Part 179: Hinnom - ASCENSION
srb posted:
Great, another update! I've been reading some of the older Dom 3 LPs in the meanwhile, and this little tidbit posted by builds in the first Legoman LP seems rather relevant to what happened in this game:
Bonus: He was playing Lanka.
Hi. My name is builds character and I... I have a problem. (hi builds!) I'm an early war addict.
Below is the summary I posted in the dom3 thread of that game (Ascension). I wish Legoman had finished the LP. That's still the most fun game of dom3 I've ever played. The level of in game scheming and all the shifting alliances were absolutely absurd.
me! posted:
ASCENSION
You might remember this game from such LPs as "shit, I started an LP but forgot I was lazy!" and "stop fucking posting pictures of monkeys you jackass you're going to get this thread closed even though we haven't had an update in a month and a half!"
I'm here to tell you what happened.
First, here is a picture of the map and the important graphs. Following are some of the super awesome summons that Lanka gets.
That tells the story of the game more or less.
That's the big gun. He autocasts darkness and has an aoe fatigue effect.
There's the muscle. With four weapon slots you can do a tremendous amount with these guys. They're only 75 blood slaves to summon three and then 20 n gems to gift of reason them.
I really should have been summoning these far earlier and more frequently. They're Lanka's mid and late game engine. They make amazing thugs (they can fly, they have innate blood vengeance and horror and can bless themselves and cloud trapeze - not to mention being able to blood hunt) can blood hunt and are upkeep free which is important when you've switched entirely to blood.
These guys were my eyes and ferried my blood slaves about. I named all the blood slave ferries after various modes of locomotion.
Enough pictures, on to the wall of text. I'm just going to touch briefly on everything that I knew about that happened in this game. The other players are more than welcome to correct me where appropriate and to add anything else they wish. This game was unusual in that everyone was on IRC and there was a remarkable amount of smart teamwork (and by smart I mean no sandbagging which happens all the time because everyone is stupid and does not understand that the goal of the game is to win and not to lose later [Ed. yay editorializing!]).
Year 1
Sauro invades Vanheim. This war doesn't end until year two. This is the beginning of Lilli getting rushed early in every game ever.
I rush Pan. I do not realize that my palankasha can be banished easily by flavahbeast's h2 dryad banishment spam. It sucks.
Niefel rushes TC. TC gets Atlantis to join in the war against Niefel because TC is willing to grant Atlantis a foothold on land but Niefel isn't.
Mictlan rushes Yomi.
Year 2
Sauro eventually finishes off Vanheim, although not before lilli absolutely slaughters dawkish's androphags with bladewind. Sauro and I agree to be friends forever and protect each other's borders. This alliance lasts until I think we're the only two viable contenders left.
I figure out that my kala-mukha warriors can not be banished. I also convince irony.or.death/marverni that he should help me kill flavahbeast so he has to fight me later instead of flavahbeast. I wish I'd been more clever and recruited kala-mukha warriors as soon as I decided to rush pan. Once I got them there wasn't really anything he could do to stop me and he ended up being the first person to die.
Mictlan still can't kill Yomi. Everyone laughs at him because it is delicious deity/duck and cover. Little do we realize it's all part of his clever plan to be totally ignored as he builds up over the next thirty turns.
Atlantis and Niefelheim and TC all stalemate. Due in no small part to Niefel having a six thousand hp jarl prophet dual wielding frost brands. They eventually settle for peace.
Year 3
Once Pan and Vanheim are dead I try to figure out what I can do to win next. Marverni is huge and has tons of infrastructure and research and has for many turns. Sauro is huge and has tons of infrastructure and research and has only just gotten there. It's like the USA vs. China. It's at this point that I make my long term alliance with Sauro. I do it after iod blows me off a couple times when I try to talk to him about plans for invading folks. With an alt site it's just pride. Without one it's hubris. [Ed.]
I make my second huge mistake here. As you can see I've been lagging in research already and I launch my attack without researching cloud trapeze or mistform. Please take a moment to laugh at how stupid I am. I easily kill his bull with palankasha and kala-mukha who continue to be tiny murder beasts. Then the druids come and with the druids come the asteroids. Oh god the asteroids. I still have gifts from heaven ptsd. Marverni strikes back with a vengeance and I spend a great deal of year three getting absolutely hammered by teleporting druids. At one point or another he sieges every fort I own except pan's cap.
Fortunately for me, nobody wants to see Marverni take me out and become even more powerful. Prior to attacking I had, I thought, forced folks hand by saying "I am attacking Marverni. If you don't help they will slaughter me and you will have lost on turn 26." TC, Niefel and Mictlan all agreed to attack as well. I told them when I was attacking and they all agreed to attack too. So I attacked and TC and Niefel waited two or three turns for Marverni to start really porting druids in and slaughtering me before attacking. Mictlan laughed at me and kept building up. So that was pretty awesome. But they did finally come in and I finally researched mistform. Raksharaja with mistform, flying shoes, a brand and a w9e9n6 bless absolutely murder druids. Also three on one is basically impossible to fight if the three commit fully, which we did. At this point TC and I were allied and Xanrick was a lot of fun to plan with.
During this war, Mictlan and Sauro steadily built up. Atlantis spars with Sauro a bit and discovers that Sauro has a construction site and a blood 40 site. At this point I think I would have been within my rights to invade Sauro, alliance notwithstanding, but I didn't and I wouldn't and it drove folks absolutely crazy. Certain ones were ranting about how I was throwing the game for Sauro and we should all stop playing and I was just a bit player ruining everything and a bloo bloo bloo my pixel mans.
Not to worry though, I had a plan. I'd been fighting pretty hard the entire game and was pretty weak although I had an abundance of thugs that nobody really wanted to fight. It wasn't until killing Marverni that I was even able to set up a blood economy. Anyway, I figured my best chance of winning was to take a little while to build up (blood is greatbroken because you can turn gold into slaves and then slaves into more slaves), then grab a ton of land while Sauro just stagnated. Then either be powerful enough on my own to win or team up with another player to take him down. Until then there was a bit of an unspoken three way alliance between TC, Niefel and I keeping Sauro from attacking any one of us.
Year 4
Sauro began killing Atlantis with Wendigo and Ice Devils.
With Marverni finished off, I built up a little and then Niefel, TC and I agreed that we needed to fight someone. Niefel pushed hard for attacking Sauro but I thought Sauro would be a very tough fight and that Mictlan would just be able to build up (even more, jesus), and then kill us all easily while we ground ourselves down against Sauro. [Ed. and the small matter of the alliance.]
I refused to attack Sauro and explained that we could all three easily take Mictlan quickly and then turn to Sauro. TC even agreed to cede Niefel a path to Mictlan so Niefel could get some territory as well.
The war against Mictlan went fairly well initially. I'm honestly not sure what Mictlan had been doing all that time by himself. He had something like 600 jaguar warriors and 300 eagle warriors but I figured my sacreds ought to be able to chew through those with no problem (w9e4n4 bless instead of f9). Plus they were all mostly down by TC and Niefel. Anyway, as you can see from the chart the war went pretty well for me. TC was making progress as well although it was a bit slower without being able to port a bunch of thugs in all at once.
Then Niefel backstabbed TC. This was a bad mistake but I can see why he did it. He thought that his only chance was to take down TC quickly while TC was busy with Mictlan. This was a mistake because the only thing keeping Sauro back was the possibility of a three way alliance against him. Oops? Sauro pounced, TC turned back and Niefel was annihilated in a few turns.
Once Sauro attacked Niefel I didn't have much choice. We'd been beating Mictlan [Ed. Oh look, a committed dogpile works again.], TC was quite weakened by Niefel's backstab and Mictlan's counterattacks and at this point it seemed to me that the two strongest nations were me and Sauro with Sauro a fair bit ahead.
TC, Mictlan and I all agreed to team up to fight Sauro.
I think our victory over Sauro was inevitable, although Dawkish was certainly making us bleed for it. TC busted out all the artifacts and EDM summons, Mictlan started sending horrors and raining toads and I was raiding.
Then TC cast Arcane Nexus. Mictlan immediately put up Astral Corruption (with a fair few extra gems from Sauro I bet). After losing a nasty battle (damn you rigor mortis! I thought my bless would overcome the fatigue but how wrong I was) on the same turn I agreed to a land cease fire (for five or ten turns, I don't recall) with Sauro. I had a few of his provinces and was planning on taking all of the sea. He had his hands full with TC, and I wanted to take the opportunity to build up a bit more.
And that's when Xanrick moved never to be seen again. This game is easily the most fun game of dom3 I've played because everyone was on IRC and chatting and there were so many shifting alliances and twists and turns.
Everyone agreed that without Xanrick the game just wasn't the same so after waiting for him to come back for two months we agreed on a pantheon victory. The great and magnanimous Winston Churchill will rule the monkeys forever and ever while Engineered Suffering practices his dark arts in secret in the jungles of the south (no monkeys allowed) and the jaguar warriors of Mictlan sacrifice virgins to the unmoving stone idol A Great Head.
All hail Winston Churchill, Lord of Monkeys, Bearer of Bananas, the King of Poo-Flinging.
