[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by apoger:
I am still doing the Abysian tests. (results soon)

As to the gold cost of the scout strategy...

I need to do some more tests to try to optimize the situation. In the test from the first post I did no patrols, nor did I farm the best provinces (I farmed some big expensive ones).

However I can tally up the approximate costs and results from that slightly sub-optimal test:

Gold costs of taxes lost, scout costs, and upkeep = 3005 gold (approximate, I had to estimate the times of acquiring some provinces, but I'm pretty close)

For this 3000 gold I got 420 blood slaves.

That comes to 7.14 gold per slave.
Think of it as 214 gold for a Horde from Hell or perhaps 392 gold for an Ice Devil.

OK. Neglecting research, as others have pointed out - and also neglecting the empowerment cost. Those built-from-scratch Blood 4s you mentioned earlier are costing you (50+30+45+60)*7.14 = 1320 gold each, neglecting the cost of the chassis. (Of course their upkeep is low, because empowering doesn't raise upkeep.) You could save a bit by only empowering to Blood 3 and then forging blood thorns and brazen vessels - you can save even more if you have Ring of Sorcery.

In any case, I don't think 400 for an unequipped Ice Devil is necessarily unreasonable. How do they compare stats-wise to the 500 gold Niefels?

As per Pocus's "20 turn challenge", it seems that competitive play yields a turn 20ish income of about 1500.


420 blood slaves could be;
almost 8 Ice Devils (3 more than exist)
14 Hordes from Hell (14 Devils and 350 Imps)
21 Lifelong Protection Contracts
The ability for Jotunhiem to cast the global spell Illwinter 3 times (and have 60 slaves to spare)

Again, you are neglecting research and empowerment (if you are truly intending to simulate slave hunting by a nation with no blood capability). 14 Devils and 350 Imps doesn't sound that impressive for 3000 gold - I would estimate Imps as weaker than most HI, and 14 Devils, while they will do some damage, will still go down against a sizable force of quality troops. 3000 gold is over 20 Black Hunters, for example (plus the Voice of the Lord prophet to bless them).

21 Lifelong Protections could be really annoying if they were all on assassins. Otherwise they're not that much of a threat.

3 Illwinters is pretty nasty, since Dispel takes research now. But I think that someone is likely to have it - and in any case, Jotunheim is not a non-blood-using nation (AFAIK - I haven't played Niefelheim yet).

I think this might help put things into perspective.

It is, of course, difficult to come up with similar numbers for the cost of obtaining gems, because gem availability depends on the placement of magic sites - sometimes you can hunt 20 provinces with level 3 in a path and still find only 3 gems/turn because there just aren't enough sites of that path. (This is really annoying if you are Desert Tombs C'tis and can't get enough gems to keep summoning your mummified priests and kings.) There is effectively a limit on how much you can invest in getting more gems - once you've searched every province you have with every type of mage you can get, you can't further increase your gem income without expanding - while there is less limit on how much of your gold economy you can convert to blood.


As I posted on one of the supercombatant threads, I think there should be more battlefield spells that increase the effectiveness of regular troops, which would allow players to more effectively combat summons and supercombatants with conventional armies (backed up by magic). Of course Hordes from Hell could use those spells too, but if the effect is to make their attacks more deadly, it will tend to favor superior numbers.