Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Another possibility is vine bow or vine whip on one commander plus the hero's blades on a few others. Lock the big guy down and then chop away.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Caveate: I haven't played Tir yet. That said, I can offer some suggestions as to some specific questions raised. Tir, like Eriu seems likely to do very well with a heavy forging focus. Sidhe raiders obviously are exactly the same, but cheap items can go a long way towards overcoming some of the other weaknesses.

A couple indie commanders with ice pebble staffs will go a very long way towards compensating for your low damage output and will quite vex the guy who managed lightning resistant troops. Generally though lightning casters + soothing storm will bring all the damage you need.

Sidhe champions have an 18 precision once you cast eagle eyes. Bows of war and piercers can be pretty nasty when you field double digits of them, particularly on stealthy guys.

Enemy SCs shouldn't be a problem. Anybody not lightning/frost immune is trivial to bring down, and hero blades are an obvious default answer to anybody that doesn't have a more specific weakness.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

All of that becomes harder without hammers.

Everyone else is hurt too, but if you're relying on items for almost everything you're much worse off. Taking a Forge lord helps, but is still only 1 item a turn.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Well, as I posted elsewhere I don't think the hammer nerf is quite as crippling as everyone makes out. Take, for instance my suggestion to crank out piercers because that particularly makes the comparison easy with everything is in E gems. With a hammer you're saving 2 gems apiece - but you sank 11 or 15 gems into the hammer so you're not even breaking even until you've made 6 (or 8) of them. This is compounded by the fact that if you've got hammers available you're not just forging a single one so it's not unlikely that it's late game before hammers really pay off. True, they do pay off in a big way by end game when you're forging big things and can easily save 50 gems per turn, but that's not really where the sweet spot is for this sort of nation.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

But what nation isn't relying heavily on forging? The SC's still have to be kitted out.

What's more expensive? 6 guys with bows of war is 30 gems. 4 guys with hero's blades are 40 gems. How many gems is a fully equipped SC? Plus the guys with blades and bows are all stealthy and so are much more flexible in their deployment; you don't know where they are until they attack. Plus the non-summonable SCs are mainly capital only mages.

Once were talking about summonable guys TNN isn't doing too badly with Rocs, Asynjas, and Shishis. All lightning immune except the Asynja. But the asynja can travel with the remainder of your stealthy armies. Can also get treants or any of the other late game summons if you want to crank your pretender for them. But those three are the ones that obviously fit with what you might want to do with them.

Also is fairy court any good? Seems like she would also fit in with what we'd be trying to do with TNN. The fairy queen herself kinda sucks, not a bad mage but not powerful at all. What catches my eye are the sprites she can summon. 100 armor negating stun damage per shot. MR negates but if you've got a ton of these things (and you do since I think she can summon three each turn) then everyone on the battle field just falls asleep, including SC's. There only 2 hp but 19 defense so hitting the buggers before they get you is damn near impossible. Counter would seem to be AOE spells or big battlefield evocations, also only 9 moral so fear would also be useful to counter. But they're stealthy so once again, you never know where they are. Use a conventional army or SC to distract, make them prepare for a traditional fight or a SC fight, then knock out their force with just a horde of little fairies and some lightning spamming mages instead.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

In practice, I think TNN suffers heavily without hammers. When hammers were in, you could take E on pretender (not a bad idea anyway for sacred thug nation, so no wasted points), and you had little use for E gems except for hammers. Without them, things like Vine Shields (which are key items for TNN) are suddenly very costly.

I think game experience with newest CBM so far supports my words: thugs have become rare.

Concerning the anti-SC options for TNN - how about airdropping a couple of Sidhe Lords dual-wielding Axes of Hate?

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

What we really need to know too tell if this is a huge hit to thug nations is the average gem outlay per thug, the average gem outlay per sc, and the average ratio of thugs/SC fielded in any given game prior to the removal of hammers.

If gems/thug / gems/SC = thug/SC then removal of hammers should have relatively little effect. E.g. if people were putting 15 gems worth of stuff on thugs, 45 on SC, but the average ratio of thugs to SC was 3/1 then the cost in gems for both was unchanged. You raised the price of both equivalently. 1.33 * 45 and 1.33 * 45.

If gems/thug / gems/sc > thug/SC then removal of hammers did nerf thugs. E.g. people were putting 20 gems into each thug, 40 into each SC but ratio of thug/SC was still 3/1. This effectively increased the price of the thugs. 1.33 * 60 vs 1.33 * 40.

if gems/thug / gems/SC < thug/SC then removal of hammers hurt the SC nations. Opposite of above.

So the question I have for those more experienced, what were these ratios?

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Very hard to determine :D.

Don't think you can really put numbers to those values, they depend totally on situation and play style.

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Well I can't speak to general perception which does seem to lean towards what you describe, but from just looking at the numbers they don't seem to me to support that conclusion. As a rough estimate assume you forge enough hammers to outfit one thug per turn with equipment not more than 10 gems apiece. You're not breaking even on the hammers until you've got 6-7 thugs fielded, and not at a very noticeable detriment until you're close to double that number. I just don't see how modest amounts of thugs mid game are suddenly not cost efficient (in plenty of situations at least).

Re: Question about EA Tir Na N'og
 

Sure, we can spend E gems on hammers, or we can spend them directly on equipment. But does this calculation take into account the fact that different types of gems have different utility depending on exact circumstances? Let's consider TNN. It has limited access to E, so even without using pretender for site searching it can have some kind of E income. On the other hand, it has no access to F, except on a hero. If we are talking about thug gear, two best choices for spending E gems are obviously Fire Brands and Shields of Gleaming Gold. But both are F/E items, and thus very difficult to forge for TNN. The alternative is Frost Brand+Vine Shield combo, which is perfectly easy to forge, and they do not use E gems. So, shouldn't we spend E on hammers to forge W and N thug gear? After all, what else can we do with them (if our objective is mass thugs strategy), alchemize?