I lost the research game beating Abysia (and then Helheim), so I wasn't ready to fight a "real" war. The alpha strike plan you proposed would have been a decent one, but it might not have paid off quite as fully as you'd hoped, because we'd have been battling for the corpses, and there was the matter of my mobile thug/junior-SCs which you never got to see much of. Even if those only slowed down things, in the deep south 10-candle Wrath would have thinned the shambling hordes quickly (though not necessarily quickly enough, although if the apocalypse didn't axe enough of my omnipresent coral priests, the baying hordes would have quickly staged a comeback). Still, it would have swung the odds a lot further into your favor.
Since I wasn't ready for the endgame I didn't have tarts - I was, like wishing, two turns from getting those online. I'd actually been forced to experiment with CBM tart-alternatives -
Asynja aren't bad (or great) if they get the right paths (which they often don't). I was about to start rolling out
Ember Lords, since I was swimming in rubies, and while again, they're poor cousins to tarts, I'm actually curious how those would have fared. Underwater, I didn't get a chance to test out how packs of
Great Kraken would handle tartarians, but I suspect if they could catch them alone or even in pairs they'd do a pretty nasty number on them with a minimal amount of gems spent. Hmm, digging around on the mod inspector I suppose the actual top of my wishlist should have been
this guy, but its uniqueness and lack of mobility would have made it of limited value. Interestingly, in Dom4 they were changed to a one-nation pretender, but the unique label was dropped, so their utility as wish-fodder has increased, hehehe...
Elemental Royalty role call? In the end, I was reduced to the three Queens of Water and one King of Earth. None of them saw action, though the queens were mostly only good for defense.
I have no doubt I'd have lost had we continued, though by forcing Yomi to slog through a micromanagement hell to finish me I might have managed to tip the scales to Marverni. Which is typical; Atlantis is kingmaker, but not king.
A list of my best strategic/tactical coups through the game must include the invaluable 100 diamonds I sunk into Caelum's second casting of Perpetual Storm - that was so useful I might well have re-cast it had the birds died sooner. It probably was the nail in the coffin for Abysia; cryptic utterances (and observances of visible gem expenditures) from Il Palazzo suggested that he tried repeatedly to knock it down, and it was probably cast at 250+. The other big revelation for me, one that I wish I'd've realized sooner, was the humble Coral Priest. Recruited for 45g in any ocean or coastal castle with a temple, half of them have W1, which is enough to spawn endless hordes of filthy sea dogs - a surprisingly useful talent - or eventually skulk around in battle freezing hearts. They also had the effect of supercharging my research; had I realized CBM gave Atlantis something like this before the game started, I'd've swapped my not-so-useful Res3 with my Mag1, and it might have been a very different game. Might have.
Still, this was my 3rd or 5th MP game, depending on whether you count a lonely 1v1 duel and my abortive participation in Round 2, so I think I did pretty well. It was definitely a learning experience; I had no real grasp of how to properly use battlemages when we started, and Abysia forced me to teach myself that skill on the fly...
Edit: for CBM 1.94 games, the Sunderer is almost certainly the best wishable unit out there for general purpose use. However, while much less useful than a slightly-scaled-down Grigori,
the other two units that are summoned with him by Open the Seal aren't awful either. Probably not worth a wish, but they might be under certain circumstances, as they have good paths and some special abilities to balance their shattered souls.
Incidentally, I'm inclined to wonder if their analogs in Dom4 would be worth wishing for. It may be a bug that God Vessels won't Defect if they're not GoR'd, but even as non-commanders
God Vessels/Legions of Gods are pretty damned nasty things.
Edit 2: EucreJack, I'd say the micro is cut down a fair amount in Dom4. Not a ton, but it's noticeable. A lot of the non-micro-altering changes make the game more enjoyable as well, too. I'd say it would certainly be worth grabbing one of these times Gamer's Gate or suchlike does another 50% off sale, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I wanna play with you again in the future...
Author
Topic: Dom3 Round 15 - Game in Progress (Read 53190 times)