I would be so mad if i was the last opponent at the end of the match

Best wish for baby #2

You can stop buying the wheat from SillyMan now....

I've never seen someone find so many Undead Staffs. Except for some crummy tarot pulls at towns on certain stages, you had some great luck. Would watch an "evil playthrough" - though I don't know how you could make it more evil than this, lol.

I was surprised that in combat against his huge stack not one samurai went against cavalry. I would have expected that undamaged strength 8 with first strike is better defender than injured strength 9 musket even with shock promotion on cavalry.

Re: Finding all that stuff. The original box game had that paper item chart, which had hints for most of those items.

Frecking RNG giving a flawless win at 20%. Unbelievable!

You are getting insane luck with those item drops late game.

Yay! Finally more Civ IV! :)

Doll Masters lose their shine in the later levels, as upper tier units have more Physical resistance, which is what their Acid attack does. Still good against mage-types, but they lack the versatility of the Wizard tree.

The Alignment change formula is based on your current level, the level of the enemy you killed, the type of enemy you killed, and your own unit's current alignment. If your own unit has 0 alignment, it already gets a -3, for any enemy killed. Killing an undead is a +3, but unless your level is lower, it will be a wash.

Agree re: dragons are terrible. The later dragons should have three attacks (or more!) in the front. Also, they should have been High Sky. High Sky alone would make me always include them.

The backrow Paladin with healing is there to kill your undead - which, I guess you aren't playing with.

The Dinner Bell can be a good way to recall units you don't need anymore before 12 noon comes. Then you don't have to pay them!

You could put some expensive units with your Opinion Leader. He deploys free, so it can cut costs a little.

Vampires are good in the front. At night, they get bloodsuck, an HP drain ability. Works great with high STR and low ALI. Tanking a Kinght's ALI can be tough, but Evil Ones (whom you have dissed often in previous stages) can also become vampires! This is a "secret", in that the class page that came with the game did not have this method listed. And in the day, coffins take almost no damage and are easy to carry, allowing some low sky units to keep low sky when otherwise they would not be (Sylphs and the Angel family). Back row Seraphim with front row vampires? Yes!

Around the 17 minute mark, you fight 3 demons and 2 ninja. You could have wiped the unit (and voided the wasted attacks) if you had opened with a damage tarot, of which you have several.

The Star card is amazing in battle. It can cause most attacks to miss you, and most of yours to hit. Handy vs. high AGI units and certain bosses.

Inevitably, you will end up over-levelled usually. To counter this, I have troops with weaker stats do too much, taking the ALI and CHA hit, but then retire (re: dismiss) them. The Knights Aisha comes with are an example. you aren't going to keep them, so if they can't reach Paladin, it's no loss.

Typically, I add a Ravenman from Lake Jannenia (spelling?) to most of my unit to make the low sky. This helps cancel out the snow movement or other bad movement types of the other characters in the unit. Once you experience making everything low sky or high sky, you never go back.

Super jealous you still have your physical copy. One of my regrets...

Overall I think this set was fun but it was really hurt by the bad balence and mostly just felt like filler

I think the draw of the Dragoner classline is that they can recruit dragons and such. Of course, those are badly designed as well, so...

I always get bad cards too whenever I draw a World card early in a stage.

Those Kraken get crazy stat boosts when fighting in the water. All units get an advantage in their favourite terrain type, and a mallus when fighting in hated terrain. For the Octo family, they are at a huge advantage over infantry who hate the water.

To train Dollmages from Fighters, spending a few levels as a Wizard is worth considering for their superior INT stat growth.

Pumpkins do a "half damage" attack. So, if a bad guy has 100 hp, the first Pumpkin hit does 50, but the second will do 25. So, Strong or Best with Pumpkins. I think they can also hit undead too... EDIT: lol, you mention this later on!

Happy to see this played in 2024. One of the all time great games.

Is there a completely enclosed valley between Brennus and Saladin?

Cuirassiers are almost as good as cavalry against longbows and samurai units because they ignore first strikes which cavalry does not, but cavalry is way better against just about everything else, especially pikes.

2:30:20, discount if AI has tech? I have never before heard that. How does that work?

2:05:09. I once was hunting for Great Prophet for a shrine and game kept giving me engineers because I had two wonders that boosted engineer. Chance to get one was about 5% and I got five of them. No Prophets with ~90% chance. Game was trolling me. Not that engineers are bad, but I would really wanted to get a prophet.

Wonder if a Montezuma/Shaka diplomatic victory would be a fun thing to go for after this series.

So scummy! I had to stop watching

Looking fwd to this series!

In this video - Sullla playing the farmer's gambit war...

So, say when you declared war last session, you encountered only one longbow and three axes defending your target city. Would you have still replayed the turn? My guess: probably not. Every game is winnable if you are willing to replay your mistakes.

Best thing to do if you declare on Toku is to bait him into wasting units attacking into you before taking cities.

Sulla paying Saladin for wheat reminds me of the Roman grain dole lol

24y10m

The first augment that gives you shops full of 4 and 5 stars every round seems strong early. Looks like you didnt need it clearly, but I would have been tempted.

Bad timing on the dow tbh. Longbow north of Nara could end your game. Also I wouldn't have went in with my stack, but would've instead let the AI move in

At the end when your capital started starving was probably you losing wheat down in the south. Was giving you 2 health everywhere.

More roads on the border with Toku maybe helpful for later when you are trying to bring up reserves.

It seems like waiting for one spy to look at Japan's defenses would have helped.

For thombnail you could put "You're winner" from cult classic.

uploaded 22 second ago :o

I just love that testing is going into the map design. Love the design. If anything maybe shrink the size by about 15% and see if that allows conquest to compete with cultural and spaceship?

I think the map is potentially fine - I'd be really interested to see what happens with more aggressive leaders. The consensus in these comments seems to be that any econ leader will inevitably win this map whatever else happens, but I'm not so sure, and I do like the postponement of the wars caused by relatively late contact between the civs - early wars on the normal blobby maps are just so random and destroy the chances of 2 civs from turn 80. A bit of adjustment to the actual size and placement of the capitals might also be in order.

ON Ultra P{oor planets, I'm pretty sure you're a lot better off force-growing people before you build factories. I don't think ECO or TECH are affected by Poor/Rich.