Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

If you're not taking a bless, there is absolutely no reason to recruit the sacred giant troops. Instead you rely on the non-sacreds in your roster. If there's no bless, it encourages you to build more early mages and you'll be able to hit higher levels of construction faster. It's hard to make them fatigue neutral without at least some level of earth bless though. And ashdod's sacreds/sacred commanders are very probably overpriced now, which could be fixed in a later version. I think they'd work better at 6 encumbrance as well, but this is really the first version of Ashdod that's not insane from turn 1.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

Squirrelloid, while I don't know anything about Ashdod, I think you're wrong about vanilla Ulm. In early game it's rather strong and can deal with most opposition. The problems begin with transition to mid-midgame if you don't diversify with pretender/indies by that time.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

See, that's your second fallacious (and eepeen) post in a row.


Let's suppose (as hypothesis )you manage to win me with Ashdod. Would that show that Ashdod is fine? Not really, just show that you are (in hypothesis) a better player than me (or at the very least, that you think you are). That would proof absolutelly nothing. I'm sure Baalz could beat me with any nation, even if I use pre 1.92 Ashdod. That shows absolutelly nothing about Ashdod (or any other nation) balance.

Just like your post proofs nothing, but that people in internet argument fall to e-peen show-offs when they have no other point to argue, or the points they made before have been refuted in a way they cannot answer back.(IE: the stupid remark about Berserk unbreakable morale, which had nothing to do with what I was replying to: the fatigue)

Do you want to prove something about Ashdod balance? Fine, let's take a look in the next couple of months to every middle age game there is, that is played under CBM 1,92. Let's see if they win they fair share of victories. I doubt it.

@rdonj
Fair enough, I change my stance from "ashdod is horribly overpriced" to "ashdod sacreds and sacred commanders are horribly overpriced". Which is kind of similar though, as the nation strength is their sacreds and sacred commanders. It's like if you remove Vans from helheim, or Jarls and sacreds from Niefelheim, and you say "hey, but they still can use everything else"

For example: you say that, without sacreds, they'll be compelled to buy extra mages for extra research. Sure. Except those are 200g non-sacred (for unkeep) mages with research 6. It's not like they are Bogarus or something, you know.

I'm not sure if they need to go down to encumbrance 6, or whatever. What I'm sure, though, is that 7 encumbrance for 150g and 88r is NOT a good deal. For that price, they suck. They suck hard. Sure, you can use the other troops in the roster. Bassically, the ones that don't suck. This doesn't change the fact they suck. Hard.

To repeat myself:
Yes, Ashdod with encumbrance neutral where way too powerful. Even if they were very expensive, they were very powerful. They needed a nerf. However, they nerfed them hard, but kept their insane cost. Most of the nations have *commanders* that are cheaper than Annakites. If you want to keep them with encumbrance 7, then they need a (serious) reduction in cost.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

EA Agartha was virtually unplayable for years until CBM finally got around to buffing it. It still managed to win at least one game. And Ashdod is in better shape than EA Agartha ever was.

What's frustrating is you don't seem to actually want to play Ashdod to see if it still works. (I'd be willign to bet E10N4 still works, too, but it was never the sacred *troops* that really mattered). Which is why i offered to blitz. You specifically said:

Ok, so prove to me its lose incredibly fast if you don't use the sacreds. My offer was not an epeen argument, you literally said 'anyone who doesn't use the sacreds is going to lose'. Prove it. Put your money where your mouth is.

If instead you'd rather attack me then prove your claim, you're conceeding that you were wrong before. I wouldn't have even offered a blitz if you hadn't argued that doing anything but using sacreds was an autoloss.

Otherwise, there are other options, and thus Ashdod is probably fine. If a single one of their sacred options is not optimal in all situations, that's only a good thing. If its optimal in none, well, it'll get tweaked eventually. CBM balancing is an iterative process. But its clear to me at least this is solely a unit issue, not a nation balance issue.

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You seem convinced that enc 7 is too much without being willing to play them. Considering net enc 2 is better than enc 5 for most troops, including Ashdod's nonsacreds (which work just fine!), this implies you don't actually understand the issues.

And berserk is an advantage. Those troops are fatigue neutral *until* they berserk, and then they don't run away once they do berserk. Horrors, they build up a little fatigue every round they attack *after* they berzerk. Its still less than the other sacred overall, because they have enough protection (18 with E9+) that putting some damage through that in the early game is hard.

The fact that you automatically dismiss them because they *eventually* become not-fatigue-neutral sort of demonstrates that you won't be happy until you have fatigue neutral broken giant troops. Since we know that's a bad idea, of course we're skeptical of your position.

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And the real point you seem to be missing is that Ashdod was never about armies of *troops*. It was about armies of thugs and SCs. Being non-neutral on fatigue is only going to really matter in large battles, at which point you'll be thanking your enemies for killing off your cash-guzzling sacreds so you can recruit more SCs.

The only impact of non-neutral fatigue via bless is that Ashdod needs to do some research before it tries to crush someone now, as opposed to just rushing people. This is a good thing

Zazzumite: excellent thug/light SC, self-blessing, frequently with good buffing paths (Summon Earth Power, ironskin/stoneskin/invulnerability, soul drain, potentially personal luck/body ethereal, etc...)

Adon: Excellent SC, self blessing, good buffing path. (E2 ones are the best, but S2 isn't much worse and F2 is ok eventually). 3 misc slots. Typical E9-10 bless with bracers of protection doubles up the +4 protection bonus from the bless, and the third misc slot lets you pack a pendant and AMA in addition to the bracer.

Base enc 7 can be cut with lower fatigue armor or shield (or both), and mitigated away with boots, summon earth power, and of course bless.

Even without a big E bless you can still drop them to fatigue neutral pretty easily.

And no, Adons are not overpriced. They're a recruitable SC chassis - how bad the armor is or isn't is irrelevant, you're just going to slap something better on them anyway.

When every commander you recruit all game except Talmai Elders is a viable SC, its time to start wondering why you bother with recruitable troops after turn ~12 at all.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

Just tested non-bless start.
Used dormant sphinx e6s4 dom7 03/P3/H3/G3/M1.
No problems with expansion - starting army is abysia class.
archers + amorites for second army are good too,
Recruited Zamzumites each turn (starting from turn1). Had adon with lantern shield, luck pendant , earth braces and black steel plate on turn 8. He rocks:).

Don't see what problems ashdod have.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

I did the same as Scaramuccia and tested an expansion with both the non-sacred troops and E10n6 sacreds. I also found things worked fine with the non-sacred troops. Both types of sacreds did fine as well, even with fatigue accumulating. Fatigue as a possible counter to them seems reasonable.

I also agree with Squirrelloid that beyond initial expansion, it's the sacred commanders that matter, not the troops. And there you can swap out the encumbrance 3 armor and give them reinvig items if needed.

Actually, looking at the troops my main thought is that they are among the better GoR candidates in the game. Probably not worth it since you've got Zamzummite's but 6 gems is a reasonable cost to pay for that type of thug.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

My issue would be that the principal behind CBM was, I thought, to reduce the number of "useless" units each nation has and encourage diversity. This change does the latter (because Ashdod becomes more of a mage-variety emphasis and de-emphasizes the cap-only sacreds), but at the expense of the former (the sacred troops are much more niche-utility, where their use was already limited by their extreme cost and limited massability). Sure, people are more likely to consider strategies other than high Earth bless now, but I'm not sure that the high Earth bless is even a good investment any longer.

For Adons, you can just replace their armor with something lower encumbrance (even Black Plate Cuirass is better), but Anakites (both types) are likely to see very little use. Was an Ahiman Anakite bless rush really a constant problem with Ashdod? Why not just push them up to a higher cost?

I don't understand why, facing Ulm, one wouldn't load up on the cheaper giants. Amorites and Edomites should be able to do a number on the base troops of Ulm and survive most of the early things the smiths can do. So "Ashdod is worthless" sounds a lot like "monkey PD is crippling" to me, but I'm not sure the change made here was well considered.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

The problem with this assertion (although it is a goodthought) is that without the nerf, the sacreds, and the high E bless was so good that it made all other strategies severely sub-optimal. So CBM has at the very least kept the number of options the same. I think it has increased because personally i think at least E6 is still huge for ashdod just for the SC's.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

Indeed, there were a number of nations even crappy vanilla Ulm (after the Black Guard adding patch) could rush, and CBM Ulm can rush a lot of people successfully, provided they are close enough.

Re: Ashdod is worthless now
 

had I realized the sacreds were worthless now, I would have just used regular troops.. They should have just deleted the sacreds, so people don't mistakenly use them like I did.