It was recommended here that I build walls. I now know why. I was running without them, but a determined enemy attack showed me the light. I've since remodeled every town and city.
With each subsequent ritual, the Chaos forces attacking me seem to get larger. I'm at the third Ritual and accidentally triggered it without paying attention to where it was happening (I was just clicking through confirmation messages). I ended up reloading, but not before seeing the three or four armies waiting to lay siege to my most remote outpost that I only recently acquired. Thankfully, all of my long-standing cities and villages have the best walls they can install. It's the remote and newly-founded areas that are ripe for decimation.
Previously, a single Chaos army walked through two of my villages and was a turn from a city before I got to them. Without walls, there was little to defend with. I had (falsely) assumed they'd have to push through the defensive gates to get to the inner circle.
I'm up to four armies. My main army is off in the greater wilds, searching and settling ruins - though a few turns of this is proving to be costly and maybe ultimately fruitless. For each settlement I take on, it seems like there's a nearby army that's happy to decimate it. I don't really want to park my most powerful lord (level 22) in a foreign land just to babysit a single city until it gets big enough to do it alone.
My main lord has a relatively diverse army - 2 dragons, 2 phoenix, 2 artillery, 3 archers, 4 spear/archer/shields, 2 axes, 1 greatsword, 2 heavy cavalry, and himself with a Life mage. My second is less diverse and is more of a home guard with a lot of defensive units and anti-infantry. My third is a pillager, running from shipwreck to shipwreck, annihilating the drowned forces with 17 archery units in different flavors. My fourth is relatively diverse and recently recruited. I'm still bringing in 6,000+ gold per turn, in addition to the shipwrecks.
Dwarven pirates are no joke to take on. Seemed like everything they had was anti-infantry and/or anti-large AND armored. The first time I encountered them it resulted in a complete wipe of my mostly-archer forces. The flamethrower units just strolled up behind a shield wall and cooked my soldiers like they were chickens. My second encounter went better as I knew what to expect and made their artillery and flamethrowers a priority, but the "army strength" bar at the top gave me a 25% of an easy with with 25% toss-up and 50% for them. It cost me a dragon and two horseback archer units to defeat them, in addition to needing several turns to revive my decimated forces (which is fine as it takes 3 turns to re-recruit the dragon). The after-action reports showing which enemy units killed most people can be eye-opening. I hadn't given much thought to the dwarven artillery units until after I had seen that combined they killed about 1/3 of the people I lost. After that I made them the utmost priority.
"Friendly" factions aren't handing themselves over to me anymore. I waver between being 1st and 2nd for military might and seem to clearly hold more territory than anyone else, but they won't join me. I'm sorely tempted to "Hulk Smash" them instead of being diplomatic. I really want to control the whole central island, not 65% of it. I had read online that declaring war on a bunch of remote factions and forcing your allies into war with you - then brokering peace with those remote hostiles would leave your allies with little "computational option" but to join you as they were at war with more people than you. All that accomplished for me was putting all of us at war with everyone else and leaving me the most distrusted MoFo in the world with no one willing to deal with me, peaceful or not.
As I write this out, I think I'm going to bring all of my armies home and pair them up - then set them loose on my "allies" and conquer the island cities in rapid succession. If everyone hates me I may as well live up to it.
I've also been playing for quite some time now and only just figured out how to switch my Eagle Bolt Throwers between anti-large and anti-infantry. What I had been missing before was the knowledge that I needed to highlight them by themselves, not with other units, to see the option. I was always moving them as part of a group and couldn't find the switch. I've had a number of "duh" moments in this game when it comes to using units. I used them for ~40 fights and only just figured this out. When I did - holy shit - they actually made a difference vs. infantry.
I also only discovered the "interrupt ritual" option on the bar as my enemies started their second one. I tossed 20,000 gold at that to prevent two of them from moving up - and it set them back quite a bit. I'm now far in the lead at the 3rd ritual while no other faction has passed the second one.
The game also mysteriously crashed on me twice last night - first time in several nights. Is there an increasing likelyhood of the game CTD without error or warning as the number of turns gets higher? I'm on turn ~90 right now. The first CTD was just after a battle was finishing loading and the second CTD was randomly during the AI's turn.
NickAragua wrote: ↑Thu Jan 14, 2021 5:22 pmAssassination-specced heroes are great - walk up to an enemy army and kill the leader and all the heroes (over the course of a couple of turns), leaving them a couple units short and with a level 1 scrub for a leader.
I'm starting to test out a theory with one of my armies, keeping a Noble Assassin in the ranks and sending him forward to kill leaders. It's worked twice now, and then I rejoin him to the army.