[Call of Warhammer - Rage of the Dark Gods 1.6] The End Times

[General Dragon.]

Despite all the odds againts them and that the whole world was ready to end under the power of the 4 chaos god and their anointed champion Archaon, the Everchosen, the mortal races of light persevered and in the end managed to defy the cruel destiny, that was planned. Archaon, the Three-Eyed King and Lord of the End Times have fallen! Not even the chaos gods foresee this event, that their blessed champion will fail and their goal of engulfing this world crumbles down. This terrible news to the chaos forces rapidly spreaded through chaos sorcerers and messengers. Without their champion to unite and lead the followers of the 4 gods organised, their unholy alliance will fall apart.
However the remaining Herarlds, aspiring Champions and Daemon princes, that followed Archaon now went on a rampage to slaughter all, that is still standing, to get revenge on this unforgiven, unexpected victory and to die in glorious combat, instead of facing what might wait for them in the pantheon of the chaos gods, if they return alive.
Their savage frenzy knew no bounds and without any thoughts or planning they all charged againts the nearby empire forces, that they knew were still around. At first the wissenland forces felt their wrath:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Then the nearby reiklander and the middenland forces on the otherside of the river felt their crazed charge. The defensive position for the middenland forces provided great advantage, as the chaos forces had to go through a bridge to get to the otherside, free to be shot at with cannons, mortars, handguns, crossbows and archers. However this mattered not for the madness filled chaos forces and they charged relentlesly againts them, while suffering great losses at every charge.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The last charge, led by Belakor, the first Demon Prince was too much for the leftover defenders, as the previous assaults in mere hours caused too great amount of injuries and damages. Belakor's army is too much of an overwhelming force and suchm they were switfly overran and crushed.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Not soon the defenders were shattered and Belakor's forces reached the other side fully, he continued to march towards the last remaining Empire forces. The Armies led by Karl Franz, who delivered the first blow to Archaon and ruining everything for the Chaos Gods. Belakor didn't care anymore, what kind of odds he has, he charged at the Empire armies, in the last ditch effort, that he can claim Karl's head, as a revenge and to satisfy himself atleast a little in the eyes of the chaos gods. However the remaining imperial armies were still had good amount of strenght and no matter, how powerful Belakor was, his army in the end was still not enough to crush the Empire forces. His army was and destroyed he himself was slained by numerous empire soldiers, as they swarmed around him. He couldn't even get close enough to Karl Franz at all. In the end the last of the heralds, demon princes, great demons, aspiring champions and elite followers of Archaon was killed and their armies utterly destroyed.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Without the Everchosen the followers of the 4 chaos gods, lost their uniting force, the one key element to keep their forces together and to use them in a single goal for the ruinous powers. Archaon's death broke this uniting force and now all the remaining followers and demons of the 4 chaos gods already started infighting and trying to claim new leadership between themselves and on what was left in their hands and soon the fractured alliance and the new infighting once again destroyed the cohesion of the chaos forces. Soon the empire forces will be able to reclaim their lost lands and push what remained of the chaos forces back to the northern Chaos Wastes.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The End Times have been averted and a New Age of Peace has arrived in it's stead for the Old World.


Well this is the end of the hotseat and luckily (or unluckily) the Empire stood their ground and defeated all of their great foes! I read the question about the empire elector lands and, if you guys indeed have atleast half of the lands. To be honest I forgot I actually put that, as a condition (), but sylvania and marienburg lands both counts as elector, empire lands. So those 2, with stirland, averland, wissenland reikland and most of Talabechland still in your control, completes the condition to have atleast half of the empire lands.

I declare the hotseat with an empire victory, with Mergor, AdmiralThrawn and paladinbob123 as the 3 best players for the empire alliance, with the other reason, that they are also players, that still alive with their factions, spent great amount of times for doing their turns or subbing other empire factions and that they played since the beginning, which was almost 3 years now, no thanks to me being a lazy, idiot aswell.
Apart from that I also made many mistakes both within ingame balances and such and outside with planning things, as how will they unfold, or how will I play with my forces and so on and how time was kinda wasted more, than it was necessary for the hotseat to conclude, atleast in my opinion.

Anyway big congratulations to the empire players, for those that achieved victory and even for those that played in the hotseat and tried to remain within as long as they could.

As a last request I would like to ask, all that still played and remained to the end to please voice your honest opinion on the hotseat's set up, the 1vs many idea itself, ingame balance, rules, my ideas I brought for this event. As I said honest opinion, so any of you can freely "" at me, if I screwed something up. I do have a list of things, that I wrote down already for myself, as what did I screw up and had a bad effect on the hotseat's gameplay itself.

Lastly I will in the next few days ask Flinn to help me out sorting the rep and gaming sword awards for you guys, while we also wait for Lifth to finish the signature banner for you guys also.
This is what the banner looks like right now and all that will be changed is carving Mergor, AdmiralThrawn and paladinbob123 names or avatar into it in some way or form:

[Mergor]

In my opinion this was a fun HS and the 1 vs many format can work and worked here also. There was only one game breaking stuff, the 4 HP units which Dragon already knows about. Other than that, I only have one small issue, and rest are just suggestions.

1 - There seems to be a cap of alliances. Ostland and Reikland was never allied and the diplomatic tab did not show it either
2 - I feel like summoning chaos reinforcement in the smack middle of the fight is not good. It can catch people off guard too easily
3 - I would say that if the setting is AR, then it is better (and more challenging in a good way) if chaos/orcs throws mid tear armies in hordes and only has just a few elites. The "evil" guys of the hs should not be defeated in one decisive battle. Insted, the hardship for the empire should be that while they can defeat any battlegroup, new ones always pop up. It should be like a war of attriction. If MR, I don't know, I think what worked here would work well, but the issue is that big engagements lag the game out.
4 - And finally maybe let the players go to war at the start. Mimic the empire early game a bit more.

If I have any more thoughts, I'll edit this comment

[AdmiralThrawn]

Awesome, thanks!

I loved the 1-vs-all idea, and the funky balance was mostly good since it necessitated planning and diplomacy. Coordinating Elector Counts is kinda like herding cats, which I found to be entertaining. That being said, I was the only faction that was mostly fighting on my own, so I didn't need to deal with too much of that.

The only things I didn't like were whenever you got to spawn in new armies of Black Orcs. It always felt kinda cheap to win a major battle and then immediately find that it didn't matter because another army was on it's way. That being said, this could probably be dealt with by both tweaking the initial balance and maybe having a fixed (and known?) schedule for when each wave of forces would arrive?

Overall though this was a great time, and I really enjoyed it!

PS: I love the banner!

Edit: my only other thought is that some of the front-line provinces like Ostermark seemed to get overwhelmed pretty quickly. Maybe next time they get more of a breather so that a bit more defense can be coordinated? Lore-wise the Dwarves would likely have put up more of a fight so I think this makes sense...

[Mergor]

Ostermark got overwhelmed because I was stupid and dumb lol. Don't blame Dragon on that one.

[paladinbob123]

As a last request I would like to ask, all that still played and remained to the end to please voice your honest opinion on the hotseat's set up, the 1vs many idea itself, ingame balance, rules, my ideas I brought for this event. As I said honest opinion, so any of you can freely "" at me, if I screwed something up. I do have a list of things, that I wrote down already for myself, as what did I screw up and had a bad effect on the hotseat's gameplay itself.

personally i have no issues with the hotseat setup, and i came to the hotseat a little later than others picking up talabecland, which was a little underdeveloped for what was about to occur.

So as a generally summary i think it it worked well overall , as the system of co-operation works generally well, as long as one player is given a little more responsibility than the others, to help co-ordinate[which helped us later on when things turned really bad] ...perhaps a few more early events allowing more time allowing some states to build a little more,and for them to get a good gold reserve, for once in problems its a little hard to play catchup with the mtw2 game system. For the human armies need all those special troop types and numbers to give them a chance to complete against the more hardly enemies, and if you dont have the gold or economy or the buildup[&time] of special buildings then you are never going to commit gold to build em when u need to push gold into building troops?

as for the rest, perhaps there should a new rule to restrict megastacks[grouping of 6+ full army groups moving together] especially for such armies as orks and chaos as they can be so powerful...likewise with the humans perhaps there should be some of stack limit of armies a faction could field? [dont know, might be over complicating things?{winks] ]

but overall its good fun, if you can get some committed players, who like the setting and are up for a fight with close co-operation with each other

PBOB

[General Dragon.]

About preparation time, yes I guess I should have gave a little bit more breathing room, however one of my great mistake was, that I forgot to set Archaon and Grimgors age to a younger one, instead of the original and I kinda panicked, that if I don't accelarate things a little, they might die from old age before they get to their final stage.

As for the economy and recruitment one of the things I already put on my list other than a stat revamp for a future AR version is changing recruitment times and replenishment times. I set them a little bit low for the empire elite units. The economy however is very much already set up to help empire factions, you just need to build up all the economy buildings in your high level cities, especially the banks and you can easily double or triple the income of a city to compared to their starting income. Altdorf and Marienburg can easily produce more than 20k per turn income, for reikland, if they build up.
For limiting the number of units to an army is an idea, however I don't think it's necessary if I manage to revamp the AR for a better version. The other reason I started stacking elite units for the chaos armies and ork, was because I screwed up the basic unit stats for chaos marauders and early ork troops, who very much were inferior to basic empire units.

[AdmiralThrawn]

So I'm not sure if the basic Orcs/Marauders are inferior, per-se. Rather, in Hotseats the defender is always at an advantage so it feels like the Boyz/Marauders suck, while if the situations were reversed and the Empire was attacking them while they were entrenched, it would seem reversed.

But yeah, one other though: it might be smart to divide it up so that each Empire player gets 2 factions (preferably on opposite sides of the map but adjacent in turn order). This would speed up the turn rounds significantly I think as that would drag sometimes (though I'm as much to blame as anyone on that...).

[AdmiralThrawn]

PS: any update on the banner?

[Captain Melon]

I liked the idea of this HS, though I didn't really see any chance we could win after so many stacks spawned. If there was a glimmer of hope maybe it would be more fair?

[Mergor]

I mean... we won

[Captain Melon]

I mean... we won

I mean for my faction. But overall Empire won.

[General Dragon.]

Well the signature banner got a slight delay as Lifthrasir decided to remake it, as he believed the first one wasn't quite up to the task.
So here I present the final version and the reward, the signature banner:


I want to congratulate one last time for the players, that sticked to the end and of course many thanks to Lifthrasir for making this beatiful banner. Send him some reps, if you can for his fine work.