Re: Better Know a Pretender: The Green Dragon
 

Why aren't the PD helper spells any good, and why Mechanical Militia in particular? I've never got around to casting any of them, just curious.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

PD posts from the Green Dragon Pretender thread moved to this thread.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

Radio_Star, kindly dial down the insulting tone. It doesn't really serve much of purpose. If HoneyBadger's ideas are really as bad you seem to think, it should not be much trouble to show them up as such.

The points in favor and against retaining the PD mechanics as they are are interesting enough. Personally I've found PD as it currently is suitable for what I need, though some nations definitely get more bang for buck than others. Changing PD mechanics in any deep manner is not going to happen, though. You'd probably need to break a lot more things than it's worth to get there.

As a final note, I do not wish to need to moderate this thread again. Anyone who makes it necessary does so at his or her own peril.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

If you just want stronger PD for SP, I suppose that's fine. I'm not sure that would make for a particularly fun game (hordes of AI chaff+huge AI PD... ugh) but you could certainly do it. I'm not sure who would be interested in doing such a mod, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to do if one was so inclined. It's just a matter of selecting a few nations and switching a few numbers around. It shouldn't take more than ~an hour per era, if you have a good plan for what units you want to use. You could even add in typically summoned units in small numbers at 20+ PD if you were so inclined.

The PD helper spells aren't THAT bad... they probably aren't that good in the bang per buck department, though.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

Arent the PD helper spells dependent on domain strength and sometimes terrain?
It becomes not a question of whether its good or not, but how good can it be. A little bit of help is good. But with Domain 10 and 125 PD you wouldnt want it to make a castle impossible to take.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

Whether the "PD helper" spells are worth it depends on the number of provinces you own and if your opponent is a raiding nation that could be hampered by that type of summon. Situational but certainly useful.

I've found mechanical militia very nice when fighting light cloud trapezing thugs, both as a deterrent and actual defence. It makes those vanjarls, early eagle kings, siddhe lords etc. just a bit too fragile to risk with minor equipment. That's worth it in itself sometimes.

I just wish they scaled with PD, that would be cool.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

In my current game, mechanical militia paid for itself in the first turn in terms of the number of raiding groups it surprised and killed. It's also great as an offensive raiding tool, since each province you take now requires a medium size force in order to retake.

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

I've been Shrap'd!

Re: PD wars! (no monkeys allowed)
 

PD is far from useless, it's just situational.

It is good for:

Beefing up a province for an impending attack where you have no other way to ferry units there next turn.

PD make great arrow catchers.

Buying 1 PD at least gives you a scouting report of the army that just trashed your province.

Some nations have pretty great PD. If I remember right, Mictlan gets Jag Warriors > 20 PD. LA Pythium has some pretty tough units in their PD as well.


PD becomes useless when someone tries to use it in place of mobile troops.

I should say I don't play games with binding NAPs, so my vision of PD significance might differ from point of view of people who play such games.

Usually, when I plan to attack another nation I expect to take a decent number of provinces in a surprise attack during first turn of war, when opponent isn’t ready. I consider information about enemy PD to be one of the most important ones while planning.

Let’s suppose I have 4 poorly equipped flying thugs and 2 well equipped ones. And let’s suppose enemy has PD of one or such in all his provinces. Small squads of mine take 3 bordering provinces, 6 flying thugs take provinces within flight reach, and 5 provinces beyond their reach I take with ‘Arouse hunger’. Result: If nothing extraordinary happens enemy loses to me 14 provinces in single turn.

Now let’s suppose enemy has 20 PD in all his provinces. I need far larger squads in order to take border provinces, poorly equipped thugs have small chances against PD 20, and ghouls from arouse hunger have none. Result: I can confidently take only 2 provinces with 2 well equipped thugs, so I’d rather find another target.