its been talked about a lot, so we tried it. in the end you have to crack mordor, and with agents, dragons and cursers, thats not happening after turn 10. the body count in terms of heros is too high. next time, it will be executed much better.
not bad, could have been better. the northmen were an easy choice, they had the emmisaries to make the m town. the cardy and hire for free was probably the best option. the bad part was the 5k hiring fee. you guys started to attack the northmen reserve.
what really hurt, in my opinion,
was gildor assassination early in the game( i mis spelled din o) so we had no locate on him that turn. stuff happens. was he defending the blind sor mages early, or was that blind luck? ( pun intended)
the double tap on the noldo heros deprived us of intel, curses and high end emmisaries. that bill came due as we were 1 emmisary lite on taking 3622, 3624. had we won those hexes, what would have been the impact?
i needed 1 food at 3525, and 400 hc would have arrived at 3624, we could cleared and sieged the hex, and flipped it. poor logistics. shame on me.
3525. i was a bit obsessive about security, i didnt want any multiclassed guys hiring there unless i had them doubled. i figured you had the location nailed, i’m shocked you didn’t. perhaps i should have more faith in " fog of war".
doubled heros, the northmen had a pretty good list, some guys added and fell off, some of your guys for a long time. i had almost all the duns agents doubled via northmen. the duns was targetting, or moving to target, all your commander rank army leaders inside mordor. i had a few shots lined up for this turn. figured it was time to drain you guys. i think the hiiden po pcenter trick, with a handful of dedicated freep agents to kill off the responding evil commanders, can be a very effective tactic. very effective. i tried a few counter agent ploys( the northmen activity in eastern region) but your guys never shined. i had 2 guys doubled , but virsh then doubled one and cost me a commander. my dun guys i nthe hex missed there shots. 3424 i think…the cloud lord agents then went to 4018.
i should have pushed to have the rider capitol revealed. again, my fault. combined with timber stores, the freeps should make a play for it, if the rider tries to play navy games and keep the harbor open.
i was a big fan of camping in the plains, al lthe time. but vast amounts of timber has its advantages. esp when the freeps mass it and attack.
i like your emmisary dump into the enemy capitol attack, but i like to counter with 800 hc near home, and run my economy from a small named camp(stack it with food and such). it avoids the potential high body count of sitting at your capitol, gives you the ability to retake the capitol. too many people leave oversized fixed defenses at there capitols. keep a tower, and move on. oh yeah, downgrades. im mean, why not?
please toss me a private message, i’d love to talk about this game.
i enjoy these games, as it active battle on so many different levels.
we had our shots. we made some, you blocked some and we missed some. well played by your side. its a shame newer players can not get a look or turn by turn of what was done, why it was done, and all the shadow war that a well played grudge game has in it. too many play at the checkers level, instead of chess.
sm
There’s plenty more to be discussed, but I’ll throw you this one in public. Din was as the BS capital delivering a curse art he had just friendly-stolen from Murazor or Dendra as I recall. You could say it was luck on our part that you failed to track him, but conversely, if our intel gathering wasn’t up to snuff, we wouldn’t have known Gildor was there to begin with – he didn’t show on the pop report, and we weren’t thinking about ScoChar at the BS capital that early.
Now the double curse of Noldo mages, that was no luck. We were tracking them, and patiently awaiting their arrival in our double kill zone. Our second curse squad was just coming on line and wasn’t 100% on its cast chance, but good enough as it turned out.
When did you guys ascertain you had knocked out DoL? And losing Morannon wasn’t the fatal blow. We miscalculated selling product out of a camp if you can believe that.
We figured DogL was gone with Morannon but we NMen emis doubled someone who was under the employ of someone else shortly thereafter concluding the matter. How close were we to knocking out anyone else during the course of the game? Rhu, WK, QA, etc…?
Brad
Not too close, to be honest, and DoL was a mistake of ours I would say, certainly not a direct result of your burning Morannon. The late sudden rush upon QA caught us quite by surprise, and there was a forced tax hike, but as of the end of the last turn, QA had 4 MTs I think it was. We had a couple or three of high deficit nations, but we kept them in plenty of product to sell each turn.
Here’s the equivalent JOverseer map for the DS. Really pleased with JOverseer - no going back to MEOW or Archon now…
Heh. I was wondering if some of my agents had been doubled. We’d had a few of our own double agents through the game, not so many as I would have liked, but Wilwarin/NG was particularly helpful, leading us to the new NG capital at 1614 and then naming a character we could curse. Doubling low-level commander/(agent|emmies) is particularly successful at intel gathering because no one ever thinks to counterdouble or counterespionage them.
Note to self: train all friendly emmies by counterdoubling friendly agents, AGAIN. Seeing if your assassins fail vs. nation X doesn’t help very often because most of the time you aren’t operating against nation X.
And looking at those maps, I think I may be dropping Palantir soon…
Ji Indur’s Ghost
As far as Rhu goes, I was never in real danger of being out. Burning my inner Mordor capital brought me up to a 72% tax rate and degraded a couple of pop centers, but the rest of the team was pretty good about keeping me supplied with MTs and money until my emmies could start pulling me out of the abyss. I had another MT transferred to me the turn you would have burned 2223 if my surprise challenge of Crawford hadn’t worked. Sending some emmies after Rhu’s villages might have had a chance of forcing me out – most of my loyalties were in the teens, and a single emmy at each Rhu pop center probably could have forced me out due to bankruptcy.
A bit more economic pressure in Mordor – perhaps some extra armies raised in your southern pop centers, or a heavy gold theft pressure on our donors – might have caused some difficulties. IK in particular had a deficit well above his sell limit once he had to take over the Doggy role of guarding the gates of Mordor.
The hidden pop center inside Mordor was very annoying, indeed – the more so since we misread the arrival at 3624 as an army that had somehow slipped past our forces at 3825, and didn’t really start looking for a hidden pop center until the turn after.
Tony - if we had continued I had advocated exactly what you suggest vs. Rhu (emmies spread out vs. all known Rhu pops). Of course I didn’t have Crawford 215 and the rest is (sic) history.
Dave
That was Steve’s plan…
Palantir? That’s like my old Pentium II, 200 MHz Hitachi laptop that barely runs Dora and Bob the Builder for my 4 year old…get a real program~!
Brad
Elrond doubled Khmul on turn 2 and had him doubled until about turn 15.
Noldo had another DL command/emy double as well.
Losing Gildor and the FP agent toys early in the game was unreal, I thought i was safe enough with Gildor doing the 930 AND dunda who was in the 50’s (like turn 5-6 we are talking) doing a 610 on him, never saw a tricked out Din Ohtar in the BS capital…Now Losing both my curse mages on the turn the curse company came online was a killer, I blame it on Brad he told me to move to SG-i wanted to hit the black gate to open things up :).
Good game on the DS part…lots of breaks went well for them and they made the best of them. Thats the way to do it. Massive input mistakes on our part where a huge part of our loss, if you cant fill out your turn right then your should lose and so we did. Congrats to the DS on a game well played.
JL
EO/NE
We sort of thought Khamul might be doubled, which is why we counterdoubled him eventually (should have done it earlier, but at least we did it before we switched him to fulltime scouting duty).
tonyZ,
its tough to win as the freeps, all things equal.
all things were not equal, your side was stronger.
i some of your guys doubled. in one instance, i had your guys doubled, and virsh then blew up my double at 3724 late in the game. i missed two 615’s with 60+ guys, you escaped the hex and harvested hex 4018 the next turn. one thing i was insane about was friendly doubles of the dun agents. i also doubled the avenger when you spun him 3528( malazar, aduna( later lost at 3426) and another emmisary). started tracking pectoral and the voice.
i had set a few counter agent things at eastern mordor, sending in two high level dun agents to hexes where northmen armies terminated their movement. i was hoping you’d come in blind with a #905 scout/follow, and i’d 210/615 your agent. dun agents with +15 challenge and a minor sword are nasty boys. since you started to press the northmen, i hoped you might make a play for the commanders. figured if i nail 1 or 2 of your guys, you’d yelp and change tactics.
counter agent stuff is hard, with cursers, you can cause a crisis, and whack the response in 6 adjacent hexes. agent vs agent is hex specific. dunland was moving to 615 all the smaller commanders you had running inside mordor. i failed to expolit hidden valley enough i nterms of armies, or use of agents to hammer your responding armies.
again, the basics. attack the evils inside mordor via emmisary, force them to garrision all the major centers. then dedicate at least 1 agent per nation to consistently drain gold. ignore north harad and take out south harad. DRAGONKILLER!
my opinion, in the end we didnt have the tools to win the game. you had the advantage, and that we were “short” had more to do with your play. we could have hurt you, but not killed you off. maybe you’d make another "dog lord " type mistake, but not enough times to matter. congrats on your victory, and your high(er) level of play.
this was tough one to raise the white flag, but it was time.
%$^$%#%$^$&$^! if ya know what i mean.
sm# 2/#23
Our emmy guys weren’t fanatic about counterdoubling, so I had to arrange it as best I could. We were pretty fanatic about keeping our scouts doubled.
I did a few ScoArmys, but the general plan was to stay in companies and empty out capitals, and kidnap the FP army-nation commanders to make it harder for you guys to hit Mordor with armies. Don’t know how well it worked as you guys perceived it, though.
And, yeah, luck sometimes happens, but really high-level guys can be darn hard to get sometimes (the one you tried to assassinate had a couple artifacts and was A100+, so I’m not surprised an A60 failed, but I agree that Virsh’s double probably was useful for us that time…) I failed a lot of times against Regent-level commanders, don’t know how I would have fared against an 80+ commander.
I feared that was the case with Elrond (& Erestor I think it was) at Dol Guldur so early. And with your kidnapping of my #2 E30 (#1 named #2 and moved out the turn you arrived, T2), your forced me to put Khamul on the emis track for economic survival. Becasue he was only out making camps, I wasn’t in too big of a hurry to get him redoubled.
Note to Brad: you 100% confirmed that fact with one of your posts on this forum (loose lips do indeed sink ships), after which we made it a priority to redouble, as Tony said, right before we put K into the scouting business.
Interesting. I’d love to see this post. I’ll hazard I was being cryptically snarky about something else entirely and you’re giving me credit as a result of your completely false read on what I was saying. I guess if you’re reading this dribble for nugget’s, you’ll find them. I personally have the face of Piglet on a piece of toast in my freezer.
Try this one on for size.
Hmmm. I’ll eat the crow. Are you sure you didn’t appear on a pop report that was subsequently hit with 525’s, though, the turn before that post…? Rings a bell.
we also had wodurshak doubled for nearly the whole game. that might sound nice, but you won the game. i think we had khamul and/or urzahil doubled, right until you killed the noldo guys. ah, ashburgnal…we had forever. we had idea dog was out, then he went rider.
Got a lot of useful info out of Wodur. Sat in the capital with downgrades, NatSells, and InfYours about his range.
We doubled a few folks, but most of 'em ended up pushing up daisies shortly thereafter. <g>