[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
The sense I get from re-reading this thread is that everyones got a similar idea of what to do its just that no-one has managed to have much success with it.

C'mon Illwinter - 2 spine devils for 5-6 blood? It is a blood 2 ritual so it takes a costly mage to perform and if you only get one devil its hard to make the spell cheap enough in blood slaves to be efficient. If it only required blood1 it might be different.

And some bronze armour?

I feel that Illwinter have been somewhat cautious with their new nations and as a consequence only Machaka (which gets Plate) seems up to scratch. Its not that I want Mictlan and Tien Ch'i to be more like the classically successful races - I'd like them to be a bit better at what they do.

I believe that the central focus on balence redressing should be improving underpowered options not weakening useful options. The only exception I can think of at present would be a decrease in the finanicial effectiveness of Order as part of improving turmoil/luck races.

Even that, I think, is unnecessary - rather, the event reducing effectiveness of order should be reduced and/or event increase given to both ends of the luck scale (as in Dom I), plus most disasters shouldn't occur at or above a given level of luck (differs depending on the magnitude of the disaster). This would make order/misfortune riskier and turmoil/luck more beneficial for their respective events, which IMO would go a long way toward balancing out the steady-state income reduction.

Luckily, instead of a severe flood, we just had a mild rainstorm. Thank God!


I do feel that Mictlan is rather weak - they have the problems endemic to light units, plus their copper armors are very inefficient in terms of protection/weight/resources. Low level blood summons aren't very useful because of the high cost of the mages necessary to perform them and the need to use slaves to maintain Last place in dominion . I'm not sure what could be done to help them, other than multiplying the blood summons (i.e. 2-3x the demons for 2-3x the slaves). Maybe a blood hunting bonus for their priests (like Fountain of Blood only not as strong)? Or maybe they just need to have more javelins and less slings? Javelins are quite effective in Dom II, but slings are still worthless. An improvement to sling precision/damage across the board would be interesting - few other nations use slings, and those are usually weak (Man militia comes to mind).

T'ien Ch'i isn't so bad except for the magic duel weakness - their special themes suffer from the current order/luck imbalance, but assuming that is fixed, they wouldn't need much more. Barbarian Kings will benefit a lot from the rumored change to fire and flee, and (if it is implemented) firing during hold and attack (or a fire and attack order). I think they don't need any nation specific changes right now as they stand to benefit from some game-wide changes.