Quote:
Boron said:
The Dai Oni kings are perfect raiders in earlygame if you do a e9 bless.
With the e9 bless + summon ep they get 8 reinvigoration. So you can use them unequipped and they still make terrific thugs.
With equipment they are SCs.
Imho they are fine, you just have to rely on your mages. Your troops are not important, but the archers for 8 gold are useful.
Hanyas can cast flaming arrows for them.
Yomo is imho a good nation, but hard to play. But they have extremely interesting options available with the dai oni, which are imho more flexible than niefel jarls.
You said dai oni have less hp then the niefels, that is only half true, you have to count their ghost form hp as hp too. And their ghost form is an extremely useful feature:
A niefel jarl dies from 1 sucessful GfH hit, whereas for a dai oni you need 2 such hits.
And they have the most flexible buffs i think, both atlantis and niefelheim are a bit more limited there.
Summon EP, Invulnerability, Soul vortex, Fire shield, Phönix Pyre, every 4th mirror image.
They also can do terrific battle magic: Earthquake and RoS.
Their troops are a weakness, but at least the archers are useful enough. The Dai Oni are their main strength.
Imho they are balanced and one of the better early era nations. The only problem is that you are almost forced to play them with an e9 strat imho.
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You make some very good points Boron. I completely agree, Dai Oni are more flexable (and potentially more powerful) than Niefel Jarls. That's why I like them more, and as I said earlier, in the end game with good buffs and items they make better SCs than Jarls.
I haven't tried E9 bless with Oni. I suspect you are rigth, and it might work reasonably well. However I would expect your Dai Oni to suffer and collect afflictions quickly, if you use them butt naked from the very begining.
Still it maybe worth it because of faster expansion. It's hard to know for sure before you actually try it. An interesting idea in any case. Personally if I would be trying something along these lines, I would probably throw N4 into the mix, to make my Dai Oni last longer without becoming walking wreck due to injuries. And at the very least I would get them before sending them on their own or with only missile support against tough indeps.
Overall I think your and mine perception of Oni are not too far from each other. I agree than Dai Oni are great, and the archers are cheap and low resources. But all my suggestions, as you can see, were centered on Oni demon troops, which, as pretty much all people here seem to agree, including yourself, are very weak and need some boost, or there is not much point of using them at all in MP.
And playing Oni Kings nation while only using single demon king SC and bunch or human archers/infantry, without using any of 6 demon troops, just doesn't seems as a elegant solution to me from the design/balance point of view, if you know what I mean. I think Oni overall balance and diversity would increase a lot, if the actual demon troops would be made efficient in MP by few tweaks. My suggestions are an attempt to do just that.