Bay 12 Games Forum

If you had to get just one, I'd probably recommend the Dawn of War Platinum edition. Soulstorm's good for mods, but the base DoW+Winter Assault+Dark Crusade is pleeenty sufficient to kill a good chunk of time with. Master Edition would work, too, if you wanted the whole shebang.

DoW II is also pretty alright, but it's much... smaller? More focused, I guess. Nearly as much RPG as RTS.

I've never played the non-RTS ones, though. Can't comment on those, but I hear Space Marine is decent enough for a 3rd person action game.

I'd use nether blast to find the actual PL and then drain HP out of that.

Wouldn't a PL just... not fight a pugna, in a situation like that? Keep it engaged with spare illusions, but have the actual PL somewhere else, doing other stuff.

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.

Mm... while I'm thinking about it, some thoughts on breaking R'lyeh, from my perspective of things, since it was talked about earlier.

Probably the biggest thing with R'yleh is that they have one absolutely tremendous weakness -- they're incredibly dependent on their capital. Primarily because of their caster starspawn, which is their number one bottleneck for force projection -- even with recruiting one every turn I could, gold and other situations allowing, I had all of fourteen total by the end game. Without those, my best recruit (which frankly feels freakishly overpriced, for what it is) caster is 2S, without boosters, and that's a 1/4th random. You can do some battlecasting with that (especially if you get around to using communions in conjunction with the much more easily massed star children), but when it comes to forging, mobility, and astral artillery rituals they're basically junk -- can't even forge boosters for themselves. Slave mages... aren't worth talking about. If r'yleh is seriously recruiting those, there's good odds they've already lost _{That's hyperbole, but... only mildly. They really are incredibly terrible, especially for their cost.}

So there's two things out of that -- if you can stop the capital from recruiting (either by siege or unrest), or kill those caster starspawn, you effectively cripple R'lyeh. Them being underwater makes either of those harder, but there's a lot that can be done. For Jotulmdel, dropping a crap ton of blights (Alt-4, 2E1D -- might have required a death empowerment, but probably would have been worth it) on my capital would have murdered me -- I had also spent every turn since seeing the earth king dreading the beginning of an unending earth attack barrage (and expecting to have to teleport my everything out, but even that would be a notable victory for opposing forces). Anything in general that bumped unrest or caused assassination attempts, if it could reach underwater, would have been nasty, to say nothing about just biting the bullet and loading up a (few) commander(s) with waterbreathing and MR boosting kit and setting them to siege.

Other stuff: You basically have to make R'lyeh fight for the water. If they're not keeping raiding or invasion down, they are -- as Jotulmdel probably noticed -- free to drop astral artillery all day and use the nasty raiding potential of well positioned UW provinces to wreck all sorts of havoc. Skratti or Carrion Lords would probably have been ideal for this: One with a waterbreathing ring, maybe a fire brand and vine shield, would have been a threat. Two or three, with one (maybe with a booster, or just carrying the appropriate item) doing something like casting friendly currents or some buffs on the other(s), would have managed to cut a path through a great number of my provinces and possibly a couple of the larger armies.*

Other bit of advice would be MR kit -- for the love of zeus, if R'lyeh has reached soul-slay mind hunt, MR kit. That was another consistent surprise, I'm guessing brought on by gem income limitations? But stacked up MR would have made a serious difference. Is how you make an astral ritual spamming R'lyeh (or anyone, really) uneconomical and effectively win the war against them off the battlefield (on it, too, to a large extent, but especially off it).

Another niche possibility is hitting supply -- pillaging when you raid, dropping any ritual spells you can spare that kill population or shift the scales to cause supply hits, that sort of thing. R'lyeh's armies are incredibly supply hungry, and it's very easy to push them over the starvation point (and from there, hit their morale in battle and send them running).

The mindless thing is also a pretty big deal, though hard to exploit for a while. Golems are the big late-game weakness, but if you can squeeze out the gems and casters for it, earlier stuff like gift-of-reason'd Crusher Constructions (with some mindless troops, probably) are very possible and pretty capable of no-selling quite a lot of what R'lyeh brings to the table.

... anyway, that's most of the $0.10 I can recall off the top of my head, when it's approaching midnight. Raiding, stop the caster starspawn, if you have earth attack and blight (or a anything like them) abuse the buggery out of them (incidentally, the beginnings for a dedicated blight (and eventually, raging hearts, among whatever else could be scraped together) assault on Jotulmdel's lands was probably going to kick off within a turn or two), and MR boosting equipment. That's about it.

*It's an aside, but the overall lack of skratti kinda' surprised me. Did notice some being used against gman's group, but I was expecting them to be everywhere -- they're very solid thug/minor SCs and ridiculously good for raiding via the wolf form.

E: And ah, part of that jump was also me turning over some provinces, apparently -- you can see r'lyeh's income drop during the same period. Shy of half, but not by too terribly much.

Golems are immune to magic dual, actually. They're mindless, heh. Gah, ninja'd.

It's good to know my nuisanceing was working, though. R'lyeh's armies and basic battleground force was easily the weakest of the three of us, despite that army size chart (several hundred lobos will do that, but they're generally not really anything but (very, very good) HP walls). I was actively avoiding major confrontation with Ulm's armies, because I was expecting to get torn into a thousand shiny pieces if I engaged. Well, until the end, but the group that had almost finished coming together had several hundred lobos and a good twenty or so (all at-least effectively 2S, due to a banner of northern lights) casters so I was feelin' frisky.

Though some lucky (ish, since it was about all that was interesting under the waves) indies did mean I had a good chunk of the freakishly nasty shark tritons waiting for anything that came down to play. Well, any non-SCs... some SCs, too -- 10 gold berserkers with three attacks is just ridiculous. If those things could get on land they'd steamroll quite a lot of critters.

... though thuella definitely wasn't my first mind hunt kill, heh. I was actually peppering you guys with VotD and mind hunt for most of the last turns of gman >_>

E: Though the both the gem income and plain income graphs are somewhat misleading, I guess. We were all swapping gems and gold around pretty regularly -- I was streaming everything that wasn't astral and air (which I was mostly breaking into pearls, heh) into Arga and C'tis for most of the game, with some breaks for spreading voice of tiamat and whatnot around.

Finished m'first multiplayer game of Dominions 4. It... took a few months, but it was definitely a nice experience. Very different from singleplayer, heh, and disciple mode was a blast -- working in full-out tandem with other nations is a seriously impressive dynamic change to the dominions formula.

Could see doing that again, ho yez.

Well, uh.

That was sudden. More thoughts later, but... congrats, folks? Good show, everyone.

Changes in the air, probably, or contact if it's close enough to touch the hairs, but not the skin. Mind you, as noted, there's nerves and junk beyond fuzz related ones. Face is pretty sensitive in general, as the illustrious Furniture D pointed out.

Though do note, if what it's picking up is your hand (or carried in your hand), instead of some other object, it may be one of the extra two senses no one bothers to talk about (equilibrium and positioning of limbs, though the latter could arguably be an extension of touch... I forget how effective it is with people that are numbed) kicking in.