Quote:
Originally Posted by Darkwind
Bye, everyone!  It's been a fun game. To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed by how I did in the endgame - I don't think I had a single successful battle, just a stream of successive losses. Revenant2 has indicated he feels that LA C'tis is poorly-equipped against MA Ermor, but I'm not sure I agree. Patala dealt the killing blow though, honestly, when they took out my main army with half a dozen Earthquakes I wasn't prepared for. I don't think I'd have won against revenant2 - especially not with the attitude regarding LA C'tis's viability versus them that I had then - but it would have been much closer than the mop-up that the war turned out to be.
My primary issue throughout the game was money, which I think was partly just luck and partly poor pre-game strategy. (My tactical blunders were all my own.) This impacted both my number of mages and my number of Tomb Guards, who serve as excellent chaff. This, combined with my focusing on other uses of D gems than the priest summons, and the destruction of my main army, lead to a disastrous lack of chaff - certainly not enough to deal with Ermor's hordes.
I think I was pretty much doomed when I selected my pretender, though. I decided to experiment with a gem-generating pretender who acted as a quasi-rainbow. He honestly wasn't very useful; I don't think the gems I got (1N and 1D per turn from the start of the game) was worth having to sacrifice scales (and thus money) and expansion potential (and thus both money and more gems). |
Don't sell yourself short DW, your defenders did a considerable amount of damage to my army. It's difficult to tell from the army graphs (due to the number of undead I'm generating), but I took fairly heavy losses. Admittedly, it was mostly my chaff, although you nearly wiped out one of my armies when you first unleashed Heat from Hell, which was an unpleasant surprise.
I was so concerned about my losses that I spent great effort planning each of those fortress battles in microscopic detail to minimize my losses. That last battle, for instance, I made sure I maximized reinvigoration on my Thaums and cast regeneration so they could fight through the heat and poison that I knew was coming and used my lower tier chaff to soak up your Dust to Dust spam. I also made sure to preach before each battle to lower your morale and made lots of adjustments to the initial spell lay-out.
The reason I think C'tis is ill suited to fight MA Ermor is because Ermor excels at killing undead with banishment. This might seem counter-intuitive, but all of my mages have Holy 2 or Holy 3, which is greatly magnified with communions. For instance, In a 24-thaum reverse communion with 16 slaves and 8 masters backed by Power of the Spheres this translates into 16 3H, 6 H6, and 2 H7 casters, which will melt the faces right off most undead.
You were actually my number one target from the beginning of the game for this very reason, but I couldn't attack until much later because I had my hands full with Ulm and R'lyeh.
In terms of scales, I would have had a much rougher go of it if you had been able to mass Sauromancers. I'm a firm believer of the more scales policy. More money = More Fortresses = More Mages = More Undead = More Research.
Well, maybe not research. Except for Nief, I had terrible research for most of the game. By the time I got to construction 8 there wasn't a single epic item I could forge. The only reason I researched it was because I thought you had it (I saw a Tart with no afflictions) and I might be able to forge it after you got knocked out. Alas, it's still unavailable.