[Soapyfrog]

Boron said:
Ok . But i can siege the province where the scouts are in.

And they can just sneak away!

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.

20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

So killing 200-300 of your devils you need a few turns to have them again.

Yes but.. I WILL have them again. With no additional expenditure of resources and no risk... so in addition to being able to do everything else I could do, i.e. equip and use SCs, I get X free devils every turn... which I think you'll agree is a significant advantage.

With staff of storm + a few air casters who cast e.g. thunderstrike + orb lightning the devils don't look too good .

Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

Most important though you have to remember the high costs of soul contracts . 80 slaves , 60 with dwarfen hammer.

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn. To take advantage of this you need only 2 blood 5 casters with dwarven hammers so the setup costs are not super significant... for Abysia its downright trivial, for example. I would be quite happy producing two contracts a turn until I can start wishing for blood and power. Generally this will leave enough excess blood to do other fun stuff with but if you are really diligent you can just produce more soul contracts every so often with the excess.

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.

Yes true but actually it is much faster to empower, especially in a hard research setting, which is not so expensive considering how easy it is to accumulate blood.

And you will use a lot of your initial blood first on the ice/arch devils normally..

Agreed Ice devils and Arch devils take precedence, since they are valuable uniques. In a normal research game playing blood nation you should have all your ice and archies by turn 25 or so, at which point you can start contracting... Although I usually break that rule and setup some contracts early, once I have a few uniques already.

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.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.

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.

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.