Blood of the First Born
 

Gath national/ Blood Spell / Wish option.

There are few (no) late game counters for high hit point units, at least none that dont' work equally well against low hit point units.


For example, armageddon, leprosy, earthquake, Earth Attack, whirlwind, winged monkeys, all work much better against low hitpoint units. So do things like.. the kindly ones .. etc.

Part of the reason that Hinnom and Niefle are perceived to be so difficult is a lack of these kinds of spells - cocytus and inferno are good examples.

Or I'd like to posit another - Blood of the first born. The computer picks a random number. Units ending with that number - die.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

How would giving that spell to LA Gath help counter EA Niefel or EA Hinnom?

How would giving a different wish option help counter niefel or hinnom in the early or mid game, where they probably have the largest advantage?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Very high damage, high fatigue single target spells would be a good anti SC option that would have very little effect on lots of low hp troops.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I always thought that's natural that nations with recruitables with high HPs have an early game advantage. Giving the others an early Soul Slay or similar to counter this seems strange, unthematic.

The most important thing is IMHO that the early powerhouses should have less options for a very strong mid-late game if they don't make best use of their early advantage. This doesn't apply only to Niefel but even Lanka, Helheim etc. Specialization against versatility.
Unfortunately, Hinnom and in minor part Lanka don't fully respect this trade off IMHO. Looks like the next patch should put some nerf to Hinnom, and Lanka seems somewhat balanced anyway.

I am very interested in similar or different opinions, expecially by guruz :)

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

um how about soul slay? or paralyse? curse + death bless?

curse + death bless can be utilized right from early game to ruin neifelheim bless rushes and any sort of awake SC pretender.

especially deadly on LA atlatis' arssatuts, their bone glaives sap strength so add that with unimagineably high chance to cause affliction and bingo SC is ruined if not dead.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Curses are for the most part irrelevent. Even afflictions are for the many races or paths available to fix them.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Making it a blood spell would make it available to all blood nations; making effective against large units would make it more useful against these nations - as there are sufficient things that kill low hp units.

Making it a LA Gath spell would help in Single Age games (niche, I agree - however I was suggesting three options for such a spell, not specifying one).

My interest is not in countering Hinnom or Niefle so much, as redressing the balance between low hp mages / humans and large hp units such as SC's, summoned creatures etc.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

If you want something that'll kill high HP units but not low HP, why not just something that does a lot of damage, but has very low accuracy, and is fairly expensive to cast or hard to research?

Blood Nations are the ones that probably need the *least* boosting. They've already got numerous summons, specialty spells, even their own line of forging. Added to that, most of the Blood Nations are already powerful, diverse, and interesting. If anything needs a spell that can take out high HP units, it's probably Abyssia/Fire.

Fire's likely the weakest magic path, anyway.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

i concur, i can't think of a blood nation which can't battle it out with the big guys. Lanka's an absolute powerhouse, mictlan is like the king of bless and can simply swarm SC's with blessed eagle warriors from there various fortifications scattered around (eagle warriors aren't cap only in MA, guessing it's the same for other ages), Gath i'm afraid ARE the big guys...anything i've missed?

fire being perhaps the weakest path (with the exception of the pheonix pyre spell) which most of it's stuff has a cold equivalent (as well as water magic having a load of buffs and stuff making it better than fire), mind you they already have the inferno.

to be fair i think every path has atleast one spell more than capable of taking down SCs or atleast a spell to give you an SC to face off the other in 1 on 1 mortal combat or 2 on 1 if you can gather the gems.

lets make a list

astral - soul slay
water - claws of kokytos
fire - the inferno (what's the real name of the spell again?)
nature - just send some mages behind a few tarrasques to buff them
death - tartarians
earth - same as nature but iron dragons instead of tarrasques
air - actually a little more lacking but has some nice buffs to combine with other paths to take down SC's
Blood - send horrors at the SC, horrors happen to horror mark with their attacks so the strength of the horrormark will get stronger and stronger untill a doom horror wipes him out.

any other ideas, particularly for air?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

The only problem with the above list is that the W and F spells are mostly blood. Personally I would say that for W its frozen heart, and for F its incinerate. Air would probably be Orb lightning. The only problem with these is that resistance is easy to attain for all three, whereas with Soul Slay the SC needs to have very high MR if you have a decent number of S3 mages, or communion.