[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
No, it really isn't irrelevant. In Dominions I, a living nation player had more than twice as much gold to throw around eac and every turn than they do now. That translates into a lot more units and especially a lot more mages and priests to handle the undead.

If you really feel it's such a problem, you can always choose to play on Rich world: That would give you your Dominions I balance back. Me, I think you're just spoiled by too much gold.

Yes, and we all know that every other nation can afford to have 32767 troops plus several dozen mages sitting around.

This from the guy who claimed to have several hundred mystics and astrologers camping out in his capitol?

So what, they're supposed to squander their death gems (if they can even find them affordably with their mages) empowering a mage, then summoning spectres?

If you don't HAVE any death mages, it's a little hard to do anything else with your death gems. It's not that hard to find and equip a death-1 or 2 mage with equipment needed to forge more +death items.

Province defense of 10 can stop just about any remote attack spell other than ghost riders cold.

I've overrun PD 10 with Arouse Hunger, Imprint Souls, Hordes from Hell....PD is simply unable to cope. If you can't beat it with just one casting, use two or three. What are you, the AI? Do you not care if you succeed or fail? Anything worth doing is worth doing with excessive force.

[quote]And the typical fort costs 300-450 gold, which is far too expensive to build in every province other than if you plan to bore your opponents to death.[/QUOTE
When you consider how much it would cost you to maintain a standing army or PD capable of stopping the attacks that forts can, forts are a bargain! It is difficult or impossible for a typical standing army to fight off, say, 10 casting of Ghost Riders. A single fort, even the lowly 0-point watchtower, can ward off an infinite number of Ghost Riders. Even a PD of 125 cannot stop a rampaging ice devil: A single watch tower stops it cold. A fort can stop or delay enemies that no army you can muster at any reasonable, or even unreasonable, cost can.

The only other nation that has cheap access to Ghost Riders is C'Tis.

It's not all that difficult to get access to death-4 mages, Graeme. Once you have a D2 mage, he can forge a skullstaff and skullface, and voila, D4 mage. After all, if you have no other sources of death mages, what ELSE would you do with death gems? You need death mages to even use death gems, and nearly any nation can afford to get death gems, given that Dark Knowledge requires only a single rank of death magic, which most nations will surely roll on a random sooner or later.