The Gaming Den

Damn, had the turn ready but hadn't had a chance to upload it and staled.

Also, I might be in an area of no wireless for the next 3 days, might not be able to get my turn in until evening of the 28th.

Actually, nope, I do have wifi, so I will get this turn in. It might be last minute due to doing helicopter work and long days, but I'll try to get a good chunk done tonight.

I extended the turn just in case.

Thank you. I got this turn in punctually. Hopefully I've pieced together a good one

Well, I got to see a battle, and man, K was not fucking around. Thirty-five casters turned a large chunk of the opposing army into frogs.

K is generally horrifying.

I'm pretty sure he's actually fielded about his entire research corps. That's always nasty to handle in a fight.

Well, now that Man has broken our NAP and joined the fight against me in a surprise attack, this is the point where I go AI. I just don't have the resources to fight a nation with untapped troops while Ulm is making headway and Atlantis is still nibbling at the edges.

Who wants to take over the management of the game?

I haven't looked at the turn file yet. Did I finally win a battle?

I finally won a battle. As for management of the game, I probably don't have time for that.

I could take care of the llamaserver stuff until June at least.

And back to losing battles.

Alright, so I had a bug this turn:

I lost a battle and my troops scattered. But when I watch the battle, I win it by a large margin. I lost only ~50% of my troops, and had several squads not retreating, and Machaka had lost all but 3 commanders. Any idea what caused this?

Ah, yeah, that happens sometimes, though I thought they had fixed it. See, the save file doesn't actually contain recordings of all of the battles. The "RNG" actually outputs a sequence of numbers that is deterministic from the seed value, so by recording some information about the sequence (exactly what depends on the implementation) your computer can generate exactly the same fight as the server.

In your case, either the seed got screwed up or something was off about the calculations. Probably the former, since the most likely cause of the latter would be an update between when the turn was computed and when you looked at the fight, and there hasn't been one.

Could I get a 6 hour extension on this turn? I should probably also start looking for a sub; in two weeks I'll be without a reliable Internet connection.

I'll be winning this turn, Shiritai, so that will be unnecessary.

Well, that's game.

I'd been unwilling to lead a joint attack on Ulm because I felt quite sure that knocking Ulm out of the lead would mean handing Man the game and the only chance for any of the rest of us to possibly pull out a win was to sit back and let them beat on each other. I look at the score graphs and feel validated on that point, though I hadn't realized quite how insanely far behind on research I was.

Well, I guess the title did say bad nations; where most nations have slow-to-recruit capital mages and recruit-at-any-fort research guys, MA Atlantis has STR kings of the deep at any fort and capital-only 45 gold one-path guys and expensive 3W2S guys. And on land my only available recruits were incompetent-researcher shamans. And because that's not enough of a kick in the nuts, my bless strategy meant I needed priests, and Atlantis only has one kind: STR H3 ones.

AAR: Ulm:

Capital Position (14) gave me a massive advantage in the early game, since Machaka was in (82) and Eriu was in (49).

I was able to take and castle (78) and (28) early on, which gave me 42 provinces by default (splitting the underground with Machaka). That's almost double the provinces anyone else had by default --- except Machaka, who secured a similar amount. Also, 5 thrones, for a total of 7 points.

In the midgame (~turn 35) I was talking with Shinu about possibly attacking Eriu. I realized beating Eriu would only give me one throne so I backed out and realized that making Machaka my target would make more sense.

People generally know that K is a better player than I am, so it wasn't terribly hard to convince Atlantis and Man to gang up on him. I got lucky when K went AI early, since had he totally could have vengefully done enough damage to me to prevent the win --- I won a single battle and lost 4, including one where I lost somewhere near 50 mages in a single go. I got 3 of Machaka's thrones, all of which happened to be 2 pointers, and that won me the game. Had all 3 been one pointers, I'd have been at 10, and look at taking 62 from Atlantis or 72 from Shinu.

I also got lucky that Korwin decided to be a full fledged pain in the ass to Shinu --- had he gone AI a month earlier, Shinu could have started hassling my eastern flank. To that end, I fed Korwin...~50 items and traded gems, too. 78 had ~40 mages in it + ~200 troops, so it wouldn't have been easy for Shinu to get past.

Looking at charts: Had a lead on Provinces, Forts, Income, Gem Income, and Research basically all game.

Research: I found air income early on, and my research route was something like Thaug4--->Evo3--->Construction 4, so I was producing hammers + owlquills by turn 12 or 14. For a while I was putting out ~5-6 quills a turn, and after losing 50 mages every remaining mage had a quill, and I sent...20? to Atlantis.

Magic diversity: I got Earth3 smiths early, boots made them Earth 4. I empowered one to Earth 4+Boots and got both Earth Kings.

I had a Fire2 Smith empowered to F3, which got me a Flame Spirit, which with helm, got Fire 4, which empowered to Fire 5, and I had both Fire Kings.

My pretender had Air4, which I was going to leverage to Air Queens, but Man beat me to them. I got all 3 water Queens by virtue of Indie Jade Sorceresses, which I recruited ~30 of all game, and used to search water and nature (plus water bracelet = Sea Kings court + robe = Queens). My pretender had death, which made moundfiends, which got me a couple Wraith Lords, though they didn't see action. I had quite a few golems, too, but they mostly ended up just taking a few provinces from Machaka, raiding style

End gem income is 21 fire, 8 air, 22 water, 24 earth 30 astral, 20 death, 16 nature. Death got searched by cave recruited Camazots.

Basically full site-searched, except for air. I also had 30 garnet sorceresses and was going to possibly break into blood.


Had Man been aggressive about taking High Woods (32), and Atlantis been aggressive about hassling me (though I had lots of turn1 rain of stones + firestorms + earthquakes prepared, so it wouldn't have been easy), they might have prevented the victory. Had K realized I was orchestrating the attack and gone vengeful, it might have prevented me from victory, and had Eriu gone AI earlier Shinu could have done some damage.

Overall, I think Ulm is not awful. I didn't even leverage turn 1 communions (mostly noobie reasons) but I could have to bust out big earth spells easier (apparently Maws is awesome and I never used it) --- instead I empowered and used summons. Earth is an excellent suite, with good defensive spells for both single units and armies (Legions of Steel, Marble Warriors, Army of Gold/Lead, Temper Flesh) and offensive buffs (Strength of Giants, Army of Sharpness) and battlefield debuffs (Curse of Stones, Destruction) and nukes (Maws of the Earth, Earthquake, Rain of Stones, Bladewind, Magma Eruption, Gifts from Heaven) all of which Ulm has good access to (with boosters).

And their units can hold a line and mow through indies.

Ultimately, I'm not that good at Dominions technically, though I did learn a lot this game. But I had a good starting position, and I leveraged diplomacy well, encouraging Shinu to get engaged in war with Eriu, and then helping Eriu fight back to cover my left flank, then encouraging Man and Atlantis to help me beat Machaka. And I had a good bit of fun and learned a lot, so I'd call that a success.

Thanks for the game, everyone. Super curious to hear other peoples perspectives on the game and their nations.

Edit: Oh, and my dominion was Order 3, Productivity 3, Growth 3, Cold 3, Mistfortune 1, Drain 2, with an Allfather with Air4, Water 2, Death 3 and Astral4 who was Dormant.

My last turns admittedly suffered due to finals and several family weddings, but Man wasn't as terrible as I feared. My capital-only mages were old, slow and overpriced, but Air 4 and Nature 4 give solid options. My researchers can't do much early or mid-game, but late game I would've been capable of the same Curse of the Frog Prince spam that Machaka used to great effect.

Starting off, I was planning to use Flaming Arrows (F4 pretender -> Flame Spirit gives you all the F3 mages you'd need) and Arrow Fend to turn my archery corps into a fiery machine of death, but it turns out Arrow Fend only blocks the physical portion of Flaming Arrows. Vine Ogres make excellent arrowcatchers regardless, so I had a pretty solid army.

My main mistake was not being aggressive enough; I didn't go to war with Shinu for fear of Machaka attacking me from the south, but I really wouldn't have had to worry about that, what with Ulm and Atlantis eying K's territory. My second big mistake was not immediately attacking Ulm after K retired; I hadn't realized how close Ikeren was to a throne victory.

So part of why I went after K is that I really don't have any sort of feel for what level of research is typical at a given point in the game, and when he cast Eyes Of God I was well off from having enough research for Globals and thought it meant he was way ahead of everyone in research. I was also particularly disconcerted when I burned out the eyes of the caster and discovered it wasn't his pretender.

Ikeren wrote:I also got lucky that Korwin decided to be a full fledged pain in the ass to Shinu --- had he gone AI a month earlier, Shinu could have started hassling my eastern flank. To that end, I fed Korwin...~50 items and traded gems, too.

I have a significant (if mixed) appreciation for the enemies who fight to the bitter end.

Main reason for continuing the game, I wanted to try out vengevul Waters.
Did'nt get to it. 2 more turns in Research and I would have gotten to it

I realized that I was the big target when turn 25ish arrived and no one was talking to me. I was a few turns from casting both the Earth and Fire generator globals and was hoping to get 5-6 more turns with them turned on in order to build up a summoned army that could repel invasions.

That being said, Machaka was not set up for this match-up. Cheap archers for Flame Arrows don't help when your attackers are high armor and longspears don't help when your enemies also have reach. The spiders are also about twice as costly as they should be and I needed to fight humans to realize that.

That being said, my strategy was to go for a mage-heavy core of my army and then recruit tons of cheap bodies to be buffed. This turned out to be substandard because I hadn't been paying attention to my mage recruitment and I was tight on gold when attackers cut a big chunk of my gold income quickly. I should have had pre-built quick-response armies to keep the gold flowing in, so that was an error there.

I also lost some efficiency by going for artifacts in order to cast globals. The higher cost of artifacts in Dom4 compared to Dom3 means that hitting Con8 is a lot less interesting than it used to be. That was just a tactical error on my part and no excuses there.

I think it was also a mistake to not have some Blood access. Blood Stones would have made Earth hijinks a lot more effective.

I'm also once again unimpressed by small amounts of Death access. Death really is a go-big-or-go-home path and it's a waste in small amounts on all your mages. I was especially hurt in this game because a search of my vast empire revealed very little Death income.

If I had to play this game again, I would have built my pretender for global casting and minor blood access and then gone for Curse of the Frog Prince ASAP. Also some solution for for quick raiders.

That being said, I was pretty happy with my battles. I was slowly taking ground back from two nations in a series of pretty memorable battles, but the entrance of a third was just too much with the amount of resources I had available.

Yeah, I honestly thought you could have beaten Atlantis and I...

Which is why I encouraged man to dog-pile in

You did teach me a lot about the value of big spells and battlefield enchantments, that's for sure.