[Keir Maxwell]

Hi all,

I play multi-player and I'm fairly excited about some of the bless potential. My understanding about mulit-player is that a quick start hides a multitude of sins and a berserk one is the greatest of blessings. If bless and high levels of magic can help you get you an insanely quick start most of the rest will flow from that. I have sacrificed long term power left, right, and center in a number of different mutli-player environments with great success and if taking nature 9 can turn my Niefel giants into early game supercombatents then yeehaaa! Did somone mention re-invigoration for blessed mages?!!!! Err, thats sounds pretty tempting to me.

The question really is how many races can make use of high magic/bless to good effect - I suspect many races will, like Chris's Machaka, take minor advantage of this feature and a few major. Looking forward to finding out.

I really appreciated Nyanarr's feedback and found the details and analysis thoughtful and useful - thanks. I also appreciate the value of not losing troops and find the thought of enhanced wardens well worth looking at.

So will I be playing with high magic to utilise bless in mutli-player - I imagine so. I played blood 9 Fountain of Blood in Dom I to get my first Ice Devil on turn 8 or 9 as Caelum so its not like there's no precedent. Sure I wouldn't try quite the same approach in Dom II but there should be others that are competitive. I wonder about water and increased defence for Van.

re starting with multipule provinces.

A poster said you can with the map editor - which I had assumed since you can do it in Dom I by editing the map at the start. I'm hoping people will setup balenced scenario's and then play them. All my Dom I game had preset starting positions as Stars taught me the importance of this. Hopefully this will be easier than in Dom I but even if its not its worth taking a bit of extra time at the start over a game which you will invest vast amounts of time in.

cheers

Keir