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About Wakshaani

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    Member: Rank 1 ( 95% )
  • Birthday 08/07/1972
  1. Absolutely. It was just one of his (many, many) disguises. The long term goal included taking over Iceland in order to test some diabolic machines far from human observation (Seriously, islands that modern planes and ships couldn't travel to was an *amazing* source of privacy, doubly-so when he chose islands, like Hawaii, that were far away from the "main world". It'd be one thing to drop into Sicily, for instance, but take over Easter Island and it might not be discovered for years!) ... he'd also planned on snatching some of the New England coast from under the other High Lords' eyes (HP Lovecraft's area, in point of fact), and, for his Grand Finale, around the 5th year of the war, when he'd taken all of the possibility energy that he could gather, he would have used his Iceland base to test fire a volcano machine, distract people by firing up Hawaii, and then his TRUE goal, where he'd sat up a super-hidden area that was mixed, rather than dominant or even pure, was to erupt the super volcano of Yellowstone (Which, you may recall, is where his base was located in the Orroshian realm) and end all life on Core Earth. The game we ran here never got that far, mind you, but it was the ultimate goal. (The game ended early due to a rule misunderstanding on my part! I was using the typical High Lord rules, where you gained 2-3 Possibilities per 300 kmtriangle, as long as at least 10,000 people were functioning in it. The GM was, instead, awarding possibilities based on the population in each area with no cap. Thus, the player who invaded India, and had a billion people feeding him energy, won in no time. But, that's neither here nor there.)
  2. Haiti worked quite well, since it already had history of horrors ... I went ahead and renamed it "Hisponola", drew on the nightmarish history of COlumbus' Second Voyage (Read up on that sometime, it'll break your heart), and redressed the Gaunt Man as Baron Samedi, which gave him a bit more of a festive energy, but still worked. Haitians were used to his sort of dispotic rule, thanks to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, while the other half of the island ... not so much. He used that half as a killing field, planting gospog like mad. Once he had enough forces on hand, he marched a bunch underwater to Cuba, to take over that island as well. I had him drop his second bridge into Hawaii, which ... didn't go very well. (Darn Pearl Harbor!) ... the Big Island was intended to serve as the main gospog factory overall, since it has a great environment, rich soil, a 365 growing season, and is very much out and away from where anyone could just stumble onto things. Snaking up to FLorida, via the Bermuda Triangle, was a nice angle as well. Overall, my Gaunt Man was targeting the weakest populations and small countries that he could quickly subjigate, rather than large countries that would continue to put up a fight because a chunk was gone but the rest was still around (For example, the Living Land and teh US of A duking it out.) ... this let him set up nice fear harvests, get himself entrenched in way sthat made him *really* hard to dislodge, and let the other invaders take the brunt of Core Earth's counter attacking strength.
  3. Feel free to knock it out. For me, our High Lord game a year or three back was brimming with some nice notions. I confess to some vanity in that I absolutely fell in love with Orrosh sweeping into Haiti, slowly sucking in the island chains while looking for tendrils to extend into Mexico, South America, Florida, and, of course, New Orleans. Long-term expansion plans included Iceland (there was a reason!) and Nigeria. Aysle moved out of the UK and into Prague also worked fantasticly well. Big ups for that idea, and having them gradually roll west while grimly glancing east and thinking about taking Moscow was downright keen. The CYberpapcy ... France just *works*, and extending into Spain is a no-brainer, but a push into South America also makes a ton of sense ... and crossing eventual swords with the Orrorshian horrors also makes sense. The Living Land invading the US is a given. It's perfect, but, I'd avoid Khah being used as an idiot by having him focus on the East Coast alone. He might be handy to open a second front somewhere (Japan? China? India?) that had some good technological strength. The Nile goes in Egypt. It simply *has* to. A small section dropped into the US would make the playerbase happy... I use "Chi-Cairo" personally, where Chicago gets co-opted by a small triangle and run by the Red Hand. He seems the proper level of gangster-liscious to make it work. This leaves a gaping hole in SE asia, however. China as an afterthought, and India overlooked entirely, just doesn't sit well with me, while Indonesia and Japan are two areas with amazing bodies per square mile numbers. We need *something* down there, but I can't think of anything that really works. I guess if we wound up with a new cosm, that'd be where it happens. (Perhaps a certain "Oriental Mastermind" that works for Moebius could be given his own "Mandarin China" Darkness Device, complete with ghosts, crazy martial arts, and so on, to replace Nippon Tech? But, that's a whole other discussion.)
  4. So, you're wanting to start a new TORG campaign and have picked out your cosms (We'll skip on which ones they are for now) ... the next question is this: Where do they drop? There are, in my eye, a handful of criteria. First and foremost is theme ... the Nile Empire needs to be in Egypt, for instance, while the Living Land could go anywhere. If the cosm has a theme it needs to match, then that's the location. Next is proximity to other Lords. If you're not a good ally, dropping your bridge 301 KM from another Lord is going to start a war, lickety-split. Third is proximity to defenders .... do you want to hit a hard location and overwhelm it with your initial push (For example, New York City or the Vatican) or do you want to hit an area with average defenses but a big, leechable population (Indonesa) OR do you want to attack in some sneaky, out of the way location, so that you have little resistance to deal with (Pitcairn Island or Antartica). Lastly, but no less important, is for the playerbase ... if they really want to have missions in the US, but there aren't any invaders there, they'll be miffed. Equally, if they want to galavant around the globe but you insist that they stay in a three mile zone, conflict will happen. SO! Taking all of this into account, what seven areas seem like the best places for an invasion by the High Lords?
  5. Kind of wondering that myself. Maybe teh "Most boring" poll was more recent, so superceeded this one? Science!
  6. Yeah, I was eyeballing teh Storm Knights and the danger they represented, but, I was also in a cost-benefit analysis and it looked like they were headed south. My math was that, if they went to mess with a different High Lord, then more power to 'em. As long as they were out of my hair, I wasn't going to burn resources to fight 'em. Then again, I also expected a LOT more stormers out there. I soulstained often, figuring that some would be made in every large population. I wanted them found and flipped (Since we're supposed to get 90% of 'em!), but killed if they wouldn't joined. Never occured to me that there might only be a dozen of the guys in all.
  7. Yeah, we used to have a problem with no one wanting to play Core Earthers. Two rules twinges fixed it. 1) Core Earthers start wth 10 Possibilities. Other cosms start with 5. (This reflects that Earth is BRIMMING with Possibilities) 2) Core Earthers earn 1 additional Possibility per act, as if Personal Stake was in play... it's their Earth, after all! Solved it, that did.
  8. You bought *Eighty* *six* armies in one turn?!
  9. Happy Birthday!

  10. I figured that taking Rome would be a true Phyyric victory that'd tie you up for forever. You and Disco Derek were doing too good, so, the Ravagon Ambassadors had orders to get you two to burn off some resources ... directing you towards Rome (Which needed to fall, but would take a TON of resources) and him towards California (Where, with teh CYberpapacy out, I needed someone to do some heavy lifting to keep the US troops busy.) I figured that you two'd eventually win those fights, but, at the same time, it'd keep you from expanding as fast as you'd been, to give me a chance to catch up. I asked the Nile to keep an eye on Marketplace as well, figuring that he was so tied up with native resistance and hardpoints that he'd take *forever* to advance and, ultimately, 3327'd move on him. Those two would keep one another in check, in THEORY, leaving just teh Faceless King, who I figured was frittering way too much energy on taking VAST swaths of land. The Living Land pushing California over so easily, then jumping to Texas and Mexico City wasn't even on my radar. Threw *everything* out of kilter. Then Mobius went and won. D'oh! I had close to 500 Possibilities saved up at the end of turn 6, and would have had around 600 after the next turn's orders, I think, maybe a tad more. If I'd have known the target was so low... Ah well. Lessons learned!
  11. Yeah, most of the expendature values (Bridges and Stelae) are matched to the High Lord Point system, which used the 2 for a Dominant, 3 for Pure zone rate that I was using for my calculations. Mind you, High Lord Points also don't take into account buying armies, agents, or similar, but *do* charge you for "Interfeering with another High Lord's plots", which is odd. If you wanted to use population, instead of Stelae triangles, you'd probably have to do some math based on how many triangles it'd take to cover the globe (I read somewhere that it was 140, but that seems awfully low), then divide the population by that number, to see what the average value per triangle was. That would tell you what the base "Drain rate: would be and how much energy you should get on an average area. Using that number, you could then work out how much you should get, and from *there* work out a new pricing scale. But that's an awful lot of work. You'll also want two additional metrics: One, a limit on how many armies a High Lord can draw from. and two, how many Stelae you can produce a month or week. I was working with a million men (40 armies!) for the first in my head, and three a week (12 a month) for the other, but, again, my head and the actual rules go poorly together, as can be seen by my "wonderful" performance out there. Trying to make it a weekly instead of monthly pull is pretty much required for a real-time game with a year target, but, you have to be careful that it doesn't snowball like it did here. Too easy to blitzekreig at the current level.
  12. I sent a small group to deal with Living Landers, in fact. I confess! It was me! Two groups in all... the first was sent to Spain, to find stelae around teh SPanish bridge. We were going to slip this information to them via Mexico via my Mexican government mole... I tell him, he tells Mexico, Mexico tells Spain, the Stelae goes away, the LL bridge collapses, and the backlash, in theory, would deal enough damage to slow Baruk Khah down. I'd misread EUrope and thought HE had half of Germany, not Aysle, somehow, and I felt that he was leading in the race. Teh goal was to cripple him in Spain, cutting off ENgland, so that he'd push more into California, which I assumed would be a meat grinder, distracting the US government enough that my "Slow southern ooze" would take hold. When he dropped into Texas, everythig fell apart. When he dropped into Mexico City, I sent a force there to sneak in, root up a stelae, and collapse THAT bridge, even tho I knew that it'd likely lead to war. In no way, shape, or form could I have him on my flank, taking my biggest prizes! Alas, it was for nought. That was the only activity I took directly against another High Lord, by the by. I figured that the Faceless King had doomed himself by invading South America and Africa, thought the nile was countered by India and the US forceswest of him (And probably going to be scrapping with Marketplace), and I had no *idea* what Marketplace was up to, so, not on the radar. As for Aysle, I figured I needed an ally who could blunt the LL, so, I tried to stay on his good side with the lend-lease program (Tho, admitedly, the COvOps guys had orders to loot and run if the Vatican actually fall). I'm *terribly* curious what the two different bands of Storm Knights wree up to, and, obviously, I *really* want to see what Marketplace looked like and what all he'd been doing. Complete mystery to me.
  13. A few additional Gaunt Man notes. First and foremost, Mazel Tov! Can't wait to see you stack babies instead of cats. Next, Haiti was chosen for a few reasons: An easily-subjugated populace with a compatable belief structure and an island base made for an area ripe for conquest, where residents couldn't really run away and where it'd be extra hard to try to root Orrosh off the map. Without planes to fly there and modern ships unable to get near, there was no help on the way and no armies marching to free it. In addition, I wanted to swallow whole countries where able, since a divided country would spend no limit on trying to reclaim a snipped section while a country gobbled would meekly aquiesce (in theory). Cuba was the next obvious bridge and I was too cautious in taking it. I should hav eblitzed, but, as noted, I was expecting energy levels around 20-30 Possibility Units a week, tops. I couldn't handle the speed required for the larger levels! Cuba gave way to a crawl through the Yucatan and to FLorida, which would give a "Southern Pincher" move, where I planned on oozing slowly through each while the CYberpapacy kept the United States busy. Adding teh Living Land to the West Coast was a huge boon for this approach, then he went and messed it all up. Hawaii was chosen for two things: First was a remote Gospog factory. I was working on getting about a dozen Gospog fields there... a pure zone, only reachable by air or sea but unable to support either's modern form, and nearly as remote as possible, with fertile soil and a native belief system that could be used (I was working on a Pele set of miracles last night!) made it perfect. I figured Pearl Harbor would be a hardpoint and moved to neuatralize it, but, my agents failed and it was able to inflict staggering losses. The long-term goal was to just ignore it, since the ships were useless past a certain range, then send in a wave of 3rd planting Gospog to finish it if the need was there. The other reason, which is why I *tried* to get a bridge into Italy, and went to Iceland, was the dreaded Mechanicus Vulcanica, the Gaunt Man's world-blowing-up machine. Iceland would serve as a test bed (The island of Surtur of the southern coast, in particular), then I was going to try activating larger volcanoes in Italy, then a big one (Krakatoa?) in Java-Sumatra, and, finally, the Big One ... I would have been detonating Yellowstone National Park, which is teh Gaunt Man's "Birthplace" ... seemed fitting for a final ascenscion to Torghood! Alas, alas, all my plans, now so much rubble. I made it out with 450 Possibilities in the bank, tho, so not a huge loss!
  14. Oof! I hadn't even gotten everything in motion! I was plotting a long-term strategy, not short-term, myself, and finding out about the MASSIVE eneergy loads completely up-ended everything. Biggest lack of information that killed me? Energy provided by zones. In standard rules, Pure zones give 3 possibilities, Dominant Zones give 2, and while you need at least 25,000 believers to generate energy, any number byond that makes no difference. Thus, Iceland, with a population of 300,000, generated more energy (In this form) than a triangle that held New York and Boston! Unfortunately, this was NOT the way the rules worked for this. Once that was made clear, the Living Land dropped into my two major prizes of Texas and expecially Mexico City, and that ended that. So, I was playing under the wrong rules set the entire game! Makes my strategy look downright idiotic, now.
  15. True, true. So, more sails while I hunt for coal country. ... Sails ho!
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