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Post by yurgartisb on Mar 3, 2012 20:41:02 GMT -5
Wow. I just spent the last 9 hours playing this one game. I was not victorious. After several poor starts I got lucky with 2 nearby silver mines and a nearby coal mine. I explored carefully until Mum showed up then began targeting swamps and ancient forests (AF). Trollifying an AF (and the resulting fungus spawn) keeps the AI from attacking it quite effectively. Eventually the AI was all ganging up on me and I moved position to a northern AF that was at the mouth of a peninsula with around 20 gold worth of farms/cities on it. I defended that position along with my original AF and my starting base until such a time as I had a few dragons. I used the dragons to scout the map and outfitted one of them with a ethereal ring and a regen ring and used him to sweep up smaller AI groups. This was quite effective till he got jumped by a massive baron stack; I howled with dismay when he finally fell. The AI retook the half of the map I had staked out slowly but surely and I took Mum and King eastward to a clump of 4 AF. I trollified them all and made more dragons, but without the rings they eventually fell to wandering AI. I was in a position where I felt that I would never lose as the AI wouldn't attack my massively fungused AF bases, but keeping iron and gold income steady was very difficult. Even when I got good reserves of both resources the ability to recruit the trolls and archers I needed just takes way to long to keep up with attrition. I saw no way to eliminate the AI either as most had heroes and bases all over the map. I managed to corner the Hoburg and eliminated all his heroes. All that was left was one Hoburg base. I went in with my doomstack.... and lost. I can't wait for someone to actually complete this insane challenge, and I look forward to hearing about everyone's attempts.
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Post by ulius on Apr 14, 2012 6:33:46 GMT -5
Won this on 3.04 in the "Common Cause = Off" version. This way it was doable, but still hard.
I was very lucky to kill 3 AIs in the early game. After that I had to retreat and spammed troll forests. The game took forever after that. If you manage to survive the midgame as troll king (which can be tough) and you get enough troll forests up, you've basically won the game atleast against the computer. There are still some tactics to take out an established Troll King, but the AI is not capable of doing it. But the Troll King's forces are so bad it still took forever. The remaining AIs were Hoburg and High Cultist. That means many, many Crossbows.
How do you kill 400 Hoburgs if you get 10 goblin archers say every 10th turn? How do you take out a Citadel with 15 catapults and 100 heavy infantry + 40 crossbows if you get a giant about every 20th turn?
Answer: You can't. So I controlled 95% of the map but I couldn't kill the remaining enemies for years and years. I had an income of 240 gold 40 iron and 300 funghi every turn. And they had an income of about 20 gold. The game became incredibly slow, because carrions were everywhere on the map and my army size was 30 times as big as theirs. I still couldn't kill them.
I hunted down their smaller stacks and hit end turn over and over again. They kept leaving small amounts of units in mines, towns and citadels and I killed those too until their main forces were finally weak enough so I could kill those.
I must admit the way the troll king is now he is rather annoying. This is especially true in multiplayer, because if you spam a lot of troll forests you make it nearly impossible to kill you and the game takes forever. You get to see most of the map pretty fast and that makes it very hard for the enemy to hunt your forces down and very easy for yourself to sneak past his. You get some weak armies, that are very good at taking out smaller stacks, but have no chance to kill larger stacks so you must hope for your enemy to resign ;-).
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Post by vladikus on Apr 14, 2012 8:32:23 GMT -5
I hunted down their smaller stacks and hit end turn over and over again. They kept leaving small amounts of units in mines, towns and citadels and I killed those too until their main forces were finally weak enough so I could kill those. I really dislike games like this--so my question to the you and the community is how to make the map challenging but fun without it being a "turn masher"? Set the AI to an easier level? Take away some opponents?
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Post by ulius on Apr 14, 2012 13:56:46 GMT -5
I suggest making it a different victory condition as taking out all enemies takes too long. The Jester AI is too easy, which you can see if you try the "One Against the World" challenge for example. I wouldn't change that. But I'd try to find a victory condition that is: a) thematic b) rather quick but still tough c) easy to see if you achieved it or not
One example could be: have more than twice the income of your opponents for more than a year (this would fit well into the "raiding theme"). The problem would be that it is hard to see on the Score Graph.
Easier to see: Control at least twice the number of citadels your opponents have together for at least a year.
Or what about: Make every ancient forest an ancient troll forest and make sure Troll King and Troll Mum survive (but that wouldn't fit into the theme as it is right now). Would be more like: "Find a safe shelter for your kind"
For that victory condition you could also change the AIs to be a bit harder or more numerous, like 7 non-allied Emperor AIs and you in-between just trying to survive as long as possible to find and convert those Ancient Forests.
That would also vary gameplay a bit.
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Post by mek42 on Mar 24, 2013 5:45:14 GMT -5
This was work. Using game version 3.18, I finally won on turn 195. My random was the dwarfs. Part of the reason it took so long was that I RP'ed a bit of dwarf hate and prioritized attacking them sometimes when it would have probably been better to take out a baron stack.
I lost my king at turn 30 overestimating his ability to solo an enemy stack. I had received mum shortly beforehand - she was just far enough away that I should have spent a willpower point on patience to wait for her to link up with the king. Anyhow, I decided to keep going, see what happened.
(As an aside, one of my failed attempts at this scenario is my most spectacular failure yet. On turn 3 of the loser game I found a dragon with my king and decided to see whether it was soloable or not. I don't suggest this - I think the outcome is based on the random numbers, it could have gone either way. He ends up getting a Faithful lucky sword out of the deal. A Troll King armed with Faithful, how cool is this? Then three turns later I learned that Will'o'Wisps can enslave units in this game. No more commanders, game over.)
The burgmeister was the first fall at turn 45. I took his keep, that was within 2 squares of a great forest. I made this into a troll forest and this ended up being the focus of the rest of the game. By this time, the baron had some respectable stacks. I did the old keep the Ancient Troll Forest but swap the Burgmeister citadel back and forth, splitting the Baron's forces each time.
While this cat and mouse was going on, I'd occaisionally pop someone else's stack. This led to the demise of the witch on turn 64 when she got too close to Burgmeister keep with a stack not big enough. Popped her last commander and then there were two.
I pretty much just maintained the cat and mouse near Burgmeister keep until I was able to summon a dragon. Before this, getting to 6 or 7 trolls (not mixed with forest trolls) kept me going on the wait to dragons.
This scenario has helped me appreciate the start, middle and end stages of the game.
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