Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Heh...

Tell me where they are...

I have ways of making important commanders die :)

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Okay :D

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Please excuse me for a moment whilst I express myself gleefully.

Ding dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!

:D Nephele the air queen was struck down by a mind hunt this turn, and while I lost a thug its unfortunate demise does nothing to contain my glee! Woohoo, dead elemental royalty. And it looks like a queen of the deeps may have also gone down this turn. Any confirmation on that, licker?

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Haven't seen the turn yet, but now that Caelum is showing me his Eagle Kings again, they are getting some attention :)

It's nice when your research is mostly done so you can spare the extra mage power to do 'other' things ;)

I think Caelum already knows this though :p

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

You are having better luck with your mind hunts than me rdonji. You only have all the rest of the royalty and all the Amaesha Spenta's to go!

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Also are the druids even playing in this game? They have been very quite.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

That's partly because my mind hunts are generally not targeting units with multiple forms :P If you noticed, you successfully mind hunted one of me oni generals last turn and got it killed by making it start the battle ethereal with only a little health left. But my mind hunts haven't felt terribly successful either. I am so looking forward to having to kill all of the above-named entities....

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

The druids of marvani have been in a sort of mexican stand off with the Giants, where they spent their time staring across the fields at each other trying to decide what to do.

Of course this has only helped the little bird men since the massive might of the giant armies have not yet been unleashed.

Instead we send death angels, earth elementals, and hoards of ghouls to pick and poke at various birdy targets.

The success has been admittedly limited, but the cost is essentially zero. Once we are ready to unleash the rest of our forces surely the world will tremble under our mighty feet.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Okay, I'd like to order a few more turns like that last one :D! Two elemental royalties and eagle kings down, at a cost of 20 gems. You can believe I am celebrating that victory. Only low point of the turn is the dome being put back up over bandar-kadek. Oh well, I can accept that.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Nicely done (or luckily done) my mage hunting hasn't been as effective lately, but that just means Caelum is hiding his mages again :)

Other than in the sea, which appears to be a bit of a lost cause for the giants at this point :p

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

A little bit of both. One of my dai oni got lucky and, although it was routed and died 3 or 4 times, survived due to phoenix pyre and was able to bring down an air queen in single combat :D Also, in the same battle, a group of undead horsemen I summoned with pale riders killed two unequipped eagle kings. That was the luck part. The nicely done part was 3 castings of ghost riders running down the amphibious water queen and destroying her just before she could escape the battlefield. So grand total of my gem expenditure to kill them was 20d gems :). The dai oni is pretty badly afflicted now, including being muted though so I'm not going to pull that off with him again. But for the moment he is still equipped. His deeds will be whispered of in awe for years to come in Yomi's darkest depths.

The sea is looking rather bleak lately. Only a matter of time until caelum's ownership of the oceans is complete, unless something drastic happens.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

I regret I must go. I missed last turn and have been getting more 2 busy with spring. Sorry for the AI bomb but it shouldnt matter much. peaceout :angel

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Not going to look for a sub? I'm not sure if you lost anything really important last turn... I killed a lot of sages and a few eagle kings, but that's about it. Anyway, if Caelum becomes AI I'm not sure there's much point in continuing. Marverni is doing a pretty decent dom push and is vaguely threatening niefelheim with it, but I don't think there's any realistic way for marverni to defeat both me and licker at this point. I guess that could change somewhat after the battle with caelum's AI, but even after the many years of war with caelum, niefelheim and yomi have plenty of resources at their disposal and are in prime position to acquire many of Caelum's territories.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Yeah, that is a shame, but I can see it. This games turns take me a couple days to really do properly, and even there I feel I'm not really optimizing anything.

Though at this point the amount of cloud trapeezing Niefel Jarls I have supported by packs of skratti werewolves, and everyone can have most anything they want thanks to my forge makes it difficult for me to see where I would have any trouble with a Caelum on AI.

I haven't seen the last turn, but if it went as it probably did for me Caelum is starting to feel the pinch of some real armies in his lands in stead of just raiders.

Marverni and I worked out a bit of a deal again anyway, and though we have no NaP anymore also don't have any real build up on our border anymore either.

So unless he's got something up his sleeve (and he could, communions and lots of research...) I kind of agree with rdonj at this point.

I'm willing to play it out a bit longer though if others are interested, at least through the end of March when I again have to go on a trip for 3+ days.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

IMO, Marverni has a dompush strategy up his sleeve and is not really looking forward to fighting mighty niefelheim in a straightup battle. Which I could completely understand, given just how powerful Niefelheim has become.

That said, I can see how bringing Marverni down could be quite difficult at this stage of the game, with the right spells researched and careful scripting.



If Caelum goes AI I'll be spending the foreseeable future killing off that AI, which is more or less uninteresting in an mp game. But if you and RadioGibbon want to fight on for a while more I will continue playing. I may eventually just start sending in turns of nothing, though.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Well it's up to him then, I've no intention of breaking my end of the 'deal' I have with him, but by the same token, if this becomes a 3 way race to see who can chew up the most of an AI caelum I'm going to win that race.

Not braggadocio, just my observations. I can basically put a LARGE army anywhere on the map I want to. ANYWHERE! ;)

Not that I've been doing that, since Caelum could thwart it, but AI Caelum probably cannot.

From looking at the llama stats from last turn it looks like my full scale invasion of Caelum took alot of ground, and there are more forces already en route, not counting my shuffling of my CTing Niefel Jarls.

We all know the AI will suicide itself against any sieging forces, and I'm ready to put two big sieging armies on 2 calean forts, which will probably clear out any reasonable forces he has in the area after a couple of turns.

Yomi can probably do the same, but I think there are more caelean forces in his theater than mine.

Marverni is still slowly creeping south, but hasn't finsihed off the remnants of Sauromatia I left for him.

Anyway, let us know what you think RadioGibbon, if you want to play on for a bit I'll do it, if you want to try your hand in a war with me, I'll do that too :)

I don't think Yomi has any interest in a hypothetical war with me, but if you do we can try that one too :)

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Yeah, you would. You've got far more mobility than me, especially on thugs/scs, so it would be very easy for you to quickly take over caelum's territories. I've got ghost riders to clear, plus several flying scs/thugs, a good number of grounded scs and thugs, and a pretty large army with strong buffs and the ability to cast stygian paths, but I'm stuck behind the bottleneck of doom and would need to capture bandar-kadek to make any real progress. Unfortunately bandar-kadek has a seriously potent army hiding behind its walls and it's going to take a real effort for me to take the province. Further, if I did cast stygian paths to move an army it would lose most of the support mages, so it really wouldn't be that useful.

I don't know exactly where all of caelum's armies are, but there is definitely a strong military presence in my area. I would probably not be able to capture more than a dozen provinces if I tried to blitz over them in a race to capture as much territory as I can. So I would not expect to benefit too much from the land grab, especially over my giant allies.

And yeah, I'm not overly interested in fighting a war with Niefelheim. As far as I'm concerned the game was supposed to be over approximately when Caelum capitulated, with me then providing the artillery I've been saturating caelum with to convince marverni that victory was not feasible. I think that if I tried I could put up a reasonable fight against you licker, but I am not really interested in trying to kill my allies. If you'd like to try to kill Yomi off though I could be persuaded to look for a sub :)

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Heh, no no, I've tried that in another game where my allie agreed to have a massive battle royale, but after a turn of figureing out the logisitics of getting our mega armies inplace for it we both decided it wasn't actually worth the effort.

I'm sure you could cause me some problems, but honestly, I don't think I've lost more than 5 or 6 jarls all game, and I've been building them nonstop since probably turn 4, so I have over 50 of them, and some are earth empowered, many are boosted to A2 for CT and my packs of Niefels can warp around with either the flying ship or the gate stone.

Any dangerous looking thugs I have 4 or 5 different hunting spells to target them with, an dangerous looking armies which are not Caelean... can be torn to pieces unless they are cold immune, and I've even built up my fire mages to the point where I can spam fires from the sky remotely.

I'd love to hear from Radiogibbon though, he may have a wish factory going on, or any other number of silly Astral end game strats (though his gem income has been pretty poor all game, unless he's been claming like crazy) he wants to try out. I do have a Tartian factory going though, and will expand it to 2 per turn if I really feel like I need to :)

I've got anything I want researched researched, so I don't really even know what to do with my researchers anymore. I don't have a huge blood economy, but with the amount of blood mages I have I could turn one on at any moment if I really wanted/needed to, though it would take a couple turns to get the logistics of it worked out, and frankly, after playing LA Ulm I don't really want to bother with more blood economy micro nonsense.

My gem income is huge, and getting bigger as Caelum loses land to me, the forge is massively overcast at this point, but I have such a huge earth income (including blood stones...) that even if it went down I could put it up again easilly.

My only weakness is dominion, but what do I really need it for? I can freeze any province I need to attack, and its not as though either of you are running big heat scales anyway.

Obviously, since I seem to be winning, I'm happy to call this game, but I hope Marverni has something to try on me, though even if he can put a good sized and maged army or two out there, I can raid him (really anyone) to death while that army takes whatever overland spells I can throw at it.

I'm thinking I can be raided as well, but Caelum really didn't have too much overall success with it, and I have so many SCs and Thugs (haven't even mentioned my conjuration bonus site cranking out death summons like crazy...) that I can take stuff back easilly, and even garrison things if I really wanted to.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Yeah, I don't really think it would be feasible for anyone to defeat you at this point. Even both me and marverni together, unless he has some really nasty surprises in store for you. Me, I've been gearing up most of the game to kill bird people, not giants. Some of that overlaps, but I would definitely want to change things around for anti-giant duty and I don't think I'd have enough time at this point to do it before I was crushed. I certainly don't have anywhere near your number of SCs, so I would have to rely on mage-backed armies and anti-sc groups... I think I could kill a few more jarls than caelum did, but overall I would expect to lose horribly :) I only bothered to deploy counters to what caelum actually used at least once, so there are areas I haven't really developed terribly much that would be enormously more useful against you. For one thing, I hardly have any of my main battle mages because every remotely large battle included a storm... rendering my hannyas incapable of hitting a damn thing. There's also a school or two I haven't finished off because I more or less haven't been fighting big army battles against caelum since turn 30 or so, when one of his massive armies with storm/wrathful skies/air elementals/thunderstrike spam was defeated by one of my massive armies of demons and lightning immune thugs. I actually outlasted him, his wrathful skies killed enough of his own 75% resistant troops to make him rout :D Of course my losses in non-immune units were pretty horrific, so it was pretty much a mutual decision not to waste our resources on one another.

Anyway, I'm just not prepared for it, it would take me over a year to even think about invading you and I'm going to have my hands full with caelum for a while in any case. I'm surprised you've lost so few jarls, I must have seen the deaths of nearly every jarl who died. It was giving me the impression that you were actually having some vague level of difficulty :P

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Well I'd have to look again, it could be closer to 10, but I have 50+ anyway, I have Tartians, I have some elemental royalty, I have golums...

From fighting Abyssia, then Sauromatia, and now Caelum I have plenty of items forged for various immunities, I cranked out a pile of ammulets of antimagic and have a dozen skull caps (though not on SCs) for MR issues.

I got the E9N8S4 (or 6, can't remember) bless...

Yeah I played Neifel pretty standard, but I just wanted to see how abusable the big bless strat for jarls is.

What made all the difference of course was getting the forge up, and no one taking it down. Well it went down once, but by then I'd already gotten a ton of artifacts and other stuff out of it.

I'll give out a couple 'secrets' anyway, I found conj and thaum bonus sites early, and plopped down forts and preped them for their eventual uses. Yomi and I agreed to an early Nap and it progressed from there as I needed a safe border, and he needed me to forge stuff for him. I also Napped Marverni early and while his dominion crept into my lands it didn't really bother me.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

I only have about 26 Dai Oni, and 9 of those are working as support mages... I have dozens of oni generals left over from attacking ulm and later holding off caelum, but unfortunately they wouldn't be that useful against you as they are now. I could make tartarians if I wanted to, but since I don't have gift of health or the chalice and a TERRIBLE nature income, I haven't bothered. I was working my way to poison golems though, the ubiquitous demon bane swords were getting a bit old with how quickly they could take my SCs down.

Lucky, I only found an evocation reduction site, and even then I found it pretty late and haven't really gotten much use out of it. "Yomi needed me to forge items for him" is putting it a bit lightly :P At the beginning of the Yomi-Caelum war the only astral I had was on my god, and I needed to forge luck pendants and anti-magic amulets quickly to make viable anti-caelum thugs. Then with my complete lack of water mages I also needed water items forged... two things that niefelheim can handle quite capably. I think it was a really good deal for both of us, because while I'm certain I could have killed you back when abysia and ulm were both alive and kicking, I would have been slaughtered by caelum when he decided to come after me and he would have won the game, hands down. Or if he'd left me alone, I would have had to deal with abysia eventually and I think that wouldn't have gone so well.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

I added 48h to the turn since we haven't heard from RadioGibbon and I'm busy enough that if I don't have to do any more of these turns I don't want to do any more :)

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Fine by me. I'll send him a pm, hope that gets his attention.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Sorry I missed this conversation guys (and thanks for the heads up rdonj).

I'm kind of torn. I always like to fight to the end, but I am pushed for time and don't really have a chance against Niefelheim. I sort of stalled mid-game, and couldn't decide which way to expand, and as usual my gem-searching strategy is really poor, I was crippled by a lack of astral pearls all game. I think I'll concede and we can spend our time on game's whose outcome isn't so certain.

What I did have:
Those Big fat green dragons at one a turn
A Demon Lord next turn (No idea what he does but thought I'd summon one and see)
A combat communion I was building up (Loads of L1 astral mages with cheap magic items who could be buffed to the max by a backline of Com Masters)
2 astraled out druids for Teleport/Master Enslave/Vortex of Returning army snatches


So very well played Licker - hope to play you all again some time in the future.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Well if you want to play it out we can, I don't want this to seem like I'm forcing anyone's hand.

I think though that even with some of your strengths your poor gem income (you didn't clam did you?) would eventually wear you down.

My MR on my SCs is high, and I have some drop in and battle field evocation spam guys ready to throw at anything dangerous.

That and Master enslave isn't very effective against me since I don't really have any 'armies' to speak of.

Its just unfortunate that Caelum had to go AI, as otherwise there would have been some opportunity for you to position yourself against me, though even so, my ability to cloud trapeze just keeps on growing :)

Anyway, I will set the game to end, and if we agree that I would win eventually I'll accept it ;)

Though I couldn't have managed it without the solid relations both rdonj and RadioGibbon provided me with, and at least in rdonjs case our relationship was mutually beneficial through all our trading.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

So carpetbagger, does that last turn imply you're staying? ;) You don't seem to have switched over to AI yet, and you just won what I am fairly certain was the most important battle of the entire war. When I think to myself how that would have gone if my SCs hadn't wasted all that time in the back... how many lovely explosions could have rocked your lines... it's such a shame.

And licker, shame on you, running into my only non-cold immune dai oni with a giant army of niefels. That was the one that killed an air queen :(

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

wut?

Oh yeah, forgot to tell you I was crossing that river :(

I'll make it up to you somehow.

Uhh... so what is going on in this game now? Cuz I really butchered that last turn just trying to get something in before it went.

Maybe Caelum has a new and improved strategy at work here :D

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Yeah, me too. With 30 minutes left on the clock I just tossed in basic forging orders and threw a few randomly targeted ghost riders, then rushed in my turn without really thinking about it. If this is a new bird-man strategy it certainly didn't hurt on that turn :P

Also, while I may have lost that battle (pretty thoroughly, I lost 2 SCs outright, had one horribly afflicted, and lost almost all my support mages), I think I win the award for Most Hilarious Defeat :D

Licker I'm going to send you my turn file so you can see just what I have to contend with to cross over into the land of the birds.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Actually, I took another look at the game status page, and while it doesn't say he's an AI, he is no longer one of the nations waiting for a turn file. So carpetbagger and caelum as a whole are out.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

So, from what I can see I think radiogibbon did decide to throw in the hat, licker.

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And it seems everyone staled that last turn.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

lol...

Everyone except Caelum ;)

Ok, I will end the game it doesn't seem rg has any complaints with that.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

Ok, i killed it, and am posting in the victorious thread a win for Niefel.

If anyone objects to this (as apparently there is some flap in that thread about 'wins') post and I'll rescind the win.

It's less for me and more for stat keeping on which nations perform the best.

Clearly taking a bless heavy nief isn't exactly breaking any barriers, but it still shows what it shows.

Re: Byleswar (GAME IN PROGRESS)
 

No, no objection here. You were clearly dominating the game, and the chances of anyone upsetting your victory at that point were minimal at best.