Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

A lot of effort? Iron dragon with an amulet of luck and AMA.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

Interesting Combo .
One question though : Doesn't the Iron dragon than trample around and so a lot of devils ignore him and march further to your mages etc. ?

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

And they can just sneak away! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

Yes but.. I WILL have them again. With no additional expenditure of resources and no risk... so in addition to being able to do everything else I could do, i.e. equip and use SCs, I get X free devils every turn... which I think you'll agree is a significant advantage.
Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn. To take advantage of this you need only 2 blood 5 casters with dwarven hammers so the setup costs are not super significant... for Abysia its downright trivial, for example. I would be quite happy producing two contracts a turn until I can start wishing for blood and power. Generally this will leave enough excess blood to do other fun stuff with but if you are really diligent you can just produce more soul contracts every so often with the excess.
Yes true but actually it is much faster to empower, especially in a hard research setting, which is not so expensive considering how easy it is to accumulate blood.
Agreed Ice devils and Arch devils take precedence, since they are valuable uniques. In a normal research game playing blood nation you should have all your ice and archies by turn 25 or so, at which point you can start contracting... Although I usually break that rule and setup some contracts early, once I have a few uniques already.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.
Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

I'd say Construction 9 reuires "a lot of effort" yes, considering you will have to be fighting my mile wide mass o' devils well before that.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

Doubtful. That's an expenditure of 1200 to 3000 blood slaves, not counting what you spent on the devil commanders. To get 3000 slaves requires about 500-600 mage turns, which means that you had to have 15 mages hunting for the entire game to that point. That's not particularly likely when facing Abysia, but could be possible with Mictlan if they haven't worked on their dominion at all. That's also a minimum of 5 provinces used for blood hunting, with the associated loss of income. You must be playing on absolutely massive maps if you can afford to have that many provinces devoted to blod hunting. After all, 5 provinces would be a quarter of your empire on normally populated maps.

That doesn't matter if you kill them without taking losses.

If you have 10-12 provinces being hunted, then your empire must be massive, or else you won't have the gold income to keep up in your research.

Level 9 magic in one path with level 5-6 in others by turn 40 is easily doable for any nation with decent researchers.

Ice devils in turn 13 won't do you much good because they won't be equipped with anything.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

Construction 9 doesn't require a lot of effort. It's easily reachable by turn 40 without sacrificing any expansion or defense for most living nations. Even Ermor can manage level 9 conjuration, level 6 alteration, level 6 construction, and level 4 enchantment by turn 45 or so.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

Hm i thought Scouts can't sneak away a besieged castle not sure though .

Ice devils are nice but if you have them unequipped they are not invincible .
Abysia can't clamhoard before they research water bracelet . Your pretender could clamhoard but normally he has more important tasks like conquering provinces earlygame .
So with water bracelet and either spectres or lucky Warlocks you can clamhoard finally .

But getting the astral items early for your Ice devils if you don't trade isn't so easy .
Boots of flying + an Air resistence item can be if you have no luck with your Warlock random take a while too .

Simliar with Mictlan they lack Earth + Air magic too on their mages .

Earlygame Caelum or Vanheim can be pretty hard opponents against your devils and they may have 1-2 Airqueen SCs then too when you have e.g. 100 devils + 3-4 ice devils / arch devils .

Caelum can screw your blood hunting earlygame by false horror raiding strat , Vanheim can do similiar with this + stealthy Vans .


Bloodhunting costs you a lot because you have to use mages for this + get normally no income from the bloodhunted provinces .
So you have less research than other nations + less gold income .

A staff of storms is very common . Basically every better air nation could give you a lot of trouble if they want to wipe you out early .

The resources you invest in Soul Contract hoarding pay off but it maybe too late .

How do you defend as Abysia/Mictlan when you hord against Vanheim/Caelum/Pythium ?
Finally with the blood nations you can have just plain bad luck and neighbor ermor on the one side + have poor provinces on the other side limiting your bloodhunt abilities more than normal .

It all depends , if you survive the early-midgame your hoarding pays off but often you won't survive early-midgame .
So you will perhaps win half of your games or 1/3 with hoarding but lose the rest .

Abysia is very good at hoarding Bloodstones + Soul contracts while Mictlan is good at hoarding Soul contracts + Clams while e.g. Pythium is damn good at site searching + Clamhoarding .
Normally the different ways to hoard pay off all similiar and the nations who suck at horde are very good early-midgame then instead so they can very often compensate this by territory .

You have a lot of good points though .
What makes the Devil so special are his stats + abilities .
18 attack + 16 def make most ( or all ? ) national troops useless .
18 attack + 16 def is almost as good as a banelord early game SC or similiar .

The devil almost forces your opponent to get staffs of storm + use air magic to counter you . If he can't do this he has probably problems .

But about 1/3 of the nations can do this with little or no effort . Another 1/3 has other not too bad means like banefire ( Ctis desert tombs ) or watermagic . Bladewind and magma eruption etc. should not be tooo bad against devils too .
You are probably more mobile though so you can pick your battles easier .

There are too many different factors to think of that you can say if devils are imbalanced or not .
They are probably costwise the best summon but there has always to be 1 best thing in each area .

But earlygame you use your resources setting up your hoarding factory . So you are very vulnerable there .
Midgame airnations can still give you a good fight and lategame everyone else has other strong measures against you in fields where he is good at .

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

To me the preferred solution would be making sneaking units targetable by overland spells. While hoarding would still be quite possible, useful, and smart to do, an enemy with good and detailed intelligence could attempt to take out your production base.

I would also very much like to see an overland spell capable of castle destruction, which would open up some very interesting tactical opportunities IMO. If you made it so that the chances of success were predicated on the number of earth gems put into it against the defense rating of the castle it would also encourage people to use the high defense castles alot more.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

That role is taken by crumble.

Re: Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and mor
 

Crumble hasn't been very effective in my experience... I was refering to a spell that would physically remove the castle, thereby removing the speedbump effect, which crumble does not do.