Bay 12 Games Forum

Hrm. Fair enough.

... mind, it still only takes a few dozen zotz (which is basically nothing, heh) to hold down a blood province, so far as I've noticed. You can do the same a little cheaper with militia, but it's much easier to get zotz places. I wouldn't think the zotz nations would have much trouble with unrest control, basically.

Though in mild retrospect, I'm now kinda' wondering who does. The patrolling part of blood hunting has always seemed to be pretty trivial to manage (dump a stack of native indies or bring in one of your own set of cheapos, boom, you're done). It's just the rest of it (well, mostly figuring out the right balance between hunters and the province being eaten) that's a PitA :V

_{also, there's totally three different identically named millitia that range from are totally 10/10 to 10/12, so their strength could actually be a bit over 1, heh.}

Aspho is really easy to beat though. Hell, you really only have to keep them from expanding, and they'll burn out, even with growth scales.

"Only have to keep them from expanding" is how you stop... pretty much everyone

So far as aspho goes, though, so long as they've got that 8 nature income (well, and nothing's killing their reanimators), they're still growing. Despite everything, they're still largely a gem nation, not a gold one, and their chaff hordes are dependent on their centaurs, not their provinces. They don't really take growth for the gold, they take it to make their A spam better. They don't actually need that much space to be really painful to deal with, just time to build up the centaurs. And once that happens you're dealing with sceleria levels of chaff, with somewhat less numbers but much, much better units.

... also it's something of a bastard to stop them from expanding if they really want to. Remember, they've got bucketloads of stealth. If they want to bypass your blockade and go nabbing provinces on the other side of the map, they kiiiiinda' can.

As for your questions, SC, blessed thug life is pretty much entirely viable for lemuria. It's... honestly one of the few things they're actually good at -- consuls are freaking amazing for their cost and research, and being the sort of nation it is you're probably tanking your scales (except magic and luck, at least) into the ground anyway, so a double or triple bless is easy to nab up. Consuls are brutal for early expansion, though -- they can easily solo most indie provinces without a bless, nevermind with one.

Blood magic does effect mages. It... should be in the manual, actually. Have forgotten exactly what it does at the moment, though. Probably strength, maybe age mitigation. And it definitely gives you some undead/demon command, though iirc not as much as death levels do.

Turmoil/luck is definitely less gold effective than order 3 (and also less gold effective than order/luck, heh, since there's some serious gold gain events when you've got order scales), though I do forget the calculations. It's pretty alright with getting other things, though -- gems, items, mages of various sorts, etc. Just don't take turmoil 3. Never take turmoil 3.

E: Oh, and plague is... not very devastating. It doesn't really do much for the battle itself, it just diseases a bunch of stuff and makes the afterbattle more of a hassle. Good for harassment and attrition, less good for winning a fight directly. Cast and retreat is effective enough for neutering armies, though, especially if you can get A2 from somewhere and give your plague casters flight boots. I'd rather have my S3 grand lemurs palling around with a buncha' bane venom charm carrying black servants or somethin', m'self

Setting up shell companies 3 deep as a name on a form isn't technically illegal.

More than not being illegal, subordinate companies and whatnot (if not quite shell ones) stacked however deep are often kinda' really damn helpful in regards to bookkeeping, local support and adaptation, etc., so on, and so forth. Things probably should be reworked so there's no tax-related incentive or whatev' to do so (so far as I can recall, there's several), but it's also not something that would be particularly good to get rid of. There's a good handful of fairly substantial organizational and administrative advantages to the practice.

I mostly agree, but the lines between rich and poor people are, in some places (*cough* the South *cough*), the same as racial lines.

That's not even particularly accurate, ha. There's hella' poor white people in the south/south east, often living in similar or the same areas, and you can damn sure better believe most of them don't catch the same kinda' flak the minorities (primarily black, but you can be assured others catch shit, too) do. Even when they live in the same neighborhoods, even when they're committing the same crimes and getting the same income, housing, etc., the treatment is not even remotely the same.

And it's not really limited to the south -- s'far as I'm aware, chunks of the mid-west and a few other spots have similar problems. There's plenty of places in the US that are doing relatively alright, but there's enough that aren't you can't really say things are in a good spot, yeah.

I like the freespawn nations, honestly, 'cept maybe LA squids. I'd never play them multiplayer (Barring maybe asphodel as a disciple -- they've still got recruits and their actual chaff horde comes primarily from the carrion centaurs. They honestly might even be better without the domkill...), but I like them.

Asphodel's probably my favorite of them. Freespawn, still has solid recruitable troops (including flying scouts, heaps of stealth units, and longbows), tougher than normal (for freespawn nations) chaff, cheap reanimators that are fairly durable, tons and tons of nature access, nearly as much death access plus a dabbling of earth and water, some neat national spells. They're just hella' fun and plenty strong.

And yeah, most powerful is a very very malleable thing. I think there's a tier list (or several) out there somewhere, but the game being like it is there's no real singular nation that stands out on top -- all of them have some other, similarly powerful, nation that probably have (easier) access to specific tricks that really cause problems for the nation trying to claim supremacy.

Maybe a little petty to boggle at it, but... still. Houseperson gets new cooking machine. First cook rump roast, turns out great! Second cook barbecued chicken, turns out the thing doesn't work as well with boned meat as it does with boneless. Inform houseperson, since they're the one that wants me to cook stuff in it: Get boneless next time, I say. Machine works better with boneless meat, I say.

Third thing brought to cook. Ribs.

Why.

It's not even that I don't like ribs,* it's, just. Nat. one on comprehension and/or memory roll? Food's food, but... seriously. That is basically the common meat antithesis of boneless.

*Though I don't. Biting into or scraping my teeth on bone is quite possibly my absolute least favorite eating experience, even beyond stuff that makes me throw up, and eating ribs without doing either is a complete motherfucker.

Depends a lot on the person, and what works for you, yeah. I like meditation, occasionally swimming (not so much these days, but I do miss it, heh) or meandering around woodland/overgrown areas when it's cold enough (being florida, that basically means never, but still), and the standard gaming/reading/etc., m'self. Daydreaming/writing is can be pretty nice, too... just kinda' lose yourself in idle creativity. Used to really like climbing around accessible sand/clay pits and whatnot when I was younger, but my spine et al largely precludes that sorta' thing these days.

My mother does artwork, mostly painting these days. Grandmother does gardening and occasionally knitting and whatnot. Grandfather tools around with machine maintenance, mostly, or just sits outside and watches the sky/pets/etc. Sometimes even people watches, which is an odd alone time thing, but seems to work for 'im. Got more than one family member that does music.

There's oodles and oodles of things that are really good for alone time. Low-ish effort creative works tend to be a very common theme. Art, writing, maybe music composition or playing if that's your thing. Sing, if you can find an area sufficiently isolated/insulated that's a private thing. Write dirty limericks or drinking songs or whatev', it doesn't have to be high quality. Could do yoga, dancing, that sort of thing. Lot of time that sort of stuff's even nicer 'cause you can include others if you want to, but there's no explicit need for it.

Huzzah, mini's back! ETA on the control return, EA? I've given something of a status update via PM, but it should be interesting to see the look of horror reaction to actually seeing the state of things :V