Noob's shot at an R'lyeh AAR

[CharonJr]

Turn 2

I only got 2 Messages on this turn. Ulm declaring its commander prophet and Jotunheim declaring its herse as a prophet.

Treasury: 199
Income: 176
Upkeep: 43
Resources: 72

Water gems: 4 (+2)
Astral gems: 6 (+3)

Hmm, interesting, I have not noticed this one before. Is it normal that my actual income is going down without havning unrest between turns 1 and 2 ? On turn 1 I still had 212, now I am down to 176 without any special events that I am aware of.

I don’t really like what I see on the map when I get to it. I have received no intel at all about the potential income of the surrounding provinces, but I can see a black candle in one of them.

Concerning the surrounding provinces I have the following informations about potential troop strengths (from west to east):

Devourer (6) – 40 Trition Troopers and Triton Guards – Sea - Scout report
Tiash (15) – 40 Militias and Heavy Infantries – Forest/Swamp – general intel – Heat 2
Dershid (20) – 50 Tribal Warriors and Tribal Archers – Plains – general intel
Dunheim (28) – 30 Light and Heavy Infantries – Farm Lands – general intel
Gol Phalas (26) – 50 Militias, Longbowman and Knights – Farm Lands – general intel
Vepitre (14) – 80 Tribal Warriors and Tribal Archers – Plains – general intel – Black Candle1, Order1, Magic1
Kolermegor (5) – 50 Crossbowman, Militias and Heavy Infantry – Forest – general intel

I decide to modify my army a little bit. Since the leadership of my commander is just at 25, but I currently have 30 troops I swamp some of the initial slave troopers for the newly bought Illithid Soldiers and Shambler Thralls.

The 5 slave troopers are going to guard my summoner. With some lucky hits they might even be able to offer him a little bit of protection, but I will not count on it.

The 3 Illithid Soldiers are etting their own squad and are put at the leftmost end of the battlefield, together with the commander.

The 2 Shambler Thralls are set up together with the 20 slave guards for now. I hope they might be able to bolster the guards moral a little bit this way. This squad is put on hold and attack closest. They are set up as a screen in front of the commander and his little mindbLaster squad.

Due to the setup I should be able to get some turns of mindbLasting in vs. Slower opponents before my own troops are getting into melee range.

Due to the low protection (2) of the slave troopers and their long weapons (length 4) they are mainly useful as a kind of “one shot troops”. If the ememy is not routing after the initial assault I will likely lose a lot of my troopers and might rout myself due to moral.

I need a slow enemy with small troopers and short weapons fairly small numbers in order to maximise the effect of my mindbLasts, tramplers and my own troopers.

The Tritons look like a fairly bad enemy at this stage, their speed being the main concern here, but the length of their weapons is another thing to take into account.

This is forcing me to focus on the land provinces.

Since generating new income is one of my main goals I first consider the 2 farm land provinces. My intel about them is not very reliable, but the 30 light infantry in Dunheim are surely sounding MUCH better than 50 militias, longbowmen (yuck) and knights (yuck, too) in Gol Phalas.

On the other hand Gol Phalas is right next Vepitre, the province with the enemy dominion, so maybe I will see enemy troops around there soon. But since I seriously doubt that I am able to take Gol Phalas and there are some chances that the AI might fail to take it, too, I decide to send my army for Dunheim at the moment. In addition there are 2 more farm lands a little bit north of Dunheim, which would be a nice addition for my empire.

I would have prefered to be able to wait a bit more before attacking, but with a fairly crowded map speed of expansion is looking even more important now than it normally is.

The summoner (having 1 random skill in blood) is send to the Void Gate despite his bodyguards most likely not being strong enough to defend him if he gets attacked, but I have decided that I will try to take my chances here in order to get a fast start in summoing.

My pretender is continuing his research in R’lyeh and I should get Thaum 1 at the beginning of the next turn.

Due to potential routing of my attacking army and wanting to climb the research tree as fast as possible I decide on recruiting a Star Child and 2 more Illithid Soldiers before I run out of gold (14 left, 27 production).

Mercenaries are no option at the moment – simple right now, because I am still confinded to the ocean – but I am not sure if I will try to enlist some in the future, due to the AI not bidding aggressively enough for them they seem to be a fairly huge advantage for a human player. I think I will decide on using them by the level of my desperation

CharonJr

To be continued...

Edit: Forgot to mention that I send my scout to Tiash in order to get additional information about the troops there since the oceans are fairly blocked to me at the moment due to the tritons.

[ February 12, 2004, 07:15: Message edited by: CharonJr ]

[GavinWheeler]

The lower income might be due to the scales on your province varying.

I'm also surprised to see that you don't appear to have set your starting army to 'patrol' so you can jack up taxes for the first few rounds. Population wastage is much less important than the extra cash for a quick start, in these early game.

For your scales, I've always avoided taking Order+3 with Luck+3. If you are spending lots of points on Luck to get good events, you want to get a lot of them, so you want turmoil (Order-3, or possibly less if you don't want to live dangerously). This has the advantage of Luck+3 being balanced by Order-3 (design point wise) giving you plenty of points to spend on Growth (for example) to slightly counterbalance the income hit of Turmoil, and help feed your hungry squidheads too.

Name: Cthulhu? tsk tsk!

Next we'll have pretenders called Drizzt dual wielding - thankfully we don't have scimitars in this game, do we?

I tend to restart games a lot as I try out different mixes of scales and pretenders. If you do restart, here are a few suggestions:
- Cthalamari (still clearly derivative, but more fun, if more appropriate for an Ancient Kraken)
- Deep Mushroom
- Bathomycetis (snobby Version of the one above)

I'm waiting to be able to rename commanders, so I can have 'Gift of Reason'ed Things That Should Not Be called "Semi Skimmed Milk" "Tepid Coffee" "Christmas Jingles" and so on.

[CharonJr]

Yup, just read about a bug concerning the scales changing on turn2 in another thread.

I have read about the tax-raise/kill the dissenters with troops approach. But since I have not tried it before I have no idea how many people I will kill with this tactic.

But this AAR might be a good place to give it a shot in order to show me and some other people who have not tried this one before the additional income one can generate this way and the consequences one is faced with (lower pop + unrest).

In some of my earlier games I have tried to play around with turmoil-3/luck-3, but in the end I kept losing most of my population and income due to bad events. This is the reason why I wanted to give Order-3/Luck-3 a shot here (my first try actually).

I agree that the name is not exactly original but I am even thinking about modding R'lyeh to be even more Lovecraftian, Shoggoths, Deep-Ones, Elder-Things, Mi-Go...

Thank you for the feedback

CharonJr

[von_Schmidt]

Regarding random numbers/ dicerollers:
http://www.amicron.com/diceroller

Funky program to roll several types of die.

[Wendigo]

I wouldn't say that R'lyeh is a very analyzed nation, in this forum it has not really been discussed to much, apart from the Void gate novelty.

I'd rather say it is however a difficult nation for a newbie, because her biggest strength lies in her Starspawn mages, and playing those right requires a good knowledge of spells & magic items.
The military in itself is kind of weak, & the Void Gate is a gamble. Being underwater & the magics are the real (& always reliable) strengths that make R'lyeh IMO one of the top nations.

On the matter of your pretender I prefer a combat oriented one for R'lyeh, for 2 reasons:
-My general rule when choosing a pretender is to go for multiple complementary magic fields when playing nations with narrow magics, and to go with a SC when playing nations with powerful & broad spellcasting choices. R'lyeh is definitely one of the 2nd.

-In MP there is a high probability that you might end up fighting Atlantis (or even Ermor) for the seas early on, and a SC adds some much needed muscle here while you develop your magics.

Your scale choices are very good for a noob. I would have done some things differently, but that's more because of my personnal style of min-maxing the scales to get more design points, which might not really be for everybody. Heh, I am playing a MP game as R'lyeh right now and if I were to start another one I would change half my scales with new ideas!

Maybe you can get Nagot to chime in, he can give you the best R'lyeh advice as far as I know.

[GavinWheeler]

We already have Elder things (called exactly that) as one of the Void Summons.

Shoggoths also have a clear analogue in the Lesser and Greater Othernesses, or the Formless Spawn

Deep Ones could be represented either by the Atlantians or by the hybrids that pop up in any coastal (on the land) forts you may build - that bit in the national description is not just there for colour!

This is not to say that there is no point in adding on your own personal interpretation of these. Personally I saw the Shoggoths as something the Elder Races made, rather than calling through a portal, so would have represented them as a High-level construction item, similair to Golems. But no two Dominions/Lovecraft fans would ever agree on the 'right' way to represent R'lyeh!

Mi-Go would be nice (for R'lyeh) in that they would be (if I recall correctly) cold-loving land-based troops that would nicely complement a R'lyeh taking a cold scale, as it often does since its sea-based troops are snug and warm under the waves. But does R'lyeh really need more strengths?

[Norfleet]

What would be really fun would be Stealthy void gate Things, such as the "Thing That Goes Bump In The Night".

One of the downsides of being underwater is that most Underwater indies tend to be Tritons, and if you're doing an SC, you run the risk of a severe mauling before you can get your spells up. A heavier pretender chassis can help, but R'lyeh doesn't exactly have a very wide variety of pretender options to choose from.