Re: Balance on small maps
 

Uber-bless with awaken pretender will mean really bad scales, which would mean somewhat limited ability to produce sacred troops quickly. So overall, it will become much less dominant strategy.

What uber-bless would you suggest with awake pretender?

Re: Balance on small maps
 

I'd try f9w9 Mictlan, ME Ermor, Van/Helhiem/Midgard, or e9n4 Pan.

The problem with blesses is many fold, first there is the option of imprisoned pretenders, as mentioned. Then there is the also mentioned slower research/more gold. But those aside, there are still some nations with sacreds far above the rest.

Re: Balance on small maps
 

I'm looking at F9W9 father of winters Dom 6, order 2, sloth 2, cold 1 everything else -3 (maybe sloth 1 cold 2 would be better?) for Van/Helheim/Midgard. It doesn't look anywhere near as strong as with dormant pretender. Initial start will be slower and even if the first neighbour is successfully overrun, I think that the further game is not going to be easy. Facing someone like Caelum at turn 15, even having twice as many provinces doesn't look promising. I think it's better to take F6W9 or F4W9 - blessed troops will still be very good, but it will allow sort of reasonable scales with some future prospects.

For Pan E9N4 is a good strategy, I don't consider it an uber-bless. Giving their weakness in magic they must have something http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Mictlan F9W9 looks pretty good (they can easily take sloth-3 and they don't even need high order). Dominion has to be somewhat lower, but with non-capital sacred it's not a big problem. But that's Mictlan - no matter how you play it, it's going to be very strong http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Balance on small maps
 

I can't see why you would not go full order and full sloth. My build would have order 3, sloth 3, cold 2, drain 2, all else minimum. If you need faster expanding, try a e9w9 cylcops that can expand from turn 2.

For pan, it may not be as unbalanced looking at the whole nation, but it is a far better option than most else you can do with them, particularly early era. And it is still very suffcient for an early rush.

And saying Mictlan is good no matter what is like saying balance of any kind is pointless.

Re: Balance on small maps
 

Awaken really doesn't hurt too much of most of the imbalanced bless strategies. If anything it hurts the nations that can make an effective uber bless without teetering in the imbalanced range.

The REAL tweaking needs to happen around the order/magic/luck area ...

Re: Balance on small maps
 

There's a second thread running about the bless balance. In this thread Twan has made a suggestion I really like - why not give holy units different costs according to their strength. vanhere for example can have a holy cost of two which well reduce their number by 50%.

Re: Balance on small maps
 

"I am holier than thou"?

Re: Balance on small maps
 

Yeah, I'd imagine that KotC's are more revered than Flagellants. For example.

Re: Balance on small maps
 

Arralen's post on this thread was spot-on and nobody seems to have replied to it, so i'll make the point again.

The growth scale has negligible effect so you can take death-3 to pay for your uber-bless strategies with no real harm. So basically, you can go and kill off your *believers*. By the tinker-bell effect, it stands to reason that your dominion should die off and yet it doesn't. In extreme cases, you could conceivably have your lands at dominion 10 and... empty of believers. Worse, if I take a growth scale and choose a thematically life-related god, I have not even a mildly effective way to counter and repopulate your laid-to-waste lands again, so why bother to even invade and defend them? This effect is more severe in small maps, but even in large-ish ones, the speed of your expansion and the devastating effects of your dominion can more than pay the loss of gold from your population dying.

Re: Balance on small maps
 

The only problem I see with that is that currently holy is too small an integer to use with different costs, if perhaps you would have dominion*10 holy points of recruitment and most sacred would cost 10 points, then you could perhaps differentiate the different sacreds a bit more.