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Urraparrand (1 land, 1 sea, weird geography; 145 land + 35 sea)

0 (0%)

Plane of Rusty Nails (1 continent, 1 large sea, 1 small sea, 1 lake; 143 land + 12 sea

1 (16.7%)

Valanis (Cave system, 2 continents, 1 sea, 1 island w/ throne; 142 land + 21 sea; not wraparound)

0 (0%)

Realm of Roaring Rhinos (1 continent, 1 sea; 169 land + 16 sea)

2 (33.3%)

Cradle of Dominion (1 continent, 1 sea, few lakes, interesting geography; 199 land + 22 sea; not wraparound)

1 (16.7%)

Other (post what you want in the topic)

2 (33.3%)

Total Members Voted: 6

Voting closed: June 06, 2014, 04:54:52 pm

[Biowraith]

It looks like I'm going to be without internet until at least monday (seems workmen cut through my connection) . Given my weak position in the game (and that some are talking about calling it already) I don't particularly feel I need or want to inconvenience anyone with an extension request but figured I should mention it in case I stale.

[Puzzlemaker]

I will do as much damage to Ulm as I can before I go down!  Which probably wont be much!  But there should be some epic battles at least!

[Mindmaker]

So can we have a vote?

[tompliss]

I vote for more Pangea destruction !
(as I don't spend more than 2 minutes doing my turns anymore, I "don't mind" playing this game and I must admit it's more fun to wander around the armies and raid provinces than handling a big empire worrying about the many neighbours :p

[Puzzlemaker]

I didn't have a chance to look at it this morning, but depending on the status of this turn I may or may not want to call it.

[lijacote]

I am fine either way. If I must make a vote, I lean towards calling it.

[Toady Two]

I vote to end this game.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Whether you end it now or a little later, I just want to make it known that any and all post-game write ups will be read and appreciated.

[Puzzlemaker]

WELP I think we should call it.  I learned quite a bit.  My pretender died and I got destroyed.  Here are a few things I learned.

Pangaea is definitely an interesting nation.  I found it pretty fun, and even though my strategy wasn't perfect I enjoyed moderate success.

Now as for my chosen strategy, I relied on a lot of "Flak" backed up with ranged units, Flak being a lot of maenads and other summons.  This worked well... sometimes, but fell apart at the end especially against Ulm.  One major problem with this was that once enough Flak died the heavier troops would retreat.  Another is that against heavier troops, the arrows would just bounce off the shields and armor and the flak would die.

To back up my Flak, I used Satyr Hoplites, who can't hold a candle to other nations heavy duty units, especially Ulm.  However, Pan does have minotaurs, and I should have built more of them.

Centaurs are what I use for my ranged unit (In fact they are the only Pan archers).  However, their arrows don't do squat against armored units, especially with shields.  Due to their speed and range, I often set them to "fire at closest enemy and keep distance".  This worked perfectly against lightly armored enemies, but as the game progressed I found this tactic failing spectacularly due to enemy mages and counter-archers taking them out, along with heavier units.  However, I did see many early successes with it while going against lighter enemies.  Another great benefit to Centaurs is that they can be built in any forest region you control, making them easy to raise a huge army of horsebowmen and harassing the enemy.

I should have definitely built more Centaur warriors and centaur cataphracts for close range horseman action, a bad mistake on my part.  While you can only build them in forts, it seems that strong "horsemen" are a big part of Pangaea, one which I did not use enough.  I also didn't really bother with sacreds, due to my blessing being meh, and Pans only unit sacreds being capital only.  However, I should have also deployed some of them, as I really needed heavier troops.

Now lets talk magic.

I fucked that up pretty bad.

So, my build for pam was turmoil, and I built a lot of Pans to generate Maenads.  My chosen pretender ALSO generated Maenads, meaning I basically had a ton of them, for Flak.  I also chose to have good scales, and my pretender had only forest and blood as his naturals.  You can build more blood guys, Pendomeniacs, but they are fairly weak in blood.  Normal pans also have some earth as well.

I used my Pans to summon a lot of creatures, in fact I managed to max out conjuration.  I should have focused on getting a few other key spells instead.  Namely, Growing Fury in Thaumaturgy Level 5, which if your units already have berserk makes them go insta-zerk.  Holy shit, that would have been so useful earlier on, basically an army of all flak, pop that spell then have your mage retreat, suddenly you have a giant suicide bomb.  Awesome.  Backed up with a spell like Mass Protection (Alteration level 7) and it could have done a lot of damage.

Now, there aren't too many good offensive combat spells for Earth and Forest, which is what I had the most access to.  There are a few, and I underutilized them.  Espcially things like Iron Bane (Alteration level 6), which I -JUST- saw and realized how useful that would have been.  Damn.  That would have been great for boosting Flaks ability to take down armored units.

Basically, because I used so much flak, I was really vulnerable to mages.  I didn't give my troops enough magical protection and support, and I paid the price.

I didn't get into the Thug game either, as far as I can tell Pan doesn't have very good thugs.  I did try, but learned a painful lesson.  If Pan DOES Have good thugs, please tell me what I did wrong.



Also, I finally used communions.  THEY ARE AWESOME.  Turns out blood can use communions as well, so I should have gotten some evil pans together.  Oh well.

Any other comments?

[tompliss]

I don't think your general strat was that bad, but it had drawbacks and you didn't manage to lessen them as you could have (mainly using magic as you said).

[Mindmaker]

Well, since I staled my last turn anyway, I might call it as well.
MA Agartha is definitely a powerhouse, although it's power has it's limit as well and an unexperienced player, such as me, won't be able to use their full potential.

I've made a lot of mistakes.
My sitearching was bretty bad, I wasted a lot of gems on the sitesearching spells. The knowledge about effective sitesearching just "clicked" in another game I'm currently playing and I definitely could have used this knowledge here.
I've also didn't make use of dwarven hammers, which I also just discovered recently in another game.
My thugging/SCing was beyond pathetic. 35 gem thugs + full gear lost in their first battles.
The upper three made me miss out on a lot of spells that could have been used to leverage my advantage.
I've dismissed Living Mercury much too early because of my early failures to use it correctly.

That said I was quite dissatisfied about the player interactions in this game. They were severely lacking.
Little diplomacy, little trades, no flexibility once a course of action was decided and general silence, which had a devastating effect on my motivation to keep on playing and resulted in a lot of "lazy" turns.
The games on 4chan are a lot more livelier than that, despite the fact that everybody there is anonymous and communicating is a pain, unless you can reach the person on Steam, which isn't possible in a lot of cases.

[Puzzlemaker]

Yeah, how DO you thug?

And what do you mean by bad sitesearching?

[E. Albright]

The aim of thugging is mostly "cheap but effective". A Bane is a thug chassis; a Wraith Lord is not. You thug by picking a cheap summon/national recruit that can take 5-20 gems worth of gear (e.g., vine shield and frostbrand), and either: ramp up the destructive potential of an army via melee combat alongside troops; kill light PD by themselves; or kill/incapacitate thugs/SCs that are not equipped to kill your specialized thug. You can up the effectiveness of any of these by having the thugs operate in small groups or with a small escort of elite troops; one thug may be able to blow up PD 10; three of the same thug or one plus ten sacreds may be able to blow up PD 25. Etc.

Marble Oracles are so expensive they don't really lend themselves to thugging. They can do all of the above, but it's really more at the SC level just because of how much of an upfront cost you paid for the chassis.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Re: Pangaea:
You have high N and E mages. That's a ton of troop buffs and debuffs right there. Alteration has goodies all the way up to level 9. Enchantment has Strength of Giants and Regeneration in particular. There are probably others, like that Thaum you mentioned, but those are the most obvious ones. Alteration and Evocation help turn your E3 pans into monstrous battlecasters. Special mention to Maws of the Earth at alt-5. Yes, it burns a gem per casting, but you get 7+ AOE and 15+ AP damage for that.
N is less destructive but offensively you can do swarm (unneeded if you use maenads), sleep cloud (all your non-maenads have higher than average MR), poison cloud (combo with poison resist spells), panic and storm of thorns (it's evoc-7, but that gets you probably the best direct-damage nature has going for it). Low tech N is mostly a support path, I prefer the blunt force of E3 pans over N4's early on.

While I don't think that investing in centaur archers is particularly wise (horribly pricy for bows), you could have buffed their efficiency a lot by using Destruction, that Blacksteel Infantry is suddenly a lot less durable when they find themselves naked. The spell comboes nicely with most damage spells you can cast. Pangaea doesn't have a ton of path diversity, but what they have is quite versatile and powerful.

Maenads are really crappy units. You need to buff them AND debuff the enemy for maximum efficiency. But they're free and help siege forts fast, so far from useless.

Did you use raiders? 6-12 centaur warriors lead by a satyr can crush a lot of PD. Send several of those into your enemy's lands and they'll be forced to either divert forces to retake provinces or lose most of their income. Combine groups to take out higher PD provinces.

I don't think the sacreds would be that useful without a bless, they're essentially slightly buffed centaur warriors, who are a lot cheaper. White Centaurs are some of the best sacreds in the game, but without a bless they're just expensive centaurs who luckily are one of the awesomest troop chassis in the game.

That said I was quite dissatisfied about the player interactions in this game. They were severely lacking.
Little diplomacy, little trades, no flexibility once a course of action was decided and general silence, which had a devastating effect on my motivation to keep on playing and resulted in a lot of "lazy" turns.
The games on 4chan are a lot more livelier than that, despite the fact that everybody there is anonymous and communicating is a pain, unless you can reach the person on Steam, which isn't possible in a lot of cases.

That's unfortunate. My experience in three games here (401, 402 & 408) have been mostly opposite. Most players in those games were quite responsive and open to scheming and negotiations. I've certainly been frustrated the few times I've tried to communicate with very unresponsive players.

---

Mindmaker might be referring to this bit:
Site repartition in dom4

About 7.5% of sites are lvl 0. Lvl 1 search find about 75% of site, lvl 2 90%, and lvl 3 99.95% (except for astral where it's closer to "only" 98% - there is a common lvl4 astral site, who yield 1 astral per turn).

There's a spreadsheet download within the thread that breaks down the numbers more if you want to dig in.

[Toady Two]

This was my first and probably last game as Bandar Log. I wanted to try out the successor to Kailasa (which I've tried out once and semi-enjoyed). Bandar is an entirely different beast that requires very skillful play and is devastating if played properly. It is not really my cup of tea. I'm not saying they are not fun to play but I enjoy other MA nations, such as Machaka and Agartha, much more.

A strong bless is something you want for sure. I think my E9 B4 bless was too weak for all the troops it supported. Practically my entire standing army was some form of sacred: cap-only, recruit everywhere and summons.

I now know that I messed up in my initial Pretender design and a bit of bad luck gimped my expansion and warfare options. I went for an awake combat pretender with a decent-but-not-outstanding bless and garbage scale. The scales hurt me most of all. I think Bandar, as opposed to it's predecessor Kailasa, needs productions scales. My cap was unfortuantely bordered by two sea provinces and because of that I was limited to recruiting my cap only sacreds at only 30% capacity because of Sloth.

My weakened expansion also resulted in an oddly banana-shaped border that ran alongside the sea. This was a tremendous strategic disadvantage as I bordered Agartha which was amphibious. War ensued and my main stack was outmaneuvered constantly by amphibious raiding forces. I was able to defend only thanks to my flying SC pretender as my army took 10 turns to cross from one end of my lands to the other.

Once I had defended I knew that I was not in a winnable position so I resorted to experimenting and defending my meager holdings who's value was every dwindling due to Death scales. I managed to branch out into blood and start summoning Lanka demons. Dakini raiders were later tried out.

Overall I've learned a lot about Dominions since this game started and I'm sure that if I were to give Bandar Log another shot I would do things completely differently.

My impression of Pan what that you severely underutilized mages in your army. Do not underestimate the power of Nature evocations. There are little direct-damage nukes but spells like Sleep Cloud and Panic can have more impact in a battle than regular aoe damage spells.