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[chaoticag]

Well, I've got some time before I got to get going, but I figure I can do a more proper breakdown now that I'm no longer late for class.

Where to start with Asphodel... I think I ought to preface this with saying that I'm not by any means a great Dominions player, I only really know a few nations, and even then, I mostly know some Ulmish strategies at this age and in the early age, so anything I say is prolly not so much reflective of my nation so much as reflective of my blindspots.

First of all, I think Asphodel suffers for lacking it's defining feature, the Carion Woods Dominion. Asphodel's troops are very gold heavy, rather than resource heavy, so chaffing them out with some freespawn, particularly piercing resistant freespawn, would have gone a long way towards making their army more effective. The only other option for getting those units was awakening manikins from their carrion mage-priests.

Secondly... I never figured out how to handle my nature mages, and for a big chunk of the time, that was the defining feature of my nation. I had some adepts of silver, and at some point, some adepts of gold, but to break it down, I really did not have the gem income to support that. My predecessor probably didn't see the value of gem income, or was too busy expanding to do something micromanagy, and to be fair, you can do well into the midgame without a proper gem income, especially in a disciples game. But there were wastes and mountains and forrests and swamps without much other than a gem search spell cast on them. Usually nature, and I had no idea what to do with that income. Most of the mages I inherited turned out to be 1N1D which was terrible for research, and I guess they could have used a booster or something... maybe worst comes to worst, you hand them a war bow and have them cast eagle eyes?

I guess the next pitfall I ran into was finding the army niches for asphodel. Their troops are heavy up front gold cost and low resource cost. I don't think having them in a team with Ulm and Jotenheim was a good idea, since I'd never use up my resources before I run out of gold. Then I'd likely end up doing something stupid with them and get them killed, since I counted on them being more survivable than they were. Every berserker killed was 40 gold down the drain, while wearing some pretty...questionable armor.

My fault though, each army should have had a mage priest to mass enchant them with bark skin, and make them live. I probably hired too many, and should have had them charge in from the flanks rather than acting as the linchpin of my armies.

Lastly, my disciple... was actually pretty good, so it was a solid piece of design there. Good path diversity, but eventually, the surest way to kill her became nightmaring her against too many units to kill in a 50 turn limit. Losing that path diversity was pretty bad.

In terms of things done well... it looked like there was solid expansion early on, though I wasn't involved in that. I put an effort to have more forts set up. That might have been more questionable, but I needed more mages. Did some solid site searching for what was a game 40 turns in, hired some better mages with better paths rather than depend on the cheapest I could muster, even if it meant a smaller army. I started off communicating well with the team, but I should have been more proactive about it. At the very least, when dealing with people across the world, I should make a point to at least send a message over the PM system here from time to time.

It's been an interesting experience, and thanks guys for having me. (Asphodel wouldn't have been my first choice though)

[E. Albright]

I've never played Asphodel competitively, but had I been in your shoes, I'd've spent ideal emeralds summoning national mages to spawn more manikins.

We'd actually considered trying to pick up Asphodel as one of our nations in place of either Agartha or R'lyeh. The biggest appeal for them as a disciple is that while they're weaker than normal because they have to summon their chaff manually... 100g temples for your team. That's huge.

[chaoticag]

I ended up spamming the hell out of those, yeah. And I did end up using those national mages, but I think I was wondering whether their mage turns could have been used else where. Still my bad for not quite looking into them as I should have.

[Shadowlord]

I think Gift of Health made a huge difference. It enabled us to use (or continue using) troops which were vulnerable to our disease aura. Before we had GoH up, for example, I was using longbowmen and magma children, and on the trip out of our dominion into Mariland up to 30% of them were catching diseases, which could eventually cause a significant loss of combat effectiveness.

Once GoH was up and we had spread our dominion to the areas we had our troops in, it cured anyone who caught a disease and even cured old age ailments (although not all at once - old guys could get 4 afflictions at once and only heal them one or two per month), making large armies of non-mindless non-coldblooded units much more viable.

I also only lost a handful of longbowmen and a bunch of disposable magma children in the final battle(s) taking down Mari, I believe. At the time I thought that minimizing casualties would be likely to ensure future success, but I didn't realize we'd win without my armies having to fight any more major battles at all after that. (I saw actual battles going on with R'lyeh's armies, of course, but R'lyeh hit in the middle of enemy territory, including Ulmish territory)

[Frumple]

Yeah... if for some reason you do end up playing disciple Asphodel again in the future, chao my best advice is to convert most/all of your spare nature income into carrion centaurs -- like, as soon as you get the income for it, you set one of your casters (eventually, more than one) to cast carrion centaur monthly and never stop (note: Regular asphodel probably wants to do this, too). It takes a bit longer to reach critical mass, but after a point all of those centaurs set to awaken manikins generates freakishly huge, MA Ermor/LA Lemuria levels of notably-better-than-longdead-against-most-things chaff. And then you lead them with Carrion Lords (or black dryads, in a pinch) to do priesty/battlecasty (poison can be fun, in this case) stuff, probably use minotaurs for shock troops and centaurs/longbowmen for ranged support, all that nice stuff. Without the domkill, they're basically nature sceleria, with the same sort of desire to spam reanimation chaff like crazy.

[Karlito]

I don't think having them in a team with Ulm and Jotenheim was a good idea,

Asphodel wasn't a nation that we planned on picking up at the outset. Denzi wanted to do something with undead (that was the one criteria I was given to make a selection), and they were pretty much what was left. Our early tests showed that Ulm couldn't possibly spent its excess gold before it ran out of resources (this was true only until I discovered a wealth of recruitable indy mages midgame), so it seemed like a decent fit.

Yeah... if for some reason you do end up playing disciple Asphodel again in the future, chao my best advice is to convert most/all of your spare nature income into carrion centaurs -- like, as soon as you get the income for it, you set one of your casters (eventually, more than one) to cast carrion centaur monthly and never stop (note: Regular asphodel probably wants to do this, too). It takes a bit longer to reach critical mass, but after a point all of those centaurs set to awaken manikins generates freakishly huge, MA Ermor/LA Lemuria levels of notably-better-than-longdead-against-most-things chaff. And then you lead them with Carrion Lords (or black dryads, in a pinch) to do priesty/battlecasty (poison can be fun, in this case) stuff, probably use minotaurs for shock troops and centaurs/longbowmen for ranged support, all that nice stuff. Without the domkill, they're basically nature sceleria, with the same sort of desire to spam reanimation chaff like crazy.

I did try to push Denzi in this direction initially, but I guess the reanimation machine never really got all the way up to its full potential. I did end up sitting on a huge pile of Asphodel's 'unwanted' nature gems for quite a while, and never really did anything useful with them.

Final thoughts for Ulm will have to wait until I can sleep on them.

[E. Albright]

Huh. The thread was locked. Did I do that? I mean, it's easy enough to do, even on accident, so I suppose I might have...

[Karlito]

I think the first thing I want to comment on is that Ulm's starting position was really good, like, if we were going to repeat this exact same game I would recommend moving it. Mountain province with 5 neighbors? Two of those neighbors are caves, and two are forests? This meant that about a year into the game, I pulled every single smith I had out of the capital to head to my secondary fort near Sceleria, and still had over 400 resources per turn at my capital, so then I had two forts that could churn out blacksteel infantry, and I never wanted for what are supposed to be difficult to amass troops. Also, I lucked out and probably the two best magic sites I found during the game: Conjurer's Circle and Citadel of the Lore Masters were both in provinces adjacent to my capital.

We've already discussed the gem-income gap, but ultimately I think what killed me was that I was playing the wrong game. Before this my Dom4 end-game experience was zero, but my Dom3 late-game experience was, well I wouldn't call it plentiful, but I'd been there before and I knew what it was about. However, I'd read the 4.01 AARs and was probably expecting a similar sort of late-game slog, not thinking at all about how the drastically different throne settings changed things.

If you look at the score graphs, you'll notice Jotunheim and Asphodel collapsing at the end, but Ulm was holding strong. My income was still increasing, my research was supreme, and though I failed to take the lesson of Voldemort's death to heart and some gems had been wasted on SC projects, the armies of Ulm were completely undefeated in the field, and the squids were declining engagement. My recruited lore masters and assembled boosters meant I had access to at least 4 in every magic path, and I'd snagged all the best artifacts. In a few turns I'd start opening the gates of Tartarus, and I unlocked Wish on the final turn. With the Orb of Atlantis and various other items I'd be sending an army into the sea to begin my counter-offensive. It was clear in the last five turns that we weren't winning, but I at least, certainly wasn't losing, or so my thinking went. That's why I was so caught off-guard when the throne blitz worked, and the game ended when it did.

Ultimately, the team went into the game with a fairly casual attitude, we certainly picked nations more for fun or a desire to experiment with a game mechanic than for a serious competitive play- our initial plan involved drafting Arcoscephale and Scerleria, and I actually submitted the wrong disciple to the server, but I think Voldy's path choices ended up being superior to what I initially had planned. I'm sure we succeeded in having a fun time, and though I ultimately couldn't deal with the larger problems, I really relished finding solutions to the smaller scale ones- I think I actually cackled out loud when I was picking out the gear for Fortitude, the construct-shattering angel, and seeing him work out as he did was so satisfying. Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to take a break from Dominions for a few weeks at least, and I'd definitely play another disciples game in the future.

[chaoticag]

Same here. I've been in one other before though, and the worst thing that can happen is when your team's communication falls apart. This really should be the take away from all Disciples game, how well you do is related to how well you communicate. And nothing sucks worse than being on a team where the most experienced member misses out on a whole third of their turns.

[Shadowlord]

I had a site which let me recruit Lore Masters and Sages two provinces from my capital as well, but it was the Throne of Knowledge, I believe.

(I was about 3 turns away from getting Wish myself when the game ended, and we had a site that would have reduced the casting cost, and a plan to use it to print gems)

[E. Albright]

I think the first thing I want to comment on is that Ulm's starting position was really good, like, if we were going to repeat this exact same game I would recommend moving it.

I actually would like to hear some opinions on the starting positions. lijicote and I worked them out, but were not 100% happy with what we ended up with, though we pretty much agreed we'd done about as well as we could for what we had. I would say that we gave Ulm the best start on the map though. We were kinda forced into it by our various restrictions, but yeah. We also agreed that we were probably giving your team the best starting position as well.

We've already discussed the gem-income gap, but ultimately I think what killed me was that I was playing the wrong game. Before this my Dom4 end-game experience was zero, but my Dom3 late-game experience was, well I wouldn't call it plentiful, but I'd been there before and I knew what it was about. However, I'd read the 4.01 AARs and was probably expecting a similar sort of late-game slog, not thinking at all about how the drastically different throne settings changed things.

I agree with the first part, but not with the second. Because...

That's why I was so caught off-guard when the throne blitz worked, and the game ended when it did.

I really don't think it's accurate to call what we did at the end a blitz. When we went to war with you, we held 18 Ascension points, though only 11 were claimed. We proceeded to attack your borders in a steady, methodical fashion, and captured several thrones in the process. We claimed 8 points on the last turn, sure, but 7 of the 8 we'd held for 15+ turns - one for 50+.

Really, it wasn't the different victory conditions that made things so different here. The conditions were actually pretty similar, and in both endgames, it was down to two "teams", with each holding roughly half the thrones. It was the map that made the big difference. Our teams shared very long, porous borders on a wraparound map, so there was much less of a safe heartland like there ended up being on Valanis - and also, mostly by coincidence, on Valanis most of the thrones weren't near the shared border. So yeah, I'd say the big difference wasn't the victory conditions, it was the geography.

Also, I'd argue out that the score graphs were actually showing that you were losing, just not in terms of the more straightforward military sense. This got hidden by the disciple-game quirk/bug whereby a defeated pretender's dominion doesn't disappear when they lose, but we'd figured if we didn't win by thrones we'd've Domkilled you. This was one reason Asphodel was bearing the brunt of our aggression, though the other was that they simply were the most vulnerable. The full brunt of our temples and thrones was being blunted rather drastically by Py's slowly-crumbling wall of faith, but it was pretty obscene.

[Karlito]

Also, I'd argue out that the score graphs were actually showing that you were losing, just not in terms of the more straightforward military sense.

My point (even if I'm not the best at expressing it) was that I never felt like I was losing, even if two-seconds of  rational analysis would say otherwise.

[E. Albright]

Ah, fair enough. I actually agree with you; rationally, when we saw the score graphs and looked closely at the maps, we could tell we were winning, but casually looking at the map, the artifact list, the periodic SCs and doomstacks of IB casters, and the research chart, it was an effort to convince myself that was actually true.

[GP Trixie]

Late game was pretty hard for me as Jotun. I never managed to reasearch anything else than blood to a serious level. Having no real mages under 200 gold and no sacred mage hurts. And the only real mage outside the capital are slow to recruit.

So the plan was to summon as much as ice devils as possible. This part went ok with a small blood economy of 3-4 provinces. My big problem was the transitioning to something else. I managed to get a bit higher in blood and got some ice devils. But I couldn't expend my blood economy enough to get serious things going. My gold income remained pretty low for the whole game and getting slow to recruit and getting the blood economy to run was to slow.

The only decent thing I had were the few SC I managed to equip with the stuff ulm sent me. They did manage to raid quite well before they were stopped with that mind hunt thing. In the end I'm not sure if the way I played them is really the best way to play Jotun.

Anyway it was fun playing with you all.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I've been under the impression that your forest-recruit vaetti hags are pretty awesome at cost-effective researching. I can imagine that battlemagic would be an issue however.