To explain a bit more my message about Pythium: I pitched Pythium on Erytheia wish farming being an existential threat to his ability to control globals should the game go late, as it surely will. And I did that about 7 turns ago, when Pythium had a large FV army next to Atlantis and no NAP: the proposal was to move the army onto Atlantis, kill the Erytheian main army with foul vapors, and together we destroy the other surviving underwater power.
This would have been, I think, a really good use of Pythium's early oppressive Foul Vapors capability: killing a scaling neighbor who doesn't yet have the tools to deal with your early game magic. It didn't sound like Pythium had worked closely with Erytheia abd would have felt it was a big betrayal to do that… But he was very tempted by Midgard's promises of free Agarthan land.
Pythium decided to fight Agartha, and we thought it possible we could stop Erytheia alone; since we'd seen Erytheia commit 25 mages to the slow siege of Atlantis and lose their Pretender, it seemed possible that they might have lost enough mage turns so as to not have the crazy research they did. But the very high gold income of their starting territory and thus early fort timings meant that 25 mages was pretty small compared to their total mage corps.
Geographically, if Erytheia holds Atlantis, and is our ally, our options to grow either involved becoming a banana shaped nation or taking land off Pythium… There's just not other land in our column. Having that sort of shape borders is defensively weak unless playing a high map movement nation like birds or Pan.
So in my mind, Pythium's choice to attack Agartha meant that our rational option having given up on killing Erytheia was to kill Pythium.
With Serpents Blessing around the corner, and our thug research online, we felt we could 1v1 Pythium easily at this research level and would have loved to do that, but Erytheia wanted to attack them too, and we were ok with that, as we were pretty sure we could get enough land from Pythium to have a suitably deep national shape.
It's pretty common to not get blessing off against LLP assassins. I almost took 5PR on my bless in order to make my mages not sure to swarm assassin dryads, but testing suggested they'd rather summon useless ancestor spirits than bless themselves in assassination battles, so it would have required using holy water bottles instead.
The sling is very appropriate because Gath has both the Giants (like Goliath) and the human Slingers (like David) in their armies.
It's presumably a few item from an event, but it might be anti assassin gear for that commander; missile weapons are one of the few ways to kill LLP assassins for a mundane commander.
Regarding the Marignon fighting the thug, I imagine they really wish they had Thaumaturgy 5 at this point; LLP plus a tiny communion able to do Soul Slay (say, 3 S1 chartmakers with a pearl to do PotS) would have saved them a lot of losses to Kohen Gadols… Or at least killed the thugs and let them loot the gear.
So this is probably a place where a bit better expansion or scales (or Pan/Gath waiting a few more turns) might have changed the outcome.
In that Pythium fight on Agartha's capital, a few things of note. One is that it wasn't just cold magic killing the elementals; Vine Arrows from the N1s were a lot of the damage too. Vine Arrow is very much an underrated spell; I particularly enjoy when it hits an air elemental, as those don't have the strength to keep moving after getting entangled.
The other is that Pythium had been making their fire resistant infantry, and could be buffing Fire Resistance on his troops either with his F2 heliodromi or his W2 Renatus, at a very small gem investment. Given how much Agartha has been using fire elementals and doesn't have a ton of troops left where protection buffs might matter (Umbrals and water elementals have AP attacks, and there's basically no chaff infantry left), probably he could have switched his script away from protection and towards point buffing FR and been pretty confident of keeping the fort locked down.
Speaking of curse of stones The plan was exactly what Lucid described. Turn 1 against no antimagic because of gemburns. I believe the scales in the province were also magic 3. And it is super devastating against royal guards in particular, and those (and elementals but there were supposed to not be many because of gemburn) are the main threat to my troops under Arrow Fend
Regarding the bump with Pythium, I am pretty sure we told him we wanted those provinces, he said "let's talk about it later" and then didn't, so we just decided to raid it to get the turn in. I don't think we knew Pythium was in a position to attack it; so we just had half the army we'd had blood hunting with scouts on that border go to each province. (Or at least I didn't; Latch had taken over at this point, so it's possible I was not aware of everything).
If you watch the bump closely, you'll see our front line of cavalry was really struggling to fight through the Protection buffed infantry and we were on track to lose, before a few guys flank the enemy commanders, most importantly the high damage glaive dudes who were there to keep our cavalry from shooting. Protection buffed Pythium infantry are tough! This matchup is a demonstration of why we've been making the glaive troops: Barbarian heavy horsemen aren't an amazing matchup against protection buffed heavy infantry.
I think we would have been happy to make a deal with Pythium over those provinces had he talked; we felt that land important to allow us to build temples and defensive fortifications to keep Vaettiheim Dominion out of Midgard… We'd brought it up with him while still very much at war with Erytheia. So it was not a cheeky attempt to kill his stuff, but instead just grabbing land that we considered valuable sure to its location (populations were very low).
Jomon here. Yeaaa that Foul vapour compleatly got me off guard. hard to remember excactly what happened with my mages, but i don't belive i had my mages on advance and cast. My main line of thought was that if he is gonna make a ball of mages and units on guard with no offensive spells, relying on fluffed sacreds, than he will move forward with advance and cast spells and get within range of me or route to the turntimer. that plan however compleatly bricks when FW is added to that mix. The ghosts and the ghost king chilling my mages was however a massive brain fart, and i did not considder that when throwing togeather the armie. Arco played really well, and imn sad that i did not get to put up a better defence, but sometimes you just get outplayed, and boy did that FW catch me off guard.
The TC Pythium bump was an "Accident" that was coordinated with Agartha. We are not salty against Pythium, but with peace made with Eyrithia we are absolutely already pivoting into attacking Pythium and this is just build up into that. His forces were just too vulnerable here. Not a play I normally do but Agartha has at least convinced me that Pythium was doing the same to him with his midguard conflict and i was not worried about offending Pythium and i did not think this would offend anyone else.
1:07:30 I'd like to add that Fire Elementals also got a pretty serious value of Fire Shield (size 6 -> 14, size 5 -> 13 and so on), and the Comitatenses have only size 1 weapons and fire vulnerability on top of it, so by my rough estimates they should be recieving around 7 damage base from each of their attempts to harm the elemetal and get conflagrated afterwards (which can not be put down in any way while the unit is vulnerable to fire, well, unless someone casts Rain). So I think that the Fire Shield did a lot of damage to the reformed legionnaires and finally finished them off with fire damage each turn recieved from conflagration.
The reason those devils are wrecking is less due to the barbed tail (though it's a magic weapon too, which helps vs mist form). They are using a 29 damage weapon after SoG…with *piercing*. You don't notice it when someone is shoving 13-15 damage spears, but a 0.8x multiplier on high prot is devastating. The damage roll vs 30 prot is 29+DRN vs 24+DRN. 0+DRN is more than 0 expected damage per turn. Thus, even if we assume pierce resist, the devils at 57:20 are still going to average > 20 damage/round. It's 40 w/o it. 55 hp won't last long like that, even if you put regen on it.
TC and Erytheia denying me the opportunity to see a big battle with lots of magical booms is sad. Gath and Marignon are also teasing me with the possible big clash without delivering! You guys are mean. Arco and Jomon tried to fill the void but Jomon didn't manage to hold up their end so that's unfortunate. Dying to poison isn't a satisfying boom! Utgard allegedly joining in against Vaettiheim is why I thought the frost goblins should have just killed them before now. They're absolutely not scary one on one but they're plenty strong enough to be annoying if they stab you while you're fully engaged with Pan.
The research graphs as of this point are really quite remarkable: Arcoscephale, usually a very fast researching nation, has been committing mages so heavily to fighting that they have lower research than both TC (who have spent a ton of mage turns on site searching, forging, and moving to the Erytheia border despite having no forts there) and Drain 3 Gath. A testament to just how good Drain 3 Gath builds are.
Lucid, haven't you talked extensively about Innate Casters in both your LA Ulm series (with the huge map) and the custom-nations game? So at least the people somewhat following your channel should have a rather good understanding of the intricacies of Innate Casters
This game is getting better turn after turn.
Yes, please ask them to add a spectator faction!
To explain a bit more my message about Pythium: I pitched Pythium on Erytheia wish farming being an existential threat to his ability to control globals should the game go late, as it surely will. And I did that about 7 turns ago, when Pythium had a large FV army next to Atlantis and no NAP: the proposal was to move the army onto Atlantis, kill the Erytheian main army with foul vapors, and together we destroy the other surviving underwater power.
This would have been, I think, a really good use of Pythium's early oppressive Foul Vapors capability: killing a scaling neighbor who doesn't yet have the tools to deal with your early game magic. It didn't sound like Pythium had worked closely with Erytheia abd would have felt it was a big betrayal to do that… But he was very tempted by Midgard's promises of free Agarthan land.
Pythium decided to fight Agartha, and we thought it possible we could stop Erytheia alone; since we'd seen Erytheia commit 25 mages to the slow siege of Atlantis and lose their Pretender, it seemed possible that they might have lost enough mage turns so as to not have the crazy research they did. But the very high gold income of their starting territory and thus early fort timings meant that 25 mages was pretty small compared to their total mage corps.
Geographically, if Erytheia holds Atlantis, and is our ally, our options to grow either involved becoming a banana shaped nation or taking land off Pythium… There's just not other land in our column. Having that sort of shape borders is defensively weak unless playing a high map movement nation like birds or Pan.
So in my mind, Pythium's choice to attack Agartha meant that our rational option having given up on killing Erytheia was to kill Pythium.
With Serpents Blessing around the corner, and our thug research online, we felt we could 1v1 Pythium easily at this research level and would have loved to do that, but Erytheia wanted to attack them too, and we were ok with that, as we were pretty sure we could get enough land from Pythium to have a suitably deep national shape.
It's pretty common to not get blessing off against LLP assassins. I almost took 5PR on my bless in order to make my mages not sure to swarm assassin dryads, but testing suggested they'd rather summon useless ancestor spirits than bless themselves in assassination battles, so it would have required using holy water bottles instead.
Jesus, whenever Xibalba rolls out it's gonna be glorious
The sling is very appropriate because Gath has both the Giants (like Goliath) and the human Slingers (like David) in their armies.
It's presumably a few item from an event, but it might be anti assassin gear for that commander; missile weapons are one of the few ways to kill LLP assassins for a mundane commander.
Regarding the Marignon fighting the thug, I imagine they really wish they had Thaumaturgy 5 at this point; LLP plus a tiny communion able to do Soul Slay (say, 3 S1 chartmakers with a pearl to do PotS) would have saved them a lot of losses to Kohen Gadols… Or at least killed the thugs and let them loot the gear.
So this is probably a place where a bit better expansion or scales (or Pan/Gath waiting a few more turns) might have changed the outcome.
Agartha better do a PD dump on their cap. In caves they get full plate, high stat dudes literally 1 per point in addition to everything else.
In that Pythium fight on Agartha's capital, a few things of note. One is that it wasn't just cold magic killing the elementals; Vine Arrows from the N1s were a lot of the damage too. Vine Arrow is very much an underrated spell; I particularly enjoy when it hits an air elemental, as those don't have the strength to keep moving after getting entangled.
The other is that Pythium had been making their fire resistant infantry, and could be buffing Fire Resistance on his troops either with his F2 heliodromi or his W2 Renatus, at a very small gem investment. Given how much Agartha has been using fire elementals and doesn't have a ton of troops left where protection buffs might matter (Umbrals and water elementals have AP attacks, and there's basically no chaff infantry left), probably he could have switched his script away from protection and towards point buffing FR and been pretty confident of keeping the fort locked down.
Speaking of curse of stones
The plan was exactly what Lucid described. Turn 1 against no antimagic because of gemburns. I believe the scales in the province were also magic 3. And it is super devastating against royal guards in particular, and those (and elementals but there were supposed to not be many because of gemburn) are the main threat to my troops under Arrow Fend
Regarding the bump with Pythium, I am pretty sure we told him we wanted those provinces, he said "let's talk about it later" and then didn't, so we just decided to raid it to get the turn in. I don't think we knew Pythium was in a position to attack it; so we just had half the army we'd had blood hunting with scouts on that border go to each province. (Or at least I didn't; Latch had taken over at this point, so it's possible I was not aware of everything).
If you watch the bump closely, you'll see our front line of cavalry was really struggling to fight through the Protection buffed infantry and we were on track to lose, before a few guys flank the enemy commanders, most importantly the high damage glaive dudes who were there to keep our cavalry from shooting. Protection buffed Pythium infantry are tough! This matchup is a demonstration of why we've been making the glaive troops: Barbarian heavy horsemen aren't an amazing matchup against protection buffed heavy infantry.
I think we would have been happy to make a deal with Pythium over those provinces had he talked; we felt that land important to allow us to build temples and defensive fortifications to keep Vaettiheim Dominion out of Midgard… We'd brought it up with him while still very much at war with Erytheia. So it was not a cheeky attempt to kill his stuff, but instead just grabbing land that we considered valuable sure to its location (populations were very low).
Jomon here. Yeaaa that Foul vapour compleatly got me off guard. hard to remember excactly what happened with my mages, but i don't belive i had my mages on advance and cast. My main line of thought was that if he is gonna make a ball of mages and units on guard with no offensive spells, relying on fluffed sacreds, than he will move forward with advance and cast spells and get within range of me or route to the turntimer. that plan however compleatly bricks when FW is added to that mix. The ghosts and the ghost king chilling my mages was however a massive brain fart, and i did not considder that when throwing togeather the armie.
Arco played really well, and imn sad that i did not get to put up a better defence, but sometimes you just get outplayed, and boy did that FW catch me off guard.
More Fake news about TC threatening Pan
Come one guys..you can do better intros than "once again joined". Be creative! Also boycott biological pregnancy! 10000 foster kids need homes!
the armor on the Bane is for map move i think, otherwise he wouldnt reach the province maybe?
Really great how there's no inkling of even an unclear winner so far.
The TC Pythium bump was an "Accident" that was coordinated with Agartha. We are not salty against Pythium, but with peace made with Eyrithia we are absolutely already pivoting into attacking Pythium and this is just build up into that. His forces were just too vulnerable here. Not a play I normally do but Agartha has at least convinced me that Pythium was doing the same to him with his midguard conflict and i was not worried about offending Pythium and i did not think this would offend anyone else.
1:07:30 I'd like to add that Fire Elementals also got a pretty serious value of Fire Shield (size 6 -> 14, size 5 -> 13 and so on), and the Comitatenses have only size 1 weapons and fire vulnerability on top of it, so by my rough estimates they should be recieving around 7 damage base from each of their attempts to harm the elemetal and get conflagrated afterwards (which can not be put down in any way while the unit is vulnerable to fire, well, unless someone casts Rain).
So I think that the Fire Shield did a lot of damage to the reformed legionnaires and finally finished them off with fire damage each turn recieved from conflagration.
That's why I hate barkskin.
iirc even with morale fail there is still 50/50 chance to retreat to your own province and if that fails it's random
Oh man the unsupported Pan army is making me sweat 😨
The reason those devils are wrecking is less due to the barbed tail (though it's a magic weapon too, which helps vs mist form). They are using a 29 damage weapon after SoG…with *piercing*. You don't notice it when someone is shoving 13-15 damage spears, but a 0.8x multiplier on high prot is devastating. The damage roll vs 30 prot is 29+DRN vs 24+DRN. 0+DRN is more than 0 expected damage per turn. Thus, even if we assume pierce resist, the devils at 57:20 are still going to average > 20 damage/round. It's 40 w/o it. 55 hp won't last long like that, even if you put regen on it.
Curse of stones is also really good at slowing down and fatiguing out low movespeed thugs and armies, like atlantis and agartha
TC and Erytheia denying me the opportunity to see a big battle with lots of magical booms is sad. Gath and Marignon are also teasing me with the possible big clash without delivering! You guys are mean. Arco and Jomon tried to fill the void but Jomon didn't manage to hold up their end so that's unfortunate. Dying to poison isn't a satisfying boom! Utgard allegedly joining in against Vaettiheim is why I thought the frost goblins should have just killed them before now. They're absolutely not scary one on one but they're plenty strong enough to be annoying if they stab you while you're fully engaged with Pan.
The research graphs as of this point are really quite remarkable: Arcoscephale, usually a very fast researching nation, has been committing mages so heavily to fighting that they have lower research than both TC (who have spent a ton of mage turns on site searching, forging, and moving to the Erytheia border despite having no forts there) and Drain 3 Gath. A testament to just how good Drain 3 Gath builds are.
Lucid, haven't you talked extensively about Innate Casters in both your LA Ulm series (with the huge map) and the custom-nations game? So at least the people somewhat following your channel should have a rather good understanding of the intricacies of Innate Casters
It's astonishing that even someone as experienced as Sy can still get surprised by the game. Twice in this episode!
Great series overall!