[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
Then of course, if she has both death 3 and fire 2 then you really can't kill her without very specific troops and spell selection. Soul vortex and phoenix pyre provide esentially unlimited ressurrections.

If ANYTHING has Soul Vortex and Phoenix Pyre, it has essentially unlimited resurrections against normal riffraff. You hardly need a VQ for that.

A VQ is a highly potent base chassis priced at a reasonable 110 points. The baseline model is not that impressive, however, unless you invest a sizeable chunk of your nation points in tweaking it for battle. As Arch points out, I plow several hundred points into paths chosen specifically for battle. This is not a small outlay, and comes at fair expense in other areas: Yet the VQ can be in only one place at a time.

Ultimately, the VQ has one very specific role: It's built to be the ultimate combat base chassis for a pretender, and very little else. By the time you've bought the loadout needed to make it a monster, you have very little free points for anything else: Your scales, dominion strength, and castle will likely be somewhat subpar. In short, you've invested a sizeable chunk of your national allocation into a single point. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that you can tear through anything that you can get your hands on....but you can only be in one place at a time, the fundamental shortcoming of the strategy.

Sure, it's possible to create economy-class combat VQs, but they're simply not up to the same caliber as the near-invulnerable monster that people who have played against me have seen: That requires a sizeable investment above and beyond that which you sink into a typical SC chassis. Tweaking a VQ really requires a LOT of nation points and is NOT cheap, given that the starting paths you get by default are generally non-synergistic: You wind up having to pay for other paths from scratch most of the time.

So yes, the VQ is definitely the most potent base chassis you can pick for an SC pretender....but that's also the only thing it does. You're probably not going to shoehorn a useful blessing onto one and still retain its combat potential. To go truly overboard on it will cost you a ton of points, leaving you with somewhat insuperior scales, dominion strength, and castle: Without the natural dominion strength, you have to aggressively push it with temples, as natural spread will falter in the face of opposing dominion.

It's not as unbeatable as certain people would have you believe: I have no fear of somebody else playing the same cards.

The VQ strategy is not an adjunct on top of an existing core strategy that is already strong: The VQ strategy is a standalone strategy of its own. To analyze the VQ as if it was also being played on top of something else is missing the bigger picture, because that's simply not how it works.

If you're worried your conventional army will be utterly destroyed by it, then don't send your conventional army into a place that the vampire might be: Don't drink with the vampire.

[ April 14, 2004, 01:30: Message edited by: Norfleet ]