[Keir Maxwell]

Very interesting Zen.

My main experiment in turmoil has been Barbarian Kings in which I have had success using turm3, luck3, prod3, growth3 and the Lady of Fortune.

The HI spear are cheap and the comp bow and Celestial mages important to early success. The key advantage of BK in early expansion is starting LC with lance who attract any enemy that overcomes the HI, thus protecting the comp bow/CM's, and generally rout them with their lances. Over time you build more HC and these combine with Summoned spirits for some brutal charges which can devestate even well armoured opponents.

Big weakness is the Celestial Mages vunerability to Mind Duel and that I can never find many gems.

Unlike Zen I have found Celestial mages to be poor searchers and suspect the difference is the extra random pick of S&A plus the luck of the draw. Having only 1 magic level in most areas (and 2 in water which is hardly commen on the land) you only find a fraction of the sites available in a given path. This makes it hard to follow the standard procedure of using indies mages to fill gaps in searching as your gaps are everywhere. Barbarian Kings has one of the poorest gem incomes of races I play, in practice, despite looking handy on paper.

The random events generally work out positive but I would like to stress the point made by many others - the bad events are significantly worse than the "good ones" - some of which are often bad - militia for example. Order3, misfortune3, in practice, leads to luck which is generally not much worse than luck3/turmoil3. Luck needs to be better.

Biggest problem with Barbarian Kings - when I invest in LC I do badly when I invest in foot I do well.

Waiting for 2.05 with great interest.

Cheers

Keir