Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Hinnom is strong. As strong as Neifleheim? I don't think so. And the color and theme is a thing of beauty. Good work guys.

Also the pop eating effect has complicated and long lasting ramifications that won't be clear til we have seen it go though at least a few mp games.

Every new nation gets attacked by people who want to nerf it. Even Bogarus got a lot of calls for a nerf when it first came out. And as far as balance that is just plain ridiculous, Beyond ridiculous with the likes of Ryleh and Ermor in the Late era.

Every new nation should not be underpowered and I think we have a wide spread here in these three new nations.

Also, if anything these conversations highlight the need for boosting some of the weaker nations who never win mp games like Arco all eras, early Ryleh, maybe abysia somemore, etc..

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

It's not that Blood doesn't have battle magic, it's that it doesn't have real battle magic. Combine the fact that even with flyers bringing in tons of blood slaves to battles you still have massive fatigue and a huge cost in slaves, it isn't good enough to qualify as real battle magic.

For example, compare ten other casters in a big battle and ten blood mages with slaves in a battle, and you'll see:

1. The blood mages cast about half as many spells per battle because they keep passing out.

2. The blood mages spent 100 slaves doing it.

3. Arrows and battle spells sometimes kill your slaves, thereby turning your blood mages into expensive infantry.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't niches. Claws of Coctyus and its fiery brother are one of my favorite things to do to another player's SCs and god (mostly for the morale breaking), but that doesn't mean it's a viable combat tactic for regular play.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

it isn't?

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

It seems to me that making heavy use of blood spells in battles is just begging for an Earthquake. In my limited experience with blood magic, when the slaves take damage (e.g. from my own Soul Vortex) they stop being usable for magic and become regular mindless chaff. I guess damage counts as defilement.

-Max

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I've seen it mentioned to take misfortune and just use your fortune tellers to balance it out.

That's fine, but then you won't get the heroes, and these heroes are something special. They are basically gods themselves. The first hero I received was easily more powerful than my SC Pretender.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Yes, you will. I have taken misfortune 3, and still manage to get the heros in most of the games before turn 30.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Hmm, that's odd. Base chance of a hero is 3%, minus 1 point per point of misfortune = 0% chance. I guess the figures I have seen are wrong.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Or chris could be confusing misfortune, since I almost never get more than 1 or two heros by then unless I specifically take a high luck

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Or, even more interestingly, the fortune tellers could increase the chance of getting a hero. Now that would be intriguing.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Invading a high luck neighbor is just like having high luck.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Is it? For getting heroes?

For most things, invading a high luck neighbor should be like having no luck, until your dominion takes over, but I'd always assumed the hero chance was calculated at your capital since that's where he appears.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I've often wondered about this.
What is the purpose of having luck in each terrain, unless each terrain has a possibility of generating an event in that terrain.

Are there capitol only events?

So the question, more or less, are there capitol only events, or do things like temples/labs/capitol merely enable certain classes of events.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I think the game chooses a province and an event (perhaps not in that order), checks if they work together, and tries again until it finds a combination that works. So labs are only destroyed if there are labs, and you get something else if there isn't a lab.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

IIRC at least in dom2 forums it was said that the event frequency was dependant on capital dominion, but the exact nature depended on scales of the province (which was randomly chosen).

As it was, turmoil/luck nations had terrible day when invading order/misfortune lands. Ewww...

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Gem generating events seem to be tied to terrain type, among other things. "Huge amount of water gems floated ashore" happens in coastal provinces. Death in swamps, fire in wasteland... So there's a slight amount of extra strategy involved in your conquests.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Chrispedersen, I somewhat doubt you have gotten most heroes by turn 30 with luck -3. Since the heroes have worked this way since dom 1 and most other people seem to have impressions consistent with the way they are supposed to work I think you might have misremembered.

The appearence of heroes is based solely on homeprovince luck scale. Captured provinces won't matter. As someone said it should be 3% +/- 1 per scale setting a turn to get a hero.

Number of luck events are determnined by homeprovince scales and number of provinces, IIRC. The events are categorised as either bad luck or good luck events, the ratio of which are dependent on your home province luck scale. Once the general nature and number of events are determined the will be randomly assigned to provinces. There they will be randomly generated if the province does not have the requirements for an event the event will be rerolled. For the purposes of what events might occur enemy dominion luck scale in a province will be coniderewd unluck, unluck scales will still be unluck. So in order to get the 3000 gold event you will have the event occur in a province where you have your dominion and a plus 3 luck scale.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I have had Order 3 Misfortune 3 in over a dozen+ games and I have never had a hero.

Misfortune 3 = no heroes!

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

my view is that the best scales for Hinnom is 3 in everything but luck and magic with a -1 for luck and 1 for magic, I know that any race would work well with those stats, but you get a lot better results out of Hinnom with these

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

You may be right. I have no idea what the total number of heros are. But in the current game, with luck -3, with less than 30 turns, I have two of the sons, the first and the 3rd son.

In a Gath Game, with -3 luck ... less than turn 40 .. I have 2 heros as well, although I cannot recall their names.

I do not mean to say that I am getting more than 50%. I do mean to say that having a negative luck scale, and -3 in particular does not seem to be precluding getting national heros.

I also do mean to say that I have observed this on enough games that I believe this is not statistically aberrant.

So, I don't know if its
a) because we do not know the mechanism for heros
b) perhaps its a racial feature of the new races

but I'm reasonably sure its not
c). I'm hallucinating.

I would further contend a couple of points:
I don't believe luck scales consider a ratio at all. I believe rather it represents each individual luck events chance of being good or bad.

However, the ratio of events will vary widely.

I do agree that luck, dominion, and scales, as well as the contents and territory type do contribute and/or unlock certain events.

Lastly: I have often wondered did fortune teller units reduce the percentage chance of bad events - or, did it represent the chance of cancelling a bad event. I tend to believe the latter.

To illustrate:
Suppose you have 10 fortune teller units with a cumulative 50% chance.

Suppose you have Negative luck, to the extent that you have a 33% chance good, 66% bad.

Does the fortune teller reduce the chance of bad to 16%.. or as I suspect if a negative event occurs, does it have a 50% choice of cancelling it.

The former makes fortune tellers much more important.
But I have to say in thinking about it.. with around 10 fortune tellers.. I don't EVER recall getting a negative event.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I didn't realise you were talking about the new Gath heroes specifically. IIRC these Gath heroes are not proper heroes per se, but commanders recieved as nation specific events. That is you recieve them as events rather than through the national hero mechanism. The reason this mechanic was used, once again IIRC, was primarily because there is a hardcoded limit to the number of specific heroes available to a nation and the number of lords of civilisation exceded the maximum number of heroes, so in order to have sons of each lord Kristoffer figured he would go this route. Still, perhaps the event is a bit to common.

I guess my english failed me. Because it was very much my intent to convey the idea that the luck scales result in a a percenage that an event is either is good or bad, not that luck scales determine a fixed number of good or bad events for each number of random events. Perhaps it was my use of the word ratio that muddled the issue.

The fortune tellers have a chance of cancelling events.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Maybe you should make Gath's hero events have a requirement of at least Luck -2 so there'll be no heroes with Luck -3 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Gath has a multihero, and an event that generates the same multihero (much the same as a priest with a group of militias).

No nation can get normal heroes with misfortune 3. If you do there is something weird with your game. The mechanic is widely known and has been since dom-ppp: 3 percent +/-1 percent per scale step.

Johan is a bit wrong on the hero limit. It was increased and there are no events in Hinnom that generates normal heroes. THe Gath hero event is to make sure they get a lot of these quasi-prophets/heroes.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Just ran a few tests with turmoil-luck for Gath, and all I got were there holy-2 self-made human priests...
Dice dont like me. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I ran a fair number of turns with six female Hinnom priests in the capital and Luck-2, Life-1, and didn't get any special events. I'm not sure what I'm fishing for, if anything.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I think there are 7 (or so) tainted offspring of the Grigori. They all have titles like Son of, they look like heros but you may get them via certain special events.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Hmmm... interesting.

Well, sometimes scales unlock things.

Try +3 +2 +4 +1 X -2

Start with 10 territories or so. Run it for 30-40 turns see what you get. Now I'm *Really* curious.

You know what would be cool and self limiting?
heros that only appeared with an unluck scale = )

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

hah i had the great idea to make a big army of those giants that eat your population. they killed everything i sent them against but at the time i had forgotten that they ate the population. So when i tried to build the smaller giants they all starved. It was pretty much liking fighting the dominion of late age ermor.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Yeah, I was just experimenting with the Himmon. I wasn't paying enough attention to the population eating and ended up with a depopulated capital. It doesn't matter, though--against the standard AI I so overwhelmed it that the game is near victory without my ever attacking any AI, only the independents. Against 9 AI's I took something like a quarter of the total map--and nobody took the water at all so I really had well over a quarter. I put very heavy PD on all border provinces, once the borders were drawn I recruited nothing but mages for research and a few priests to build temples.

One AI fell to another one, of the 8 that remained I've popped 6 by dominion and lost only three provinces during that time. (And one of those doesn't really count--it was vacant, I took it with a priest. An AI cast Ghost Ship Armada, the armada attacked.)

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

It's been mentioned before, but if you want to up the AI difficulty a notch try Edi's Better Independents mod, which prevents the AI from recruiting most independents. The AI does better when it's recruiting national troops, not hordes of useless indies. Some indies are of course an exception.

-Max

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

The mod is not available currently. A better version will be available soon.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I may actually consider using the province attack rituals against Hinnom. Research Alt 4 and you can start bombarding their capital and fortresses with pop killing spells, and they'd probably have a really hard time recovering, rendering their troop production centers useless pretty quickly. Blight, E2D1 at 5 gems is probably the best choice if you have E/D mages, Wolven Winter at W3 for 5 gems is a little harder if you don't have access to water but not to boosters.

There's some other ones either higher up research or require a more powerful mage, like Black Death or Volcanic Eruption, but those probably come too late in the game to be a real strategy. Baleful Star and Melancholia though would be helpful to cast once on each city you're doing this on, if you can cast them. But I could see casting these spells with 5-10 mages (you can do that right?) for a few turns on key provinces and crippling the whole nation because they can't grow the pop back if they want to continue to use the fortress to produce troops.

Unless the mechanics work differently? I'm actually not so sure how pop effects production, I haven't played Ermor in a very long time. Supplies and income will be an issue if not so perhaps hitting their high pop lands instead would be better. Their capital at a minimum almost certainly will never recover, I don't know if that's worth pursuing though.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Of course Hinnom can hit you right back with Rain of Toads, which is three times as good as Blight in terms of causing unrest to shut down production.

-Max

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

They aren't really a great blood economy nation though, Hinnom. Their blood hunters are pretty expensive, cap only and eat the population.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Intriguing!

-Max

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Kullervo, perhaps?

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

T'ien Chi's Master of the Iron Crutch should be a Misfortune hero. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Yeah, that spell is pretty nasty. I don't think it'll hurt you as much as it hurts them, though. You can always patrol, lower taxes, and recover the population. They'll have a hard time doing all three because they need the income and growing the population back is tough. Patrolling with indies is an option for them.

Upon further thought stealth armies would hurt them too. Let them blow cash on PD, or better yet march large armies around and patrol trying to find you, killing their pop the whole time.

I don't know, I haven't really tried any of this. I played against them twice in SP. They were close neighbors both times so I eliminated them early through regular means. Just some ideas I'm shooting around.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Hinnom's PD is pretty damn good. Certainly pisses all over other giant PD.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I think it's better than anybody else's PD.


One question I have: What units exactly eat population and how much do they eat? I wish the text told us those things!

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

yes their light infantry is greater than some heavy of the age just armor wise.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Ulm's stealthy troops, with some mage support, seem to do pretty well against it. Then again, Ulm's stealthy troops are pretty good.

They're in my game now kind of beating the crap out of everybody else. I'll try some of my ideas out and see how they work.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

I have only played them in EA but i think only the biggest giants eat the population in EA. I thought i read something about them not eating each other and everything else in one of the later ages but not really sure?

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

In EA the rephaim all eat population and can also eat avvim and each other. My Baal ate a Melqart the other day. I think he may have gained power by doing so actually.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

[/quote]
Kullervo, perhaps?

[/quote]

Umm, wrong mythos. But I still hope to see a Kailevala mod some day.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

o yea they do eat each other which was quite annoying. I had a melqart with 4 experience stars from the arena and one of the baal ate him and didnt gain anything. I was a bit upset

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

He probably became more powerful in blood magic, unless you had empowered him already.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

When do they eat? I usually take growth 2.. and have yet to see it.

Butit makes me wonder about an interesting strategy.. could you send 4 wounded afflicted giants into the desert with one Bel?

Might that be a cheap empower?

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

The rephaim constantly eat population but you don't get any message about it. They can also create events where they eat avvim or each other, merely by being in the same place. It isn't /very/ common though.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

hmm ill have to check and see if he did become more powerful. I was thinking maybe he gained some health or strength from the other giant.

Re: The New Hinnom Nation
 

Are you sure they constantly eat population, or do they only eat population if supply is insufficient?

I usually take growth with this nation - and I haven't seen pop decreasing...