Part 89: Endgame Retrospective
Endgame RetrospectiveI made a few dumb mistakes.
I mentioned a lot of them in the last post. Not enough Priestesses early on, too many Elephants later on, no Phalangites. I forgot that Arco has its special scry ability (I don't even know if I mentioned that - any Astral unit can spend a turn in the capital to scry on any province. Nice, no?) I screwed up battle orders, I misplaced gems, I had an army attack while its important backup stealthed around behind them, I used the wrong gear at the wrong times, I lost Obscuro to the AI. You name it, I probably fucked it up.
But my overall strategy? Well, I feel like I was generally doing the right thing.
The Agartha war went just as I intended: easy territory capture, no excessively increased warfront. T'ien Ch'i dragged on far longer than it should have, but, again, no excessively increased warfront. After T'ien Ch'i I realized I needed to expand quickly to catch up to Ulm, which I did, while keeping myself locked up in a corner to avoid giving Man or Mictlan an easy attack against me.
And for all the mistakes I had with Mictlan, I was well on my way to crushing them. According to my scout reports, that horrific barrage of magic brought their main army from 360 units to 110 units. Easy targets for my war communion, then all I do is split the communions up six ways and devour their entire civilization before converging on their capital and nuking it.
The only really worrisome bits were Mictlan's various supercombatants, like the Lord of Corruption. As I'm writing this I haven't yet posted Turn 74, but if I haven't mentioned it by now, the reason I never showed that battle is because it turns out Cloud Trapezing into a sieged castle lands you inside the castle, not fighting the siege on the outside. Whoops.
So, could I have killed him? Well, I think so. I think I could've had Cloud Trapezing Queens of Air leaping around and slaughtering anything big that Mictlan pulled out. That would take care of the big superunits, and my communions could have taken care of anything smaller.
Another issue would have been that whole Infernal Prison deal. My best idea there was just to keep Mictlan guessing - interlace supercombatants and war parties, so that Mictlan was never able to aim their Infernal Prisons at something that was reliably a supercombatant. Additionally, it's not like those units are actually dead - they'd break out eventually - and if I could just send enough Tartarians in, I'd get to the point where they actually couldn't send them to Hell faster than they could break out.
With my ridiculous enchantments I should have had no trouble summoning a fully-geared Tartarian every turn, if not more, perhaps after a bit of prep work.
After all that, I don't think Man would have been an issue. My biggest worry with Man was his ridiculous array of forts - my plan was to do a huge alpha strike where I Cloud Trapezed/Teleported a dozen Tartarians and Chayots directly into his territory, locking down most or all of his forts before he could actually react. From there it's just a matter of cleaning up the provinces, killing whatever troops he had - and if he'd had anything SC-caliber I probably would have seen it fighting Atlantis - and finishing the sieges.
(There's a remote spell you can cast to help shatter fort walls, and I was expecting to get a lot of use out of it.)
Overall, I'm satisfied with my play. I could have done better, but I could have done a hell of a lot worse.
Would I play LA Arco again?
Hell yeah!
A lot of people seem to think LA Arco is boring. I don't get this for a second. Let's see, we've got:
* Access to almost every type of magic in the game, all of them available in communions.
* More Mind Hunts than you know what to do with, without the normal issues that Mind Hunts have.
* Easy access to literally all three of the big end-game strategies - clams, Wish, and Tartarians.
* Ultra-cheap Scrying.
* ELEPHANTS. Which are awesome for two reasons. First, they give you a crazy-fast early expand. And second, they're goddamn elephants!
I'll admit I might be missing something here, but when I hear people talk about races like Mictlan, it's all "oh yeah, they're awesome, they can summon huge numbers of demons!"
"Okay, what else do they do?"
"Well, that's pretty much it. The demon thing. I mean, you get a lot of demons. Holy shit, so many demons. But yeah it's basically all demons."
I gotta say, I prefer LA Arco's diversity.
And that, I'm sorry to say, is the end of the thread. It's been fun, but the war is finished, and Mrs. Butterworth needs to settle down to a long enjoyable life of owning the entire world forever.
I'll be leaving it open for a bit before archiving it. Thanks for reading, everyone!