MP: ThreeFort - Experimental game - Squirrelloid/Bandar Log wins!

[Squirrelloid]

Cap and Coin? Lol. I never forged a coin all game, and only a single cap.

I cast a total of 6 or 7 mindhunts. Every mindhunt was cast by an S4 rishi.

Most of my pearls went to Kinnara, gear for Kinnara, and Gandharvas. I think i forged a total of 3 boosters in total, and most of those late in the game. I simply couldn't afford to use gems on such things regularly, I needed troops and I needed Kinnara for the air access, holy, or thugging ability. (In particular, arrow fend was *necessary* against Agartha's bladewind spam, so early on that need was especially dire). Kinnara's holy magic let me use divine blessing while communioned without my prophet being there (my priests otherwise are all H1).

Now, at the end I had 7 Kinnara and an 8th on the way. That's 200 pearls right there. That's about half my pearl budget for the game in Kinnara alone. Figure another 4x18 for Gandharvas, 50 pearls in gear for thugs (ethereal robes + pendants x5), and a decent number of pearls spent for LotNS/PotS in combat, plus some sundry other forgings (some void eyes, the one cap), and you start to realize just how tight my pearl budget was. Now, arco may have *nothing better to do* than cast mindhunts. But BL certainly does.

So honestly, I didn't see much impact of mindhunt on my end. I agree there were likely *metagame* effects because I *could* cast mindhunt. But my pearls were being used in entirely different ways.

I'm not sure I agree mindhunts should be 3 pearls. A pearl is worth double another gem, and seeking arrow is what, 4a? Of course, its not MR negates, but does have to deal sufficient damage to kill (Eriu, you were targetting the entirely wrong province if you wanted to actually kill something). And even when it fails to kill it might inflict a wound or can be built on by other arrows. Mindhunt is defendable against by a few items, is a lot more expensive to boost penetration (and less total boosting), so the actual cost to kill a commander that matters is expensive (multiple mindhunts from mages with good gear), and then you're gambling that your opponent doesn't have a sneaky astral mage in the province or didn't teleport one in before your mindhunt went off. I made very sparing use of mindhunt because its so expensive to use well and because of the risk.

I do have some suggestions for the next game regarding spell access:
1) The all-battlefield resistance spells should be made available. I know they're normally Ench 8, but without them its much too hard to defend against a number of elemental strategies at all, and its only 50% resistance so its not like it even makes you immune. There is no good counter to things like Grip of Winter or Heat from Hell without access to them.
2) While bloodmagic is underpriced in the normal game, i think the repricing was handled the wrong way in this game. It was no surprise that no one even tried to do anything with blood magic (that i saw - did Mictlan even try to use their national blood spells?). Given the gem economy was basically online immediately, but you'd have to start up the blood economy from scratch, slaves should have been treated as more valuable than in a normal game, if nothing else. The ultimate take-home here is that a number of blood spells probably needed to increase in price, but it wasn't all of them, and many of the price increases were probably too much.

[LoloMo]

We should simplify the initial fort system. I remember that we waited quite a while for all players to submit their fort locations. With this small map, no forts will be constructed. Is it possible to start the game with say 2000 extra gold that can be used for fort construction? Then we can set the initial forced NAP to the first 5 or 6 turns.

If it's not possible to give extra initial gold, then maybe a similar thing can be done by putting gold settings up to the highest.

Regarding the spells, we can just lower the level of spells that are included. It's natural for players to try to weaken other nations and strengthen their own nation by taking out certain spells. We can just lower the available spells to level 5 or even 4, rather than have long negotiations on which level 6 spell is overpowered. Hopefully, this fixes the problem with blood spells too.

[LDiCesare]

As for fort locations, you could just set them in the map and decide the capital to be in the middle. That speeds up the process and is quite easy.

To me the most annoying spells were the damn black hawks (impossible to break the walls despite almost all my forces on the fort, and with some wall-breaking bonuses to boot). I have no idea if they can be as effective in a non-nerfed game, though, but I think a Flame from the Sky ruins them pretty well. But then there are domes. But then FftS will eventually pass through if you spam it.

Also seeking arrows. I think that Caelum could stockpile air gems whereas I and Eriu were busy using our gems on other stuff (black hawks, jaguars...). Caelum's stockpile was efficiently used to slaughter the commanders whom I sent to besiege their capital. Without mages and leadership, my southern army was soon toast.
I'd suggest a map that forces players to attack an identified neighbour too btw. If 2 players randomly gang up on the same guy, the poor is likely toast and the remaining player can easily sit and wait, stockpiling gems instead of losing them in battle. When hsi neighbour becomes too big or small, he can effectively attack him. I think it's a bit cheesy, although one would be stupid not to profit from the situation. I started wondering where to go when Eriu pleasantly offered me a god to kill, but kept being afraid that Caelum would strike me rather than BL.
Also note that seeking arrows are very effective against humans but mostly harmless against giants and big-hp commanders. Since it was hard for me to summon big-hp leaders, this made seeking arrow more effective. This also makes nations with recruitable thugs much stronger. Oh. Also, I s*** at putting up domes.

I never tried blood. I had no blood mage to begin with, so I'd have had to hunt + empower + hunt + cast. The game was far too short for that.