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[Frumple]

Well, you see, when a priest loves an amulet of the dead very, very much... well. Stuff happens, and then longdead! It's a mysterious process fraught with peril and bone splinters in uncomfortable places.

[E. Albright]

Any general thoughts about the game? In particular, any feedback on balance issues? I'm mostly looking at the Dust Walkers and Yazata, here, but anything is fair game.

[ThtblovesDF]

Didn't know you can create free-spam with a amulet, outside of combat. Huh.

[E. Albright]

You can't. An Amulet of the Dead just lets you spam more if you can already spam them, though. My nation had undead reanimation for priests (Karang = newt Sceleria, yo), so we could either naturally spew out 3 longdead per turn with an H1, or give them an Amulet and spew out 5 per turn.

[Frumple]

Can say the pale one infantry (even the big holy ones... especially, really, because you have to have really precise positioning to stop them from being either suicidal or ineffective) were... kinda' shit. Never did really get a good handle on how the zog to use the bloody things, and early expansion in particular was miserable. I very much understand why agartha has trogs and whatnot, now Just about everything would ablate pretty hard, or even outright lose, to even amounts of and sometimes substantially outnumbered indies. I'd probably attribute somewhere between 5 and 15% of the culpability of my team's loss just on me not being able to get those bloody things to function worth a hoot, particularly during the early expansion phase.

Also those expensive castles hurt, pretty badly. Not sure if they had some kind of beneficial feature to go with them, but if they didn't, they... probably should.

And not a thing with NG itself, but I really bloody wish you could build on ally provinces without having get 'em to relinquish to you. I'm pretty sure our team would have been two or three times more effective if we could have... probably not as much of an issue for a team that has relatively few differences in construction, but ours only had one bog standard on that front and wrangling logistics around to get that stuff in line was... troublesome.

[E. Albright]

More expensive forts are the result of a nation having a more advanced #fortera. So while the forts are technically better, if you don't care about the benefits of higher admin, more and better upgrades, or resisting sieges, cheapo palisades are far more appealing. That's a lament you hear a lot in vanilla, actually. Come to think of it, I'm not sure a nation's tech level theme has an impact on fort era probabilities, but it probably should. Ugh, and that'll take coding, albeit not much.

For the record, once you start building on a province, you can relinquish it (with a second commander, obviously) and the construction will continue even though you no longer own the province. It's still a PITA, but we used it to quickly build cheap temples early on - i.e. turn 1, A1 relinquishes to B1 and B2, turn 2, B1 builds a temple while B2 relinquishes back to A1, turn 3, all three move to another province, etc - and a few underwater forts.  Later we basically concluded it was no longer worth the hassle of having Zen build all our temples just to save 200g, but at the start the savings made a difference.

It would be a lot less clunky if you could build in allied provinces, though. No argument there.

I did okay with my pale ones, to include expanding with some, but after expansion I was mostly either using them as armored sacks of hp to hold a line, or as aquatic troops (where they actually did pretty well because of how heavy their armor was). I also had really good national commanders, so they'd keep fighting while their faces were being eaten. They do tend to be fairly awful in a lot of ways.

[EuchreJack]

Since the game is over, thoughts on countering the Undead Chaff strategy?

Granted, I probably should have attacked before E. Albright hit critical mass.  Although I don't know what that would have been, I have to take the blame for not being more aggressive, same as the other game.  No more dual games for me, no siree.

Sadly, we find out in this game that Undead Chaff trumps Tarts as an end-game strategy.  I'm still not used to the masses of troops beating solo combatants, its not like Dominions 3.  I'm starting to rethink even Thugs unless they can be rushed early on.

[E. Albright]

Well. In battle you want to throw around things like Firestorm or Acid Storm. If you have the casters for it, Flamestorm works too. If they have mage support, getting them to attack you to hit them with turn-1 EQ or RoS is good; if they don't, attack them and hit them with the same. Banishment spam works as well; it was not for nothing that I didn't go on the offensive against Hessia until their main mageblob was broken and they'd gone AI (although I did start the mageblob rotting, which helped). If you want some ideas about particulars, my turn dump at the end of 4.10 shows how a number of different nations did and didn't counter Lizard Scelaria and Air Sceleria in that game (ultimately, Lizard-and-Humanbred Abysia domkilled them both). Strategically, hammering my most-occupied forts with Flames From the Sky could have done some significant damage to the unholy globs of ghouls manning the walls, although that's a pretty expensive way to kill chaff and you also run into the issue of domes. Multi-casts of Shatter can work too so long as there aren't domes.

Had you gone on the offensive a bit earlier, Team Food Poisoning would very possibly have won. Had you gone on the offensive significantly earlier, Banebo and co. may well have won. That was the basically what our diplomacy was aimed at: generally be good, unthreatening neighbors while Ita and Zen researched, and while Karang researched a bit less but grew their undead to critical mass. My plan from turn one was to make Karang difficult to invade, and while it got worse with time, it never would have been pleasant. This tended to make the other factions more appealing targets... which was no small part of the point. Not coincidentally, the same sort of devil's bargain is presented by Ermor: kill them fast when they're less of a threat even if you'll get less of a reward for doing so given the cost, or risk them growing to the point where they're very hard to deal with.

[ThtblovesDF]

Burden of time sure did help.

I don't think priest spam could have helped much - for one, the world was/is in the shiter and cash is hard to get, I spammed priests for many a turns and it had little effect. I really do wonder what could kill 2000 Undead Chaff coming at you - and do so several times, without massive cash/time or gem investment - doubt there is anything. Maybe some holy-water-fire-hose item if there is one? Slap it on commanders, hope for the best - or counter with better summons/more undead chaff? At the end of the day you'll still have more troops then others have commanders/priests.

Edit: Had I had this nation from the start and with total hindsight, I'd just have used "good" armys and then earthquake & mass flight spam the chaff to death and head straight for mage-blobs. Our scouting was suboptimal and the map extremly large.

[PrimusRibbus]

Well. In battle you want to throw around things like Firestorm or Acid Storm. If you have the casters for it, Flamestorm works too. If they have mage support, getting them to attack you to hit them with turn-1 EQ or RoS is good; if they don't, attack them and hit them with the same. Banishment spam works as well; it was not for nothing that I didn't go on the offensive against Hessia until their main mageblob was broken and they'd gone AI (although I did start the mageblob rotting, which helped).

The real kicker is that having Hessia as a buffer really helped you diplomatically. AlStar and I were warning people, both in the thread and in PMs, very early on that the undead chaff machine was approaching critical mass.

One PM I got dismissively noted that if I was able to wipe out 600 units of Karang's chaff in a turn with minimal losses, how big of a threat can Karang really be? Totally missing the fact that my anti-undead chaff effectiveness was because of luck-of-the-draw NationGen RNG that allowed me to produced 6 H3 mage-priests a turn, and should not be considered typical performance for any particular nation.

[EuchreJack]

Had you gone on the offensive a bit earlier, Team Food Poisoning would very possibly have won. Had you gone on the offensive significantly earlier, Banebo and co. may well have won. That was the basically what our diplomacy was aimed at: generally be good, unthreatening neighbors while Ita and Zen researched, and while Karang researched a bit less but grew their undead to critical mass. My plan from turn one was to make Karang difficult to invade, and while it got worse with time, it never would have been pleasant. This tended to make the other factions more appealing targets... which was no small part of the point. Not coincidentally, the same sort of devil's bargain is presented by Ermor: kill them fast when they're less of a threat even if you'll get less of a reward for doing so given the cost, or risk them growing to the point where they're very hard to deal with.

I love how my team had no chance at winning under that analysis.  Yay.*

*Obvious sarcasm

[ThtblovesDF]

In dom4, far more then in dom3, pure numbers count for a lot - I can't really nail this down to a single factor, but it seems to be so - I'm doing fairly well in round421, due to just pure numbers and I did very well in 420 with one of the largest army of oceana-garbage.

[BFEL]

So this is done now? And my team lost?
Did Pythia and Co. at least survive till the endish?

[Frumple]

The only one to actually bow out was banebo & co.  EA's lot won, the spaghetti set was the only other one still standing, and the capitulation of the other lot was what ended the game.

[E. Albright]

I love how my team had no chance at winning under that analysis.  Yay.*

*Obvious sarcasm

...unlike the other three teams, your team never really committed to any early war you fought. You just grabbed a few provinces and went back to building up your forces. The only way you could have assured victory was to tip the balance of power before we reached the endgame. So long as the endgame started with three teams intact, you weren't in a strong position to win even if you were in an excellent position to play kingmaker. And so long as the undead hoarders made it to the endgame with their legions and turtle-nests intact, Team Clinging-to-the-Pond would have the upper hand. If you had fully committed to wars early on and grabbed enough territory to swing the balance of power, you could have locked in a win. By waiting until everyone reached endgame research, you gave up your biggest advantages (faster research, Murgia's early martial superiority from those wretched sacred birds) and made it a fair fight - except that my team had fully committed to early wars and had more territory than either of the other two standing teams in addition to the Great Wall of Ghouls, so the fair fight wasn't fair. You had a huge stack of Tartarians, but those were getting ground down by rank-and-file longdead except for the largest concentrations of them (and even those were seeing attrition). You could have won, but I'd stand by my conclusion that you couldn't have decisively won by the point I was discussing. Any victory for the beastmen would have been a grueling slog against endgame armies; if they wanted to win decisively they probably needed to commit to an all-out war by the end of the third year or so. That's how it looked from the Karangian Department of Nuisances, Disease Vectors, and Scouts, anyway.