[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

I agree 1 on 1 a storm demon beats a devil. The problem is that I will have 300 devils and you will have 30 storm demons...

SC I agree you can with a LOT of effort make an SC who can tank an unlimited number of devils. However of course there are more devils where they came from (for free!!) AND of course I can use anti-SC tactics against your devil-tanking SC.

Since my devil army is endless replenishable, losing it is not a crippling blow. Your SC on the other hand, well, you will have to expend those considerable resources all over again, since the devil problem wont go away just ebcuase you killed a bunch of them.

You have to kill the source... and you cant becuase they are hidden on scouts...

Ok . But i can siege the province where the scouts are in .
And until very lategame you don't have so many soul contracts that you generate each turn 100 new devils , rather 20-50 new ones .
So killing 200-300 of your devils you need a few turns to have them again .
With staff of storm + a few air casters who cast e.g. thunderstrike + orb lightning the devils don't look too good .
And they have -50% cold resistence so ice strike and falling frost can do some damage too .


The devils are of course tough but fortunately you can ground them via storm and as a sideeffect the storm makes fire magic harder to use as well .



Most important though you have to remember the high costs of soul contracts .
80 slaves , 60 with dwarfen hammer .
A dwarfen hammer costs though 20 earthgems and the blood nations are not the best sitesearchers . Abysia and Mictlan both lack earthmagic , Mictlan lacks it total and Abysia can only get E on warlocks , then you can forge a bloodstone and earth boots for earth 3 but that takes some time .
If you don't take blood 5 on your pretender then you will need construction 6 in order to get 2 boosters to blood 5 to forge the soul contracts .
And you will use a lot of your initial blood first on the ice/arch devils normally .

So by turn 30 you have i think if you don't go only on soul contracts about 10 and produce each turn 1-2 new .
By turn 50 you have then like 20-50 soul contracts but on turn 50 the others will have other good things .
Only when you reach 100+ soul contracts at turn 70-100 they start to really get out of control .

Soul contracts are good but unless you manage to get FoTa running or find a constructionbonus site they are not really overpowered .
With forces of darkness you get 14 Fiends for 50 blood that's not bad too . A fiend of darkness has about the same combat power like a Devil .
So only after 15 turns the soul contract starts to get a higher output .
But 15 turns is a long time so the player who uses the lvl 9 blood spell instead will have more forces earlier than you .
If you can survive this then it is fine but chances are not bad that the nonhorder overwhelms you before your hoarding really pays off .