[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Solid plan. The Lord of the Night is a good pretender, and he's an assassin....although his Fiends of Darkness may cause him to rout, like other accompanying towed rabble. At least fiends of Darkness are very MEAN towed guards. Oddly, I've never seen them rout the pretender in my usage of the LotN. Perhaps it has to do with that interesting bit about how if they all die, your pretender doesn't rout....fiends don't break, they always die....let me know what you find, okay?

The only time I have had a Lord of Night get killed was when, on a lark, I snuck him into the abyssian capital and started assassinating commanders there. I was doing well until I ran across a warlock packing blood slaves and he spammed imps at me till I died (negative dominion had me at 18 hit points lol, like I said...it was just to see how he would do). Even in that case the fiends didn't run and I think I would be hard pressed to purposefully try and get them to run before they either win or flat out die due to their rock solid morale. If I come across an instance where the fiends run I'll let you know what happens to the pretender.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Mictlan only favors heat-1, and you'll suffer an economic hit for the excessive heat-3. I personally would go with heat-2, myself, due to the instability of temperature: Having a scale one-off hurts less than it appears.

The scale choices are definitely controversial. I chose heat 3 to see just how bad an economic bind it would put me in and if it could be deal with by gold sites, luck scale occurrences due to Turmoil overdrive, and alchemy from fire gem sites.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Luck gives your very nice national heroes, which do a good job filling in missing magics, but your pretender has already covered the known Mictlan Earth/Air/Death holes. However, they're a little suboptimal for pure battle performance. You lose out on Quickness and Breath of Winter by lacking water-2, and BoW can clear out those pesky indies fast.

Yes, I can see your point. My idea with the pretender choice was to have him in a province by turn 3 and assassinating all the commanders on average by turn 6 and conquering the province on that same turn. I guess this would be considered slow but I also am building a second army with fiends at the same time I am popping taxes to 200% while using the starting army to kill unrest creating burst income until my total population reaches around 25k at which time I drop tax down to 100%. Growth 3 usually brings it back to original numbers by about turn 35 or so. Around this time I have aquired around the amount of fiends to start taking other provinces I am not currently assassinating in with the Lord of the Night. You are right about the air and death being repeated on the excellent national heroes but they tend to be very irregular to rely on comming and I want to build an air/death gem income asap. My current game in single player is in turn 42 without any sign of a national hero but my pretender did uncover a mirror-wall palace that nets 3 air gems and allows recruitment of a 2 astral, 2 air, and 1 random mage for a good price of 180 and a Bowl of the Lost that allows a death mage to enter to summon Banes as regular troops. I think though that perhaps I could drop off all that blood and put up some fire instead for fire gem searches to help out the economy. I'll look into it.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
However: Turmoil BAD! That's going to absolutely MAUL your economy, reducing your ability to churn out priests like they're on sale.

Yes, I choose Turmoil 3 on purpose. Number one, just to see HOW bad it would affect things and if this could not only be overcome but overcome well. Number two, to see how using such as an accelerator combined with luck 3 would off-set the poor initial economy. In the three single player games I have tried this I have met with more success than failure from an economic point of view. For instance, on one game I had labs burn down 3 times but on like the 4th turn I had my gold income permanently increased in my home province by 40 gold. The gains tend to offset not only the bad scales but even, eventually, the bad events. These are from a limited amount of single player games so you have to take it all with a grain of salt. I have just found that with nations that you don't care to mess with the national troops very much a maxed misfortune scale crossed with max luck has yet to be very much of a problem and in fact is very fun. Again, this is single player games not multi-player and very experimental playstyle.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
While certainly acceptable in SP, this is probably a little too slow for competitive multiplayer. The Lord of the Night's fatigue is relatively modest, so in lightly populated provinces, with the magic paths you chose, you may be able to clear them out just by buffing Mirror/Mist/Ironskin/Attack Rear. Your paths aren't quite optimized for battle performance, though.

Yeah everything you said is more than likely true. Having only played single player I would have to say that my choices are definitely not made with multi-player games in mind. I just figured him to be the best assassin in the game out of the box and tried to optimize that within the overall theme of Mictlan which is the nation I started playing first when I got this game and remains my favorite.

Thanks for your observations.

Edited to exchange the word misfortune with Turmoil as it would cause complete confusion if left that way.

[ June 21, 2004, 20:33: Message edited by: Anglachel ]