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[Ehndras]

I tried to take a town and got ass-raped by elite guards... Christ, it seems my formerly-powerful group is now weak as shit.

[Arx]

I tried to take a town and got ass-raped by elite guards... Christ, it seems my formerly-powerful group is now weak as shit.

Elites are pretty fearsome regardless, but the way the game's gone does kind of mean that a group that's not well over level twenty is is somewhat poor. If the town doesn't have a healing budget (and you have turns to spare) you can take out the guards by attrition across multiple raids.

The best way is still entangle and entangle scrolls, though.

[Reelya]

Perhaps elite town guards were boosted in power at some stage?

A quick checklist is -

- party composition. I like 2 priests + the rest as a mix of warriors/archers.
- all have upgraded weapons and plate armor, from a god-like blacksmith. Stop once they will cost 51200 (i.e buy up to 25600).
- upgrade full plate armor to about 41-42 defense points. Upgrade indestructible weapons for everyone.
- be careful not to run out of ammo or have damaged gear, keep things in repair
- enough healing to survive the battle (two priests with lots of healing spells)
- bring lots of entangle scrolls, give them to all your characters. Sneakily leave your mage in a garrison somewhere until you need scrolls.
- entangle all elites on the first round of battle
- use attack targetting every round, focus on the elites first
- keep priests selectively healing characters each round once they start to get hurt
- make sure to heal up fully between battles (the script is great for that)
- possibly have priests cast haste spells on your best couple of warriors early in the battle (apparently it's best to haste two-handed melee weapons, since you can't have 3 attacks/round even with.haste. Shield-bash + melee = two attacks, and archers also get two attacks/round by default).

It's a bit of micro-management, but doing all the above in the tough fights can massively increase what you can take on.

Right now, taking advantage of the rules for weapon reach and defense, my party line-up is two archers in the front rank, and the back rank is 4 warriors + two priests. Two of those warriors have indestructible halberds, because halberds have no back-rank penalty. The warriors with halberds get full attack power, but the added back-rank defense bonus. For the rest, being in the back-rank loses some attack points but adds defense value.

Once you get to about party level 25 with upgraded gear, you can actually take down any stack of enemies in the game without needing the special tricks - except for other players, for which you will need to use the strategies above to get an edge, as well as strategically running away, healing up and trying again.

[Arx]

Even getting the 25600 upgrades can be a bit unnecessary, I think, and even a god-like smith will tap out your durability pretty fast if it's not indestructible.

Haste and enchanted weapons can be very useful. It's not useless if you have shield bash, since bash doesn't trigger every turn, but it's better not. Fire damage can splash as well, which is nice. I'm currently hunting for good weapons, having kitted out all my main warriors with enchanted or indestructible axes.

Also, I wouldn't bother stopping to loot chests - if there are elite town guards, they're near-guaranteed to be trapped to hell and back (traps are really cheap) and you'll just debuff yourself before fighting.

[Ehndras]

I joined Bloody Baronies and took a few empty castles and towers. I'm going to try to build up power before flipping back to our guys. Will all my buildings / towns / towers / etc come with me?

[Reelya]

Towns can be set to any country. You do not have to be a member of the particular country, so you can have towns strategically set as members of different country's, but with your own mayors.

I'm really not sure about the exact rules for castles flipping since it's a fringe thing that rarely happens. Zazmio's castles seem to have reverted to him when he went Free Citizen. So I'm not prepared to put my money on any particular scenario there. Maybe if you change country, any castle with your garrison in it reverts to you, then you have to go there and manually cede it again. That seems probable.

~~~

We do really need to talk about strategy in the North, and what we want to achieve. We can go for short-term gain or longer-term gain. Generally, being greedy is short-term, and will result in being attacked and probably losing all the gains, or worse, giving Staberinde an excuse to take over our cities in that area under the pretext of being the good guys.

Fallon doesn't really have many characters, so he's probably not too serious about his kingdom. So it should be possible with good timing for you guys to take over all the fortresses in a short period of time, and probably all of Fallon's current cities (I'd wait to see if he goes inactive). The question then would be whether it's better to control the region as a proxy country, or incorporate the whole into Slaves to Armok. Personally I think Morlicar could turn his border-holdings Blue, but it might be best to have some sort of proxy-state further West between us and Staberinde. A proxy state would be great cover for nefarious plots.

As for whittling down Staberinde, I think Ehndras could try and eventually tackle one each of StormTrooper's and Kronk's cities. If they only lose one each of very remote cities (such as 73,5 for StormTroopers and 68,39 for Kronk, to an unknown player, they're less likely to try and take them back compared to if you systematically start taking cities from the same player. But I wouldn't recommend setting these cities to Blue for a long time. If they get the idea that we're targeting Staberinde cities to make part of Slaves to Armok, I think we're going to have a lot of problems. Set them to Bloody Baronies for the duration of that kingdom. If and when Bloody Baronies falls apart, then set them whatever you like.

[morlicar]

Eventually will turn them blue.  When I have a little more time to actually deal with the rebellions that seem to happen when I flip city loyalty in the hinterlands.

Edit:  My mayor at Jewel Cities is well loved and they throw parades in her honour.  So, thinking they might follow her lead, I flipped it from neutral to Blue.

They're not very happy with the kingdom:
Town's loyalty to the Kingdom: The peasants are considering treason

This is actually the worst start a city has had in the kingdom that I've seen.   

Edit the 2nd: Not surprisingly, they rebelled.  I expect I'll have to go res the mayor & her cohorts and repeat in a day or so.  The last couple of these cities I've done that are far from the capitol have had this issue.  Eventually the rebellion gets put down and things settle down, but it is a pain until then.

Welp, they whacked her, she's back in place and ready for rebellion 2. 

Setting up for rebellion 3, we're up to abysmal loyalty.  A slight improvement.  And, yes, I moved the garrison out (except for a few new hires, level 1/2/3 don't take a lot of gold to res, and there is still a level 10 barracks there)

Bad news, rebellion 3 has started..good news, loyalty to the kingdom is up to Terrible.

[Reelya]

You can also consider not putting a garrison in there with her, to save time and money on ressurections until it settles down a bit. As for the Bloody Baronies, Fallon has gone inactive for over 1 week now. But Starberinde has also started to carve out a portion of the Northwest. It's probably the right time to think about grabbing some of the area for yourselves. Definitely put garrisons in the larger castles (see the map) and try and prevent Staberinde grabbing all of those. Bloody Baronies carelessly expanded without any thought for garrisoning any holdings.

~~~

Did a quick dungeon-delve recently before my classes start again (they started now), and found some bugs creeped into the last script version for auto-heal. Fixed them up as well as possible, and fixed an issue where it wasn't treating dead people properly when deciding who to heal (couldn't test that until I had some actual dead people). Still not 100% happy with auto-heal syncronozation (sometimes it fails to run after a fight, the heal button will go red then). But it's not a huge deal now.

One new feature added is auto-retrieving encumberance info when you're in a shop. It pulls out the figure and shows it under your current equipment, and also shows how much space remaining you have, plus how much of wood, clay, iron and stone you could carry with that space. To make shopping for materials faster and not need a calculator.

http://jgame.net.au/kingdoms/crownofconquest.user.js

It might be a while before I work on many more features. Doing any more combat/magic improvements is a bad idea if I don't have time to test dungeon-delving for specific bugs that might creep in. Blacksmith repairs should be automatic now. I decided against auto-raise-dead since it's only marginally useful.

[Arx]

Templiers has been offline for three weeks now, so their two cities should be open for the taking if anyone wants to make a claim in the far west.

Staberinde is making serious holes in the Bloody Baronies, so I'm pretty sure their time is short.

[Arx]

Welp, Staberinde is going full hostile takeover on the Bloody Baronies. Just lost the mayor of one of my towns, switched the other to Staberinde to maybe appease them.

Edit: which may well spell the end of me significantly playing this game. It doesn't hold my attention any more, and it's kind of pointless to have to either play fairly actively and optimally or be squashed by the players with years of buildup of assets.

[Reelya]

Yeah, the problem is that there's no structure to the endgame for an established player. You just get more and more guys, and more and more cities. And since there's a limited supply of cities then there's little space for new players. So the long-term trend in this game is to lower numbers of players.

I mailed Mutant suggesting he implement a character cap of 250 characters per player. It would upset 1 or two players, but the game as a whole would be much better if there was some upper limit. I can see his point he made a while ago about not wanting to scare off successful players, but there comes a point where you have to say "no, you got enough stuff leave room for other players" when it's a zero-sum game like in this game.

I also suggested another option of adding more money-sinks related to characters. What if garrisons characters took some gold as upkeep? And how about heavily increasing the inn costs for high level characters? I notice StormTroopers and Kronk have a lot of character just sitting in inns. Basically they've pre-placed mayors in every city so that they can conquer any place and have a ready-made mayor at any time. So making inns cost a lot more for higher level character would curtail these sorts of things a bit.

[morlicar]

First, at long last, Jewel Cities is neutral to the kingdom and the last rebellion has been put down.  Takes a long time to pacify a city in the hinterlands.  Fortunately, Longham flipped itself somehow (even though I had a mayor there and had set it to neutral) when I ceded a nearby castle.  I think because of that, they didn't start all the way at terrible and I only had two rebellions there before they became neutrally loyal.

Arx, I agree that the game is becoming harder to pay attention to.  With the disparity of power, there is no point challenging Staberinde and there is little else to do but dungeon crawls to get stat boosts and gold.  If it wasn't for Reelya's work streamlining the interface, I'd probably have dropped it by now.  I think this game has potential but won't realize it unless Mutant finds time once again to actively develop it; which seems unlikely.

Reelya, I think you placed as a goal getting 35 cities.  When I flip Lonemaiden, assuming we don't lose any cities in the mean-time, we'll be at 35.  Are there any other goals for this kingdom?

[Reelya]

Hmm, well as you can see from Staberinde's advance in the north, that's the reason I wanted us to keep Bloody Baronies around as a proxy state. I guess it's too far gone now to do much except for try and take some of the border towns that starberinde hasn't gone for. Flip the border cities ASAP because Starberinde will probably see them as fair game if you do not.

35 cities gets us to the same level of the original Mountainhome nation. If you can grab Smiterow too that gets us to 36, beating the previous bay12 record.

At this stage I can't see much else for us to achieve without a full-on war, and that will just become a war of attrition basically with both sides whittling away at each other back and forth.

We can still achieve stuff on the individual leaderboard however, both of us are in line to take 1st and 2nd on XP/Turn, and with all of Staberinde's character just sitting in inns and stuff, he hasn't optimized his level up, despite having 800+ characters. So we're in line to exceed his XP/Char too eventually. We can pretty much do all that with just the level up script etc, so no need to really "play" from now on. I'd like to actually beat Starberinde on total XP, but of course that would take effort. My 400 characters gain about the same XP/day as his 800 do, so he's clearly not playing efficiently, he's going for quantity over quality. But right now I don't want to any more characters than I already have, because I know that Staberinde will actually buy more himself to stay ahead. Right now with <400 he won't see me as a threat to get more XP, and I'm more or less keeping pace with him on XP/day, so the percentage difference will keep decreasing over time.

[morlicar]

Smiterow is taken.  Surprisingly, it has a pretty good chance of not rebelling.  My mayor is poorly regarded, but the kingdom is neutrally regarded.

Lonemaiden, on the other hand, currently hates our guts.  I will probably have 3 or 4 rebellions there before I get them to settle down.

We are currently at 36 towns and 2833 land.  Mountainhome's maxes were 35 towns and 2267 land. 

I'll probably won't expand much further, unless you ask for a specific target.  I'll make sure to pacify Lonemaiden, and I'll start filling out the few fortifications I know about that don't have garrisons.

As an aside, Smiterow currently has a godlike blacksmith.  Hopefully he'll stick around for a few days.

[Reelya]

Ah, Deadfort 61,31 rebelled against StormTroopers. Could be a good opportunity for someone, Arx etc to take that city over, then switch it to Skr's Green country who has expanded in that direction. If it stays Green then that's one less Staberinde city and no cassus belli against Armok.