five: Build Tower of Complacency in your food city
Step Six: Convert to AV and build a Demon Altar, Mokka's Cauldron and Soulforge (and Council of Esus if you want to)
Step Seven: Get Vamp Lords, sacrifice em, and you'll get back:
Research
Hammers
Infernal Lords
And the same Vamp lord, reborn in your capital

This is the strat I'm following in my current game. Ofc you could get unyielding order instead of ToC, but ToC is faster, especially if you want to go heavy in the melee tree. Im using the Council aswell, using it to tear down Arthurus' defences, and having one Vamp Lord in my main land sacrificing himself over and over leaves me with an army of infernal lords (past the national limit)..
I really wished you could feast in foreign city's with HN Vamps tho

Btw, whats your guys' strat for vamp feasting? I usually keep feasting when the city takes more than one turn to grow.

Thought I heard something about Mokka's Cauldron doing something different in the next version, so I suppose the infernal lord duplicator, at least, is sort of short lived.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

One problem I had with the free Infernal Lords was I tried to get them when had only 1 Vampire lords. That prevented me from getting any more Vampire lords, so I had to settle for a few dozed inferior Infernal Lords. A few minutes ago, when about 10 Infernal lords died, the game crashed.

 

[Celeborn]

You know whats really fun? A level 20 odd Vampiric Sphener running around...


Good vampires... Woulda thunk it?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I was under the impression that only living units could become Vampires,and that Sphener, as he has the Angel promotion, is not a Living Unit. Bambur or Valin could be vamps.

 

[Celeborn]

I was under that impression as well. But apparently if there is a level 6 living unit in the same stack as the vampire and Sphener, so allowing you to gift vampirism, it passes on to Sphener as well if he is level 6 or greater.

 

[MrUnderhill]

Does that mean Saverous and Mardero can be vampirized as well, or is it just Angels?

And yeah, Orderly Vampires aren't a new thing. Confessors make the best flesh golems when mixed with vampires because they get Spirit (Spirit Guide), Life (Heal, Cure Disease), Law (Loyalty, Unyielding Order), and Fire (need I say more?).

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Orderly Vampires make perfect sense. The Vampires love maintaining the social order, with them on top, of course. They do start with Law mana.

If only they could adopt social order and corruption of spirit...