Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Well I guess it depends upon indep settings doesn't it?

Further such rates do not hold for up long either, since one will quickly meet up with other empires.

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Precisely, your growth is limited to what you can conquer. You cant spend 800 gold and create a new province once you have conquered all within your reach.

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

The difference is that after 5 or 10 provinces or whatever you can expand no more - it is bounded.

Pickles

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Yeah and gold income tends to decrease in the long run because a lot of nations have death scales + random events / spells .
4 elephants + 16 Hypaspists are not bad but normally with each province you conquer you will lose at least 1-2 Hypaspists or sometimes one elephant . So if you can conquer 5 provinces with this force is already good but on indeps 7-9 at least i doubt that .

And a SC can conquer those provinces without upkeep or if it is a recruitable SC ( Jotunheim ) goldwise significantly cheaper . And he doesn't lose his value mid-lategame as your hypaspists + elephants do .

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

It's only bounded by the size of the map. I can apply my Elephant Investment Strategy to other players' provinces as well as independents (in fact, my ROI might increase because the defenses in such province will - on average - be weaker than, say, size 6 Indeps).

Or are we taking enemy action into account now? We certainly weren't in the previous calculations.

Mark

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Naturally not. Your clam/fetish/stone/contract-holding scouts are quite safe from enemy action unless your empire has been completely overrun.

It's already been stated that fighting is detrimental to a clam-hoarding strat.

Military expansion, on the other, requires you to fight, and fighting reqires a continual investment or resources, AND your ROI is much less sure and much harder to calculate (if it goes badly your ROI could be quite negative! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif) In short military expansion is a much riskier "investment".

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

I think there isn't a major problem with the way things are now, but a small tweak like clams are only equippable on mages sounds reasonable. Who could object to that? All it does is limit the extreme clamming strategy (abuse?) where you have hundreds and are making more each turn. It does nothing to discourage a moderate to heavy investment in clams.

Also, I'd like to see the life given from lifedrain capped at the user's normal hitpoint maximum and/or another magic item added that gives protection from lifedrain (soul protection pendant or the like).

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Actually, the single best solution to clam hoarding would be to make water magic useful.

For a start, they ought to eliminate the inability of casting water magic on both land and water. Make water spells unique in that they all could be cast either land or water. Excepting the auqatic or land summons, of course.

But really, why on earth can niefel flames not be cast underwater? You spend all that mage time as Atlantis getting to level 9 and can't even use it in your most powerful dominion of your home territory.

As it stands, water gems are most useful for turning into astral via clams.

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

It is more like e.g. Civilization . Normally earlygame expansion is always bloody and Lasts long . Midgame it already gets better ( Roads everywhere , e.g. knights in civ http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif ) and lategame it is much easier against weaker opponents ( Railroads everywhere , the best weapons in civ ) .
In earlygame fighting in enemy dominion is quite risky , especially if your opponent has an immortal pretender .
It is hard to get a huge enough superority earlygame over your opponent to win fast enough with most nations .

If you played well and made the right preparations then a lategame war can be won in about 5 turns while an earlygame war Lasts often much longer . Lategame you just have more possibilities like SCs teleported in / Huge summoned armies / lots of battlemages / Ghost riders etc. .

Sure your opponent can do this too .

So imo the "art" of clamhoarding is to always not let the gap between you and the biggest nation not become too big , try staying in the upper middle in most graphs and hoard . Then you can be quite sure that when you are ready you are probably deadly enough because you have about the same income than the largest player or only slightly less but you didn't lose much because of wars .

Rushing is always good in small games with few players but with lots of players it is too risky because there will be always one who techs . If you would e.g. play empire earth with 8 players in a true FFA and rush you will probably get 1-2 of your neighbors but one who teched will be 1-2 ages more developed than you and beat e.g. your middle age troops with musketiers .

Empire earth is a game with "hard counters" like FM_Surrignon called them but the interesting thing there is that it often doesn't work because of different tech levels http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif .
Tanks e.g. improve to a new model every age there while Paks improve only every 2 ages and iirc the Last tank improvement is in era 14 , the Last one while the Last Pak improvement is in era 13 .

You got your first tank and your first pak in world war 1 era . There the pak won . In world war 2 era there was only a new tank model . This won then against the paks , narrow but it won . In modern age there was a new tank and a new pak but in the Last era again only a new tank .

I think dominions is in many ways similiar there , like Banes -> Bane lords -> Wraith lords -> Tartarians .
That makes it so entertaining i think . That every nation has an era at which it is especially strong but every nation has weaknesses too .
If you remember my long postings where i compared dominions with starcraft i had that balance in mind but starcraft lacks a real techtree . Starcraft is perhaps a bit more balanced but it is not as complex .
Dominions has another kind of balance .
I think now that the balance of dominions is even better than e.g. starcraft because it is more chesslike there . So it gets soon boring while the number of possibilities in dominions is just great .

The "negative" side is because dominions is so complex and because most ppl when they are asked about balance think first imo in a chess/starcraft system of balance tend to say when they are new dominions is imbalanced ( I have proven this often enough myself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif ) .

I agreed here too that clams are too good etc. but the longer i think about it i think i were wrong with that .
It is a good strategy but not overpowered because other strats can lead to victory as well or perhaps even better .


The only thing which i would like to see finetuning is the false horror spell . Against all troops with morale this is too long toooo powerful . I think about 10-12 of the included nations have severe difficulties defending against the common caelum false horror strat and a few have still difficulties but can defend because they can do the same or similiar ( vanheim / pythium especially ) and the 2 undead nations are here advantaged because they have enough troops + they don't rout .

Re: Are devils worth 7 blood each?
 

Yep. It always strikes me as wrong that air spells are more useful for underwater combat than water spells are. Lightning, orb lightning, etc, can be used on land or underwater, while many of water's direct damage spells ... can't be cast underwater. That's just so wrong...

Same thing with rituals. If Voice of Apsu can be cast on a land province, from another land province, why can't it be cast on the land province from an underwater lab?

And artifacts and magic items - with the exception of the Orb of Atlantis, there are none that require more than Water-3, and 20 water gems.