[Saxon]

A point or two if I may.

Is SP, which is all I play, it seems that most games end up with me having to knock out Vanheim at some point. Either I meet them early and have to kill them to live or I meet them late, where their early expansion leads them to have huge resources and they are a monster. Either way, pretty much every game comes down to me vs. Vanheim. That takes some replayablity out of the game.

They run over independents and take next to no casualties. They expand fast and stay strong. Sure, magic can help, but I am also finding that in vanilla games, magic is slow to come. This is for another thread, but magic comes so late in Dom 3 that many, maybe most, games are already decided. In any case, my point is that the higher level spells come when Vanheim is already the 300 pound gorilla, having stomped most other nations out of the way.

The raiding strategy is a good one and I have used Joton’s troops to do it. However, you have to get lucky with Vanheim going after someone else’s empire, rather than eating the heart out of yours. In other words, it works sometimes.

Also useful are the armour destroying spells, particularly destruction. However, you need good earth paths, so again, it works sometimes.

Ermor has (had) an easy counter, available to all nations. Priests. And to get those you needed temples, which gave you the bonus of dominion, it was an attractive solution. Sure, they would run over a newbie in SP, but after their first trip to the forums, Ermor was in trouble. I argue that Vanheim does not have an easy or even somewhat easy counter.

To summarize, in SP, this nation dominates all map sizes and takes some of the flavour out of playing. They do not have an easy counter (unlike Ermor). In my opinion, they are too strong and it is all about those glamoured troops. Having played Dom 1, 2 and 3, I have never before felt something was so badly unbalanced (I did not use the CB mod, I thought vanilla Dom 2 was good). I am not an amazing player or a terribly competitive one. I am Joe Boring and Normal, so I won’t even pretend to give you numbers or detailed analysis. I just want to say the nation is too strong for SP and it really stands out. I don’t want to use a mod (someone else said the vanilla game should be the standard) and I don’t want to take the nation out, it has a nice flavour.

Thus, I vote for an increase in price, probably in both resources and gold. It would reduce the numbers available, particularly early against independents, yet retain the cool unit. It would make the massing of armour and morale to counter it possible by all nations, at a cost, but a cost which has other benefits. Really, who doesn’t have a use for armoured units with good morale? Just like everyone has a use for more dominion.