Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Ghost Riders do well against any SC that relies on life stealing (ie. a whole lot of them) since they're all lifeless. Anything with positive encumbrance and insufficient reinvigoration will eventually fatigue out. Helps a lot if they also don't have fire shield.

At 5 gems a casting, you can throw a whole hell of a lot of them at one SC and still come out ahead of your opponent in terms of gems spent.

[ May 22, 2004, 05:58: Message edited by: Yossar ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

My fave is Horde from Hell, which is at least 5 times more effective than those crap CoW-s http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Both. But since everyone already has misfortune anyway, the latter effect is negligible. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is the second time I have seen you mention something like this.
Who is "everyone" that takes misfortune? Has there been some sort of tacit consensus while I was out getting cigarettes? And if so, why?

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Both. But since everyone already has misfortune anyway, the latter effect is negligible. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is the second time I have seen you mention something like this.
Who is "everyone" that takes misfortune? Has there been some sort of tacit consensus while I was out getting cigarettes? And if so, why? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Nah, not everyone of course. Norfleet is exaggerating, as usual. It strongly depends on your nation, your overall strategy, your "random events" settings, your "order" scale, the estimated length of your game. Although it is certanly a popular scale to sacriface when you are looking for more points.

[ May 22, 2004, 16:19: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">And a $300 castle permanently eliminates this, and many other nuisances regarding sudden temple burnings. That's $300 well-spent, something I'm reminded of every time I burn down one of your temples. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Nearly everyone takes misfortune, as a living nation, because it's the easiest source of points you can get after taking Order...which nearly everyone must also do, or they'll be making half the income of anyone who doesn't. While Misfortune-3 maybe be too much of an ouchie, Misfortune-2 is a pretty decent source of points to partially offset the costs of Order, since Order helps to suppress the annoyance of random events in the first place, which makes it anti-synergistic with Luck.

When you consider the huge effect Order has on income, as compared to any other income-affecting scales, and how badly short of Gold you usually are, this tends to rapidly become a no-brainer for nearly all living nations.

Furthermore, the Luck scale is weak, as a number of bad events appear to be classified as good events, such as heavy rains, or the "free" militia.

Obviously, dead nations need not apply, but then, do you really care if a plague wipes out half of your zero population every so often?

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Oks a castle worth to defend the temple, sure.

But what about when you lose an entire army cause someone cast for 25 gems 165 Longdead Horsemen and 5 Wraith mounted commanter unleashing this sudden strike on you?

(I told 25 gems cause this will take out a pretty big army)

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

I believe the ghost rider should be a little nerfed, or cost raised ... I know it's a very high research level spell ... but for 5 gems you've a very powerful strenght to annhilate armies and to harrass provinces temple undefended

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Sudden strike? Your army can't be touched if it's inside of your castle.

If you're in front of an ENEMY castle, you should have expected this! It's not sudden when you expected it to happen and braced for impact.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Eh dunno, the good luck events are really pretty good. Everyone guffaws at free gems but they can easily lead to site searching paths you wouldn't have been able too, at least easily without hot-footing it on the map. The gold events are unpredictable but quite nice.

I had been making test runs with nations for PBeM games, and i found lots of bad luck completely unacceptable, especially the 'province is attacked by barbarians' sort - and even with 3 Order. Those just really damper you expansion if you have to circle back and recapture them, sometimes 4-5 turns have been lost, not to mention the income during occupation and unrest after recapture. This is especially true for nations weak in the early game that really NEED to expand to gain enough capital momentum to move further on their tree to better casters or summons (hi Mictlan!).

And after being burned by Rain in my Home Province in my first email game, i just don't like the risk.

In fact in one game im taking Luck AND Order. We'll see how that works out.

I believe that bad events are triggered by other scales as well. Even with Luck 2 i would get several especially annoying bad events, because another scale was set to -3. Its like there are thresholds for bad events.

For me the 'freebie' scale is either Sloth or Hot/Cold; well, ill take a peg of cold if i just have to have 40 points, but ill take Sloth 2 or 3 if something has to give, over Misfortune. I may well be wrong if you look at the formulae, but its what seems to work best from my experiences and methods.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Heavy rains happens just as much, if not more, with Luck. Luck has absolutely no effect on preventing it.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This tends to be true for "good" events as well: In order to reap the benefits of Luck, you need good scales in other areas as well, particularly a strong magic scale. This is why Ermor works well with luck: All of their "good" events are channelled towards gems, and the "bad" good events, like heavy rains, plagues, and whatnot, just kill more of your 0 population.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">A peg of hot or cold generally has only half the effect that the numbers say it will, and, in fact, especially if you're a Heat/Cold-2 nation, like Jot/Machaka, taking an extra peg helps more than it hurts, as you will be at your preferred temperature MORE often than not.

Sloth, of course, greatly cuts into your ability to produce troops. If this isn't a great concern to you, it's definitely worth it: I certainly do it....but it's not enough! You need more points!

Sloth also has a slight income malus, but not a strong one: its primary effect is on resources.