AssAsians - Newb game, MA - Snacktime/Abysia Wins, ideal for new or inexperienced players

Postmortem: Machaka

Congrats to Snacktime for the win. I think he also counts as the hardest working man in assasians. For all the talk of his diplomatic skills it should be pointed out that he did end up having to fight perone's ascendant Ulm pretty much by himself while me and Jot pursued other interests and Shin had management problems. I understand he did that quite well.

For a bit I thought I was going to have to bail on the game so I compiled a RAR file of all my turns for whoever was going to sub. As it turned out it wasn't necessary, but I still have the file so... here it is with the latest turns(1-85) + map and mod for anyone who wants a look see:

http://www.mediafire.com/?36c5pvopz616v53

(Since I've never seen this done before I'm not sure what the etiquette is. If any of the players or Calahan have an objection to this I'll take it down.)

As to Machaka it should be noted that I am a terrible player. I have no end game, a weird aversion to most of Machaka's troop lineup, and a knack for letting problems simmer to the point of parody. My treatment of Van this game bordered on the cruel and unusual.

I am also a terrible ally. I asked Jot to kill Agartha (my ally) twice, allied with both Ulm and Van in an attempt to get them to kill each other, and then flipped on Shin after deciding gormy was way too nice (and he is a very nice man).

For my troubles I lost Pythium, largely due to a profound misunderstanding with Rabbitcook over the exact meaning of the phrase "but I have some commitments" while seeking a NAP. (However, gormy's sieging of Pythium is a textbook example of how to get things done.) Much later, after inviting Ulm to finish Van and Ulm accepting, Me, Ulm and Van did a near pitch perfect in-game reenactment of Waiting for Godot with Machaka as Estragon and Van playing the part of Vladimir with Ulm in the title role as Godot. However Ulm improvised a new ending where Godot does indeed show up and immediately starts firing a gun at Estragon's head. Estragon then spends the remainder of the play hiding behind a tree. Inventive but I thought it put a tad too much emphasis on the angst and not enough on the existentialist dread for it to work as theater.

I suck at this game.

All in all a good time with good people, but also a lot of time. Much praise and thanks to Calahan for being our shepherd.

@ All

So what do you guys want to do with this game?

1 - End it.
2 - Continue to do some testing and/or see some mock super battles
3 - Rollback the turn to try and simulate that Agartha battle again where Jotunheim wins and we get the correct replay.
4 - Something else!?!

Please let me know so that I can remove it from the llamaserver (if we no longer need it).

I want to try option 3, since we're already over and I'm really curious.

Regarding the game, yes Parone, I meant before sub, wanted to know your perspective. As for Jotun, we had a mostly peaceful expansion, but didn't got very big. I remember that time Pythium was leading, so south of me there was plenty of action around Agartha. In perspective, I was way too pasive for what could've been and I've learning to focus more (a RL problem too!) since this game. I lost a big battle to Ulm due to a pretty careless setup. That time people said Jotun went to hiding, but I went to do some real development. Put up the blood economy, researched key spells and started playing with goals. So first real target was the war weary Agartha. I remember being lost on what to do due to global issues - Ulm threat, Shinu protecting Agartha and handling items to my neighbors, stuff like that. So with Shinu finally busy, I went for Agartha and it went mostly well. Agartha spent his resources blighting my capital, when I was relying on blood so there weren't the lot of statues I was expecting. This was the time of the alliance and the heavy diplo, the Ulm and Shinu subs. I just won a big battle against Shinu, but Abysia did most of the job. He had more ready armies than me, so took better profit of the war. I went for Pythium after, something that probably should've done way before. By the time I had a decent Jotunheim, Abysia's grass was more greener than mine. In retrospective, too much time lost, but I learned a LOT of things along the way, trying and testing stuff; enough to make what was a backwater nation in the first part of the game make an honor stand againt uber Abysia at the closure. I wish I could've been more of a late game adversary. Maybe next time!

I'll wait a day in case anyone wants to trump you with 2 (in which case we'll do 3 after 2 is finsihed). Have a busy day today anyway (back in work after a week off ), so won't really get time until tomorrow anyway.

If no trumps appear I'll rollback the game tomorrow. (probably around this time). I'll probably need to pinch someones turns as well during the process, as otherwise I can't see if Jotun won the battle or not. Does anyone with eyes on that fight want to volunteer and send me their email? As then once I get a Jotun win, I'll swap the emails back so you can take a look. Or just someone with eyes on the fight and isn't interested in seeing the "what if" outcomes.

Ok, going to start doing those rehosts now. Thought about it, and it's best if I change all emails to my own, not least because it'll prevent you guys getting spammed with a ton of turn files. when/if I get a Jotun win, I'll either attached the turn file to a post, or send it to whoever wants it (if the players involved want to protect their turn files from the general populace to keep their devious tactics for another game)

Edit - Message to players sent out, emails changed

Edit 2 - Ok, on the first attempt I've got a battle that Jotunheim won. The replay still (apparently ) has errors, as I get a ***** Warning: Battle inconsistency (turn 14) error in the log starting on turn 14. But in the replay Jotunheim still wins, and it's fairly clear how that happens. (as I mentioned earlier in the thread, there are probably a lot of battle replay bugs that go unreported. As even though this one is also reported as bugged in the log, the replay shows a clear win for Jotun, so on the surface everything seems to be fine with the replay, as as such it would very likely never be reported as a bugged replay)

There's a Rigor Mortis caster in there for Jotunheim, and he stays for the duration of the battle. Jotunheim also has Relief running which keeps his non-undead units functioning intermittently. Jotun's Dust Priest is also able to keep a steady supply of Raise Undead going. Abysia doesn't have Relief running, and as such all his units are quiickly immobalised from the Rigor Mortis (Demons are not immune). Neither does he have undead D-mages to keep a supply of troops going. It's a very long battle that goes on for 74 turns, but almost all of Aby's troops are eventually killed, locked in place largely by the Rigor Mortis.

I could try to keep rehosting to get a bug-free replay, but not sure that's going to happen for a battle that complex. And the purpose of the rehost was mainly to find clues as to how Jotunheim won, and the rehost did that with room to spare. If I got a perfect bug-free replay in the process then even better, but the clues are enough to have a good idea what happened the first time around.


Admin-Player confidentiality agreements prevent me from posting the turn files but if any player wants their turn files back to check it out, then please PM me your email and I'll send your turn file to you.

This post has been edited by Calahan on Nov 20 2012, 10:18 AM

Mm that was pretty interesting. I didn't have that much faith in Rigor Mortis as I'd never seen it properly in action but it develops very well as the battle extends. I spent a hell lot of time scripting that battle, so it brings my morale up to see it worked to some extent. Required a lot of items and very specific units (like the amazons fire resistant sabbath slaves) to keep it running. Previous communion I threw at Abby was wiped due to the slaves and some key casters dying too soon to flame storm and the morale combo doing its work. That wasteland province Pythium had since forever was a real treasure, since the amazons and Dust people came all from there.

Rigor Mortis is the most evil spell in the game to get caught off guard with. As if you pull it off under the right circumstances it pretty much guarantees a total wipeout. (and at least against other surprises there's a fair chance a couple of guys will always live to tell the tale)

Very interesting on the battle replay, thanks Calahan. One thing that's kind of annoying is that once you're sieging a fort you have zero intel on the force inside the fort. So I got kind of lost as to what I'd actually be fighting after some 5 plus turns sitting on Agartha. I certainly didn't plan on rigor mortis.

Here are some lengthier after-game notes, in case people care:

(1) during the beginning of the game when I had peaceful neighbors we could all see Ulm swallowing Arco and shooting up the graphs. We tried to organize against Ulm and managed to get Mictlan, myself, Jot and Vanheim on board to fight him. But Jot quit fighting Ulm after that one big lost battle, and after five or so turns of fighting Ulm across water (our only border) I decided that staying enemies with Ulm didn't make much sense. I wanted to take the approach all game of fighting the leader because I thought that was a way to make friends, but across water I couldn't get anything useful to fight Ulm, particularly since my fire and blood magic were both useless underwater. and i couldn't forge enough water breathing stuff to get decent mage volume across to Ulm.

So I quietly made peace with Ulm for first 6 turns and then maybe 10 more. That ran through I think turn 45. I hoped that Mictlan and Van could slow Ulm enough that all would not be lost when that ended. I didn't tell Mictlan and Van and in this sense I kind of sold them down the river (although I am not really sure I could have done much more against Ulm at this point anyway given the water boundary which is part of why I made peace). One of the terms of this peace was that parone would keep it secret so I could pretend to still be at war with him.

(2) In the interim Shinuyama shot up the charts, not in provinces but in income and research because of Gift of Nature's Bounty. In my opinion, an aggressive Shin could have won the game by going offensive then, with Ulm also a threat from the other side of the world it would have been difficult for Shin to be stopped. Since I wasn't fighting Ulm, Machaka and I agreed to take on the next leader Shin. But because I honored my NAP with Shin, Machaka started the fighting before I did and took the brunt of Shin's response. Also the bottleneck between me and Shin made it relatively easy to fight just a really big battle in Shin's single fort south of the mountains and he didn't mount an invasion of me. I won that battle with heavy, heavy losses, but that ended up being the end of my war with Shin which was good because I don't think I could have kept it up especially if Ulm saw the opportunity.

Shin's decision to return Pythium's capital to Pythium was a very friendly but I think critical strategic moment because by the time we dispelled GoNB he didn't have a lot of territory or income and that was part of the reason.

(3) Right after Shin and I finally fought, gormy left and Shin's leadership changed. With the change it was an opportunity to get Shin on board with a more complete alliance against Ulm (which Machaka and I joined) and I got busy getting ready to invade Ulm on turn 45 when peace came. I was pessimistic but I think was helped a lot because parone thought we had an NAP when in fact the peace expired on its own. So I was able to invade him first. At that point I had a land border because Ulm had almost finished off Mictlan.

(4) By this point my research had come along far enough to allow me to implement the routing strategy parone mentioned. My troops were pretty hopeless against his high armor Ulmish infantry and barrage of artillery (mainly through magma spells and that Ulm iron darts or whatever its called). So I planned to fight almost exclusively with fear: blood rain to lower morale, demon knights and other troops to trigger morale checks, and fighting in my dominion. I strategically allowed Ulm's biggest army to take provinces for about 3 turns so he was deep into my territory. Thus when the rout ocurred his big army had nowhere to run and was annihilated. The routing snowball happened by like turn 3 of the fight so he lost everything before they killed much of my army (they could have killed all of it fast if they'd stuck around). I combined this with teleport/infernal prison combos to pick off his iron angels.

I was disappointed that during this phase of fighting Ulm Machaka and Jot didn't help. I actually thought that would be the end of me. Machaka went for Van instead and Jot went for Agartha. Incidentally I quietly helped Agartha with some gems during his fight with Jot and as a result when he finally died he sent me all his leftovers, which were substantial. I was only able to cast my gem gen spell because of it.

(5) I basically won two big battles against Ulm with the routing strategy but parone was not positioned to hold Mictlan after that. so when bradicus subbed he realized he was going to be toast (also because now the alliance against Ulm was very strong). Machaka, Jot and I extracted the big peace from Ulm that basically gave me all of Mictlan. Part of the peace was also a lengthy fake-out of Shinuyama (the clear leader now that Ulm was weakened). We acted like we were still fighting Ulm (including some fake battles) but instead collected gems to dispel GoNB and moved our units for a simultaneous invasion of Shin. Shin kept fighting Ulm and clearly did not realize this was happening. Although I never understood who Shin thought dispelled GoNB.

(6) After we jointly took down Shin I think the writing was on the wall for me to win because no one was as well positioned for an end game as I was. I had a huge blood economy by now (200 slaves per turn usually). I had also found Mount Chaining (the site with 20% off blood rituals). And my astral/blood magic was very good for endgame. With my dom push there was a time limit on how long everyone had to beat me, and I think without dispelling GoH and especially Dark Skies I was pretty much unbeatable. The routing strategy I used against parone was going to be hard to stop with Dark Skies reducing every enemy troop's morale by 11, and by this point I also had two vampire lords empowered with air to cast wailing winds (morale check for everyone every round). The only way this could be beat is the way Jot apparently beat me in the Agartha battle, namely unroutable 50 morale troops (I guess mostly undead) and SCs. But by this point I had about 20 SCs of my own as well.

So I basically spent seven or eight turns working hard to limit my graph rise so it kept looking like Machaka/Jot/Ulm and I were close to even. By the time Shin was done it was too late to stop me I think, even if Ulm had not invaded Machaka (although a unified attack on me would have made things a lot less clear).

(7) I will add that a huge factor in this game was Austen/Vanheim. For the life of me I do not understand how he held back Ulm for so long and then Machaka as well. If he had not slowed Ulm, Ulm would definitely have won I think and his prediction on that front would have been right. And when Machaka decided to let others do the heavy lifting against Ulm and to instead swarm Van, I figured that was a clever decision because Machaka could quickly take Van down and be in great position after the Ulm war. But that didn't happen and van stuck around forever. In my honest opinion Austen was clearly the best player among us in terms of tactics. And as I said before my victory was mostly diplomacy along with a huge dose of the luck that comes in all these games (not being the victim of a rush, as was Austen, for example - he beat Pan's rush back and took Pan over but was immediately invaded by Ulm etc).

Cheers all, not sure anyone is interested in any of this. Thanks again to Calahan for making this game so smooth and so much fun.

It was a good read, Snacktime

Ok, I'm turning the lights off on this one now. Hope to catch you all again soon

Might be running some newbie games at the start of next month if we get an influx from the Desura launch. Anyone that is still a newb is welcome to join. Those that have graduated from newb school will have to look elsewhere I'm afraid. But I might fish around for interest in a non-newb game at the same time. no promises though.

Oh and most (or maybe all) the games will be no-diplo. Maybe not full RAND (as I'll probably allow nation selection), but likely no-diplo. (if I run more than one newbie game, then one of those might be a regular diplo game. depends how new some of the newbs are. As don't want to spring too much on them in one go)