30-06-2000 04:29									#1
	An interesting fantasy game -- tunnel blocking Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

I just finished a rather exciting fantasy game. In this game, I played humans. A few tribes were destroyed pretty early, and it became clear that my real adversary was the goblins. My humans had about 15 cities on a large landmass. The goblins had six cities on the same land mass, and (as I discovered when I built socerers in all my cities and started spying out the underground), another 20 cities directly below my own.

I had a definite technological edge in the year 1000 (second age) but, at that time, no way to conquer goblin cities. The goblins had lots and lots of trolls, and were beginning to build many ogres. I could see that if they came up onto map 0 through tunnels, they would simply overrun me and destroy my food production, even if my individual (and outnumbered) military units were stronger.

I adopted two tactics:
(1) find the tunnels as fast as the goblins built them and plug them up. I was more successful at this than I expected -- the AI did not understand that it should build LOTS of tunnels. Eventually I was blocking a dozen, but the goblins could have built fifty tunnels and I would have been helpless.

(2) To slow tunnel production somewhat, my many sorcerors scanned the underground every turn (very time consuming) and killed every goblin miner I could find.

One other fun thing -- early in the game I got a hawk from a hut. I used my hawk to open a nest (a cloud map hut) directly above two Infidel cities. A barb griffin (a rather nasty creature) came out, swooped down to map zero, and killed a bunch of infidels. A little later the same hawk opened a nest and got another griffin. This time it killed the hawk, but then swooped down to map 0 and killed a number of AI units directly below. I had often thought about using this type of kamikazee attack early in the game, but this is the first time it worked. (In the standard one-map game, I think it is a little harder to create barbs right "next" to AI units.)


- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

	30-06-2000 07:27									#2
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First, you can pillage the tunnels rather than blocking them; secondly, you can use the tunnels to get your skalds down and bribe cities.

	30-06-2000 18:20									#3
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I don't know why I never thought of pillaging tunnels. Obviously a great idea. If I pillage a square that contains a mine (that I built), a railroad and a tunnel, will the tunnel disappear first?

In this game, the goblins had so much more cash than I, that bribing was out of the question. They had over 30,000 by the year 1800, and was wondering if they might hit an overflow bug.

Also, it was very difficult to use the tunnels to go down, because swarms of goblins awaited below. The tunnels were not next to a city on map 2, so skalds would be vulnerable as soon as they got down a tunnel.

Late in the game I sacrificed several sorcerers to clear an opening so an ice drake could go down a tunnel an fortify itself below. It was immediately killed by a gang of goblins. I would have needed to send about a dozen ice draks at once, to kill everything around the tunnel, to establish a beachhead. (Ice drakes take damage killing even one ogre, and there were forts everywhere around the tunnels.)

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

	30-06-2000 22:36									#4
	Get a bigger avatar today!

you need to bribe a dwarf first. (or if somebody else got the dwarf tech, steal it). Then build a couple of dwarves and dig a tunnel to underground. The other end of the tunnel should be IMPASSIBLE terrain, but not too far away from passible ones. Build up your forces there after you change the place to passible. Then use dwarfs to make a passible bridge and let the goblins waste themselves.

	03-07-2000 07:15									#5
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Thanks! A very impressive approach.
-toby

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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com