Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

"Many" blood nations? Aren't blood summons demons pretty much by definition, i.e. immune to Darkness?

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Say rather that high X is most useful for nations with capacity to generate X gems. A Blood Fountain can do more for a blood nation, for instance. High Death is useful if you have at least D1 mages (Dark Knowledge is only D1). I agree that Mictlan would have problems getting death gems for a death strat unless their game plan was to ambush the first death nation they find and take its gems. Depending upon the game setup that might be viable/predictable.

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Ironically it'd be far more viable with a F9 bless.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I ment national troops. F.e. Lanka's kalah mukha warriors have darkvision but the recruitable rakshasas don't.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Let's think this through here.

* The goal is to have piles of death gems for your pretender to use for casting Utterdark the first turn he pops out. We'll neglect the Research angle in this post. Assume he's going to pop out on turn 37, giving you 36 turns of gem accumulation.

* Base cost to get a D1 mage without national D: 200 gems (or 100 pearls). I'll neglect the indy angle because you mentioned empowerment specifically. This is a fixed cost which generates no return.

* With only one D1 mage, you'll going to be more limited by mage-time than by province-count. Let's assume (optimistically) that you can get an average return of 1 death gem per turn per 2 provinces searched, by targeting swamps and deserts and by getting lucky with multiple-death-gem-generating sites. (In practice I think it's about 1 for 3 or less.) We'll say that half of these are level 1 sites, discoverable by manual D1 searching.

* Assume for simplicity that you can have a total non-death income which scales linearly with time. We'll say that on turn N, you get 2N non-death gems from national mages searching, etc. And we'll pretend getting to this point doesn't cost any gems or research. That means you can have 210 non-death gems by turn 14, which means that you can have a D1 mage and 20 death gems from alchemy by turn 15. That gives you 22 turns of gem accumulation.

* Under these assumptions, it takes either 8 turns of mage-time (manual site-searching), or 2 turns of mage-time and 6 death gems, or 2 turns of mage-time and 24 non-death gems, to generate an income of 1 death gem per turn. Your best bet is to search with Dark Knowledge until turn 31 (14 turns, cost 42 death gems, yield 2*Sum(1...7)=56, net 14 death gems) and then manually search for the 6 remaining turns because mage-searching wouldn't have time to recoup costs. If you get lucky and find the site on your first manual search, that brings in an extra 6 gems.

* That means you spent 200 gems alchemizing to D1 and searched for 22 turns to net 14 death gems and one D1 mage (and an income of +8 death). If you had just alchemized those 200 gems and kept the death gems you'd be 36 gems ahead.

* It should be clear by this point that if you really do want to Utterdark your way to victory by turn 36, bootstrapping your way to a Death income via alchemy + empowerment is not the way to do it. You'd be better off building on your core national strengths (water, astral, whatever) and alchemizing THOSE for your Utterdark. (By turn 37 you'd have an income of +74 non-death gems, a stockpile of 1406 gems, and you can alchemize that to 351 death gems.)

* You could also trade with someone who does have a core competency in Death (Helheim, Lanka, etc.). Or kill them and take their gems. Either way it's better than trying to bootstrap yourself.

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

You mean the Palankashas, etc.? They don't have Darkvision but they're demons, which is just as good. Undead and demons are immune to Darkness. Or is my memory playing tricks on me?

-Max

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Thugs don't get dispelled.

I have no concept of how you're proposing to get an Utterdark cast by a non-D nation to actually stick unless you save up your gems until well past turn 100.

It's 70 gems more expensive than a dispel (And dispel has a decent chance of getting a few bonus gems from a high-level caster), in a non-native gemtype that's twice as difficult to alchemize to compared to pearls for a dispel, and you can't even start site searching until you figure out how to actually GET a D mage, at which point you still only have one site searcher, and DKing 20 provs still takes 20 turns and 60 gems from that point. If this is a duel situation you also have to be fending off those 5 thugs you didn't spend your gems on while you research up to alt-9, and if it's a bigger game you have to contend with universal hate, and more importantly, gem-pooling for a dispel.

And I was replying to your statement that "Even a nation that does not natively get Death can easily alchemize gems, Empower one guy with D1, have that guy cast Dark Knowledge, and have a huge stockpile of Death gems by the time his Pretender arrives." Using a wolf tribe shaman to site search D is a perfectly reasonable strat, though still far from reliable enough to base a pretender build on since finding them and then lucking out on a random can be difficult.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I am curious what you mean by this. Personally I can't think of any tactic that wins enough to be called a "top 3" tactic. But I would say that Mictlan, Mictlan, Lanka, and Niefle's bless strategies make them top 10% contenders.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

Pretty sure all demons and undead get a pass on dark vision. Even without it they don't seem to suffer a malus in the dark.

I can't remember if rakshasas are demons, but I believe they are.

Re: Fire vs. Death heavy bless
 

I agree empowering to D1 is quite silly, but there is another angle that make *much* more sense for a blood nation that I've used before - Mictlan. Taking D on your pretender and empower into *blood* (assuming you didn't have the design points), this is immensely easier for a blood nation and gets you vampire lords (and for Mictlan some nice national summons). Of course you're not going to be dropping UD on turn 36 like this, but it's a much more realistic way to actually get it up around the time you're ready to switch to a blood only economy.

Note (I bet Micah remembers this game) do *not* go with burden of time under the assumption that boots of youth will protect your mages. Miserable, miserable way to end the game by killing off all your own good mages...