Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

You keep harping on their non-sacred mages but they have a perfectly functional sacred researcher. Granted he's not doing anything in a fight, but your combat mages are actually pretty cheap because they're not sacred, while you can fill out your labs with really cost-effective guys.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Not to mention that the W or N random monks become absolute monsters when placed into a communion. 0 enc, 0 gem reinvigoration and POTS are nothing to sneer at.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hey, don't rip on the ghost king. he is a very good expander/rainbow

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I've used GK with plenty of nations, often UW ones! He's a great expander early on against non-archers non-mages - which means UW you can guarantee a province/trn so long as you avoid the hydromancers (they're the ones with sea trolls and a kraken). Land nations need to be a little more careful (or give him air magic!).

Jomon:
1) Samurai armor's huge encumbrance is irrelevant. If they acquire more than 20-30 fatigue, you're doing something wrong. Namely, not killing the enemy fast enough. You have 6 damage katanas as the *low* end of your weapon options. At the high end you have 10 damage glaives. Since all the units you will ever buy have str 11, that's 17-21 damage per guy. That's enough to really matter against even elite infantry. Throw on some strength of giants and its your own fault if you start fatiguing out.
2) Earth bless can make a lot of sense as Jomon - specifically for your summoned thugs. But it also benefits your sacreds - the yamabushi are well worth using *even without a bless*. Don't overlook the H2/H1 thug that comes even earlier than the other one - he can self bless and has only slightly worse stats. (Also, only requires E gems iirc, instead of precious astral).
3) Jomon's magic is good. No seriously, you have access to everything but D natively, and you have a summon that has D magic (i forget which offhand - its the swamp one). Who cares if they're not sacred - they're dirt cheap for how good they are. 4 total paths for 160g and recruit anywhere is pretty nice - it comes out to around 11g upkeep, which is less than 2g/RP in upkeep - its not winning any efficiency awards, but its certainly not notably bad either.

And since you can (and should) buy a lot of them, you'll have the path combinations you want, and access to boosters in most paths. The only boosters you won't have reliable access to are air and fire, and for the most part you won't care. Heck, you have the coveted E+S in combination, so you can make coins to S-boost. IIRC, you can get to RoWs without needing your pretender involved.

Site search aggressively (you'll be able to use auspex, augury, apsu, arcane probing, gnome lore, and haruspex trivially) to get good gem income.

Map move 1 a problem? Use your air income to make boots of flying.

4) Samurai archers suck. No seriously, don't buy them. Go-hatamoto, aka-oni, ashigaru, and yamabushi are about the only troops you should ever buy.

5) The monks are just amazing, but not for research. They're less efficient researchers than your other mages (no seriously, they've got half as many RPs for more than half the cost, meaning they cost more upkeep/RP than the mages do). What the monks excel at is being handed a master matrix, and leading line-backer communions in which they get to use awesome spells (W+N monks), or casting AoE air shield (A monks) on your shield-less troops. The F and E monks are acceptable researchers, and the cost of getting the really awesome monks.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Thanks for some good suggestions (I did not really notice yamabushi, for example), but, in my opinion, the main points still remain.

Sorry, but Jomon magic is simply not good. Sure, there are nations in LA with worse mages, but not too many. Tien Chi magic is good. Marignon magic is good. Jomon magic is not. I have played 2 MP games with them (and several SP), and the most vivid memory is a huge crowd of W1N1, A1N1 and E1W1 Onmyoji hired in a vain hope to get an F2.

I did not mean that earth bless is completely useless for Jomon. But here the in-built frustration factor of Jomon manifests again: you need earth bless for thugs BUT your mages are not sacred and you have a reliable access to earth. So, it's a kind of a lose/lose situation. Typical.

Moving around those huge monk-powered communions which are supposed to be a trump card of Jomon using boots of flying does not really look like a solution.

Nushi does have D1, but she is Conj-5, needs W2 and can only be summoned in swamps. Well...

Why ashigaru? I did not really find any use for them. You start with 10, and they do a good job as archer decoys, but I never saw a reason to buy one.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

Hmm. At first glance, yamabushi don't really seem to be a real improvement over go-hatamoto without a bless. Care to elaborate on their usefulness, squirrel?

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

I rather agree on the mage frustration part, as you can't plan on anything, apart on a giant map where you'll be able to pump enougth of them so as to be 'almost' sure to have the paths you need. Even in SP I had problems with those damn randoms.

But the troops seemed to me rather good, ok you have no shields, but you'll crush any recruitable troops in melee, thanks to awesome attack skill and good damage output. And your cavalry is here to flank ennemy archers. Heck, the attack skill of your troops is so high you can even hope to reliably damage water blessed sacred troops ! The only real threat is crossbows/ fire arrowed archers, as basic archers will have great pain damaging your troops.
Think the other way around : who will I send to the frontline to hold those god damn samurais that won't end sliced up in two rounds ?

As I'm a SP player, I won't praise the jomon specific summons (AI can't react properly to thugs) but they seem to me efficient enougth to be worth using. Those plus the ones you get as an heritage of earlier time gives you a enormous lot of tools to use.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

rdonj: Yamabushi have (1) higher attack than go-hatamoto, (2) damage 10 weapon vs, damage 8 weapon (21 vs. 19 damage before drn), and (3) map-move 2. You're also likely to have some sort of bless unless you played for pure scales, most of which are going to be at least plausibly useful. Finally, they require relatively few resources compared to their gold cost, unlike most of your troops, so they're easy to 'mass' - I usually take good dominion as Jomon to push my likely great scales so i'm buying 7+ of them every turn.

Ok, first of all: castle aggressively. If you have less than 3 castles at the end of year 1, you're probably doing something wrong. If you hire mages at all your castles every turn, and continue castling aggressively, you should get most variations you need.

Second: both of your mages are useful. The Onmyoji only really come into their own later on - i'd focus on the other earlier. He'll get you easy access to haruspex and gnome lore, and you'll probably pull an augur and auspex before too long. As your anti-rush strategy should involve alteration research, these are the mages you want to shut down a rush anyway because the early earth magic in alteration is killer. (Suggested research: alt2 -> thaum2 -> evo2 -> conj3+ OR alt4 OR constr++. This gets you all the site searching spells as well as the necessary rush counters before the end of year 1.)

First, your god doesn't *need* to do anything for you except provide good scales. So grabbing a major e-bless really doesn't involve any opportunity cost except your scales are worse than they would otherwise be. So who cares if your mages aren't sacred? That means you don't need to waste effort trying to bless them all either, and since your priestly options kind of suck, sacred mages would be even more aggravating.

Monk-powered communions are *a* tool in the jomonese toolbox, not the only tool. You have summonable thugs capable of raiding, you have good battle magic especially in earth and astral, and you have solid troops. You even have mages capable of casting Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows (F2 + Phoenix Power + 3f gems - so keep an eye out for good indie archers). The communions should come out for big fights only, and as your Onmyoji can all teleport with a cap, they are easy to mass when necessary, and are your go-to mages for communions because they can slave themselves up on their own.

Since your major early research goals are in alteration, conjuration, and construction (following acquisition of site searching spells), conj 5 is not that inconvenient. Also, swamp forts are cheap, so you have good reason to want a swamp anyway. And you'll have W2 by the time you have conj 5. IIRC, she also has decent water magic, so you can use her to break into Streams from Hades with some boosters for D3 access. Conj 5 is plenty early enough for death access.

Ashigaru have a length 5 weapon, and you'll have a pile of N2 mages. Panic + repel sounds like a tasty combination. Also, cheap chaffe is always potentially useful, especially when your cheap chaffe is better armed and armored than most of the independents at a similar resource cost, and the independents are much harder to mass. Deploy them against average morale foot soldiers or cavalry, provide some mage support (re:Panic, but also LoS, Wooden Warriors, etc..), and the lowly ashigaru might surprise you. With sufficient panic-spam, even elite soldiers are vulnerable.

Note that the yamabushi's glaive is length 4, so still good for repelling a wide variety of targets - they could easily be mixed into blocks of ashigaru for some punch.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

The tread is actually about CBM, so I will try to be brief, so that we can concentrate on discussing possible mod suggestions
This does not really solve the problem. Sure, if I hire a huge number of mages, eventually I will get all the needed combinations - and end up with scores of nearly-useless high-upkeep mages.

IMO, Jomon absolutely needs death on their pretender. Without death, they will miss one of the best thugs in the whole game, and their late game will be completely unimpressive. Nushi is _not_ an option for death access, because it is difficult to summon, and, far more importantly, comes far too late. Ghost General is Conj 4, and as Jomon I would want to mass summon them ASAP. Not to mention the amount of death gems Jomon will have available using this approach. Forget Dai Oni, I am not sure Jomon will even have enough for some generic late game summons.
Sure, Jomon has all these options. In addition, it has good national SCs, powerful amphibious troops, great flying shapeshifting water mages, etc, etc. Too bad most of these options are best described as "hypothetical". I mentioned communions because this is one of the precious few things Jomon can _reliably_ access.

So, to keep this constructive :)
Jomon as it is, in my opinion, is flawed in several ways. It has access to very, very intersting things that can make this nation unique, competitive and just fun to play. But Jomon practically cannot use most of them. I would accept the mage-frustration thing by itself without any problems - lots of nations have problems with their mages, and they should compensate for it somehow, it is part of a game. But in Jomon's case it is a part of a greater picture. Heavy armor, bad randoms, no death, weak starting army, no underwater access, etc - all these things combine in a way that cripples the nation and ruins its great potential. Remove a few of these, and then players will be able to either compensate for the nation weaknesses, or accept them and boost the strong sides instead. This is the usual approach with most nations.

Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
 

....

I'm not about to go through all the possible path combinations to tell you what they're useful for. Suffice it to say that most of them are good for something, and you do need researchers after all, so even the few 'bad' combinations aren't actually useless. There are lots of great spells available at X2 for most paths, and quite a few at X1Y1 or X2Y1. Once you get some boosters you can cast 80-90% of the spells in the game. Most nations *cannot* say that.

...

No. In fact, Death is among the *last* things I would want on my pretender. Nushi -> Kolkythiad -> Lich -> Tarts gets you all the death you could ever possibly want, and the early steps don't even require d gems!

Conj 5 being late is hilarious, considering most pretender achieved D-access is acquired at conj 5 or 6 (lamia queens, streams from hades)

Ok, first of all, ghost general (like dai oni) is a yomi/shin summon that you are *lucky* to still have access to.

Second, you have your own perfectly good thug summons at conj 2 and 4 that don't require death.

Third, you will never have the d gems that early to mass ghost generals. You might get one, maybe 2. You'd be better off saving those d gems for something you actually need.

If your pretender is awake so you can get d-income that early, your scales aren't good enough. Jomon lives or dies by its scales. Then you consider sites in LA are often fairly rare, and you're really wasting your pretenders time if all he's doing is site searching and casting thug summons.

When i said summonable thugs i meant the e/s ones that are actually Jomon's, not the shin/yomi summons that jomon happens to have access to.

Jomon does not have national SCs really - it has access to shinuyama's SC summons (which is, in turn, a yomi recruitable). Its lucky to even have that as an option. Not being able to predictably use it should not be interpreted as a Jomon disadvantage - they only have access to it because Shinuyama has it. It was never intended to be cast by them.

... the starting army can expand just fine with some recruits - it is by no means especially weak.

They have everything but death, and all you need is a swamp to bootstrap up death in a real way. You won't need death magic until the endgame, so...

Kappa provide UW access. Also Naiad warriors, which you can easily summon, or happening across merfolk/shambler towns.

Basically, stop whining about things that Jomon doesn't do well when it was never intended to do those things well. Look at what Jomon actually does well instead - there's quite a lot. Not having easy access to death magic isn't exactly the end of the world - plenty of good nations don't have access to it, and Jomon can bootstrap into it *without* using precious pretender points!