Best MA sacred unit
 

I think for the cost, it is the Heart Companion, with a f9 4n
bless, followed closely by the temple guard, w9 n4 bless.

There are tougher units, but the cost of these, and their staying power, make them a hardcore nucleus to an army.

Vans are better but they cost 70 gold.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Well, vans costs 70 but only 16 resources compared to heart companions 30 resources.

I'm quite sure vans win the battle with the same blesses and the double (maybe triple) amount of heart companions. If i find the time i'll make a test how many heart companions needed to win against 50 vans.

In adition:
Vans have +20 stealth and are undetectable in own lands which give you a very big strategic advantage.

Vans have movement 3/26 movement, heart companien 1/7 which makes them inflexible in strategic move and slow in battles.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Gotta go with Vans.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

I would probably have to go with vans although, in single player, i personally like my F9W9E9N4S4 Knights of the chalice(baphomet, imprisoned, LA Ermor style scales) as they are really nasty. Sure i have to take max negative scales(only 1 misfortune and 2 drain) and imprisonment but my knights(and thug paladins) are great and once you get the national angelic summons/SCs with shrouds of the battle saint(and boots of stone probably for protection) your really having fun.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Heart companions are durable, but most experienced players would consider them a poor choice for a bless strategy. Likewise, the temple guard. When playing against the AI, and facing massed PD-type light infantry, the two units (and frankly any bless troop) tear through them with few losses. In multiplayer, where massed light infantry are less common, players tend to go with high-damage, low-resource sacreds such as Ermor's Shadow Vestal or Marignion's Flagelant. With that said, I think the Van, which is recruitable in any Vanheim fort, with a movement of 3 and stealth/glamour is clearly the strongest, most durable MA sacred.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

In terms of cost effectiveness I think it is a toss up between the Jaguar Warrior and the Van.

I still do not know how many HP a Jaguar Warrior has ( I think it is 30 ).

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Heart companions cut through about giant's best troops as well as light infantry. heh. And they dispatch Ermor's sacreds with ease. They are slow though(:

With solar imprisoned, you can have a f9 4n bless plus very good scales.

Though slow, they form a good front wall, while the elephants, which are fast, circle to rear troops. And provide protection for the astologists which are paralyzing.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Good bless strat sacreds need to have something really special about them to be worth it. Shadow vestals are Eth and reasonably high defense, Vans and white centaurs are stealthy/glamoured and have 3 map move. Niefel giants are tough as hell, have enough HP to make regen amazing on them, and have a chill aura, plus the Jarls gain a lot from a good bless. The various Abysian sacreds dual wield, berserk and hit like a ton of bricks (and are still not really good for a pure bless strat). Jag warriors are cheap, really damn good, and can be made everywhere. All of the sacreds except Abysia all also have very low resource costs so you can take some sloth picks to offset the bless cost, and Abysia needs production anyhow because all of their units are resource hogs. The Heart companions don't stack up at all. They're great blocker units for your mages, but they do that just fine without a bless. Sinking in the points to make them a little bit better is a massive waste...if your mages were sacred I could see a high earth bless for reinvig (9 encumberance on them too, seriously, they're NOT GOOD) and the prot bonus, but since your mages won't get the reinvig that's right out the window. MA Arco is not a bless nation. I think you'd be much better served with an awake/dormant pretender to help expansion and good scales.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

You opinion is well reasoned, but Acrosphale with a f9 4n bless, with the Solar as the pretender(imprisoned), still has very good scales. With a few heart companions and elephants, you do not need any help with early expansion from your pretender.

The fire bless turns the heart companion from a good blocking unit, to one that takes down giants, ethereals, and any other tough units with relative ease. The 4 nature is something I find useful on a pretender anyway. Solar starts with 3 fire, so getting to 9 is not too bad.

So I actually agree with you that the heart companions may not be worthy of a bless strategy, if you had to sacrifice scales. But it still allows 3 growth, 3 order(with 2 heat).

Also, similar to pangaea's infantry, since afflictions are healed, by midgame they have 3 stars which makes them even tougher. Since astrologers are brutal with paralyze, having a solid wall of these troops shielding them, while cutting other players elites to ribbons, makes a good combo.

Now a heart companion is not going to catch a KOA or Van, but that is what flanking elephants mixed with the quicker hyperists (high morale) are for. And for 25 gold, you can have tons of these guys and not notice if a few are fireballed etc.

At 75 gold a pop, and no way to heal afflictions, you have to wince when 20-30 vans are destroyed by some nasty spells.

And someone said above, he would pit 50 vans against 50 Heart companions. at 3 times the cost, you would have to pit 15 vans against 45 heart companions. With no simulator handy, my money would be on the 45 heart companions, who with the fire bless, would hit those vans.

I like the vans, but they can be killed or get afflictions from 10 gold ind archers quite easily.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

With the way your using heart companions my reccomended bless would either be E9(great prot+reinvig), E9N4(same as before+less afflictions) or, my personal choice for blocking, N9. With N9 you get 2 regen rather than 1(quite helpful on an armoured unit) and get the very helpful berserker ability which gives you extra prot, makes you do more damage and makes you practically unroutable(very important for a meatshield). You will do a bit less damage vrs regular troops and quite a bit bless vrs ethereals and high defence troops but the berserking and extra regen really helps you hold the line.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Sorry for not just using edit but i feel this deserves a new post: I just tested 45 of xietors heart companions(F9N4 blessed) against 15 F9W9 Vans(they have worse scales but lower resource cost so i based it purely on gold cost) and the result?
45 Heart companions dead alongside 1 dead van, a complete massacre. The battle was in a province with no scales(no dominion had spread), all units were blessed, it was farmland, arco had the defenders advantage, no units had afflictions.

Sure you could make various arguements such as astrologers would have paralyzed the vans and elephants would trample them but then there are easy counter arguements such as vanadrotts would thunderstrike heart companions, dwarven smiths would destroy their armour and skinshifters and einheres would have killed elephants(high damage attack=dead elephants) ect.

In a pure test of vans vrs heart companions the vans did win, and by a rather large margin.

edit: no vans had afflictions after the fight. The vans also have glamour, stealth and higher movement and so could have avoided the heart companions rather easily.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Well, you have vans with 2 9 blesses. heh. try van with 1 9 1 4. My whole point was you can get a solid, not spectacular, troop without giving up scales, and for a relatively cheap 25 gold. But you ran the fight, and my hat is off to you for that.

Still, i am surprised the heart companions did so poorly.
Fire bless is better than e9 bless, they need the added attack bonus more, plus can hit ethereal units. They never rout anyway, sick morale, then blessed and divine spell, and exp star or 2. Since the priestess heals their afflictions, i am not too worried about them getting hearts.

What god did you use for those double 9 blesses, and what were your scales?

If you do not mind, i would be curious to see the vans fight the koas of man. I am sure with the double 9 bless they would trash them.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

I used an order3, sloth2, cold1(they like it), misfortune2, drain2 father of winters with dom6(he makes an amazing SC by the way) for the vanheim F9W9 bless. Not good scales but not really bad either.

With an E9 bless(i tested for fun) the heart companions did exactly the same with them wiped out and 1 dead van.

As i said i took 2 level 9 blesses rather than 1 level 9 and 1 level 4 to account for the extra resource cost of the heart companions(vans costed 240, companions costed 1350) although i'll try a 9/4 bless with around 20 vans some other time.

As for KoA vrs F9W9 vans, 15 of each in a straight fight(the KoA's got the charge) the vans won without a single casualty and no afflictions. I did a 1:1 fight because, although man wasnt paying for a bless, its knights are 5 more gold(80) and 45 more resources(61, almost 4 times the vans cost). The vans got produced fasters than the KoA's simply because gold is much more avaliable, in general, than resources, particularly for capitol only troops like KoA's.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Actually, I just tested it, 15 E9/W9 Vans killed 45 N9/F9 Heart Companions, taking 6 losses, I replicated the test several times, Van losses ranged from 4-6, Arco lost all 45 every single time. Prophet commander on both sides, in Arco dominion. Troops set to hold and attack, prophets to divine bless, sermon of courage, stay behind troops, center of the field.

This gives Arco a stronger bless than is suggested, and also gives them every other conceivable advantage...they actually get to find and fight the vans instead of moving around ineffectually protecting one province at a time while their empire is raided to death, the ridiculous resource differential cost is ignored, as is the triple Holy cost of producing that many Heart Companions, and the benefits of having an Earth bless with sacred mages on Vanheim's side is also not accounted for. Actually fighting a straight up battle is the Van's WORST point, and they STILL win.

Xietor, it seems your understanding of the competitive MP environment is not very developed at this point, and I was there myself about 6 months ago, getting killed in a few games, and doing well in others where I've taken advice has really led me to trust the opinions of the people on this board that have had extensive MP experience. Dom is a very complex game, and while something may look great on paper the people that have actually played a lot of MP are the ones that will be able to tell you if that translates to actual gameplay or not. I guess it might be hard to tell who is actually experienced and who is not, but in general most of the people that are posting here using a definitive tone are fairly accurate in their statements. (Like my earlier post about Arco being a bad bless nation) Your tendency to argue for your favored strategies despite not having nearly the amount of experience as some of the other posters is slightly frustrating, since you can always come up with SOME situation where unit X is better than unit Y. If you're not sure WHY someone is saying what they are then feel free to ask, but arguing based on hypothetical situations doesn't accomplish much.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

I ran a quick test, 15 F9W4 Vans vs. 45 F9N4 Heart Companions. Lost exactly 80% of the Vans and 80% of the Heart Companions. The Vans wound up with the province but that was just coincidence since they both routed the same turn. To me it looked like roughly parity, at least for those blesses.

On the other hand, it took 3 times as long to amass the Heart Companions as the Vans, and the Vans have tremendous strategic advantages. And the Vans could have afforded a W6 or W8 bless without giving up much of anything.

-Max

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

I do not consider myself an experienced mp player. Though i have played many mp games, they are not against people that are hardcore DOM II and III players, giving me a huge advantage(regardless of strategy). I would be glad to play a game with 1 or 2 players and 12 Ai on difficult. A game with
10 or so players has little appeal to me.

I like to play for 3-4 straight hours and get in many many turns in one setting. The more people, the harder that is to coordinate. I also see no point to diplomacy. If you are relying on your skills, then you should not need to team up
to eliminate another player. How can you accurately assess your skills if you are being aided or double teamed?

I am not actually arguing that the heart companion is better, but that with his low gold cost, he can be quite effective with a slight bless, and allowing acrosphale to keep good scales.

Additionally, I think(do not know) that the heart companion would withstand missile fire much better than the vans due to better protection. With e9 bless that is not true, but many on here claim the f9 w9 bless is the best for vans, and the added defense would not help against missiles.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Since we're talking hypotheticals here, yeah, the Vans will take slightly more damage per combat round from missiles (although shields help a lot), for fewer rounds (39 AP vs 7). I don't know in whose favor that works out, but the blazing speed of W9 Vans *does* help against missiles.

Also, consider that the low resource cost of Vans plus Vanir cold tolerance allows Vanheim to take worse scales and not really feel the pinch, while Arcoscephale will have to blow points on Production to make effective use of Heart Companions.

Edit: I didn't realize until just now that Heart Companions are capitol-only. That makes the gold cost of producing them nearly irrelevant; resources and Holy cost will almost certainly be your bottleneck. Vans are clearly a superior sacred IMO.

-Max

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

The stealth factor would be deadly mp, but even when i play Pangaea mp, i never use it. Unfortunately, none of my friends i play with can beat me playing a very vanilla game. if i started taking their provinces with stealth armies they likely
would quit playing me(:

None of my friends are hardcore dom III players and ask me basic questions every time we play.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

As you said Xietor, f9 lets your heart companions take on ethereal units ect fairly successfully but you missed one big point: thats not their job! Arco's mages, summons(including SCs) and sometimes elephants are the guys who are meant to do the damage, why waste points on an offensive bless when you could get a defensive one which could buy you a few more turns in combat and allow your heavy hitters to do their damage?

As a final test I tried 45 of my reccomended N9(even cheaper than the other tested bless) heart companions against 15 double blessed vans and the results? All companions dead but arco prophet still alive and 2.5(2 first time, 3 second time) dead vans. With an even cheaper bless than before and 3 times the previous dead vans i hereby declare my n9 bless a success(although both battles could have been flukes).

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Anyone feel like running a test based off the Conceptual Balance Mod values?

I know the gap would be considerably less.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

White Centaur can be double blessed e9 n9 with an imprisoned gorgon, and scale are dom 6, 3 order, 2 sloth, 2 heat.

Scales are not too bad, and the n9 berserk stacks with the berserk the white centaur has already.

With 22 hp, these have regen 4, and a fair protection from earth bless and 5 berserk. Pretty tough unit, but takes 2 9 blesses to make it so. And it is capital only.

Not sure how these stack up against vans either.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

N9E9 gorgons are great. You can also turn the heirophants into decent thugs.

Re: Best MA sacred unit
 

Once protection is researched(and alt 3 is the 1st thing i research with Pangaea), those double 9 blessed white centaurs are murder.

I eat crow on these. I saw the prot 9 and 70 gold price and never bothered with them. But with e9n9 they are worth 70 gold, and once they have prot on top of that, they are a terrible unit to face, especially with recuperation.

If you are careful and they get 2-3 stars, they may fair decently against a van.