[nakomus]

I don’t think Soul Contracts are all that great if you have easy access to the summing spell as well.

If you assume that devils are what you need, Soul Contract is only desirable if you either a) cannot easily summon devils directly or
b) Do not need your devils right away.

If you need an Army right now it matters not at all how good a return on investment a Soul Contract has. And who can really be sure what the game situation will be like in 5 or 10 turns?

If you are playing Abysia (the only nation I’ve seriously used Devils with), its quite easy to just summon them. You need level three blood and one demonbred per devil per turn. The Demonbreds can cast the spell without items or empowerment. At 260 gold and sacred the cost of the mages to support the summoning is not too severe.

Soul Contract requires 5(!) Blood. No Abysian mages can cast this without a boost. Your closest bet is a Warlock with 3 blood and a random pick. If you don’t have a warlock with a random pick in blood you need con4 and two boosters in order to forge the item at all. 11 turns after that, your first soul contract will make its return on investment. If you count the cost of the boosters (60 additional blood, I think), that first contract actually takes 20 turns to payback. Of course you could amortize that over later contracts.

Still, the cost of that first contract is 140 slaves and some time. By the time that you get your first devil out of the soul contract, someone summoning devils directly could have an army of 20 Devils out in the field. My money is on the guy with the army

As to Huzurdaddi’s point that I would be spending the Blood on SCs instead anyway, this is probably true a bit later, but Abysia can get Devils out with less research and boosting.

I’m assuming the game is played on a small enough map that you cannot reasonably expect to just be left alone. Certainly if you have 20 or 30 turns without major conflict, Soul Contract is a better deal.

This doesn’t address whether Devils are themselves balanced of course.