[Squirrelloid]

On mage and troop spamming (Separated out because its a rather different subject):

So what do you want combat to be? Nothing but thugs and SCs? This is an army scale game and you want to play it without armies?

I'm honestly quite confused. I actually find the tendency of the lategame to be about ubersummons and crazy kitted individuals rather than armies to be a let down.

I mean, yes, it'll be nice to have less than 30 mages in your capitol on any given turn. But that'll just translate into more mages roaming the map i imagine. And i haven't found troops to be all that micromanagement intensive compared to mages...

And there is no way around spamming mages - everyone needs to do some amount of site searching/forging, and everyone needs battle mages. And if you insist on closing the purse strings as much as you are I imagine people will forsake troops in favor of more mages after the early game, since troops are becoming less effective.

One important point here is that playing with less than 100% gold is a bad idea when you're adding a large fixed cost.

Predictions:
Once enchantment 3 comes online, nations which can efficiently skelly spam will be big winners, so long as they can afford to buy mages at all, because they don't even need armies, and their skelly spam is even better than usual since other nations can't afford the armies they'd normally be able to.

Awake SC Pretenders will be overpowered because they'll permit excessively rapid early expansion relative to other nations. I'd be surprised if anyone can expand before turn 4 without an SC, while SCs will start expanding on turn *2*. That 2 turn advantage will turn into more money for troops, which will turn into even more accelerated expansion and a bigger province gap. (While an awake SC is always an advantage, its not normally nearly so much of one).