OK, so I just got done playing a game with my custom side "Misfits", and it did OK against lvl2 AIs. It had some defects though (slow start, two mostly useless units), so I came up with "Misfits2" and started a new game against lvl3 AIs to try it out.

Immediately I notice the computer has placed me in a bad spot -- there's only a small number of cities anywhere near my capital, and they're not that close and there's a bunch of nasty terrain in between. Then I notice that one of the AI capitals has a tight/neat row of lots of cities right next to it -- not cool. So it's already looking like a poor test (to see if "Misfits2" can get a quicker start than "Misfits" did), because starting on this map is going to be painful no matter what.

But that's not the worst of it. I quickly find out that my capital city is completely surrounded by impassable terrain. (It's not immediately adjacent to my capital city, but it does fully surround it so it is impossible for non-flying units to get to any other city on the map.) And unfortunately my side does not include any buildable flyers -- all I have for flyers is green dragons in allies slot #4.

So, not seeing any way to actually win this map, I decide if I can just survive until turn 100 I'll call it a "win". By turn 35 everyone's declared war on me. Somewhere in the 30s the first attack on my capital arrived. It was a hero stack, but was easily repelled. Somehow they managed to dump some dwarf runners just outside my city, and I ignored them at first, but they didn't attack next turn so I attacked and killed them. I get hopeful that maybe I could finish some "killing enemies" quests and gather exp from defending, but that was it for attacks -- I made it to turn 100 (and well beyond) with no more attacks.

By that point, I had figured out a couple of potential strategies for actually winning. I replaced some of my troops with mercenaries. Since mercenaries don't charge upkeep, this increased my net gold income. I figured I would try to save up enough gold and buy an item providing (full stack) flight, then I could try to start attacking. I had purchased a couple of decent items by the time I got a hero offer -- and the hero had a couple of green dragons. So I get the hero, and notice my upkeep didn't go up. So that's cool -- dragons are expensive, and allies are expensive, but apparently when you get allies with a hero they're zero upkeep. So a new strategy forms -- save up and buy heroes with green dragons until I have enough to go attack.

Unfortunately I then notice that this hero with two green dragons on the offer screen only actually has one green dragon. What happened to my other dragon? Things then start getting worse. Subsequent hero offers don't work at all. The offer shows up, I have the gold, I hit accept, and nothing. I get no hero, no allies, and my gold doesn't change. This happens many times. Thinking maybe it's because my capital is too "full", I move a bunch of stuff out of my capital city (and even make sure there's a blank square between the capital and where I park them) such that I have two completely empty squares in my capital. Still the hero offers are broken. (Maybe I have to disband one of my heroes before I can successfully get more?) And mercenaries offers have become broken as well -- when I hit "accept" for mercenaries not only don't I get any mercenaries but it *does* take my gold.

Well, there's always that flight item strategy... except that's not working so far either, because I keep seeing the same two items for sale over and over again. (If I buy those will I start seeing new items? Or will I just get no more merchant offers after that?)

According to the "winners" report I was in sixth place for a while, but now I'm in third -- purely because of others getting eliminated (not by me obviously). The two remaining AIs are allied with each other. They stopped doing anything interesting a long time ago. One of them was doing one quest after another, but then just stopped. I suspect the AI may have gotten a quest which requires it to attack me, and it can't figure out how to do that. The other AI has flyers all over the place (two of its closest cities to mine have 17 griffons each, as do a number of its other cities), but isn't attacking me for some reason. (They *are* both at war with me. I guess it must be the same reason -- it can't figure out how to attack? But it *did* attack before -- though that was with a hero and I don't know that that AI has any heroes any more.)

I'm now at turn 450. (The turns go by really quick -- about two seconds each now, except when the computer decides to stall for some reason.) I think I might be calling this one a stalemate. (I guess I'll try buying those two items and/or disbanding a hero first to see if that shakes anything loose.)

BTW, if anyone wants to see the map, it's a 128x160 random map with default settings, seed = 7994. My capital is "Dralaltor" in the middle of the mountains in the upper-right part of the map.

(Despite the above, things are generally good. After logging in to warlorders.com I see: "Last Visit Date: 29 Apr 2011", and I don't think I've played any warlords3 since 2008 due to being on a 64 bit computer [so I could play 1,2 and 4, but no 3]. I finally bit the bullet and used a VM to get DLR to install and have been having some fun with it since.)

Interesting. This is against the AI and with razing off correct?

Slayer: Yes, it's against the AI. Razing is set to "On Capture". I could try a razing approach, but several cities were already razed earlier in the game (by opposing AIs which are now dead) and the AI rebuilt them. I don't know if I could raze them faster than the AI can rebuild. If I end up having to give up on my current strategy of take-and-hold though, I may try that as a backup strategy. (And if anyone wants to peruse a save game at any given point, I've got 20+ "perma-saves" so far.)


UPDATE:

It would appear that if you only have one city, you can only have two heroes. As soon as I disbanded one of my current heroes, I was able to successfully hire another. However, I was *also* hitting some kind of unit limit -- I would get the hero, but none of the troops that were displayed in the offer screen. So in addition to disbanding a hero I had to disband units. In fact, I had to disband lots of units -- apparently the units must be weighted by their strength or cost or something (with one green dragon being worth a lot of weakling units). I eventually accumulated 8 green dragons and 8 other various units (including my hero) at which point I couldn't enlist any more green dragons. (Hiring a hero with green dragons would give me the hero, but not the dragons. Thinking back on it, maybe I could have tried again but with a hero with only a single green dragon rather than two in case there was some all-or-nothing logic going on there, but I'm sure I had seen a contrary case before so I don't know.)

I then started saving up gold (preparing for the "big attack" -- once I had more cities [which I presumed would increase my hero/unit limits] I would want to have gold ready to hire more heroes+allies/mercenaries). I also hired what mercenaries the game would let me purchase (I got some wights and heavy infantry, but it wouldn't let me buy a stack of giants, and eventually wouldn't let me buy any more heavy infantry either -- though again I could have waited around and tried with smaller offer-stack sizes, maybe I could have gotten a small number more of them).

I then figured I would start producing regular units -- get a few full stacks together so I could quickly take multiple cities. I knew I would be under massive attack very quickly, and needed enough cities to build fodder fast enough to be above the replacement rate (to avoid death by attrition). Unfortunately, it is at this point that I find out that the unit limit that was interfering with hiring mercenaries and heroes+allies *also* applies to production -- the time for a minotaur to pop out came and went, and no minotaur. Ouch.

So I have a total of about 32 units, I'm on the biggest random map, my enemies are allied together and own every other city on the map (aka a lot of production capacity), and they have 17+ units defending each of those cities. Time to kick some ass!

Oh, did I mention I am now a bit beyond turn 1300? Saving up for those green dragons took a while. (Gross income = 35, upkeep = 11, net income = 24.) Also, I purchased all of the items that were offered for sale. (I did start seeing other items once I bought the ones I had seen many times before, but I think it might have had more to do with having enough gold for the other items rather than some type of purchase prerequisite.) I think the merchant may be done selling stuff to me though, because I managed to ramp my gold all the way up to 5,000 (in preparation for attack, as mentioned above) without getting any more merchant offers.

I took my "main" hero (with all of 2 xp, but a lot of magic items giving some decent bonuses) and 7 green dragons and attacked a city with 17 ogres defending. Lost a few dragons taking it. Immediately flew the other dragon there, bought some dwarven infantry production, and started vectoring units from my capital city. Of course the 450+ units my enemies have sitting around start a mass migration towards this one city. I got a +5/-3 combat bonus wedge going for most battles, but even so I'm taking significant losses. I've taken out two of their heroes (had an assassination quest for one of them, the quest reward replenished my heavy infantry supply) and got two nice piles of items in the process. (Oh, *now* I get a flight item!) Their army counts are dropping pretty fast. I'm hoping once this first wave is done (they use up their pre-existing stock and have to then rely on production), I can take another city and let a secondary hero take over the one I'm currently defending. My main hero now has a number of extra items that can be transferred to help out with that. Then I'll be able to produce 3 fodder per turn instead of 2. Between less attacks and more fodder production, I *might* just make break-even. (Some more quest completions and mercenaries for sale wouldn't hurt -- I'm still sitting on a few thousand in gold.)

I got kind of tired of fighting wave after wave of attacks today though, so I'm going to shelve the game for a while. I'm sure you'll all be sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens!

Turtle wrote:


You really don't seem to have got this game, no offense meant.

The AI possesses a number of fundamental weaknesses which regardless of the map one can pretty reliably exploit. The No1 weakness of AI is that it cannot do anything but vector stacks around and send them to attack a small number of target cities. This makes it very vulnrable to fully augmented hero stacks of death. You can outmanuevre it and wreck their cities, wearing them down slowly.

If the AI rebuilds a city, remember it still has to rebuy all the existing units on top of the steep rebuilding costs for the city itself. Thing of razing as looting+800gp extra gold cost on the side.

Turtle wrote:


You disbanded a hero! The aim here is to get high-level heroes, like Level 10 heroes and combine a mixture of powerful creatures to create a superfast, superstrong stack that can wreck several enemy cities per term (looting or razing depending on options).

Turtle wrote:


Turn 1300? Are you making this up?

A Warlords game should be over between 40-60 turns. A game that lasts longer than this is unusual indeed. You've probably won the world record.

The AI focuses there attacks on a limited number of cities. What you need to do is fortify those cities with hordes of low level units, bolstered by bonus carrying units.

The Green Dragon for instance carries a massive Fear+5. This means it will always take -1 away from it's enemies in any battle. Place a Green Dragon in each threatened city and combined with the fortifications alone you are getting a +4 strength advantage. This means your basic low-level units can kill far more powerful units.

Divide your armies up thusly.

1. Cheap efficiant units for defending.
2. Bonus/penalty carrying units to be deployed to bolster defenders.
3. High powered, expensive units.

The latter should only be used for offensive purposes and should form the core of hero-stacks. These stacks should be used to wreck enemy cities and disrupt the flow of reinforcements. Once you have done this you will be rolling in units and you can then begin to vector those units to new areas to defend your heroes gains.

Oh and finally FORGET about money. Get money by looting enemy cities, DON'T try to save it up but spend it to buy bonus units as soon as it is earned.

A particular reason to do this is that if you have lots of money and lose a city a proportion of that money is transferred from you to your enemies. And the same applies in reverse.

Hey Slayer,

Did you notice his situation about his starting location/City and his army set?
He is surrounded by mountains and has only access to flyers as a Green Dragon in the 4th ally slot.

That's why his game is crazy.

Hey Slayer, my starting city is completely walled in by mountains. See attachd "turtled1" image (higher res version). Although it looks like you might be able to walk out the right hand side, you actually can't. That's why this thread is titled "too turtled" -- having a "hard shell" of mountains surrounding my city is too much turtling even for me. Also if you look closely you can see that I really am at turn 1318.

The attached "turtled2" image (higher res version) shows the one city I have taken so far, and many more enemy stacks on their way to attack me. (That annoying elephant stack is standing on a pile of items a hero dropped -- I'm hoping they don't keep parking stacks there every turn because I want to get those items.)

My normal (and preferred) play style is defensive -- I tend to "turtle", hence my nick. I'm a constructor, not a destructor. I'm nice to my virtual citizens (when I can manage it). I'm sure that would be a losing strategy against aggressive/skilled human players, but it tends to work well enough against the AI.

If I end up having no choice but going on a razing spree, I'll at least want to try to hold that 2nd city so it can continue pulling troops away from defense. If I lose it and the AIs go back to defending cities with 17+ units each (like they were before I attacked), I don't know that I can replenish my green dragon supply (remember, I lost 3 of them just taking this one city) faster than the AI can rebuild the cities I raze.

The terrain is really irrelavant. Mountains aren't a problem because of vectoring, once you control a city outside the mountains you can vector armies over the mountains, that's the only possible AI target for ground units.

If anything your mountain capital is a serious blessing as it reduces the number of possible points of attack for (most) AI stacks. It should not limit your play options at all because you can vector units OVER mountains.

Your normal and preferred style may be defensive, but as the saying goes no plan survives contact with the enemy. You must be somewhat flexible but here goes. Also you have to do this properly, 'turtling' requires you establish control of a core base sufficiant to not only hold the enemy at bay but also to build up your counter-attack force, this you have clearly not done.

What you need to do is fully overload the AI's single city target (4 stacks) and place one powerful hero in the city combined. The aim is ideally to reduce the battle to full bonuses. At the same time send another flying hero stack to capture or raze other cities. Destroy the 5 cities to the west and capture the other defensible cities to the east that are further away.

You need to do too things, firstly increase your turtling base and reduce enemy resources so that you can build up your final base.

Also raze one of the cities to the north-west of your cities. You hope to defend fewer cities as it allows you to concentrate your cities and bonuses. The AI will relentlessly hound a single city while you help yourself to the defensible (isolated) cities while destroying the less defensible cities.

Remember the AI cannot target your heroes in the field unless they have another hero stack. Also remember the defensive value of scorched earth, the longer the enemy must march their armies towards you the more it costs them, because it is cheaper to keep armies in cities than out on the field. If you're lucky you'll be able to catch them in deficit and their armies will desert en-route to your base.

Stoy wrote:


Ah that makes sense. The side in question on random map 7994 has plenty of flyers so it doesn't seem to be in trouble inherantly, that's the confusing bit, he's not using his side's default army list. The lesson seems then to be always to give your custom side decent fliers available as non-allies.

The pure take-and-hold strategy didn't work (this try). I might try it again some time because I failed to use a couple of key assets I had. One was my priest which I should have at least tried to level up enough to get a bless spell going on my fodder. The +1 from bless on top of the +5/-3 combat bonus wedge I already had going would have been nice. The other (bigger one) was that I obtained a Necromancy item but unfortunately didn't really know what such an item did until I saw it in action later in the game -- it only works when attacking while I was only defending at that point. If I retry I'll have to attack their stacks in the field as they come so I can convert them to undead and then use the undead to defend my 2nd city and possibly expand. But I'll leave that for some other time. (It probably still won't be enough -- when the AI switched from using its available stock to having to depend on production the rate of enemy troops arriving didn't slow down as I expected -- the AI seemed to be able to produce units faster than I would have thought given the number of cities it had and how many multi-turn units the AI was using.)

As it played out this time, when my fodder (dwarven and heavy infantry) was exhausted and the enemy started eating into the few minotaurs I had, I retreated back to my mountain fortress. Taking the 2nd city (and holding it for a while) was not a total waste of time though -- I think I got every magic item on the entire map from their heroes sacrificing themselves upon the shores of my defenses. I ended up getting not one, but two flying items. Having a flying item meant I no longer had to see if I could save up for green dragons to raze cities faster than the AI can rebuild -- I could instead attack with produced troops (specifically minotaurs, which have a +2 city combat bonus). It also meant I could bring other troops to provide bonuses, such as a siege engine. Because I had two flight items I could even use a secondary hero to ferry replacement troops between my capital and my primary hero and keep my main hero stack busier.

However, after just a few cities and no action from the AI, rapid razing was just rubbing me the wrong way. I switched to taking "raze city" quests instead -- at least then I could (try to) pretend that the "just following orders" excuse is a valid reason for burning cities to the ground. That slowed things down a bit, but meant I got more bonuses along the way. (I chose mana crystals when I could so I could power up mighty feast, song of life, bless, haste.) More bonuses also meant I didn't have to raze so many cities (which I don't like doing) before switching to a more "constructive" strategy. Once I was ready, I took two heroes and used them to take-and-hold two cities. After that I started reconstructing all of the cities I previously destroyed. The AI was also reconstructing cities, but was way slower at it than me (probably in part due to it wasting gold on heroes that it would then suicide on me). During this period I didn't take any AI cities except for one where the AI was picking up a site bonus that I wanted.

After every city on the map was rebuilt, I started taking AI cities. The AI gave up after I took two of its cities.

some final stats:
turn AI gives up: 1691
my cities: 28
total cities: 40
upkeep: 419 (16 units per city plus about 4 hero stacks)
income: 1807
units lost: 170
allies lost: 4 (3 green dragons taking the 2nd city, 1 defending it before vectored troops arrived)
heroes lost: 0
enemy units killed: 1640
enemy allies killed: 34
enemy heroes killed: 23
battles won: 287
battles lost: 1 (that "battle" was the 2nd city after I abandoned it, leaving no defenders)
heroes disbanded: 8 (7 farming green dragons; a 2nd alchemist that turned out to be useless)

Some things learned:
* Unlike what this page would have you believe, Alchemists do not have an "Income +7/City" ability. (I'm playing vanilla 1.02. A lot of stuff on that page appears to be wrong. Other pages hosted by other people say different things, and are wrong in different ways. Even the in-game docs appear to be wrong in spots.)
* Priests' Bless spell is "sticky". (Normally I run units through a bless site, but there was no bless site on this map. I happened to notice that bless was not showing up in the "spells report" even though I cast it, and then realized it had no upkeep, tested that units could leave the priest and still remain blessed even after a "new turn", and started using my priest as a bless site replacement.)
* Alchemists' engineering skill is capped at 6 (after that the ability is not offered even when you have plenty of AP available), and doesn't stack with other alchemists.
* Thieves' income bonus does stack with other thieves. (I don't know if it has a cap -- if it does I didn't hit it and I had one thief giving +30 gold/city. Yes, that might be excessive, especially with the 2nd thief giving another +10 gold/city. But at some point I just started trying stuff out to see how it worked because the docs don't say.)
* The hero with the engineering bonus does not need to be at the building site to get the bonus.
* What Necromancy items do in this game (kill enemies by attacking -> make undead units for you).
* I should probably use heroes more than I have in the past for things besides just combat bonuses. (A contributing factor here is probably the bad docs -- it's just frustrating to pick a hero type for some skill, go through the trouble of designing a side with them, save up the gold to buy them, wait for them to be offered, spend the time leveling them up -- to then find out they don't actually have the one skill you wanted in the first place. Let's just say that's not really an incentive to go through the whole thing again.) One of the things I faulted in my original "Misfits" side was having a slow start, but at least part of that was due to not questing for "supplemental income". (I think I had forgotten how easy quests were relative to how much they paid off, so I wasn't doing them. When I broke out the old DLR manual to try to work out strategy for this play, the quests appendix reminded me.)



I disagree. First, why design a side around a 1 in a 1,000 chance map (or whatever it is)? Second, this map combined with this side presented me with new and unusual challenges that I then had to think about in order to overcome. As someone who plays games for entertainment (and not for money or as some kind of ego trip or something), that's a good thing. (The bit about undocumented hero and unit limits that cause recruitment to silently fail though, that part wasn't very nice.)

BTW, your assistance with combat bonuses and vectoring was predictably not necessary -- if you read the thread prior to that you would see I was already maxing out at +5/-3 and was already vectoring. (By the end even most battles against my non-hero stacks were maxing out at +5/-3, though for a while I had a shortage of wight mercenaries and had to make due with buildable zombies, and then my non-hero stacks were only getting +5/-2 when getting hit by stacks with +1 morale.)

Turtle wrote:


I'm glad you've finally won after over a 1000 turns.

You ended up with an impressive kill ratio though.