[Dominions 6] Grogspocalypse: The Return! (FINISHED)

[Tanaka]

What I sent to Ulm was already more than I could supply though.  Even if you guys did nothing, I sent too much!

Well damn if you can afford to send troops to all fronts I guess we are all screwed lol. But that is the advantage of full scales I guess. Nice battle btw unfortunately I did not have my prophet but at least I scattered your troops temporarily a little bit. Hopefully that will at least slow you down a bit. I really need those bats to do something! Haha

[al_infierno]

Just waiting on you now 

The main problem with trying to enforce war incentives is that doing so has consequences that are not immediately obvious, but can distort games.  For example, if you make indies stronger, you will *greatly* encourage particular awake expanders and nations that can handle clearing them.  Anybody who builds anything else will lose before they play a turn, with a more extreme outcome in expansion disparity than we observed this game.

Weaker indies will level the expansion playing field, but it will also make it so fast that wars by t12-15 are an obvious choice...there's nothing else to fight, and players will then try to find their best matchup and go for it. (Edit: this type of setting also makes it possible for some nations to build an expansion-viable party every single turn, get > 20 provinces by like turn 8 with reasonable scales, and pile their sacreds + 300 archers onto a target by turn 13, just as an example of what tweaking settings can do).

One thing that will greatly help, however, is if everyone practices their expansion and knows the basics of their nation.  I get that it's very early for Dominions 6, but under-expanding is one of the most consistent ways to be a sitting duck.  There aren't many strategies for "try to beat that guy with 4x your assets" which tend to work out well (more possible as the game goes on, but not in early game wars).  You need the other side to make multiple mistakes just to equalize.

I also disagree that economic and magic development aren't relevant in this game.  Yes, having someone hit me before turn 15 influenced how I allocated resource to a degree, but I've still put up infrastructure and other players have too.  Spells other than "blessing" and "divine blessing" have already had an impact on player combats in this game...both things I've cast, and forcing me to make estimates for what opponents are likely to have by now and which things I will probably have to deal with.

As an aside, I don't know how many games you've been in that go past turn 50-60, but those are not easy turns to script.  There are interesting strategy and prediction aspects, but doing these turns quickly still takes > 30 minutes.  Doing them WELL, as in something approximating a high skill lobby, might take 1-2 hours even if you're familiar with hotkeys.  If you've ever played an astral nation where you're setting up communions with 60 mages in the fight on multiple fronts in a single turn and not only the magic you choose but the sequence (and whether you commit matrix items for t1 casts etc) all matter, you might not be so eager to run settings that encourage that haha.

-

All that theory aside, Xibalba attacked me this turn and lost 43 of 57 sacreds he sent slamming into my PG.  He's corner positioned to me and orchestrated a 3v1 gank, so I'm not really in position to press his infrastructure, but maybe this information could be useful to others looking to become a significant player in the mid-late game...perhaps Xibalba could enjoy a little multi-front action too!

Great points about tweaks to the game. Tweaking magic research and economy also really affects things this way.

So Ulm attacked you first? That is very surprising if he had bad expansion? If so that was a very bad move. I saw an indy province in his cap circle the whole game yikes.

Orchestrated a 3vs1 gank? You mean Ulm, Bats, and Me? Ulm attacked you and you attacked me lol. I don't think he orchestrated anything.

Well, I did technically attack first in game terms, but the underlying reason is a lot more nuanced. :)
Mekone and Ulm tried to engage in diplomacy pretty much at the same time, but it was quite clear Mekone was out for war. Ulm tried to get some leverage by taking a province from Mekone (which looked to be undefended when the decision was made) where this province would be given back to Mekone after diplo. Just to stress the importance of Ulm keeping a certain other border province which served as a very nice chokepoint in between mountain ranges.
The turn after it was clear that Mekone either sprung a trap or Ulm just made an unfortunate move, which wiped out the expansion army whole.
Mekone already had told Ulm that there was no reason to hold back and would press on Ulms provinces without any diplomatic agreements viable (and rightly so, considering Mekone's position vs Ulms expansion).

Due to the hampered expansion of Ulm and frankly not expecting such an aggressive game right from the start, there really wasn't much I feel I could do as Ulm to just consolidate and try to rally all troops back to Cap to try our luck there in defense.

It doesn't seem we will hold much longer, though.

We're just waiting on you now for this turn, BTW 

[Yskonyn]

Ulm is done for. One less pretender to worry about.
Interesting to read all viewpoint on the whole situation! Quite fun.

I wish you all the best of luck in the game!

Do I need to do anything other for admin purposes in the game itself in order to get out of your way?

[Tanaka]

Ulm is done for. One less pretender to worry about.
Interesting to read all viewpoint on the whole situation! Quite fun.

I wish you all the best of luck in the game!

Do I need to do anything other for admin purposes in the game itself in order to get out of your way?

Your pretender and his dominion is gone. Nothing left to do. Good game and thanks for playing. We will now face the giant tidal wave ourselves. See you in the next one!

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm the one facing a tidal wave!  I've been looking over shoulder, trying to block raiding on multiple fronts, or outright fighting war for like half the game, none of them chosen on my terms!

If you want to see something pretty brutal, try the fight from last turn w/o me having the PD dump to help buy time and provide harassment against jinn/ifrit for the gigante.  Mekone would have been beaten like a drum.  I've had tough choices for several turns in a row.  Feels like a mid game war!

However, if I'm locked into such a conflict, I will not go quietly.  I only ask that my gankers get to enjoy a similar experience :)!

[Tanaka]

I'm the one facing a tidal wave!  I've been looking over shoulder, trying to block raiding on multiple fronts, or outright fighting war for like half the game, none of them chosen on my terms!

If you want to see something pretty brutal, try the fight from last turn w/o me having the PD dump to help buy time and provide harassment against jinn/ifrit for the gigante.  Mekone would have been beaten like a drum.  I've had tough choices for several turns in a row.  Feels like a mid game war!

However, if I'm locked into such a conflict, I will not go quietly.  I only ask that my gankers get to enjoy a similar experience :)!

Well that has been the whole point of everything was to at least give you tough choices. Otherwise the game would be too easy for you haha. Yes that PD dump was very well placed. It certainly won the battle for you. At least I am making you spend money not on more giants. Now that you have taken Ulm and prevented the bats from doing anything not too much to look over the shoulder for. Agartha is hiding in caves and not helping. Lanka is non-existent. You are winning no one is ganking you lol.

[al_infierno]

Ulm is done for. One less pretender to worry about.
Interesting to read all viewpoint on the whole situation! Quite fun.

I wish you all the best of luck in the game!

Do I need to do anything other for admin purposes in the game itself in order to get out of your way?

Hope to see you in the next game!  Better luck on the mapgen next time.

We'll most likely do Middle Age, so start thinking about who you want to play!   

[solops]

Agartha is finally catching up a bit to all the other better players and plans to come out of his cave soon. I finally got some scouts out to see the world for myself. With all parties involved telling me that I should do certain things, things that are quite beyond my current means, AND that their opponents are overwhelmingly powerful, I'd be silly not to look for myself. The downside is being too late, but I have been stampeded into rash action before. It did not end well. On the plus side, you can all give yourselves a gold star for being very persuasive! I am very confused.

[TheMeInTeam]

Food for thought:

If a 2v1 against me is such a problem that it requires howling every turn to make it a 3v1 again...where are Xibalba's mages in this conflict?

So far, I have seen one of his cap only mages alongside a raiding party, a bunch of sun guides, and a ton of chaff.  Xibalba hasn't committed a single serious combat spell against any player for the entirety of the game.  Yet he cries for help against a nation that is forced into using over half of them...

Ubar has properly fought all in so far, and between the strong troops and assassin play it's been tough.  But rather than committing as well, Xib remains the nation with the most forts in the game with 5.  In a supposed all out war to stop a runaway, he's constructed multiple forts, slammed mages, and sent practically none of them at Mekone. 

It's been a masterful piece of diplo work, trying to use other players to buy time for research.  But that also creates a problem.  I'm big and apparently scary.  However, I am not tech leader and by far lack magic hardware as the game goes on, and there remains basically nobody on the board who can fight a 20-25 province blood power with techs 5-7.  Xib is only a few provinces short of that, right now, with the best scales of any nation (including magic scales).

[al_infierno]

So far I haven't really encountered anything of yours except your dragon and PD.  Committing mages to PD raids doesn't seem worth the risk if I can achieve the same result with chaff and one of my cap-only thugs.  Of course I'm sure that'll change once your proper armies show up...

[TheMeInTeam]

The fact that the only thing you've "committed" to doing is raiding is why you've only met PD and the drakon to kill a few thousand gold worth of your stuff. 

In this allegedly existential-threat situation meriting diplo specifically to coalition someone, the only thing your nation has done was try to get me to spend a bit more money defending myself from raids.  You didn't send stuff capable of killing drakon (which is difficult, but possible for both you and Ubar on early techs), or commit enough mages and gems where it was possible to say kill 40+ gigante in one fight.  You could have done that, if you actually wanted to.  Then it wouldn't be "just raiding PD".  If paying the cost was worth it to you, I could have seen 30 baby fire elementals or hundreds of skeletons in a fight 9 turns ago.  But this clearly wasn't worth it on your cost evaluation.  Ubar and Agartha should both consider why it is that wasn't worth it to you...why you were not all in on a war you convinced him to join.  Why you still aren't all-in on a war you're begging yet more players to join.

There is nothing I can field which is 100% safe against fully committed mages available to Xibalba with ~turn 15-20 levels of tech.  But this requires you to risk them, against troops or drakon, like I did.  Like Ubar did.  Instead, so far your nation has been hiding behind other players sacrificing themselves for you while you build more infrastructure than I can conquer and hitting the books for more than a dozen turns meanwhile.  To be clear: if I conquered Ubar's cap next turn (which is impossible and requires at least one more major fight that hasn't happened yet), I will still be way behind on research and have exactly the same number of forts with less magic scales...even with all of that, my RP/turn and mage count will be slower than Xib.  The timetable to convert a money advantage into more infrastructure and catch up with research is long...longer still for a nation with exactly 0 national access to any sorcery paths.

I'm sure "when my armies show up", they will be greeted by multiple spells in the 5-7 range bolstered by blood sabbath to cast them.  Ubar's sacrifice has given you all the time in the world to build infrastructure and get there w/o anybody accosting you on those pure scales.

I ask Agartha to consider: would you rather fight lots of good troops with lackluster mages, or a bunch of level 7 magic with lifelong protections + skelly spam behind rigor mortis?  Agartha may or may not be kingmaker in this position, I'm actually not sure.  It depends to what extent either or both of us could fend off his armies while still at war with the other.  I think that *right now*, I could do better because I have put more gold into troops to defending myself and I have better troops.  In 5-10 turns, that's probably not true any more, because tons of bats can eat olm mind blasts inexpensively and rigor will make them stop shooting pretty fast (50 fatigue threshold for natural ranged attacks).  This isn't MA where a pile of statues just get to ignore rigor...

[al_infierno]

You're assuming a lot about where my tech is at.  My mages have pretty weak research, even with strong magic scales.  I'm not about to thoroughly explain what I have and haven't researched, but if skelly spam was an option at this point I would have been using it already.

[TheMeInTeam]

Assuming?  I'm *calculating it*.

Outside your cap, you are most likely recruiting camazotz, because those are your best mage.  They cost 225, well within your ability to afford on ~16 provinces with 4 forts and 1 palisades (soon 5 forts) while still making troops and some commander recruitment outside of forts.

Each one of those is 13 RP/turn, but you have magic 2.  Thus each one is 15 RP/turn.  Recruiting from 4 forts/turn, you add 60 RP/turn, aggregating at that rate.  10 turns of that equates to 600 RP/turn, plus whatever you had from first turns of recruitment.  But you'll have 5 forts soon, and whatever your cap is recruiting is adding to this.

The simple reality is that there's a good chance you *already* have the ability to tech from 0 to 4 in a single turn.  If not, you're there within a couple turns at most. 

Even if I make insanely optimistic calcs (for the rest of us) and assume you're literally recruiting nothing but 9 base RP guys (which research for you at 11), you've had them sitting in labs with a fort lead for long enough that you'd have to be a bit over 600 RP/turn right now.  This means that if you've literally researched nothing all game (which isn't true), you could have a level 6 tech in 5 turns, with a second level 6 tech even faster because RP/turn continues to increase.

Most likely, you already have at least one 5, and could easily have 2.

All of this is relatively easy to math out because...well...I don't have to factor you losing any mages whatsoever.  Because you haven't used them or moved them much.  Any small delays from making a lab or temple in your new forts are well within the margins of the math here.  Unless Ubar goes AI instantly or something, it is basically impossible that anybody will fight you seriously before you get multiple techs 5+, with at least one 7.  You can try to claim otherwise, but you'd have to convince us that you stopped recruiting mages for some reason.  Not buying it.  You didn't make that infrastructure rather than units to look pretty.  You tech rushed, and managed to convince Ubar to sac for extra time. 

My initial calculus of you throwing to attack me early was mistaken...because you were not seriously attacking me, only stalling my progress against your sacrifice while you surpassed me in infrastructure :D.  Now the question is how quickly I can untangle, what Agartha prefers to fight in late game, and whether I myself can come up with any countermeasures against the techs and tactics I used to win previous games (which are now in your hands!) using less RP/turn + gold advantage.  I can add at best 11 RP/fort myself, and I have fewer.  I'll always be behind you in research this game, which unfortunately for me means this is far from over.

I considered the possibility that you've been recruiting cheap B1 guys to hunt for slaves, but best I can tell, you're not setting up blood econ, rather tech rushing.  Since I've built scouts, that much is obvious since they're not getting nuked by blood hunting + patrolling setups all over the place.

Small silver lining is that apparently wailing winds got moved to glamour.  So we "only" have to deal with a smattering of blood stuff, a bunch of earth buffs, rigor mortis, darkness (for me, Agartha doesn't care about darkness), cloud of death, wind of death, fog warriors, and fire storm using low tech.  No big deal, right?

Edit: skelly spam is already an option at enchantment 3.  You can already research that in a single turn by now, and could easily have teched it during the time Ubar ended NAP even with 0 investment in enchantment prior.  It's only 350 cumulative RP.

[al_infierno]

Your calculations are quite generous!  Keep in mind the rest of us don't quite have the encyclopedic knowledge of the game that you do.   

If I really must blow up my strategy to convince you I'm not quite the existential threat you think I am, I've gone about 50/50 on research and blood econ, and ended up somewhat weak in both regards at this point.  I'm also doing quite a bit of site searching to build up an economy of fire, earth, and death gems for items and spells later down the line, so I don't have anywhere near 600 RP per turn, even if I were to stop all my mages from what they're doing and research.

[TheMeInTeam]

The problem is that you can easily add > 60 RP/turn, right now.  More than 70/turn once that 5th palisades is upgraded to fort.  And you *must* already have hundreds, I'd put money on >400 RP/turn right now.  You can turn off blood hunting at the drop of a hat; if you're doing that at all, it's got to be mostly in the forts.  I have scouts in the non-fort provinces, and they're not soaking up slaves.  This is why I'm talking about tech threat and not 100 hell blessed ozzies...you're clearly going for the former overall, not the latter.

And yes, I'm sure you want earth boots, gems to cast and protect from firestorm, and gems to make death summons + cast rigor mortis.  That's why I'm pointing out the threat such a tech disparity poses.  If I'm stuck fighting 7s with 5s I'm going to need every drop of gold I can get and it might not be enough, even if Agartha doesn't pile on.

A number of Grogs games back, Ajidica's Mictlan was freaking massive, but behind on tech.  Initially Agartha and I attacked him, but my tech lead was so decisive that I rolled up a big fraction of his territory like a blanket across 5-6 turns or so after winning a few fights really decisively.  This quickly resulted in first W8aminute, then Solops turning on me.  It was already far too late.  They were roasted alive since I had my first tech 8 in the early turn 40s before Mictlan war even started, and multiple tech 8s by the time Agartha changed sides.  By the time Agartha and I had a doomstack fight, I had a couple liches casting instant kill spells.  This despite being ~2/3 of Mictlan's size at most before that fight started, probably not even that.  Siekster actually accused me of throwing by ganking him first in that game along with Mictlan (he picked Sceleria though, so he needed to die as tip-top priority).  Instead, I won that game based on the tech lead and that's what started the meta-diplo against me ever since :p.  That's how scaling into a tech advantage goes...and you're on pace for that.  You have BETTER magic scales than I had in that game, and just as many forts.  By just recruiting mages on your scales, you add more RP/turn in this game than I could then.  And I slapped down a few earth kings with SC kit in the t40s.

Now I'm in Mictlan's position, and you're a couple indy provinces from being in mine in that game.  I will not be complacent, and I will not be fooled!  You don't need intimate knowledge of all the Dominions interactions to recruit a mage in your forts each turn, and we don't need a PHD in math to figure out how much that can amount to :D.

And yes, you and I are the top existential threats in the game right now, with Agartha in 3rd.  Unless Agartha can grow super fast by taking out Lanka/clearing out the water in a few turns, it is effectively impossible for him to 1v1 either of us.  I can drum up way too much garbage to attract olm mind blasts away from gigante, and you can alternate between threat of bats diving into melee with olms immediately, doing skelly spam, or just raiding the absolute crap out of him because his stuff is really slow.  For 5 turns anyway, before you just cast rigor mortis and make the olms stop shooting in a few rounds.

He's in a tough spot.  If I kill you while he does nothing, his position is unwinnable, but I'm not sure I can do it.  If you + him manage to push me back, it functionally guarantees he loses unless he gets something like 70-80%% of those spoils...Agartha simply doesn't have the chops to hang vs late a game blood power at roughly similar province count.  They need to be significantly bigger or have a tech lead.  Agartha would get neither by ganking me with you, even if you guys won.  By far best chances for Agartha was to conquer Lanka and the water while we were faffing about these last 9 turns or so, then be attacking you right now.  Just wasn't fast enough tempo for that, but I guess that's the story of this game generally so far.