5 ships- Aquila, Alouion, Aetherfoal, Hammer, Stormscape. A bomb takes 10 minutes to charge and successfully fire. Each shot appears to hit for 3% damage apiece. Thus, a volley will be a bomb from each ship, for 5 total.

We began the operation a bit clumsily- it took awhile to get everyone there. That part, I don't have the times for. Some of these snips I don't have timestamps for, either, but I tried to give sufficient explanation. I started recording worldscans maybe halfway through the weakening.

You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 59.5%
*******************************************************************************
*Logging starts here. This is when they put in Liquid Nutrients (the cook item that passively heals a construct).


4654h, 4638m, 4788e, 10p, 19320en, 21960w exk /21:50:59.703/-ship worldscan
You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 61.3%
*******************************************************************************
Total constructs/colossi: 3
The ship detects the following beings present: Gix, Haiden, Qasamet, Eliron,
Mihewi, Llandros, Krin, Synl, Arilyon, Amani, Iwiertas, Leiliadhe, Morshoth,
Talan, and Daedalion.

4654h, 4638m, 4788e, 10p, 19320en, 21960w exk /21:51:05.913/-
(The above was taken 5 minutes after the preceding volley)
*Here's the effect of LN being seen


You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 55.4%
*******************************************************************************
Total constructs/colossi: 3
The ship detects the following beings present: Llandros, Gix, Haiden, Krin,
Morshoth, Eliron, Leiliadhe, Iwiertas, Qasamet, Amani, and Daedalion.

4654h, 4638m, 4788e, 10p, 19320en, 21960w exk /21:56:20.420/-
*3 shots fired between previous snip and this one.



You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 49.4%
*******************************************************************************
Total constructs/colossi: 3
The ship detects the following beings present: Morshoth, Qasamet, Krin, Mihewi,
Haiden, Gix, Iwiertas, Eliron, Daedalion, Talan, Amani, Llandros, Synl, and
Leiliadhe.

4654h, 4638m, 4788e, 10p, 19320en, 21960w exk /21:57:22.139/-
*Finished with our volley of 5, here.
*Note the flat 6% decrease with 2 shots. So one shot is most likely 3%.




You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 46.6%
*******************************************************************************

After one shot (Would take it to 46.4), LN healed by .2.
*LN seems to range between .2 and 1.8% healed on tick from this log.


You scan the world below for signs of constructs and colossi:
*******************************************************************************
Id Name Organization Health
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13744 The Tenebrous Altar of Shadows Glomdoring 34.7%
*******************************************************************************
Final result.
4654h, 4638m, 4788e, 10p, 19320en, 21960w exk /22:12:37.324/-


Maths:

3% is taken off a construct per bombard. Bombards fire every 10 minutes.

One ship bombarding for the full one hour will do 18% damage. That is, IF a full bombard is possible. The weakening might end just before the final volley goes off, assuming you start IMMEDIATELY as the day turns. So you'll probably do 15% damage with one ship.

Multiply this by our five ships.

50 (10*5)+ 40(8*5) = 90%

Five ships can't pull a full bombard off in an hour.

These maths don't count Liquid Nutrients (these were added halfway or so in), complications (fights, of which we had two), or the effects of Sparkleberry Jelly (which wasn't used by the Glooms as far as I could observe).

In our case, we got down to 34.7% health. It took us maybe 15-20 minutes to get the Stormscape and Hammer at the location and start firing. We would have gotten the Sickle, a sixth ship in roughly halfway through the ordeal, but we had complications there.

Edit: Cleaned it up a bit.

Edit Edit: Also, SHIP WORLDSCAN seems to trigger aethersight. Those poor things.

If they were using the anti-bombard shield, of course you have issues, especially since they can just spam-eat sparkleberry the entire time due to having no Construct opposing it.

You're supposed to use ground forces as well to maximize the damage. Ground + air for the best damage output (removes shield, slows down / stops sparkleberry consumption). Further, it was supposed to be tweaked to be very difficult to take down in one Weakening anyways, and you still almost got it from that log.

So-- what's the complaint? It looks like you actually did more damage than you should have, if the shield was being put up every time and sparkle was being eaten.

I don't think sparkle was being eaten/shields were being put up. With those up it would have been impossible.

Xen, it's supposed to be balanced around taking it down to 25% with TWO ships. We had five and got it to the late 30s. That's less than we should have, not more.

Where was it ever posted / stated that it was supposed to be balanced around taking it down to 25% with two ships? The entire setup (including shield and the change to sparkleberry) pretty much requires that you at least have a small ground showing. Which is a good thing.

We were using shield. And possibly sparkleberry towards the end.

Edit: we were also focusing positive with suicidal enthusiasm, which also reduces damage, IIRC.

I know someone's going to point ground combat out to me, so here's a preemptive...thing towards that response.

Ground combat is entirely possible, yes, but there's complications on that. For the most part, whoever gets there first is going to have the demesne and an immense advantage. That's how demesne combat works. The differences in design between the Nexus Worlds themselves is staggering. I tried to help defend Celest's today, for example, and theirs is layered like some odd sort of tower/fountain. There's two rooms going straight up and down from the entrance. That's as far as you can easily break without having to go beyond the defenders, to the bottom level, and then starting to break from the bottom up.

Those of you who haven't been demesning might not be able to envision this sort of stuff as easily as others, I'm not sure. Suffice to say, it was REALLY PAINFUL. You'll be holding two rooms tops, but they can easily be demesned over because of the small size and lack of safeguards. (Safeguards being forcing the enemies to go around you and break from uncomfortable positions, a la the bottom level of the Celestian nexus world).

Glomdoring's nexus world is arranged like a spider web. It stretches out in all directions but in/out and up/down from the entrance. The dock itself is located at the farthest southern point, and it's straight down. It's essentially a tilted square of like 5x5 or 6x6 proportions. It's impossible to completely meld the place because of it's size. However, while you can meld the entrance, it's easy to just sprint right out of the demesne and start breaking it from the outsides. The only room exits aside from the dock are NE/NW/SW/SE in every room. It's one big square, no tiers or layers or anything. In my experience, it's the easiest to retake offensively or defensively. (Defensively assuming you sprint out of the demesne fast enough before Shuyin ganks you)

I can't comment on the Magnagora's, having never experienced it before.

Serenwilde is pretty mid-tier as far as difficulty goes. It's basically a series of 3 circles linked together the northern and southern points (outer to middle) and east/west (middle to inner), if memory serves correctly. You can only successfully meld maybe half the place at once. The dock is a one-room-exit on the eastern side. Breaking it is easy, all you have to do is follow a path. There's no need to walk around or through the enemy demesne- there might be a few trails you have to follow and break before you can dive into the middle/inner circles, but that's really it.

Don't make me mention shrines and chokemense.

Point is- you can arrive a day or so early and establish a stronghold if you really want to. I know that Glomdoring had a miniature weakening just before their Major, so they had been on guard for roughly 3 hours at a time. If we tried to preempt them, we'd have had to wait some 4/5 hours before we were actually able to start destroying something.

That took a long time to write and I totally failed in preempting Xenthos, nice.

Anyways- I'd completely forgotten about the shields, I assumed that was for colossi vs. construct combat. That changes stuff a bit! I don't have the maths for that one, either.

The point of my previous post- ground combat is pretty difficult to pull off, much less synchronize with an aerial force.

That sounds like bad timing (both for you and for us, if we were on guard for that long a period of time). That's not something that is common, however, and ground combat was intended to be a major factor in this sort of conflict. Serenwilde can (and has!) gotten there first and put together a very nasty demesne / group combo that is very difficult to combat.

The shield cuts Bombard damage by 50% (as I remember it). Plus spamming sparkle heals a lot of damage now (since it's not on a timer, it's on balance, it's something you can't really do when fighting a Colossus... but if you're not fighting one, spam away!) Basically, you do a TON more damage from bombard just by simply having a Colossus in the room, even if it's not really doing anything.

Yeah, that was really bad timing. This isn't a thread to complain, it's mainly intended to be constructive and to just show the maths behind this sort of thing.

I know we've done that before, but I remember an hour or so wait before the weakening itself where we were trying to keep you guys off the place so we could set up a colossus in peace. That hour, especially since this is the first attack since the change to a full month RL month of the construct being dead, might just grow even longer for the sake of defense.

I think I remember the time in question. I also remember you guys waiting until the Weakening started to actually try to build the Colossus, despite the fact that a change went in a few weeks before that which let you build it earlier, and due to your waiting we were able to interrupt it.

I'm just saying that there are options, and you guys did a ton of damage for the way it's set up. With a Colossus there, it would have been blown away in well under an hour.

That was in the construct committee.

And if sparkleberry was there I guess it was nerfed (albeit not enough to matter.) Healing used to completely negate 1-2 bombards.

As for the ground raid: no, it really isn't feasible to get there and hold it for a while. Remember, you can't beacon before the weakening, so anyone who dies stays dead (on the offence team.) We would have to utterly annihilate you for two hours straight and STILL have spare members for ships (which would probably be undefended by empaths and not kitted out with 3 combateers.) It's only feasible to do one, and we did one a -lot-.
Beacons are pretty poor even outside of that because it moves you to a random room which could just as easily be in the chokemesne, and you can't beacon with ships. Oh well.

What change was this? I don't disbelieve it but I don't remember anything like that - AFAIK you still have to build the construct in the nexus world.

uh... you guys do know that constructs cannot be destroyed from aetherspace, right? You HAVE to destroy it with a colossus

Ah, the same construct committee that decided that destroying Constructs for a full real-life month was a good thing?

Okay, then. Well, I guess there's more decision-making there that I don't really agree with. But still, with the way this was set up (with the shield and sparkle changes), you all did a huge amount of damage.

You have to build it there, but you can build it early. Like, 30 minutes before the Weakening, when you arrive. Instead of giving us a chance to try and break in / kill the builder.

Someone did actually toss that up on the Armada, and we realized there was no way we were doing a ground assault either way (we weren't sure if that someone was correct) so we decided to push it and see how far it'd go.

Someone said that earlier but where did you get the info? It sounds like an urban legend to me.

@Xen: ...well, ok. That still requires breaking through the chokemesne though, which isn't going to happen. You should probably just be able to put it on a ship and have it walk up to the construct. I think that was suggested too. Meh.

Btw, as for "deciding destroying it for 30 months was a good thing" - the original suggestion, and I don't know if this was implemented or not, was that it was only force-destroyed for a little while, and then you could spend a lot of power to put it back up. Constructs ideally shouldn't be relied upon though, and the only org that would be passively punished by it is Serenwilde, so I don't see why it bothers you that much.

So... the suggestion wasn't to disable it for 30 RL days, but instead to give it a sliding scale based on how long it had been down. Only it got changed into this (much worse) version anyways? :/

Oh, and breaking through the choke-mesne is as tough as us breaking through your Demigod-3x-people-advantage-in-demesne that you were planning on going with. We just got there first, apparently. If you had... it would've gone very differently.

Not sure what you mean. You had MORE people than us when we worldscanned - our ships weren't all fully crewed. And that's not even counting the Magnadoran demi squad.

And of course you got there first, it was your major weakening. You knew it was coming and were farming particles. Chokemesne is the order of the day in that situation.