Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If the province contains a lab the slaves do come from the pool automatically. You just have to equip the priest with the number of slaves you want him to sacrifice from then on, after that he keeps reequipping and sacrificing that number of slaves every turn. This way you can choose the number of slaves you wish to sacrifice. Once started, under the condition you have sufficent amounts of slaves, you need not bother with the priest again until you for some reason want him to perform another order.

[ November 30, 2003, 22:24: Message edited by: johan osterman ]

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

What effect does each sacrificed slave have on Dominion spreading?

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Each sacrificed slave counts as one non-Mictlan temple (or prophet, or home province). This means that the effectiveness of sacrifice depends on the God's dominion strength (including boosts from number of temples).

Obviously the ability to make each of your temples count as five (for HPotS with Jade Knife, not counting prophets or national heroes) could be quite spectacular, however, the cost is pretty steep. Maybe Mictlan priests should get a blood hunting bonus similar to Fountain of Blood (not as powerful of course).

Does anyone know why Mictlan is allowed to take the Ceremonial Faith theme (its only effect is to raise the effectiveness of preaching, which Mictlan can't do at all)? Also, how does Restless Worshipers work with Mictlan - does it spread your dominion for free (could be very valuable)?

Of course, as scales currently stand, the Last thing an already weak nation needs is a turmoil scale...

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Each sacrificed slave counts as one non-Mictlan temple (or prophet, or home province). This means that the effectiveness of sacrifice depends on the God's dominion strength (including boosts from number of temples).

Obviously the ability to make each of your temples count as five (for HPotS with Jade Knife, not counting prophets or national heroes) could be quite spectacular, however, the cost is pretty steep. Maybe Mictlan priests should get a blood hunting bonus similar to Fountain of Blood (not as powerful of course).

Does anyone know why Mictlan is allowed to take the Ceremonial Faith theme (its only effect is to raise the effectiveness of preaching, which Mictlan can't do at all)? Also, how does Restless Worshipers work with Mictlan - does it spread your dominion for free (could be very valuable)?

Of course, as scales currently stand, the Last thing an already weak nation needs is a turmoil scale... </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">IIRC Ceremonial Faith is not allowed, it's just there and useless. It shouldn't be there at all.

Restless worshippers do not give additional spread points, but allows spreading dominion to easily reduce other dominions and is therefore as useful to Mictlan as to any other player.

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

The sense I get from re-reading this thread is that everyones got a similar idea of what to do its just that no-one has managed to have much success with it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

C'mon Illwinter - 2 spine devils for 5-6 blood? It is a blood 2 ritual so it takes a costly mage to perform and if you only get one devil its hard to make the spell cheap enough in blood slaves to be efficient. If it only required blood1 it might be different.

And some bronze armour?

I feel that Illwinter have been somewhat cautious with their new nations and as a consequence only Machaka (which gets Plate) seems up to scratch. Its not that I want Mictlan and Tien Ch'i to be more like the classically successful races - I'd like them to be a bit better at what they do.

I believe that the central focus on balence redressing should be improving underpowered options not weakening useful options. The only exception I can think of at present would be a decrease in the finanicial effectiveness of Order as part of improving turmoil/luck races.

Cheers

Keir

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

Presently Mictlan seems interesting to play using maximum blesses. Such as 4 in everything and 9 in astral

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Even that, I think, is unnecessary - rather, the event reducing effectiveness of order should be reduced and/or event increase given to both ends of the luck scale (as in Dom I), plus most disasters shouldn't occur at or above a given level of luck (differs depending on the magnitude of the disaster). This would make order/misfortune riskier and turmoil/luck more beneficial for their respective events, which IMO would go a long way toward balancing out the steady-state income reduction.

Luckily, instead of a severe flood, we just had a mild rainstorm. Thank God! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif


I do feel that Mictlan is rather weak - they have the problems endemic to light units, plus their copper armors are very inefficient in terms of protection/weight/resources. Low level blood summons aren't very useful because of the high cost of the mages necessary to perform them and the need to use slaves to maintain Last place in dominion http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif . I'm not sure what could be done to help them, other than multiplying the blood summons (i.e. 2-3x the demons for 2-3x the slaves). Maybe a blood hunting bonus for their priests (like Fountain of Blood only not as strong)? Or maybe they just need to have more javelins and less slings? Javelins are quite effective in Dom II, but slings are still worthless. An improvement to sling precision/damage across the board would be interesting - few other nations use slings, and those are usually weak (Man militia comes to mind).

T'ien Ch'i isn't so bad except for the magic duel weakness - their special themes suffer from the current order/luck imbalance, but assuming that is fixed, they wouldn't need much more. Barbarian Kings will benefit a lot from the rumored change to fire and flee, and (if it is implemented) firing during hold and attack (or a fire and attack order). I think they don't need any nation specific changes right now as they stand to benefit from some game-wide changes.

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

Perhaps one of the beta, or even the devs, can share with us how they envision Mictlan, and how we could play them? The race appears so fragile that I have yet to come with a successful Mictlan specific strategy.

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Arent they the highest at having blessable units? Have you tried playing with maximum blessings? 4/4/4/4/9/4/4/4

Re: how would you play Mictlan
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Arent they the highest at having blessable units? Have you tried playing with maximum blessings? 4/4/4/4/9/4/4/4 </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Could you give an example that isn't too crippled economically? Say, we want at least 180 income with 30000 pop in turn 1?