Part 87: Turn 75 and wrapup

Turn 75

Just to recap:

So do we do it? Do we snatch this throne away from U's grasp stalling the end of the game and allowing us to stage an epic comeback?


Of course not lol. We had absolutely no chance. Incredibly buff imps swoop in turn 1 and stop us from getting any spells off before killing all of our remaining ancient clowns. Even if we'd thought to bring a staff of storms or whatever it wouldn't have made a difference. Thousands of years of clowning tradition, gone in an instant.



U went on to successfully storm the Chasos fort but we don't get to see that.


U get one final attack in with their latest game of summons:


But this is of course the one time I actually remember to script my god


And then, at the start of the next turn,



Unknown to me they actually had another army attacking the ant throne and this put them on 8 required out of 7. So even if our last stand had somehow worked, U would have still won the game anyway.


If you want a vision of the future, imagine a foot stamping on a clown face - forever.


Wrapup
First off, huge congratulations to Xanrick - they did a great job of always staying second on my priority list until it was too late to matter. Marooning my god on that summoned fort was an act of genius.

Thanks also to everybody else who played (just going off of discord names here):
Anglia: @atelier
Chasos: @Baron OhShi
Eljudnir: @weedzmin
Fennoscandia: @PurpleDCLXVI
Iram: @crystal green samog
Karanaac: @bo
Myrmecos: @Kitfox
Ssaon'raha: @Jkey Boy

A massive thanks to Mu also, for making clowns.dm - if you're interested in more of his work he has a video LP of his tendrils.dm nation in another mixed mod game like this one here. Thanks to all of you, the readers, for sticking with me through this multi-year project. I now no longer wonder why the 100+ turn LPs always get abandoned.

To address the elephant in the room of balance: hellenika nations are explicitly not designed to be played with more "reasonable" mod nations and are only designed to be balanced against each other. The author, aethernomad, explicitly told this to me back when I was working on Domingler for the first time. Accordingly we no longer allow hellenika nations in these mixed-mod games instead having hellenika-only games. It's absolutely not just U that is a problem here.

Having said that, I still feel like this game could have been winnable so I don't think it was that bad. My anemic midgame, bad scales, and non-existent lategame strategies, as well as ignoring U until they were actively throne rushing, due to constantly being in wars I didn't want to be in all contributed too. The map was an interesting choice and certainly nice to look at but the candle transport thing was a really poor substitute for wraparound.

Xanrick also kindly posted the winner's graphs:
Me and Anglia were ahead on provinces for almost all of the game until U's offensive into Chasos. Kitfox did indeed mobilise right at the end and lost his perfectly flat graph.


Anglia's great scales meant that they were ahead on income for the entirety of the game even though we had the same number of provinces as them, and U was always below any of the living nations due to their penalty.


Our bad sitesearching left us far behind Anglia here too, and you can see U catching up with their gemgens and territory gains.


As for research well this was always a shitshow for us from start to finish. I really really should have prioritised researchers over enormous clown college but what are you going to do.


lol.


I still very much like an imprisoned build for clowns, larger is great and magic weapons really showed their worth. Without rocks I could have ditched the fire resistance and the blood strength, getting much better scales and I'd probably recommend that you do so if you try this build. S8E4N4 Red Nose would be a good place to start. Low-light vision ended up being a much better choice than poison resistance for me due to all the use of darkness late game and the heavy cave warfare early game.

Uh what else? If you are interested in making a mixed mod game like this then check out the tool I made to do it, called Domingler. I honestly only started running these mod games to test it.

Please join us in the discord here and for a different style of LP see filthincarnate's ongoing diplomacy (something I sorely needed more of) heavy LP here.

Oh also I did this LP by saving the turn files while I took the turns, and then going back later and taking screenshots while I wrote the posts. I like this method a lot, since it makes it much harder to lose information - no "oh shit I forgot to take a screenshot of that" and adds a lot less burden to the turn itself. There are downsides of course, we had a few lost turn files, I probably would have played better if I had been writing out my turns at the time, and sometimes illwinter's patches forced me to get "creative" faking screenshots so they'd show what happened at the time instead of what would happen now. At one point I had to make a custom mod that re-added the miss chance to magic duel! Overall I definitely prefer it and would do it the same way again were I to do another dominions LP, which I absolutely will not.

There will be one final episode of Jokes Not Told for the last clown summon and the items, many of which would have been useful if I had the spare gems for them! I will not be doing nation overviews for Iram or Chasos at this point.