[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

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Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
I know you are mourning the old Lava Warriors Alex but the new ones can be spectacular with earth9 and Abyssian mages love it to.

Um... have you used Abyssian mages in combat? . . . Or is this just theoretical?

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Ooff - brutal.

I have been using Abyssian combat mages since I first began playing dom1 and Abyssia is historically my favourite race. While they do suffer they have their value. My standard first turn is to build an Anathement Dragon to command my first army and use all my resources on HI and/or Lava warriors while cashing in all my gems. The anthement Dragon can cast Flare in between Fantacism/Divine Blessing and gets onto the hall of fame. Fanaticism makes all the difference to early expansion and allows the use of the early small units approach which increases the reliability of early expansion with Abyssia.

You'll notice the Cyclops mentioned had Air3. For . . . Eyes of Aiming. Anathement Salmanders are far from hopeless combat mages with Phoenix Power and Fire Ball. In the first MP game I played of Dom1 I ended up with a bunch of mages dominating the Hall of fame until my Ice Devils got going. I would choose wether or not I liked their heroic ability to decide wether or not to keep them as army mages or send them searching.
With increased precison (Eyes of Aiming etc) Fire Balls etc become deadly and Falling Skies is a nice new addition.

So yes I am speaking from experiance not just blowing smoke. Sure I want the precision of Abyssian mages improved but thats not because I don't use them - its because I use them and know how hard you have to work to make them effective. Sure I could give up on them because they score low on efficiency but if I approach themes/races like that they will all end up looking somewhat similar. Like Nagot I find Pythium et al somewhat unappealing and I'm more interested in trying to make less mainstream approaches work. You can find some hidden beauties (or monstrosities) with this approach.

Cheers

Keir

ps If I was going to use Pythium I'd put together a mixed force of the 2 strat move legionaries and the emerald guard can go sit on their plumes.