[SPOILERS] Balseraphs: A Guide to Mis-Management (by Kyan and TT)

[Krill]

Kyan your worker MM sucks. Road the frigging tiles between cities 1, 2, and 3 instead of wasting the worker turns. [/jerk]

[Kyan]

Short on time. Apologies. Fuller report tomoro.

We have captured one of the griffons that popped from the shipwreck. Barbs are everywhere and will likely delay the settling of both our fourth and fifth cities. Grr. Will do what i can to ensure they're up asap.

[Krill]

Advice for the turn. Use 2 workers to road the tile 1 of city 3, move the warrior in city 3, 1, move Terence 3. Move the settler onto the mana res. Next turn, road the adjacent fp, move both warriors and the settler onto the plains hill. Only 1 barb can attack so the settler is safe and you should have odds anyway with both warriors. Move the C3 griffon 11 to protect the southern city, but it can still move to the western city if needed.

[Kyan]

Ok, turn report time. Firstly, the west:



Terence has defeated 2 barb warriors in 3 turns and will take out another next turn. He should be at 14xp next turn



Krusty is having to retreat from a polar bear. He has odds but he doesn't have subdue animal yet. Looking for something to kill before going to try and get the polar bear/tiger pair.



This annoying gobbo has delayed our city by 2 turns. The combat 3 griffon is heading to sort him out.



We got our first Freak. Really, we need to built a freak cage for happiness. Unfortunately, the RNG decided to shine out my arse and give us the following promotions:

-Heroic Strength (+1 str)
-Sentry 1 (+1 vis)
-Stoneskin (+2 def str, +3 first strike. Expires after combat)

All hail the new king of the world.

[Krill]

Occasionally you get a good return on those 40 hammer freaks...that one is going to be an awesome archer/sword.

[darrelljs]

Heroic Strength 1 allows Heroic Strength 2, even without the Hero promotion. Its +1 attack strength, so I don't recommend a defensive unit like an Archer.

Darrell

[Krill]

Axe>Chariot? And tbh, one unit doesn't really matter that much, unless the name of the unit is Gibbon. I also think it's more important to think of how to get adepts to 10XP, I'm just annoyed that Theocracy is so off the beaten path. 8XP is quite doable, but 10XP, eh. I suppose I'm a sucker for wanting Air2/Death2/C5/SE1 instamages.

[Krill]

According to Bob, I have a very detailed plan. And according to Kyan I'm a bastard.

So, nothing unusual here, move along folks...

[Krill]

So, it seems we have a plan. Grab Gibbon and use him to Vitalize our lands into gorgeous green valleys, then kill people with uberwater summons. But we’re going to have some fun with the desertion mechanic, and use our World Spell GA to swap civics and religions to get him to desert, then revolt back to Esus to rebuild him with the “right” mana nodes. This means we are going to have to get some node swapping going on after we build Gibbon with 4 nature nodes, delaying our offensive wars until we have Sorcery. Well, I think it’s important that we use all of our advantages that such a tech gives to the Balseraphs.

So, what does Sorcery give us? It gives us the ability to swap around nodes, and it gives us Mages, whom thank to summoner can each keep 4 summons in the field, all disposable, and all at high promotions thanks to the upgrading of Adepts to mages giving us the chance to get all of the spells needed on Mages on a single turn, i.e. we only need the nodes setup for that Mage upgrade for a single turn.

Now, what spells would we want on Mages? We’d want Death, as everyone knows how great Spectres can be, but unfortunately we’ve not actually seen them win a game and thanks to Darrell, who has given us the chance to really use them how they were meant to be used, we won’t be going over old ground if we use them now. There are other support spells that we want on individual mages, but not on every mage in our army. Regeneration, Mutation, Stoneskin, Shadow Walk, all these are good bu not on a stack. I think Air2, maelstrom is a good choice, and wouldn’t luck just have it, we have 5 nodes and an air mana source from our palace, so on a single turn we can upgrade a stack of Adepts to Mages, and using 3 sources of death mana and 3 sources of air mana, get Summon Spectre and Maelstrom on a stack of Mages. That’s a nice support stack for Gibbon in small numbers, and an awesome offensive tool in its’ own right.

But that’s not all. How are you going to get a huge stack of high XP adepts I hear you cry! Simple. Form of the Titan, we have a lizard 8 XP from the required level. Command Post, from the free GC from Mil Strat, also enabling the HE which we’ll want for pushing out a high level Adept every turn we are in the following civics during hte golden age: Apprenticeship, and Conquest. That’s 8XP on an adept, which according to this picture is a pretty good indication that you’re going to have a Mage soon enough:



We’re not going to just leave the 8XP Adepts to sit there, they’re going to be beating up on goblins etc, exploring the forts we have in our culture. Oh, and guess what? How many promotions are those Adepts going to have? Just the 2 free promotions from being a Mage and an Adept? Plus a third from Shrine of the Champion? And a fourth, fifth and sixth promotion from reaching 10XP. That’s right, Combat4, Mobility, Spell Extension1 Mages. Spectres at C1+E4, for +60% combat strength and 3 moves.

To put this into perspective, Flauros needs 50 XP to get a Vampire to that level of strength. That’s a lot of population being feasted. And his vampires can’t collateral.

But all this is just talk, unless you can get it to work. But getting plans to work is what I do.

First of all, Gibbon needs to be built after we have 3 Nature nodes up and running, plus the nature mana Rawwking owes us, meaning we’ll need Alteration prior to Deception. That means these are the techs we need:

• Writing - 363
  Horseback Riding - 344
  
• Trade - 430
  
• Philosophy - 287
  
• WotWicked - 268
  
• Deception - 670
  
• KotE - 344
  
• Alteration - 613
  
• Total - 3305/list]
  
  That’s a decent amount of beakers (techs are not in order though), and we are still 6 turns from CoL and Aristocracy, plus Rawwking just got into Aristo, but he has 2 cities and we are 2 turns from settling our fifth, and we have 2 incense tiles about to come online and quite a few flood plains. We’ll be OK to this point.
  
  A realistic order here is to get KotE fairly early, trade for water mana with Brian and build an adept or two to start springing the desert. This will cut down the time it takes Gibbon to fulfill his economic duties. We want WotWicked for slavery. Other than that, not so interested.
  
  But we also want FotT and to be the first to Mil Strat. Oh my, this tech list is getting long!
  
  • Crafting - 114
    
  • Mining - 191
    
  • Bronzeworking - 383
    
  • Philosophy - 287 - Duplicated!
    
  • Warfare - 306
    
  • Mil Stra - 459
    
  • Sub Total - 1740
    
  • Total - 4758
  
  Crafting and Mining are going to be needed to build Gibbon. BW opens up a chance for slightly more useful warriors (we do need some useful units for hitting Grigori with Brain) and the ability to hook our gems (that’s quite a bonus) commerce wise. Warfare will gives us the NE and that has it’s place in some back up plans and FotT (obviously critical), and Conquest which we want later on, and Mil Strat gives the HE which is critical for churning out 1 8XP Adept/turn, and the GC for the Command Post.
  
  So they all have later benefits. There are three other techs that we have reason to tech:
  
  • Masonry - 134
    
  • Construction - 383
    
  • Sanitation - 613
    
  • Sub Total - 1130
    
  • Total - 5888
  
  This gives us the marble resource, which we can use to get a half cost Bone Palace from Philosophy (235 hammers!), ability to build Siege Workshops to make Chariots for some real units, and better farms and Public Baths which we could use the happy from and who cares about the health issues?
  
  So, all of these techs make sense, but need to pick and choose an order, and figure out how to turn 4 nature nodes into 3 death and 2 air nodes.
  
  Well, it is quite simple actually. We would have a single spare node, and these are our last few techs:
  
  • Necromancy - 613
    
  • Elementalism - 613
    
  • Sourcery - 1916
    
  • Sub Total - 3142
    
  • Total - 9030
  
  We would make a metamagic node on one of the last remaining empty nodes, and upgrade Gibbon to Dispel Magic - we save his XP from his Hero promotion, and use Gibbon to dispel the nature nodes before we revolt out of Esus. The adepts can rebuild them however we want them, in this case we’d want 4 water mana from trades/nodes, and the remainder can be air. However, we might at this point need to leave the Metamagic node unless we can get an adept to 10XP after promoting his to Metamagic1 at the same time we promote Gibbon to Dispel, but that isn’t at any point going to stop a rebuilt Gibbon getting W3.
  
  At the point that we revolt out of Esus to get Gibbon to desert, we trigger the World Spell, giving us 5 turns to rejig the mana nodes. Luckily, as we’ll only need 3 mana nodes to be Nature for Vitalize on Gibbon1, we’ll have 2 spare mana nodes, one of which we can turn into body mana so some adepts can take Haste for later on during war, and double speed mana node construction, so we can get them all rebuilt in time. During the golden age, we’ll also revolt to Conquest/Apprenticeship for 4XP from civics to get out as many high XP adepts we can, plus a few real units with a few decent promotions.
  
  As we’ll be losing our dispel Archmage, we might have to use one of the high XP adepts as a dispel Mage, upgrading him earlier on, and keeping the metamagic node around if one of the earlier adepts can’t make it to 10XP in time. Which isn’t that bad, he might have maelstrom as well from air nodes, in which case he can still be used in war as a collateral dealer. After we rebuild Gibbon, we use either one of the new instamages to reset the nodes, we build 3 death nodes and 2 air nodes and when we are ready to go kill people, upgrade all of the adepts to get the free spells, ideally leaving the node construction to the last possible moment. Then we reset the nodes again, so the air nodes become water nodes, though we probably won’t want more than 2 water nodes.
  
  So, there you have it. How to build an army that doesn’t rely on a single unit, and gives you over 150 disposable summons from a dozen real units.

[Twinkletoes89]

Finally commenting after much pressing by Kyan!

While this plan sounds super deadly, what are the odds of someone else either building Gibbon before us or building it after they see that we have made him desert?

I have no idea how possible this is, but if its a decent probability, is it worth the risk of losing Gibbon who is clearly central to our plans?