MP: The Art of War - EA Vanilla Newbs Game 8/8 (Completed : Hinnom - Nightfall Wins)

[SpaceViking21]

I'm not really in a position to keep this going, so I'm for throwing in the towel as well.

[Excist]

I'll direct this solely at Nightfall:

Like I said, I wrote that post when overtired from international travel, so it had an extra bit of unwarranted bitterness injected in to some IMO warranted complaints about how Hinnom is balanced. I think we have only been at war for 3 turns that I put turn orders in, since I think it is end of turn 62 now and turn 58 was when I think you attacked me, so I haven't been going after your capital since I was going to try to take Niefelheim's forts and hope that TC could keep the pressure on you so I didn't have a determined foe at my backside when I turned my full focus on you. I did have every intention of RA your capital and then siege/taxing it once I was ready to fully engage with you, but a stale turn when my flight out of the country didn't get me to an internet connection as fast as I thought it would disrupted my chance to siege your capital while you would be responding to my raiders on your northern coast.

As for not properly scripting the EKs, I didn't script them to cast any gem-spells.

This was my spell list: Invul - Summon Earth Power - Earth Might - Iron Will - Legions of Steel - Attack Closest

And some how they ended up casting summon earth elemental and blade wind. I had one of my nationals casting blade wind unscripted too, although that one I was able to puzzle out since Strength of Gaia has some effects that overlap with some of the other spells they can cast like personal regeneration and summon earth power.

The EK scripts didn't make any sense to me at all and still don't. And I removed all gems from them so I think any gems they have is because one of them gets 1 gem per turn.

Anyways, I'm not saying that the game isn't winnable, even at this point, just that it's not fun to do all the micro involved and to be set back so much in a few turns due to RL and poor programming code and know that any setbacks you suffer are more easily recouped - my 1 capital mage can get thwarted by 20-30 of your PD and cost as much as your capital mages who can take 50-60 Caelum PD no problem.

My strategy once I could focus on you was going to be take your capital directly so that your guys wouldn't be able to teleport back and would be more vulnerable to anti-SC tactics and mostly have random magic duelers wandering around patrolling my land to catch the kits that they could from you until I could.

Going after the blood hunters requires knowing which citadel had them, and like I said, I was only at war with you for 3 actual turns before you claimed victory, so no chance to probe and prod yet.

And, for the record I know that Melqs and Baals are killable (I killed one with robe of invuln and gift of health afterall). Hinnom is just insanely better than any other race. If you don't believe me you can do 10 ai vs ai games and a random assortment of map sizes and watch Hinnom's score graph compared to other nations with the exact same strategic and tactical AI. Guess who wins every single time?

[Excist]

Regarding your final points:

- The biggest one - Hugely Capital Dependant, I spent pretty much the entire game at war without a single dome and my capital was not shut down for A SINGLE TURN.

I was only just starting to fight with you when poor scripting and a stale turn set me back, but I had been advising TC to go for your capital for 20 odd turns ever since you 2 started fighting. That would have been one of my main goals to cut off the teleporting SC strategy along with churning out crossbows that cause blindness to take out the SCs that have nowhere to return to.

-- Blood hunters - Not a single opponent made a concerted effort to raid my blood hunters; which were all set to retreat by the way.

Have to know where the blood hunters are to raid them. I suppose in hind sight I should have looked for a small-med province and taken my chances there, and I probably would have if we had fought each other more than a few turns. This is only my 2nd game and my first that I made it to the end-game, so that may be a noob area that I'm just learning.

-- Using the right tool against the right target - All three Baal/Melquart types (depending on the random path) have completely different strengths and weaknesses and should be fought using completely different tactics.

Well, teleporting in and out is a good way to nullify that. I could only chance into your Astral Melqs and Baals with random patrollers, who would have to be randomly effective against your random weakness

-- Most of your post didn't annoy me because I understand that a lot of this isn't obvious from the other side of the fence, which is why I've tried to keep this post informative and instructive; and I hope it reads that way.
But I must say I kind of resent the fact that your complaining about feeling like your inability to match my economy is entirely due to an unfair realm advantage when your running -7 scales compared to my +4

I wasn't complaining about inability to match economy. I felt that our economies were actually fairly similar (or more accurately, were similar before you started raiding me and would have been similar again after I had a chance to gear up to fight you and counter-raid more effectively), but what I was complaining about was that once I have the gold/gems, I have less useful things to spend them on, which makes it frustrating to spend 10 turns making up what a crappy spell-casting AI and 1 stale turn had cost me, especially knowing that your SCs were comparatively much more easy to script (script ctrl-1 to teleport in and script ctrl-2 to teleport out) and creating anti-SC armies and thugs that could work against a random assortment of weaknesses was much harder and expensive.

I wouldn't have conceded and would have played this out to the end if you hadn't offered to claim victory, but seeing as how after the way things have gone I wasn't having fun doing my turns, I'm just as happy to let you claim victory.

[Nightfall]

Hylobius, could you please confirm what you would like to do?

A big part of the reason I spoke up is that I think that TC was a pretty terrible position to sub into, and can't be very fun to play from your point of view.

[Nightfall]

Originally Posted by Excist

Well, teleporting in and out is a good way to nullify that. I could only chance into your Astral Melqs and Baals with random patrollers, who would have to be randomly effective against your random weakness

Yeah that tactic is horrendously difficult for Caelum to counter, but if you want to be become a good Caelum player you need to work on finding ways to do so. It works even better, and, in some ways, is cheaper, when using golems to do it.

[Excist]

Yea, I had ways, but, like I said most of them didn't get put into effect since we were only fighting for 1 or 2 turns before I staled, and then I did one hasty turn where I had only about a half hour to do my turn due to RL reasons.

I was mostly finding it annoying that the raiders that were supposed to be counter raiding died to the stale and weird AI spell casting - I still don't understand how they fit the summon and blade wind spells into that spell chain.

Part of it IS that I find Hinnom has a little bit too many strengths, and no matter what you say, having a PD that casts Blind repeatedly and at 20 PD can stand up to a SC long enough to allow for at least 4-5 castings of Blind from the PD with no extra casters or units in the province is a little bit too strong of a PD for a race that already has strong raiders, strong units, good battlefield magic, good map magic and good national summons and national healers.

It did somewhat annoy me that my amena spenta of fire got blinded (and consequently killed) by Province Defense.

If that is not top shelf PD, what do you consider to be top shelf PD?

[Hylobius]

If the two of you are happy with this ending then I am fine calling the game here. There is not a lot that I can do.

[Excist]

OK, officially calling it a win for Hinnom played by Nightfall.

Good game everybody.

[Nightfall]

Originally Posted by Excist

If that is not top shelf PD, what do you consider to be top shelf PD?

Abysia is the gold standard for PD, good by itself and excellent synergy with it's own battelfield mages.

Strangely enough those PD Kohen's usually stand around buffing and throwing minor evocations, which has no real effect on the battle. As far as I can tell the AI decided to spam blindness with that one because it only had FB and you were fire immune; thus no evocations.

Thanks to everyone for the game, for anyone that may be interested my pretender was an Imprisoned Dom 7 E4/N6/B7 Blood Fountain with O3/H3/G3/M1.