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[E. Albright]

Yeah, the throne setup was a major factor in setting us up for a slog. Although I think it's safe to say that every power still left on the map (and R'lyeh too) was also guilty of being overcautious for long periods. Admittedly, all the powers who were consistently aggressive got wiped out, so it's not like caution is looking like the worst idea in hindsight.

Another thing that made it drag was just how diplomacy played out. The north and south both ended up with fairly rigid alliances that held long after it was in the best interest of all parties involved to do so, and that had long-reaching effects.

I don't think Valanis is necessarily a bad map for MP, but it's also not the best. It's definitely vulnerable to getting fragmented and its balance of open space and chokepoints is odd. It's a real pity, though, because it has a very nice number of provinces for a game this size, and it does a pretty good job of including all terrain types and spreading (most of) them out. Also, it's pretty. So I don't want to dislike it, but I'll admit that its layout was more than a little to blame in how things turned out.

I'd not mind hearing your more specific analyses of Val, Darkwind.

[lijacote]

Hey! My alliance with Sceleria was useful. Getting the two of you battling each other on more equal terms was preferable to siding with the leading player and helping them get even more stuff! And I made gains!

[E. Albright]

Well, a lot of that came down to the southeast. I was the biggest nation, but mostly because I occupied that quadrant of the map - just as R'lyeh had occupied it before me. Neither of us had ever really held it, so we both looked bigger on paper than we effectively were. That also meant that Sceleria and I didn't really fight in the east - as R'lyeh had done before me, I could mount a token defense of Marignon, and pretty much that was it*. It wasn't so much that you made sure Sceleria and Agartha were forced to fight on even terms as you made Agartha forgo fighting Sceleria except in the central ocean and instead devote most of their resources to fighting Ermor.

*Actually, this is slightly misleading. I could have probably put up a noticeably more serious defense had there not been a slight issue with the rivers and streams deciding they hated everyone without tentacles. Once that happened, given the situation on the border with Ermor, there was no practical way I could defend the east.

[lijacote]

You could have given me Arcoscephale. You could have! You could have bribed me. I would have been happy with Arcoscephale, at least for a moment.

[Darkwind3]

Well, Valanis's starts are extremely uneven, to start with. Arcoscephale was fucked from the beginning -

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

two provinces bordering their capital? Two provinces, total, bordering those two? Compare to, for example, Agartha's starting position -

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Agartha has essentially the entirety of the caves to themselves; no one wants a vast expanse of low-income provinces that are hard to conquer and harder to defend (due to the Agarthan darkvision advantage). They also had easy access to the surface world, to take even more territory than the ~10 or so they're already almost guaranteed. And they have decent recruitable amphibious troops too! A starting position like that doesn't ensure you'll do well but it certainly helps; it's really not a big deal except in comparison to the awful starts that are possible on Valanis. You can also see that Abysia's start was similar in quality to Arcoscephale's, although not quite so bad. There's also the problem of terrain.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(excuse the MS Paint, please)
From memory, the north, excluding Ermor after initial expansion. I've outlined my, Bandar Log's, and Man's empires and pointed out our capitals (Man's is behind the interface). You can see the giant, ridiculous river which absolutely dominated warfare in the north - in black are the three bridges across the river, an additional path between Sceleria's and Bandar Log's empires, and the three (!) border crossings between north and south, two of which were Scelerian and the other which was granted to Man by Sceleria. Bandar Log and I fought over the same two chokepoints, excluding occasional all-Longdead amphibious raids through the river on my side, for most of the war. Due to Bandar Log's dominion, the border couldn't be crossed even in winter. You can see that Man bordered Sceleria and one other nation, Bandar Log bordered Sceleria and one other nation, and Ermor bordered Sceleria and one other nation. The geography in the north is extremely chokepointy and constrained everyone's options severely; you can see something similar near Vanarus, though to a much lesser extent. I was attacked by both Bandar Log and by Man essentially because they had no choice and nowhere else to expand.

The three chokepoints between north and south also limited interactions. I gave up the island to R'lyeh early, because it would have fallen immediately had they attacked anyways, and I didn't need another angry neighbor. Man bordered Marignon, but once Marignon fell they would have had to go through R'lyeh to reach anywhere else in the south, limiting them to just me as an effective expansion route. Were it not for both of us having underwater capability, the Agarthan-Scelerian war would likely have been almost entirely cold.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The map is also not great for water nations. The ocean is one big, sinuous deathtrap for an UW player's dominion; I think domkill is a serious possibility for underwater nations on this map, and it was both skill and luck that R'lyeh didn't die before it got off the ground - I think sum1won actually took an awake, perhaps dom10 pretender for exactly this reason, as you can see by R'lyeh's extraordinary dominion in the first few turns.

It is definitely pretty though.

[E. Albright]

I will agree that Valanis needs start/nostart provinces defined. There are a lot of spots on the vanilla map that are just awful to start in.

I'm less adverse to all the chokepoints than you are, because I've played enough wide-open maps to know I aggressively dislike that style of play.

I will agree it's not a very UW-friendly map, though. There aren't a lot of maps that are UW friendly, but the way Valanis puts a (narrow) sea smack-dab in the middle of a non-wrap map with a couple of narrow channels stretching out to the side makes maintaining dominion undersea a nightmare - and it's also so stretched out that an underwater nation may have a small to medium empire that takes a year to cross. This is a very common issue with Dom maps though - there are very few with proper seas rather than just coastal waters. It's probably naive, but I'd like to hope the forthcoming Underwater Patch will add a few more UW nations and generally make UW more attractive to the point where the greater community might be more open to maps that don't marginalize UW nations quite so much as most maps do...

I'll also agree that there may be too much underworld for one nation, but not enough for two - and we only have at most 1 proper subterranean nation per era anyway. It would have been better to have maybe 2/3s as many caves on the map, or split the cave areas into a northern cavern system and a southern one. But 10 contiguous caves on a map that size is too many.

[Frumple]

Yeah... at this point, I'm pretty sure the only reason I haven't been domkilled is because there's probably a good twenty to thirty telestic animations split between my remaining forts. T'was starting to drop notably for me before I started up that regime (largely to help deal with mict's demons, but still). Now m'actually making some little gains, here and there, though I'm pretty sure a concentrated dom push from pretty much anyone would shuffle poor squidland off the map.

Mind you, a concentrated pretty much anything else, besides abject surrender, would shuffle squidland off the map too, but the point stands.

[sum1won]

Yeah, I took an awake dom9 pretender.  Ryleh can trash sloth and cold, and doesn't need a bless, so I figured it was a reasonable idea.  In hindsight, research/diversity would have been better than awake expander, but whatever.

One of my mistakes was definitely being overcautious, though a big part of why was misreading the metagame. Essentially, Mictlan and Abysia didn't seem to want to go to war with anyone except me, despite all of us having other directions in which we could expand. Honestly, diplomacy with everyone of my neighbors except for Sceleria and Man proved to be unreliable, which was probably why I didn't attack them. I should have taken out abysia much earlier, since they were being unreasonably aggresive about attacking my one coastal fort without negotation (I'd have ceded it for a payment that was sufficient to replace it, but destroying my very necessary temple and then stationing their own next to my cap was really not negotation-friendly).
Abysia is also one of the few nations that can contest agartha in the caves, thanks to night vision and units that can give even statues a beating, but they seemed to have some deal with agartha - and reneged on the one deal they made with me. (which was admittedly "stop attacking my fort and I'll fight agartha instead of marching to your capital").  However, I was also really worried about encircling mictlan, which I didn't want to do, since my response to an apparent encirclement is to attack the encircler, and I didn't have a good answer for tribless eagle warriors for most of the game.  So I made a deal with them to fight abysia, which they didn't do, and then when I finally did set up my army to fight them, I somehow forgot to script master enslave correctly. (Ashdod cap battle, if I had done it right with +5 pen in magic 2 dominion that would have pretty much ended that war). Then I made the similar mistakes in 2-3 other battles, which pretty much ended my offensive power until my royalty got online, and they weren't enough on their own.

 I also should have considered joining the sceleria gank, (I figured communioned banish + magic duel would have won me that easily enough) but all of my armies were literally 6 moves away and occupied, and killing sceleria while they were fighting ermor to get rid of BoT might have upset some people.

I also didn't think of a good underwater counter for statues for far too long.  (Turns out that trample and/or water elementals are probably the best options).  At that point, school kicked up, and I realized I'd be playing a defensive communion lategame through finals, which I did not want to do, so I looked for a sub. (Of the games that I joined since 4.01, 2 are already done, and three are near it).

Additionally, Ryleh got hit hard by the STR nerf combined with the good starspawn being made cap-only.  That made things much more !!Fun!! than I was expecting, since I admittedly did not play with them in dom4 beyond trying expansion strategies.

[E. Albright]

The metagame in the southwest was largely an unwritten Pax Agartha - I was very diplomatically engaged from very early, established and respected borders, was open to trade (and did so aggressively, to include occasionally just sending resources to weakened neighbors), and had reasonably large armies visible both on the charts and near my borders (which probably made everyone down there slightly nervous about a possible invasion; my slightly paranoid diplomatic tone probably didn't help with this). I also loudly supported group efforts against looming threats, and after BoT went down (and even moreso after my Eyes went up) became a very shrill voice for a diskal anti-squid crusade. Abysia was presumably more loyal to me than you because of my willingness to very decisively intervene on their behalf when Vanarus broke the Pax Agartha and went to war with them, though you may have been referring to earlier negotiations. Mictlan and Ashdod had a brief and bloody war that Abysia and I sat out (though I traded with both sides - to be honest, I'd trade with anyone who offered me topaz, as my earth income never exceeded 11 or 12 even at endgame), and early on before Mictlan was subbed, Abysia was at war with them as well - had Mrhappyface stuck it out one more turn, Mictlan would have probably been swamped, as I was preparing to join Ashdod and Abysia in invading them.

Having said all that, this would have been a very, very different game had the nation stats been hidden on Llamaserver like we'd intended them to be.

I spent almost the entire game with a razor-thin margin of error; this was my first MP Agarthan game, and the fact that all their best troops are mindless makes them play very differently than I was used to, and made me comparatively cautious. All their most useful summons besides magma children are relatively expensive and slow to mass, so between that and the fact that you either win or lose the entire army (or at least the mindless bits) makes it very easy to be risk-adverse, and also makes initiative extremely important: being able to fight half again as long before your armies start dissolving is huge, and unless you enjoy overwhelming odds it's more than enough to make you think twice or thrice about attacking instead of trying to finagle or trick your opponents into letting you defend. That of course only became moreso the case when there was the issue of getting off a turn-one Antimagic before Arcane Domination or volleys of Opposition, etc. started hitting all my expensive and hard-to-replace summons. To say nothing of the later fights where I literally couldn't win on offense, but defending 1000 skeletons (and supporting mages) would be very hard-pressed to kill me off before they started dissolving.

As a general observation, Mindless in Dom4 is much more powerful than in Dom3. A lot of early SC/thug counters simply no longer work on Mindless units.

As another observation, N9 is OP compared to probably every other bless. This is hardly a controversial opinion, but still. Additionally, I can't imagine a non-N9 strategy for MA Agartha that would work even half as well as it does. There's nothing else you can spend design points that will bring this particular nation as much RoI as this does.

[Darkwind3]

Before I start, here's a handy folder of a few interesting turns from my game. I'm pretty sure I've lost more total troops than most nations ever recruited.

First, I'd like to talk about my pretender.

#unfunny meme was most of the reason I did so well in that game. S9W4 is an unusual bless, but it is excellent for shadow vestals - if not the best, then one of the best in the early game for them. It diversifies you into water off the bat and, importantly, gets you S9. S9 means Rings of Sorcery and Wizardry. I was able to jump from N1 indies to Ivy Kings, Faery Queens and Queens of Elemental Air off of #unfunny meme, and from an E1-base spectre to Kings of Elemental Earth. The only paths Sceleria can't get at high levels through simple summoning this way are fire and blood. Sceleria leapfrogged from one of the lowest-diversity nations to one of the highest.

The scales were another key. Sloth is a dump scales because Sceleria doesn't rely on its living troops much regardless, and it allowed Magic 3 (and Growth 3, which is not important but is amusing late-game). Sceleria researches relatively slowly due to its mediocre researchers and the necessity of using them for summoning your army and charging into battle to spam Nether Darts and/or explode in communions. Magic 3 does lower your own undead MR, but it also lowers your opponents' MR (Nether Darts!) and means the difference between mediocre research from sheer strength of numbers/Skull Mentors and excellent research.

The metagame in the southwest was largely an unwritten Pax Agartha

It's funny you say that. The metagame in the north was like that for Sceleria, but the opposite. It seemed the motto for a lot of nations was Sceleria Delenda Est. Anyways I was at war with every nation I've ever neighbored except R'lyeh.

My early-game was dominated by the war with Ermor due to BoT. I attacked their capital, sieged it down, and lost the battle but killed Orcus and thus freed the world. Around that time I was double-teamed by Man and Vanarus. Vanarus was a featherweight, but Man managed to win their first major engagement thanks to an unfortunate bug that invalidated Arrow Fend against Flaming Arrows at the time. I'm quite confident I would have won otherwise, though I would have lost a lot of chaff. This forced me to peace out against Ermor and Vanarus to ensure I didn't overxtend myself. I won the next battle two turns later regardless, and He-Man was relegated to the dustbin of history. Man relied too heavily on Flaming Arrows for too long - it's an excellent early-midgame tactic, but it can't form the core of an army past the time battlemagic really gets going.

I was paranoid about potential attacks from R'lyeh or Bandar Log for much of the game, but R'lyeh never attacked and Bandar Log only did so after I had begun mopping up Man. I was definitely not prepared for N9B9 Gandharvas - if you only look at one of those turns, look at turn 47. N9B9 Gandharvas are not immortal, but they may as well be when you have a six-round clock before your entire army completely dissolves. That battle was a woeful combination of overetimating my own army, underestimating Bandar Log's, and shitty unit scripting - notice those vestals set to form a giant line that prevented any units behind them from actually attacking the Gandharvas before they were all dead. The war was so desperate I resorted to using gladiators and winter wolves; ultimately, I won by recruiting Ermor to force the Gandharvas and supercommunions to spread so thin they could be defeated in detail. It was a war of attrition for sure, but attrition is what Sceleria is best at. (I would be very interested, if you're reading this Il Palazzo, in Bandar Log's account of the war.)

I was perhaps overcautious in attacking Agartha and slow to declare war on Mictlan, but I don't think it would have changed the shape of the war substantially. It was shaping up to be a slog to the finish, whoever won. As you can see, I was rushing up Thaumaturgy to turn my army on Mictlan's capital into half a dozen round 3 Arcane Dominations on that army of Magma Children as well as diversifying into blood, but I still didn't have a great answer to those N9 statues/SCs (when backed up by mage support) and had no good answer to that army underwater. Tartarians probably count for at least a little though.

After I made peace with Ermor, we were pretty much allies of convenience for the rest of the game, first against Bandar Log, and then against Agartha. I'm not sure what Ermor was getting out of that alliance by the end but it certainly helped me.

In terms of diplomacy, early on in the game I traded briefly with R'lyeh and with Vanarus. Most of my early trade was done with Agartha (!), amounting to a total of nearly 90 (!!!) earth gems sent their way. I got two hammers for 3-gem amulets of the dead though, so totally worth it. Most of my later trade was done with Ermor, once it became clear that Agartha was the rising star and not R'lyeh.

I also should have considered joining the sceleria gank, (I figured communioned banish + magic duel would have won me that easily enough) but all of my armies were literally 6 moves away and occupied, and killing sceleria while they were fighting ermor to get rid of BoT might have upset some people.

I'm not sure it would have been easy. You can see the sort of critical mass necessary to effectively deal with Sceleria's chaff - I think you could have dealt with my chaff (via giant communion), or my mages (via magic duel), but not both. Banish would have been worth little, anyways - as soon as I could (which was soon since it was an early target) I was casting Antimagic in literally every battle I could. I think Solar Rays was more effective overall for BL, and would have been for you too. I'm not sure what sort of chaff you were using at that point, either, but I'll bet it would be more vulnerable to a Longdead Horseman charge than a line of N9B9 Gandharvas. That said, an attack by R'lyeh was my nightmare for most of the game.

I ought to post some snippets from "Ignoring the octopus in the room". I think every player was in on it but R'lyeh and Ermor, and even lijacote was by the end.

Finally: I'd count how many Amulets of the Dead I had by the end of the game, but I'm afraid of what the number would be.

e: i write too much, hopefully there's some lurker somewhere who enjoys words

[E. Albright]

I'm not sure what Ermor was getting out of that alliance by the end but it certainly helped me.

Primarily low-cost memorial and crematory services, as near as I could tell.

I could probably give some more detailed analysis of my game than the vague stuff above, and I've got all my turns archived, so I could post a link to a selection of those, but I have a question, Darkwind - are your replays accurate? Pretty much all my old turns aren't playing out like they did originally, so I'm inclined to blame the new version not duplicating old version battles. As a notable example, during the most recent siege of Arco (the 4th or 5th over the course of the game, waaaaaay back on turn 95), Ermor got lucky and popped a MR 35 astral Golem trampler on the 6th or 7th round, and did a lot more damage because their disintegrators weren't distracted vainly trying to kill it for the next 43 or 44 rounds. If I replay it now, it frolics merrily through Ermor's lines the entire battle.

Heh. I'm kinda tempted to dig up the turn I blitzed Vanarus to see if my pretender would now survive its hubristic attack on Mud Wood since the Monolith stat bug got fixed in 4.08... [Edit: yup. If Monoliths had had their resists in the prior version, my pretender would have eaten those 16 D2s, 2 A2s, and 1 A1W1E1N1 alive instead of only killing 2/3s of them. Ah, well.]

Speaking of things that the patch did, the Smouldercone went dormant on me after 4.08. Losing those 4f for no good reason was fun.

(Incidentally, 6 third-round Arcane Dominations wouldn't have netted you as much of that vile horde of magma kids as you might think - on average, out of 285 you'd have gotten between 90 for 6x +5pen and 15 for 6x +0Pen; 14 native MR + drain + Army of Lead or Antimagic really takes the fangs out of an "easily resists" spell like AD. It'd be better than fighting the whole mess of the things, but still, that's not much bang for 42 pearls. R'lyeh tried that tact, and while it worked reasonably well the first time they did it with 4 or so first-round-defending castings, when sum1won's successor tried it again on first-round-but-attacking, it was impressively underwhelming.)

[Karlito]

Man relied too heavily on Flaming Arrows for too long - it's an excellent early-midgame tactic, but it can't form the core of an army past the time battlemagic really gets going.

Yeah, I didn't really have any plans besides getting both fire arrows + wind guide and by the time I got both of those up it was too late in the game for them to be effective.  I don't really remember much of the earlier game, but I suppose this is another case of "should have been more aggressive earlier" which was also my failing in the 4.02 game and the 4.07 game, though possibly diplomatic failures helped things along in those latter cases.

[USEC_OFFICER]

e: i write too much, hopefully there's some lurker somewhere who enjoys words

Don't worry, there definitely is at least one.

I don't really remember much of the earlier game, but I suppose this is another case of "should have been more aggressive earlier".

Which seems to be the lesson that everyone else is drawing from their games. I guess the next few rounds of Dominions should be rather hectic and interesting then.

[lijacote]

The plan was to have Agartha first cede Arcoscephale to me, after which I'd just garrison it with fifty billion zombies, and then I'd continue on to Vanarusian lands. The more Sceleria weakened Agartha and the more he became a threat to Agartha, the more Agartha would hypothetically have to cede to me in order to fight against the serious foe, the better this plan would work. I was banking on eventually being able to gain more than Sceleria could, and then I would have recast the Burden. Eventually, my freespawn would triumph, I believe. Maybe.

We never got there, so my alliance seemed counterproductive, certainly. Alternatively, you could treat my siding with Sceleria as kingmaking. After all, Sceleria is more kin to Ermor than Agartha is, and maybe they'd let us stay around as servants... of course, it'd be a terrible shame if a PORTAL TO DEATH opened and they'd all be reduced to ghosts, or something.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Vanarus' failure against Sceleria (and the game as a whole) can pretty much be blamed my on my inexperience. I didn't even buy the game until after this thread started after all.

For as long as I was playing, it definitely felt like Agartha was leading the diplo race.