HumanWar: Odd Man Out (Game On!)

[Zeldor]

Don't postpone it any more. We can have hosting even tomorrow. Still no word from llamabeast though, I will send him a next PM.

[rdonj]

Alright, in that case everyone just needs to get their turns in and we'll be off.

[Zeldor]

I will do mine tomorrow. Still no idea what to do though.

[Zeldor]

Huh, 7 AIs and 6 humans?

[rdonj]

Yeah, we've lost a lot of players over the last few turns.... It's getting to be a very small game as of late.

[Zeldor]

I don't have enough armies to conquer everyone at once... but I will do my best :)

[qio]

Huh, 7 AIs and 6 humans?

More like 4.5 humans.

http://www.llamaserver.net/doAdminAction.cgi?game=HumanWar&action=showstales

[Zeldor]

Oh. Game admin should have turned him AI long time ago...

[rdonj]

Okaaay, 9 stales is definitely too much. I would just switch him myself but I don't think that works with me playing the game. I don't suppose there's anyone reading the thread who would be inclined to set him AI?

Also if ma pythium stales again next turn, I don't think there's much chance of stopping T'ien Ch'i from winning. I would be inclined to step out at that point.

[Zeldor]

But it will be few turns until you can see what I'm going to do with few hundred of D gems :)

And I really wish I had that Nature's Bounty up. Getting 15-20k net gold a turn would change a lot... not that I can beat my record of about 50 forts soon.

[rdonj]

Well, maybe I'll stick around long enough to see the apocalypse :P I would rather do it with ma pythium still playing though. Anyway, I don't think you really need nature's bounty to kill us all, I expect the world will soon become a much darker place.

[Zeldor]

Nah, I have no plans for Utterdark. Even thought I would probably benefit from it most [well, lose not as much as others]. There are other methods, more straightforward and brutal :) You can ask Isokron about hints too. He had a chance to fight me once, 3:1. I don't think he was very happy with the result :)

[rdonj]

Well, if I had access to all the death gems I could ever want, and wasn't summoning tartarians... and wasn't intending to cast any more globals... I would probably cover the world with ghost riders. I doubt that you could spam enough to kill off pythium's armies with them but you could do plenty of damage, especially to a small, weak nation with only one army... like me :shock:

At least I defeated machaka's army before my annihilation :D

[Zeldor]

Ghost Riders are uber awesome :) And have you seen Undead Mastery animation? It's really cool. Too bad I wasn't able to really use my D15 Tartarian in Kingmaker [with boosters of course].

And I miss scenes like that:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26/Zeldor/tarts.jpg

[rdonj]

Nope, I've never seen undead mastery cast. I probably don't play enough games against la ermor....

I remember looking at your final turn in kingmaker, and seeing how you had an entire wing of flying manticore tartarians in one battle. It was pretty inspiring.

[Zeldor]

Manticores are useless. And you can't help that much with spells. They cannot kill a thing. But they have lots of HP, so can give time for your mages.

Try Undead Mastery in a test game at least, animation is great :)

[rdonj]

Well, at least if you used them in darkness your enemy won't be hitting anything either :)

I will do that. Maybe I'll do it with jomon, I haven't tried them yet since the patch.

[Zeldor]

Jomon has pretty much no D magic :) LA C'tis would be better for that. Or Agartha. Or Pan.

[rdonj]

Yeah, doing it as jomon probably would be making it just a bit excessively hard on myself :P

[rdonj]

Looking at the turn more closely some things seem strange. I don't have an item that I think I should (I might have gotten it the turn of the rollback though), a new crystal mage has no paths... and zeldor your well of misery disappeared? Or did the mage who cast it die?

[Zeldor]

Nah, someone dispelled. And I know who. There are no strange things in my turn, at least I didn't notice any.

[rdonj]

Hmm, alright. I would have thought I would receive a dispel message, but I guess it doesn't work that way when it's not your global.

That leaves only the inexplicable lack of magic on my crystal mage unaccounted for.

[LoloMo]

I just noticed that 4 of my Druid commander recruits and 1 other mage recruit appeared as non commander with 0 slots and paths. They appeared in the home garrison queue. That's a really expensive bug. Can we freeze hosting until this is resolved?

[LoloMo]

Could we have hit the commander limit already?

[rdonj]

Well, I postponed by 48 hours, I will ask llamabeast about it.

[Zeldor]

I don't think it's possible that we got to commander limit, as we didn't reach it even in Kingmaker [it was close there at least, before armageddons]. It's what, 5000? No chance to reach that. And it would affect everyone, I have no problems with any commanders. It may be some other weird bug.

[LoloMo]

I had that bug before when I was playing tomb kings mod nation and a new patch came in. It didn't resolve itself the next turns. If I recall, something about unit IDs being displaced.

[Zeldor]

None of us is playing modded nations though. Not even old ones with new stuff. Jomon could make problems, but he is weak and AI. We surely want it resolved of course. Someone cursed our game :P

[rdonj]

Anyone else keep getting their turn files resent to them without asking for them?

[llamabeast]

Did the funny commanders correspond to the release of the new patch?

Let me know if it happens again. If it's repeatable I could send the files to Illwinter.

[rdonj]

Actually yes, I think it did. We spent so long trying to get through the 1 turn I don't think we've played more than the 1 original turn since the patch came out.

[llamabeast]

Cool, well hopefully that might be the cause then.

[Lingchih]

I've sent a request for a turn resend a couple of times now. Since someone set to me receive a nation turn. I assumed it was for a set to AI. Don't really know though, since I have never received a turn.

[rdonj]

Yeah, all we need is an AI. Lingchih, I don't think I actually have your email address. I set the email address to the one on that website listed as your homepage. So, assuming that just is wrong, I need you to pm me your email address because I'm pretty sure you've never given me one, though I could be wrong. Anyway, I can probably get someone else to set him AI if this is too much hassle.

[rdonj]

Hmm, I could have lived without having to fight la pythium. I was somewhat hoping it would be too busy dealing with arco to want to bother me. Oh well, I guess if I'm fighting them maybe I'll get to acquire a little territory :)

[Lingchih]

MA Ulm is AI now.

[rdonj]

Zeldor has asked for an extension, so hosting has been postponed 24 hours. Hopefully after this we can start getting back on track, the last several turns have taken an incredible amount of time to get through.

[Zeldor]

I will do the turn in the evening :) Before 8-9 GMT time if possible.

[Zeldor]

Ha, fireworks! Pythium got some demonstration of my firepower :) That was a cool battle! :)

[Zeldor]

Huh, some bastards really have too many S gems for all that dispels :P

Funny thing is that you can cast Eyes of God with a blind mage again.

Any comments from other players on the game? It's rather quiet here...

[rdonj]

Avast ye! Hmm, so, nothing interesting on my front. Just wading through a bunch of LA Pythium's old summons. Plotting against you. That sort of thing :)

I'm sure that arcane nexus got you enough pearls that you won't be hurting too much from the dispel, anyway :P

[Zeldor]

I expected at least 2x more, but with all that AIs not casting many rituals... I didn't get enough of it to become stronger.

[rdonj]

Yeah, with so few players left, there is a lot less forging/casting. And I don't know about anyone else but my last turn was particularly light on gem use so maybe we lucked out. Maybe.

Anyway, another turn, another day to think of new ways to try to convince you to take me out.

[Zeldor]

That's a job of my new buddy, La Pythium! Don't you know that he works for me? :) As does MA Arco and MA Ulm, muahahaha!

[rdonj]

Curses, foiled again!

[Zeldor]

Could I get 24h extension? It's Easter preparation time.

[rdonj]

Sure, extension granted.

[Zeldor]

Hmm... there seems to be some bug with one of MA Pythium guys? rdonj, could you ask llamabeast to take a look and ask Isokron if he knows anything? We shouldn't be at the point where units are recycled like that... maybe it has smth to do with my guy being unable to cast globals?

MA Pythium has Octavianus the Centurion at #116 with global enchantment icon.

[rdonj]

Will do.

[Isokron]

I have no centurion there, the one in the battle seem to be part of the PD, no idea why it has a global enchantment icon. (and you must be really bored to be clicking every PD commander in every battle :) )

[Zeldor]

He is PD? Even more bizarre. I just check commanders for gear :) No big problems here, I just wanted rdonj to inform llamabeast, so he can send files over to Illwinter to help them track that quite old bug :) And I wonder if it can have anything to do with my bug [which I doubt, especially when he is in PD].

[JimMorrison]

You know, I think that the way that PD is handled may actually be implicated in the commander/unit limit problems. The units and commanders in PD are generated anew every time a battle happens, so many battles, with high PD, could hasten the descent into such problems. Just a thought, I'm not 100% sure how the game handles it, but they are created out of thin air at the onset of battle, and they must have IDs of some kind.....

[Zeldor]

We shouldn't be even close to commander limit.

[LoloMo]

I discovered two carnute nobles that suddenly became commanders with magic paths that same turn that 5+ mages I recruited became non-commanders. Perhaps some corruption in the unit IDs is being carried over turn after turn?

[Zeldor]

Huh, that shouldn't happen unless someone was messing with .2h files in a really bad way. I know it can happen during rollback when someones submits next turn from old hosting, so they have different IDs. I would be extremely surprised to see anything cheating here though.

[rdonj]

This is all getting very, very strange.

[gotchaaa]

Sorry guys, I have to go biz trip tomorrow, tonight i have to pack for the trip. I believe I will have internet access as soon as I settle in the hotel. So could you please postpone the hosting by 24 hours? Thanks!

[rdonj]

Done.

[Zeldor]

Hmm... maybe we should switch to 72h timer? I have some problems with doing my turns properly.

[LoloMo]

I won't mind switching to 72h, but how many games are you in Zeldor? :)

[Zeldor]

3 :) My standard limit. But they all happen to be around turn 50 :( Tried to avoid it, but all went in different speed.

[rdonj]

I don't have any objection either, so unless there's an objection hosting will move to 72h after the current turn processes.

[Zeldor]

Hmm... I may be able to get enough time to do 48h hosting for some more turns. Hmm...

[rdonj]

Well, that sure was a disappointing showing by bob. Maybe if I had made a barkskin amulet for him he would have been slightly less pathetic.

I was hoping I could get into a good fight with another player. Alas it was not meant to be. Since I can do nothing but grapple with la pythium's AI for the forseeable future it's pretty clear that my efforts won't have any effect on the outcome of the game. That doesn't seem very interesting to me, so I am going AI this turn. If someone would like to take over as admin now would be a good time to do so :). Although honestly it probably would not be a big deal for me to keep on as admin as I will continue watching the thread.

[gotchaaa]

Hi guys. I am still on business trip, and I barely had time to play... Now tonight I　have to work overtime, and it could be possible I could stall... Could admin please delay the turn by 6 hours? I am sure I could return to my hotel and finish by then. Thanks!

[rdonj]

Sure. You're lucky I'm awake right now though. If you need another extension I probably won't be around to see it.

[Zeldor]

Hmm... that game got a bit boring and it looks like it's not only me who has that impression. With so many people going AI, maybe we should call it a draw? I know I have good chances to win [but I'd put my money rather on Pythium], but that game will last 30-50 more turns and victory won't be as valuable as in other games - it is a race to conquer more AIs, which is well, boring...

[LoloMo]

If the two super powers of Pythium and Tien Chi agree to a draw, Marveni will concur.

[Isokron]

I guess I can accept a draw as well. With my current 3 clams per turn output it would be 25 slow turns until I could summon a seraph per turn :)

[Zeldor]

I'm making more clams a turn. I have some plans that could let me win, but I am not really motivated to submit my turns. Doing them last minute. I have lots of gems that I could use for good things. And I could devastate world with Black Death spam and tartarians. But with most of the world controlled by AI it makes it less appealing.

[gotchaaa]

I am with LoLoMo =)

However, I really want to found out how Pythium would fight TC =)

[LoloMo]

Is Ronj still the admin? I pmed him informing that this game has ended in a draw.

[rdonj]

Yes I am still the admin. I was expecting a bit more of a formal declaration that the game was over, it looks like there was a desire to see what the next turn looked like? Anyway I just want to make sure that everyone has decided the game is over before I shut down the game, just in case someone thought that it wasn't quite over yet.

[rdonj]

No one wants to say yea or nay?

[LoloMo]

It's a draw, last turn every one staled already. Tien Chi offered a draw, Pythium accepted, as did I (Marveni), followed by Marignon.

[rdonj]

Alright, as I said I just wanted to be especially careful about it. Shutting the game down now.

[LoloMo]

Thanks Rdnoj!

I had a pretty good start in this game, got to top 5 in the province count early game. But then Ermor, who I believe was first in province count then, decided to attack me while I was cleaning up Ulm. The next 30 turns or so then had us locked up in a slow grinding war against his blessed cavalry. I had a slight advantage, but it was at the cost of stopping my research and sending off my druids to war. When Ermor finally turned AI, my nation Marveni had pathetic research and could only hope that the great powers of Pythium and Tien Chi would decimate each other while I catch up with about 20 turns worth of research.

Even with human only opponents and Baalz's great Marveni guide, the druids are tough to use, being old and having map move of only 1. The druids can be a great strike force with the ability to teleport on top of any army, but gems are a big constraint. My feeling is that Marveni is strongest in the middle game, but have no punching power late game, and above average early game among non blessed troop nations.

[rdonj]

I basically had no real strategy :). I saw that there were no banned spells and thought I would go into the game, cast something nasty and go down in a blaze of glory. I got off to a good start, sort of, with pretty solid research that had me on top or close to the top on research for most of the early game. I was all set to go forward, except that once I got into the game I did seemingly everything in my power to prevent myself from going through with it! I made an ally early, which was completely contradictory to what I was planning to do. Then I for some inane reason agreed to a 10 turn nap with someone who was no real threat to me. Then I began plotting with 3 or 4 others to sneak attack ma pythium, who was at that time clearly the strongest player (and my only other neighbor) but each of my potential allies proceeded to get dragged into wars which ended up completely derailing the plan. I really wish I'd gone through with my original plan, cast burden of time, and just invited people to kill me like I'd initially intended. Unfortunately yet another thing that went into derailing that plan was a horrible lack of D gems :sick:.

[Zeldor]

Huh, Madness ended in a draw too, too bad that both of my TC games ended without a result. But well, way too many people going AI.

My plan was to rush someone early on with Ancestor Vessels. But got a lot of really bad events early on and was surrounded with swamps, so it failed. After like 50 turns my cap got to 30k pop and I had growth2...

So I changed my plans and decided to turtle a bit [after finding sages and adepts], so I signed deals with EA Ermor [to have protection from north] and MA Machaka [west secured] and started to prepare to strike south, at either Marignon or Pythium. As Pythium was getting stronger I got into a deal with other nations to join forces and attack him together. Jomon + EA Ulm attack on Machaka delayed that plans. I decided to take some water provs from Jomon, but he did not pick the fight and went AI instead. Whole game was slowly falling apart then. MA Ulm started to stale, EA Ermor and MA Machaka went AI [and so did 2 Arcos and LA Pythium], so I had to go and grab their lands [and lose all protection from that directions] - had lots of bad luck with battles [lost and reforged Sickle like 4 or 5 times, huh]. And later everyone decided to attack me and it was 5-10 turns before I'd be ready for a war like that.

To be honest I hoped to get that game finished without having to use boring and lame late-game tactics. I have neglected them a bit, but if the game continued I'd have to use them. Started clamming [7/turn] and tart summoning [2-3] and wished for Chalice 2 turns ago. I have signed peace with Pythium and Marignon, so I'd devastate Marverni with black deaths [combined with raven feast combo they were free or even profitable], then conquer him slowly + ea ulm too [and pythium would conquer ma ulm and la pythium]. Then after 30-50 turns we'd fight again, wishing few times a turn and having 100 tarts each.

Oh, all my globals were from underwater enchant50 discount site. All except Maelstrom and Well of Misery that is.

[rdonj]

Eh, jomon was I think actually at war with machaka by the time you decided to get on board. I got into that war for two reasons. One, because it gave me a good excuse to build up my army, which at that point hadn't growed significantly in quite some time. I knew it couldn't come as a surprise that I'd use it to attack someone, so that was the best way I could think of to keep pythium guessing. The other was to ensure that I got support from jomon against pythium. Jomon was intended to kick pythium out of the water and take some of his southern provinces, I believe. La pythium was in on it as well, but got into a war with I believe ea arcoscephale.

Looking back on it I should have taken you more into confidence with regards to the plot to bring down ma pythium. I was a bit hesitant to do so, fearing you might make some kind of deal with him and bring down the plot. But the way it turned out, it clearly could not have gone worse if I'd done so :P

[Zeldor]

It was my plot to attack him! :) Or were there 3 plots? MA Ulm had one too...

[rdonj]

Hmm, I thought I approached you about it first? But anyway I had been discussing it with la pythium for some time before I discussed it with you.

[Isokron]

How lucky that everyone was so busy plotting against me that no one actually had time to attack :)

Cant see why you all thought I was so strong though, I was barely winning against MA-Ulm alone before he started stalling.

[rdonj]

My plotting at least started long before you were fighting ma ulm. Back when you were still turtling, and were pretty much the clear leader. Before zeldor started catching up to you :). I wouldn't say you were barely beating ulm though, I had scouts in almost every province you owned by the time that war started and it didn't look like he was doing so well.