[Graeme Dice]

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.

Let's take a look at the two Ermorian themes then. From Dom 1 to Dom 2 their amount of available design points dropped by 50. They also gained more survivability for their troops as banish was reduced in effectiveness. Every other nation, on the other hand, has half as much gold to use.

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

A hundred is different from several hundred and that type of game is hardly a good candidate for making game balance decisions. Even so, that's all I had besides summoned troops, since the upkeep was approaching 1000 gold per turn, and even the world map doesn't give you much more than that in income.

If you don't HAVE any death mages, it's a little hard to do anything else with your death gems.

If you don't have any death mages, you're going to have a hard time creating one with death 2 or 3.

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.

So you just happen to have a few hundred nature gems sitting around to cast multiple calls of the wilds every turn? Imprint souls is 25 astral pearls, so it's a once every two or three turns deal. Arouse hunger has nowhere near the offensive potential of ghost riders. 10 ghouls isn't quite the same potency of a force as 33 longdead horsemen and a wraith lord.

A single fort, even the lowly 0-point watchtower, can ward off an infinite number of Ghost Riders.

So what, people are supposed to ignore their national troops and build pure summoned armies just so that they can have a low cost fortress?

A fort can stop or delay enemies that no army you can muster at any reasonable, or even unreasonable, cost can.

And that's one of the serious balance problems. Your conventional troops should never become useless, and should always remain the most important part of your army. As it stands right now, the game just degenerates into who can build the better SC faster.

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.

Most nations don't even have death 2 mages, so it's hardly a bargain to spend 60 gems to get a single mage capable of casting death 4 spells.