Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Any particular Favorites?

I sort of, sometimes, like Imprint Minds, and the only thing ameliorating the 25 gem cost is the availability of Astral Gems.

Dome of Arcane Warding; again, not bad if you keep all your eggs in one basket. Not terribly expensive.

Blight is awesome for wrecking a recalcitrant opponents' bread basket provinces. The pop loss is helpful but its the unrest which is such an annoyance and income reduction. 50+ unrest and you've lost about 90% of income or so it seems.

Call of the Winds is obviously better in most cases than Call of the Wilds. I suppose in some 5-ish PD Provinces the Nature spell would be better. Those birds are pretty easy to break.

Does Baleful Star cause unrest or change a luck scale to misfortune? If so i might like it more.

And the ultimate question; Astral Projection vs. Astral Window? It seems like you get to choose between a) 50% chance of mage becoming feeble minded and b) no risk at all. Now i don't know about the rest of you, but sign ME up for choice A!

[ May 21, 2004, 07:15: Message edited by: SelfishGene ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Both. But since everyone already has misfortune anyway, the latter effect is negligible.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

It also curses a bunch of units.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well, if we are going for favourites, it would have to be black death.

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Melancholia ain't half bad, if your opponent hasn't put a dome up around his favorite provinces. Has to be accompanied by a proper invasion, though.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Depends on what the player wants to get done.

Black Death works great at killing population.

For a surprise attack the Ghost Riders is the best deal for most damage per gem. So powerful the people I play multiplayer with have Banned this spell. 5 gems for a wraith lord and large group of pale riders ! KaBang... the other summon attacks don't even come close.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Generally, attempting to specifically kill population is a counterproductive exercise in the long run: It's hard to even tell what the population of the province *IS*, unless you have dominion there, and unless you are losing, that province will shortly be yours anyway, so you're just killing your own population: As such, Black Death can be considered to be the tool of either the dead, or the desperate: At the point it's available by in the game, any opponent that is sizeable enough to make you that desperate will not be greatly harmed by it unless you cast it an unreasonable number of times on a large number of provinces....but if you're losing, where are you getting that many death gems to waste just trying to kill population? If you're Ermor, on the other hand, it's certainly more attractive, but you also have so many other uses for death gems than frivolous killing of random population.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Ghost Riders has basically zero effect on an army holed up in a fort, and will not inflict any real destruction if you have one in the province....which you SHOULD, because otherwise, that province would burn down regularly anyway.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Ghost Riders does great as a counter-insurgency measure though, when someone gets a army into your territory and you cant/dont want to guess where its going next turn. Cast it 4 or 5 times on the province with the army...weeeee
I doubt its as effective against SC's but lack the experience to be certain.

[ May 22, 2004, 01:51: Message edited by: Cheezeninja ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Yes, yes it is: I find it highly effective as a point-defense weapon, especially when combined with castles, so that the Ghost Riders...and marauding enemies, aren't inflicting much harm on YOU.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Ghost Riders do well against any SC that relies on life stealing (ie. a whole lot of them) since they're all lifeless. Anything with positive encumbrance and insufficient reinvigoration will eventually fatigue out. Helps a lot if they also don't have fire shield.

At 5 gems a casting, you can throw a whole hell of a lot of them at one SC and still come out ahead of your opponent in terms of gems spent.

[ May 22, 2004, 05:58: Message edited by: Yossar ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

My fave is Horde from Hell, which is at least 5 times more effective than those crap CoW-s http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Both. But since everyone already has misfortune anyway, the latter effect is negligible. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is the second time I have seen you mention something like this.
Who is "everyone" that takes misfortune? Has there been some sort of tacit consensus while I was out getting cigarettes? And if so, why?

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Both. But since everyone already has misfortune anyway, the latter effect is negligible. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This is the second time I have seen you mention something like this.
Who is "everyone" that takes misfortune? Has there been some sort of tacit consensus while I was out getting cigarettes? And if so, why? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Nah, not everyone of course. Norfleet is exaggerating, as usual. It strongly depends on your nation, your overall strategy, your "random events" settings, your "order" scale, the estimated length of your game. Although it is certanly a popular scale to sacriface when you are looking for more points.

[ May 22, 2004, 16:19: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">And a $300 castle permanently eliminates this, and many other nuisances regarding sudden temple burnings. That's $300 well-spent, something I'm reminded of every time I burn down one of your temples. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Nearly everyone takes misfortune, as a living nation, because it's the easiest source of points you can get after taking Order...which nearly everyone must also do, or they'll be making half the income of anyone who doesn't. While Misfortune-3 maybe be too much of an ouchie, Misfortune-2 is a pretty decent source of points to partially offset the costs of Order, since Order helps to suppress the annoyance of random events in the first place, which makes it anti-synergistic with Luck.

When you consider the huge effect Order has on income, as compared to any other income-affecting scales, and how badly short of Gold you usually are, this tends to rapidly become a no-brainer for nearly all living nations.

Furthermore, the Luck scale is weak, as a number of bad events appear to be classified as good events, such as heavy rains, or the "free" militia.

Obviously, dead nations need not apply, but then, do you really care if a plague wipes out half of your zero population every so often?

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Oks a castle worth to defend the temple, sure.

But what about when you lose an entire army cause someone cast for 25 gems 165 Longdead Horsemen and 5 Wraith mounted commanter unleashing this sudden strike on you?

(I told 25 gems cause this will take out a pretty big army)

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

I believe the ghost rider should be a little nerfed, or cost raised ... I know it's a very high research level spell ... but for 5 gems you've a very powerful strenght to annhilate armies and to harrass provinces temple undefended

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Sudden strike? Your army can't be touched if it's inside of your castle.

If you're in front of an ENEMY castle, you should have expected this! It's not sudden when you expected it to happen and braced for impact.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Eh dunno, the good luck events are really pretty good. Everyone guffaws at free gems but they can easily lead to site searching paths you wouldn't have been able too, at least easily without hot-footing it on the map. The gold events are unpredictable but quite nice.

I had been making test runs with nations for PBeM games, and i found lots of bad luck completely unacceptable, especially the 'province is attacked by barbarians' sort - and even with 3 Order. Those just really damper you expansion if you have to circle back and recapture them, sometimes 4-5 turns have been lost, not to mention the income during occupation and unrest after recapture. This is especially true for nations weak in the early game that really NEED to expand to gain enough capital momentum to move further on their tree to better casters or summons (hi Mictlan!).

And after being burned by Rain in my Home Province in my first email game, i just don't like the risk.

In fact in one game im taking Luck AND Order. We'll see how that works out.

I believe that bad events are triggered by other scales as well. Even with Luck 2 i would get several especially annoying bad events, because another scale was set to -3. Its like there are thresholds for bad events.

For me the 'freebie' scale is either Sloth or Hot/Cold; well, ill take a peg of cold if i just have to have 40 points, but ill take Sloth 2 or 3 if something has to give, over Misfortune. I may well be wrong if you look at the formulae, but its what seems to work best from my experiences and methods.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Heavy rains happens just as much, if not more, with Luck. Luck has absolutely no effect on preventing it.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This tends to be true for "good" events as well: In order to reap the benefits of Luck, you need good scales in other areas as well, particularly a strong magic scale. This is why Ermor works well with luck: All of their "good" events are channelled towards gems, and the "bad" good events, like heavy rains, plagues, and whatnot, just kill more of your 0 population.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">A peg of hot or cold generally has only half the effect that the numbers say it will, and, in fact, especially if you're a Heat/Cold-2 nation, like Jot/Machaka, taking an extra peg helps more than it hurts, as you will be at your preferred temperature MORE often than not.

Sloth, of course, greatly cuts into your ability to produce troops. If this isn't a great concern to you, it's definitely worth it: I certainly do it....but it's not enough! You need more points!

Sloth also has a slight income malus, but not a strong one: its primary effect is on resources.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This particular claim is utter bull****.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You can say that, and go ahead and take Luck 3. Then I'm going to laugh at you when you wasted all those points to have your provinces rained out anyway. Luck-3 will do nothing to stop this.

I hear constantly about this happening to people who take Luck...oddly, it rarely happens to me, and I'm getting the points for Misfortune. I have to conclude that Luck does absolutely nothing to help here.

When you then consider that you must *PAY* for Luck, and that it is antisynergistic with the required Order, you have to wonder if it's worthwhile.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Sudden strike? Your army can't be touched if it's inside of your castle.

If you're in front of an ENEMY castle, you should have expected this! It's not sudden when you expected it to happen and braced for impact. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The point being made is that their isn't always a castle to hide your troops in. As a result large armies can be seriously hurt by these fast undead units. I've seen several cases where the single wraith lord could not be stopped forcing the enemy to retreat.

When comparing total damage done per gem spent against the other summoned attack spells such as army of the dead or phantasmal attack... ghost riders is almost always the best choice.

======================

I believe the ghost rider spell would be more balanced if the Wraith Lord was removed or the price of gems increased.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Which, as I've already stated is complete and utter bull****. Why don't you go learn how the game mechanics work instead of spreading misinformation and lies while patronizing the new players.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Thanks for admitting that you have absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that the luck scale does not affect the frequency of rain events.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Not if some poor schmoe forgets to dome his home province, it isn't. Being unable to profit from the province once you conquer it may be pretty disadvantageous in the long run, but not nearly as much as taking said economic losses along with a production hit in the only province that can produce Knights of the Chalice, spider warriors, lava warriors, etc.

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Well, brace for impact didn't do anything.

Against that undead horde (6 time casted 33 Longdead horsemen and 1 Wraith Lord) against

4 Friars
1 Inquisitor
3 quickened Demilich casting whiter bones
1 Demilich casting whiter bones

about 50 flagellants F9S9 blessed.

...
all this for 30 Death Gems ...
and there's not only to consider the cost of lost units, but the income of the province, the magic sites inside and so on.

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I'm still a newbie but getting conjuration 9 and 6 level 4 death mages is quite an accomplishement. BTW, how do you get 6 4D mages?


Ice

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

Ermor has D3 Dusk Elders, +1 D by the Skull Staff, here your D4 Mage, at the cost of 30 D.Gems.
Oh well, Dusk Elders are D3 1? ... so it could happen they are summoned D4 directly.
Demilich (25 gems) are D4 too.

Re: Best Province targeting ritual?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm familiar with the "listed numbers". Unfortunately, they don't really correspond to actual behavior. Even if you take luck, horrible events happen anyway, and often. You can claim it doesn't all you want, but the fact is, you hear about this all the time. It's a proven fact: Luck does not prevent bad events, they'll happen anyway.

When it comes to things that are "random", and I use this word in quotes for very specific reasons, I don't really put much faith in what anyone says the "odds" are. Randomness makes a great cover for designer sadism.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Army of the Dead is a "named" spell, however. If the Army of the Dead succeeds, the province falls into YOUR hands immediately...and the army sticks around and can raid neighboring provinces next turn. The purpose of the spell is different.

Phantasmal Attack isn't level 9. Thus, it's expected that its potency and economy are not of the same caliber.

Army of the Dead can be employed gainfully against forted provinces. Ghost Riders is of very little use here.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You call that an army? Flagellants are crap, they can hit hard, but their hits are wasted on "virtual" troops, and they die easily. They do not make a good meat shield to tank a ghost rider charge with. Friars are cheap. And not very effective against an unrushing mob, when you give them no meat shield. One inquisitor does not a force of banishments make.

And the Demiliches are fine. They rode home to your capitol on the Death Express. I'm sure I'll be seeing them again shortly.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You make thousands of bucks in pure profit every turn. Are you telling me you can't afford to replace a measly 50 flagellants in less than a turn?

Income of the province, magic sites? Uh....that was my province, you know. You don't LOSE anything there from being mauled at the gates.

Besides, WHAT income? 0 population don't produce much income.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm still waiting for your evidence that they don't. Where's your statistical analysis that shows that actual trend. Oh right, it's just more of your bull****.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">This argument is yet another logical fallacy from Norfleet. This time it's an appeal to popularity, as people don't complain about bad events when they take a misfortune scale, only when luck. It's also a hasty generalization as you haven't performed enough trials to understand the true nature of the problem.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">And this is an appeal to motive fallacy.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well in the cases where a province has a castle then ghost riders will still be best for cleaning out the units patrolling. I was comparing the spell against other summoned attack spells for total damage which can be done against an army.

Per gem cost against other summoned attack spells ghost riders wins hands down for most damage done to an army. Adding a fortress to a province is a different variable which might change what needs to get accomplished.