[Graeme Dice]

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

I don't think it's an overstatement at all. I think it's very clear that in the long term, nothing will pay off as much as building clams. You have a limited set of three water queens that can summon their own troops, and the rest of the uses for large numbers of water gems only have effects for a few turns.

Oh, you had Water Queens and Abominations in that battle?

Only one of the water queens is amphibious, and abominations are astral summons, not water.

They weren't mentioned in the previous post. Sea Trolls are far from "the toughest summons available" to ANY nation.

And that's part of the problem. Atlantis has no summonable or tough troops that can come onto land. The mother guard are nice, but its too expensive to haul around a lot of them.

but they still have some better options than Sea Trolls.

On land? I suppose they could go for enliven statues, but those aren't particularly impressive either.

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

The cost of astral pearls produced by clams is effectively 0 after 20 turns.

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

Like a 250 hitpoint vampire queen with immunity to every element, a 0.004% chance of MR spells effecting it, and multiple damage shields you mean? I suppose one could try and use mandragoras, but their sleep vines aren't particularly likely take effect and the fire shield will make mincemeat of them.

[ April 10, 2004, 16:55: Message edited by: Graeme Dice ]