The Let's Play Archive

Dominions 3

by ZorbaTHut

Part 71: Turn 61: Everything Goes To Hell







So.

Man has cast their own Gift of Health. Since only one global enchant of each type can exist, Man's Gift of Health - presumably cast with more gems than we cast ours with - has just overridden ours.

I ain't too happy about this, obviously, but we'll have to figure out how to deal with it.

(Future Me: This is one of those headdesk moments. Let's say you've got a really powerful enchant that takes Nature gems, right? And let's say someone else puts up a global enchant that gives Nature gems. What are they going to use those nature gems on? Lemme take a wild guess here: stealing your enchant.

Duh.

I should have seen this coming the instant Man cast Mother Oak, but I didn't, and now I've lost Gift of Health like a dumbass.)




I'm also not too happy about this. I'm actually quite surprised it wasn't a kill - Daidalos only has ten hit points. I'm going to assume this was Midgard, since it's an Air spell and Midgard has reasonably heavy Air.







At least we got someone. Time to start the healing process. Nowhere near what I was hoping.

Iron Range: another group of zombies, slaughtered quickly.






The latter event is someone else's dominion showing up - in fact, it's 5 enemy dominion of some kind. Not much for it, we'll just have to wait for it to wear off.



Atlantis is the site of a very large battle.

At first this looks like another clear loss for Atlantis. Man's still got their archer array, and Atlantis is attacking with ground troops.



Problem is, they're attacking with a lot of really tough ground troops.



And by the time they reach Man's front lines, they're still attacking with a lot of tough ground troops.



It goes really shockingly badly for Man. Atlantis's sheer armored firepower crushes them easily, and Man's siege is broken.



In Lucky Lake, a group of Atlantian warriors assault my Queen of Elemental Water. My Queen dispatches them handily.

So what went wrong here? She wasn't supposed to be in Lucky Lake. I botched my orders and forgot to move her.



Valgaard: Large Gath army, large C'tis army. It's not actually a very interesting battle - the best part is the rain of fireballs coming in - but Gath wins reasonably easily.



In the Mountains of Madness, Barathrus punches province defense into explosions.



And Philetor slaughters C'tis in Saeborea.



In Urd, our original province between Yldmyre and Linshire, we don't do so well. The military isn't a problem. Fluffy Bunnies is a problem.




This Fluffy Bunnies is a pale shadow of the Fluffy Bunnies we met originally. His magic paths are reduced to 1 from repeated deaths and he's picked up five separate battle afflictions. He's certainly not getting any stronger. Nevertheless, he's still terrifying, flying, and quite deadly, and my province defense quickly routs.



In Cythia, Kumlakh does his standard gradual slaughter of the enemy units.

Chilad is another small attack of Midgard, and this time they almost take my forces down. Almost, though. They don't actually succeed. Unfortunately I don't take out their cave drake or their mages.



My new army moves into C'tis territory, taking out their units with no casualties. (That flaming section off to the west is actually part of their army.)



And in Robber Home, my army has some trouble breaking through the enemy lines. They're bombarded with a huge amount of Stellar Cascades, raising their fatigue painfully high and making them unable to fight even the small force that exists. We'll need either some mages or a supercombatant to crack this - it's surprisingly well-defended.




At least we've got an opportunity to lose more army!

Alright. Before I go and post the battle map . . .



. . . here's what we got to work with.



Man is getting a lot of gems by now. He's been doing a pile of sitesearching and his total gem income, even without Mother Oak, is well over twice what it was last time I mentioned it. I should have been paying more attention to this for quite a while. Mistake on my part. I need to kill off his Mother Oak, and I also need to kill off his Gift of Health and take it for myself.

However, I've got kind of a limited number of nature gems. Right now, I'm conserving all my Nature gems. But I want to start tearing his global enchants down ASAP.

Tossing all my safe astral boosters on Mrs. Butterworth results in Astral 8. Dispel has a nice feature in that it boosts its power by 5 gem-equivalents for each Astral above 3, so we're already getting a 25-gem boost to our 30-gem spell. Our Gift of Health had 10 gems, but I suspect Man has put more in than that.

However, let's just ignore that for a turn. Let's hit Mother Oak. And let's hit it with no bonus gems - I bet Man put it up with near-zero boosters.

Next turn, we'll target Gift of Health.



Okay. War.

My newly-reinforced Yldmyre squad rigs up a quick communion, then heads southeast. They'll be sieging Lettia, the nearby Midgard castle.

Barathrus heads north. My army should have no trouble holding Lettia, and there's more territory to grab.

My siege army in Robber Home goes north, towards Lettia. but wait how are you going to finish off Robber Home With Phyleides, my fast, flying Tartarian. I was about to Cloud Trapeze her when I realized she was fast enough to just walk. Or run, or stampede, or whatever a Tartarian in a hurry does. She will have no trouble clearing out those forces, especially with a little military backup. So we'll just have her do it.

Kumlakh heads east to recapture Urd while Philetor heads northeast to grab Gol Ryepe. My army in Forest of Gun shifts north to Werk Enum. We're quickly flattening C'tis, and then we'll direct our forces elsewhere.

I have a new Gift of Reason'd Tartarian in Arco. He's busy "Reanimate"ing right now, but I can still gear him up. That frees enough room to craft a bunch of future gear, although I don't currently want to use any Astral or Nature gems.

I think I forgot to move my Barbarian-killer army from Agartha also. Sigh. I do so this turn - next turn I can reclaim Cacevic Highlands. My huge siegebreaker army in the west moves back to Boddern Weald for its turn with the Gate Stone.

And this time I actually move Thalassa.

Mictlan has moved some units into a position that I find somewhat suspicious, just east of Robber Home. They might be there because it's a faster path to their southern sieges. They might be there because they're trying to attack us. Either way, I'm keeping a very close eye on them.



I'm moving some scouts into Man - I might be able to throw some wrenches into their plans, and it's looking like their plans deserve quite a few wrenches. I'm also looking forward to T'ien Ch'i being finished off so I can reclaim all those mages. I don't quite know which way I'm going with them yet - part of me thinks Mictlan since they're right there and very threatening on land, part of me thinks Man since they're very threatening on gems, part of me thinks I should head over and start cleaning out Ulm. Well, we'll see.

Next: We try to reclaim our rightful dominance in the Global Enchantments list.