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[Waterplouf]

Thanks for your answers karlito and Gman.
I think I am going to go with ( EDIT:LA C'tis, after some reading I think Patala isn't really for me ) then, even if I have no experience with blood nation. For the map I am more inclined for a bigger one like Realm of Roaring Rhinos or Riverlands, just because I have the feeling I am going to be roflstomp just like in the round 11 on a smaller map.

[MentalFather]

If none else takes it, I'll play Ry'leh, as we talked about before, being underwater and left alone suits my passive playstyle : )

If anyone calls ry'leh, I'll give it up, no worries.

Dammit! I really hate Ryleh, they are like a pain in butt (especially LA). So I would prefer not to have a Ryleh, but ïf we have it I will have to deal with it.

[gman8181]

Yeah I'll probably be trying to terminate any Ryleh or Ermor players in the LA as well.

Atlantis may not start in the water but they can build underwater castles and recruit nationals there.  Maybe that would be a better nation to pick if you don't want people coming after you to end your dominions effects.

Disclaimer:  I've heard some people don't like LA Atlantis because its only good mages are in the Capital.  That problem would probably have minimal effect early game and could be somewhat negated later on by proper planning for summons.  They have good death mages and water mages so at the very least you could summon tartarians, mound fiends and Hidden in Snow.

[ThtblovesDF]

Various threads have motivated me to consider other nations.

[Waterplouf]

Yeah I'll probably be trying to terminate any Ryleh or Ermor players in the LA as well.

Atlantis may not start in the water but they can build underwater castles and recruit nationals there.  Maybe that would be a better nation to pick if you don't want people coming after you to end your dominions effects.

Disclaimer:  I've heard some people don't like LA Atlantis because its only good mages are in the Capital.  That problem would probably have minimal effect early game and could be somewhat negated later on by proper planning for summons.  They have good death mages and water mages so at the very least you could summon tartarians, mound fiends and Hidden in Snow.

I Think we already have an atlantis player ( MentalFather ) no ?

[gman8181]

My bad, I'm incredibly unobservant.  Uh I guess the only other nation with somewhat easier access to the water would be Agartha because they have a bunch of fully amphibious death summons that are pretty easy to research to.  It's not a horrible nation but the few times I've played around with them, I always feel like they have a horrendous early game.  Later on they're pretty good and the Awaken Tomb Oracles are really rather nice thugs: Invulnerability, soul vortex and maybe a nature bless.  If this wasn't CBM you could even get into blood, make some blood stones and throw them on the Oracles so they can run in and summon earth elementals without having to visit labs.

Looks like no one has taken Utgard yet.  They're pretty good if you're willing to get into blood magic.  Lots of frost devils and decent werewolf/skretti mage commanders.  Not as powerful as their predecessor giant nations but compared to a lot of the other LA nations not a bad pick at all.

[moghopper]

Wow, this thread got pretty active when I wasn't around. Is there anything I need to do?
?
Also, are we using CBM 1.94 or CBM 1.94 Complete (the one with the other mods included)?

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Whats added to the complete one? As it is the plan was CBM1.94 so default to that.

Edit: Okay this is what the game seems to be shaping up to be:

MAP: ?
ERA: Late Age
MOD: CBM 1.94
Time Allowance: 48 hours
GRAPHS: Off
HALL OF FAME: 15
RENAME: On

PLAYERS:
Akhier the Dragon hearted - Tien Chi
moghopper - Marignon
ThtblovesDF - Pangaea
puntocom - ?
gman8181 - Ulm
MentalFather - Atlantis
Karlito - Mictlan
Endymion - Arcoscephale
Waterplouf - C'tis
Duuvian - Bogarus

If anything is wrong or your nation is undecided speak up at some point before we figure the map out. If you don't I will assume what your down for is good. Also 10 player map where we don't have a player starting in water as apparently people don't want to be dog piled for playing R'lyeh.

[Karlito]

Just want to mention, I'm still a proponent of the "Dog-piling R'lyeh just on principle is silly" school of thought. Anyone interested should check out the conversation we had about that in the Round 9 thread. Awfully hard to dogpile R'lyeh anyway, with them being under the ocean and whatnot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(damnit, time to roll out the meta artillery)
Perhaps this'll sound less objective coming from me, but I don't agree with this "LA Ermor, R'lyeh & Pangea need to be eliminated as fast as possible" sentiment. Yeah, their dominions kill population, but it's more of a liability for at least R'lyeh and Pangea(though Ermor needs forts too, not to mention a steady supply of corpses). With passing time we get less and less income, while being saddled with hordes of chaff units that in my case also need to eat. We still need to buy and pay upkeep for our mages,  you know.

As for the pop-killing dominion, it's very easy for other players to keep it at bay with your own, unless somebody was irresponsible enough to choose very low dom strength for their pretender. A temple near the border, a couple of cheap priests. That's all it takes.

So the longer you wait, the easier time you'll have, as the economies of R'lyeh and Pangea go down the drain.

But somebody, somewhere started the scare, wrote some opinion piece on some forum that caters to that primal fear inside every one of us. The fear of being taken out of the game without a fight, with some slowly incapacitating, passively acting trick that the pop-killing dominions fit so nicely.
And now people mindlessly keep on repeating the mantra, turning it into a self-reinforcing "common sense" that nobody even considers challenging.

I mean, what the hell? It's not like any of the three nations is so unbalanced that if you let it survive to the endgame then you're screwed. I saw a several thousand strong Ermor army being decimated by a few hundred Man archers. I saw games well into their eightieth turns with R'lyeh confined to their lakes and unable to become a threat for anybody.

These are just nations like any other. They have their strengths and weaknesses, and the popkill dominions are not the trump-all ace. These are merely there to give some flavour and perhaps help put all the LA nations on equal footing, what with every other LA nation having recruitables vastly superior to the dom summons of any of the three nations.

So when you are considering the decision to gang up on somebody, don't buy into the cheap, self-perpetuation mythos. Chose somebody you actualy feel threatened by. And most of all, don't start the game with a pre-set decision of eliminating some nation.

And finally, think of other players. When we chose to play Pangea, R'lyeh or Ermor, we want to have a go at actually playing, with all the diplomacy, power struggles and backstabbing it involves, and not being singled out from the start for no good reason but some ill-founded perception of a threat to people's views on how the game should and shouldn't be played, our feeble attempts at reasoning with the aggressors shot down without as much as a second thought. "Because you're Ermor/R'lyeh/Pangea" the only explanation given.
What you're all doing here, is basically saying that choosing any of the three nations is against the rules, and we should be kicked out for our crime of defying you.

Just think about it. Don't be a bully.

EDIT: So map selection. There's plenty of good options, even quite a few with preset starting locations (which are really better). I guess it just comes down to how many provinces per player we want. Anything in the 10-30 range is available.

[gman8181]

Alright if someone plays as Ryleh, I will instead play as Ermor and then from there we can let everyone formulate their own individual ideas of how powerful or fun these nations are when in the game.

I wasn't just jumping on the anti Ryleh train because of what I've heard.  I was saying that because I genuinely find that the insanity I have to deal with playing as or against them irritates me.  I like using fairly organized armies and often employ communions.  This is all much harder to do when the odds of successfully giving orders to the necessary commanders is incredibly low.

Ermor is slightly less annoying in my opinion but sloshing through thousands of undead just to acquire mostly dead land is a pain.  Sure you'll probably get a bunch of death sites but overall the gains are far slimmer than if you were to fight another nation.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   You know what solves both those problems? Temple spam. Just slam temples in every bit of land you can then spam out priests. The temples keep your land clear of enemy Dom while the priests let you banish any fear of undead spam because nothing says fun like having 2 pages of priests. I will say that this is partly in jest though it is technically my method of dealing with the AI in such situations, or in other words when I don't have to care about the opponent actually being smart about it.
   As for a map something of decent size should work but really I don't mind the size as long as I am not stuck within a couple plots of an opponent. Also wraparound seems to be the desired type so take that into account. I've been looking at maps but I don't really have an eye for what would be fun yet as my default setup against AI is just choose large rand and be done with it so I think I will let others pick the map.

[moghopper]

CBM complete contains:

"Endgame Diversity Mod (EDM), Underwater Gameplay Improvement Mod (UWGIM), Worthy Heroes (WH), Sprite Upgrade 4.0 and portions of a number of other mods."

I'm guessing we're using vanilla cbm.

[ThtblovesDF]

Slap down Pangaea again for me, I didn't have the time to playtest a lot of nations this weekend and if I play jormon, I'll get crushed by the early rushers...

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Pangaea it is then. With that only puntocom hasn't posted a nation so I will fire off a PM and we will see whats what. I do think I will say no R'lyeh though as it makes it easier to decide on a map if we can just know there isn't an underwater nation.

[gman8181]

Priest armies can be killed by a creative Ermor player.  Mages are more limited so instead of a bunch of mages, probably just one throwing down a big death battlefield spell.  Maybe use those death golems which are great for Ermor.  Innate banefire shields, can't be banished, give them those trampling boots, bone armor and weapon for killing larger enemies.  Pairs of three should be very effective and quite doable with a decent death income.

I also sometimes do a nature bless which works well with those sacred wights.  Helps against banishment spam, so they're great for killing armies with priests and breaking through castles.  The nature magic can then later be used to cast gift of health so you can spam tartarians.

Oh and don't forget they get low research access to a weaker version of wraiths.  Send in a group of 1-3 to take out most independents and a larger group to take out poorly prepared enemy armies.  If they die, it doesn't matter because they are immortal.