[Keir Maxwell]

I suspect I have understated my case somewhat as some people seem to have missed the point.

re retarded scales.

Who cares? Death is not really a big deal when all you run are super combatents. Sloth is ok as you don't need that many resources to go crazy.

There's actually alot of room to play with scales as I tried chaos 3 luck 3 and got a truly absurd start with a free 1000gp's on the second turn and lots of other useful freebies - although I didn't like getting free troops to upkeep until they have starved! As for the magic I doubt I would research anything other than construction for along time and there's no hurry with that - you start with powerful magic through the bless and everything you fight with can be blessed.

Its not like there are any spells you could research early to compare to the bless or anything you could buy with gold for that matter - thats is why these style of races will work. You start with the power from turn 1 or 2 and thus the speed of your start makes up for the weakness of your scales irrelevent.

If you have 20 provinces by turn 10 do you really think bad scales matter? Building a conquering army each turn after turn 5 or 6 is insanely fast. I've won in multi-player using death scale 3 before with a significantly slower race so I'm not just blowing smoke on this one.

re Death 9 Earth 9 to expensive?

Who cares about weakening dominion scales if you get pretty much everything you need at the beginning.

I should have made it a bit clearer in the first post - I suspect this race is so powerful as to be broken for mutli-player. So the question of wether paying the points for the effects is worth it just doesn't occur to me - I wouldn't seriously consider doing without the +4 protection for this race.

The only thing this race would really like it doesn't have is higher dominion.

Re Jotun Herse as a super combatent.

I would not say most independants can be taken by one Jasper - indie strength 5. You actually have to be very careful and I'm doubting the speculation I have read on early super combatents and the lack of counters to them. Anything with high damage (Lizard warriors, knights, Barbarians) will, and did in test, kill any of the early game super combatents in this race if the numbers are bad enough - I tried pushing the limits and even the Earth Mother bit the dust. However vs weak indies the Herse is pretty awesome and supporting the Niefel giants it makes all the difference as do the Jarls you use for blessings. The biggest problem with this race is actually getting enough blessers early so I turn my first Herse into a prophet.

re other possibilities.

I think there are a heap (everything from sacred Serpent Cataphracts to Heart Companions could go crazy) of other good potential races with high magic pretenders utilising bless. I really rate the water, earth, and nature bless abilites and I'm not writing the others off yet (except perhaps astral and air). One of the most important features is finding a pretender to get what you want cheap - Earth Mother is obviously useful but any pretender starting at lvl 3 can get to 9 for around 160pts which is no big deal.

Van with +4 defence and 50% quickness - Valkrie with +4 defense and 50% quickness! I'm keen to get my copy of the full game.

Through your preconceptions out the window - Dom II is not Dom I.

Don't worry, be happy . . .

Keir