[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

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Originally posted by Norfleet:
So you willfully squander your national resources over a belief in what you see as "cheese" instead of playing the game as written. That is certainly your perogative, but does not figure into a rational analysis.

It also illustrates the weakness of water magic, since the only effective thing to do with it in the very long term is to turn it into astral pearls.

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I think this is far from demonstrated. Although water could use some new tricks, "the only effective thing" is a vast overstatement.

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The sheer amount of research you were giving up on such an excursion, towing around an entire boatload of mages, must have been immense.

Sure, it would have been large in the early game, but by this point it isn't much of an expense. This is still an illustration of an imbalance, since no single unit should be able to destroy an army made up of the toughest summons that are available to that nation, and certainly not one backed up by multiple mages with ninth level spells researched.

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Oh, you had Water Queens and Abominations in that battle? They weren't mentioned in the previous post. Sea Trolls are far from "the toughest summons available" to ANY nation. Granted, some of the toughest summons available to Atlantis are aquatic (where are the items that let a commander take aquatic troops onto land? Amulet of the Fish will let Auluudh or a Nerid come out to play, but not bring Sea Serpents, War Lobsters or Crab Hybrids with them.), but they still have some better options than Sea Trolls.

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I think that even my basic starting air-4 gets me a lot more than 4 mirror images. And I'm surprised you didn't have herald lances anyway.

They are very expensive, since they are 10 astral pearls, and astral is the most generally useful magic.

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I wouldn't consider a 10 gem item "very expensive" - certainly not compared to multiple-Wished VQs and their equipment.

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And of course you got water elementals instead of ice ones. You have forgotten that the Mictlan climate is warm, not cold?

Did you happen to notice the snow on the ground in that battle? I would have thought that that would have been enough to cause ice elementals to form.

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Well, next time cast Wolven Winter to make sure. You have all those water mages and research and "useless" water gems, right?

Ice elementals, BTW, can damage cold immune creatures just fine (although they might have some problem with supercombatants).


It does seem to me that water magic isn't very useful when fighting on land against cold immune opponents, and there are a disproportionate number of cold immune monsters (and of course the vast majority of provinces are land). There are only a few water battle spells (Ice Strike, Sailors Death) that work against cold immune targets at all (castable on land, anyway), and they aren't very powerful (Sailors Death doesn't even work on inanimate targets). Worse, Atlantis's normal troops use poison weapons and armor, and the largest Category of cold immune creatures is ALSO poison immune, making their normal troops less effective too. Fire and Air don't have many ways of damaging elemental immune targets either - but there are far fewer creatures naturally immune to fire or lightning.

How about a Waterspout that stays on the battlefield for a few rounds (like the Cloud spells), crushes targets and throws them around (similar to trample)? Or a Water Jet that just deals some physical damage but doesn't require another path like Geyser? Those might not work that well against supercombatants, but they'd at least help against undead or Jotun armies.

To a certain extent, the water nations' difficulty on land counterbalances their defensive advantage in being difficult for land nations to attack. But inability to project power onto land will eventually be crippling. Furthermore, land nations that have water magic (Caelum, Jotunheim) have this problem too (although in their case there's a consolation prize - somewhat easier access to the sea than most land nations).