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[gman8181]

Fifty mages to take my capital?  Do you expend that much mage power on all your battles or should I feel flattered?

You'll have your revenge on Agartha in R14.

Better yet, he'll have an opportunity to beat Endymion in round 12.

Personally, I'm just going to appreciate all the stuff I've learned from playing this round and be thankful that I'm playing a nation I'm actually good with in round 12 and 14.

Hope this particular round ends soon.  Lanka was a fun test ride but I can't wait for it to be over by this point.

[Stworca]

Hope this particular round ends soon.  Lanka was a fun test ride but I can't wait for it to be over by this point.

We've all been there. Wishing that we won't have to play Lanka again, that is.

[gman8181]

Hope this particular round ends soon.  Lanka was a fun test ride but I can't wait for it to be over by this point.

We've all been there. Wishing that we won't have to play Lanka again, that is.

Haha, now you've got me curious.  I know why I don't like Lanka but why do you and most others dislike Lanka?

[Stworca]

I deeply dislike nations that - until mid-end game - have to rely on units with a crippling, easily countered tag. Demons, in this example. Spell Breaker + EOTV and everyone is packing.

Just like Agartha falls apart against shatter (unless they.. play with their nationals?) . Ulm against Rust Mist (leaving you with MR9 and no armor).. et cetera.
Lanka just happens to be countered universally, and unlike Ermor, you cannot flood the enemies.

Naturally there must be some amazing Lanka plays, but i just don't see it.
Especially with CBM, which just fucked everyone who used to depend on Blood Rods, Hammers or Clams. (justified, no doubt, but crippling, no less)

Edit : At least you aren't playing Yomi, though.

[gman8181]

Ah, yeah I suppose that makes sense although Lanka does have non demon bandar troops which are rather good.  I have a few reasons to dislike them but it's mostly all personal taste.  First would be their lack of astral mages and I almost always play nations with access to astral magic and easy communions.  I also dislike Lanka's lack of good easily recruitable combat mages.  The Capital only mages are nice but hard to mass, the blood summons are great but again hard to mass and the regular monkey mages aren't too great with options limited to battle blood magic and nature magic neither of which are very effective in my opinion.

I do like Ulm very much and it's one of the few nations I play well as.  I agree about the vulnerability to rust mist and really just spells in general but I think at least that nation makes up for it by having good options for early through late game.  Early game, just strong national troops backed by some minor evocation.  Middle game, larger armies backed by large supporting mage groups and cheap (often immortal) thugs thrown in.  Late game, decent access to both death summons like tartarians as well as blood/astral magic spells which are my absolute favorite plus giant armies backed by equally large communions throwing out the big late game battle spells.

With Lanka, I really just don't know what to aim for and I always stretch myself too thin.  Can't rely just on blood magic because its too easy to counter alone, not enough good combat mages, decent thugs but hard to mass and not great past mid game, etc.

Edit:  Never tried Yomi, not even in single player.  Really don't feel any urge to either.

[Kebooo]

Yeah Agartha, take THAT. You and your little militia and a couple of mages can't hold back this titanic, deadly army of whatever trash I could scrounge together. If you will sue for peace, the reparations I demand won't be too much.

[gman8181]

Yeah Agartha, take THAT. You and your little militia and a couple of mages can't hold back this titanic, deadly army of whatever trash I could scrounge together. If you will sue for peace, the reparations I demand won't be too much.

That's right Agartha!  Your forces are no match for the combined force of Niefel, Pangea and Lanka!  Take your outrageous number of mages and supercombatants off my lawn and I might not let loose the vampire hordes upon your sadly pathetic armies.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   So I made some videos of my game in this round and now that I am dead I have started uploading them. If any of you are interested here is the first.
Part 1

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Double post just to tell people that from now on if no one has posted I will just be editing the last post I made with updates.
   Also video 2 is up and it has my first 2 turns: Part 2

[ThtblovesDF]

So we travel into the mind of our former enemy. Not that I actually ever fought you, even while having borders all game.

[gman8181]

Interesting, just watched the videos.  Some random stuff for you:

The reason it changed to a human pretender chassis when you clicked on the dragon is because they have two forms.  They start in human form and revert to the second dragon form after taking damage.  They can also use their Change Form command on the map if you want them to.

Magic scales are great if you have mages with low research and you want to boost that.  I normally go with magic 3 scales but I decided to take drain this particular round in order to try out a nature bless.

Luck scales with turmoil I would generally consider subpar to order and misfortune unless you're playing a nation that won't be doing a lot of recruitment (LA Ermor for example or probably Lanka in retrospect).  Tienchi should be doing a lot of recruitment to take advantage of their mages (you're playing a human nation in early age so lots of mages is extra important) and it also helps prevent the upkeep costs getting too close to your income.

If you're not going to use a SC or rainbow pretender, you probably would have been better off going for a dormant pretender, simply because it's only one year in game for a decent amount of extra points which translates into a good amount of extra magic on the pretender.  Extra magic on a non SC pretender is much more important late game for crafting, rituals and site searching than the extra research or an extra battle field mage would be early on in the game.  Especially when you're capable of recruiting decent mages in your fortresses.  With a rainbow pretender you could go awake to get a strong head start on site searching within the first year.  Even still, I'd probably go dormant.

Evocation probably would have been one of the better early research goals.  It lets all those nice mages of yours cast all sorts of fun spells.  Especially with all the magic diversity on those mages, you could keep everyone guessing with what spells you cast.  Site searching spells are fun too but I normally wait to research those until I actually have a decent number of provinces to site search.  (Granted I did terrible with my site searching this game because I thought I could just rely on just blood... not my brightest idea)

Strong taxes first turn was a good idea, I did the same.

Yeah anyway I guess that's all my input.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   A good bit of that I learned as the game went on but thank you for all that I hadn't. This was my first multiplayer game and it seemed to be decent for that. As for the luck thing I was balancing gains from luck against the income loss.

[gman8181]

I'm pretty sure luck based events are capped at 5 events a turn for better or worse.  That would make luck a much less efficient method of income generation as you gain more provinces; the effects of luck are limited but the positive/negative effects of order/turmoil are not.

Besides the occasional boosts of money from events don't help much if your upkeep is too high.

[Stworca]

The thing about random events is, that some of them have extra requirements. Dom of e specific level, buildings, terrain, scales, pretender, nation.
Did you know that many (10+) positive random events require Order 1?
Did you know that there isn't a single negative event requiring Order?
Finally..

Did you know, that the worst random event of all, requires.. Growth 1? (Ancient Presence)

@ Above. Events are for gems, not money. Granted, there are amazing +gold events (3000!), but it's mostly gems, mages, forts and items that luck is about.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   It was only in the very end was I low on money and that was because first I had a couple hundred shamblers sitting around and the because I was dumping all my money into PD because it was all that was doing half decently against Agartha as I did not know what summons or what have you that I needed to counter what was killing me. Early and mid game I only kept running out of money because I don't think I had yet kicked the habit of putting 10 or 20 PD in every single province.

Also Part 3 is up