Well, score graphs are a funny thing, in that they tell you an interesting story, but not the whole story. For example, the score graphs tell how the armies of the devas and ACGHHS are very close in size. They say nothing, however, of the fact that the majority of our armies are ulmish women, followed by indies and more or less uninteresting units hired by niefelheim to patrol his cap when it was bombarded with toads. They also say nothing of how ACGHHS has hundreds of jaguar warriors and androphag archers on our borders.
We have the most provinces not because we've been beating team ACGHHS, but because we've been more aggressive in marketing violence to our neighbors, especially the blessed ones. I find the income tally very interesting, personally. Despite having 22 more provinces than team ACGHHS, they have nearly the same income as we do despite the fact that I am currently overtaxing a few provinces, and despite the fact that they have at least one nation on their team that should be fairly into bloodhunting by this point. Clearly they are doing something right here.
I would be similarly cautious before saying too much about our gem income disparity at this point. We JUST put up a global, which is going to skew the numbers about. And as I said already, team ACGHHS has some serious bloodhunting ability on their team. It is not unlikely in the least that they are making 60+ slaves a turn. In fact that would be a ridiculously easy benchmark for them at this stage of the game, and I would suspect a significantly higher slave income. I would also like to point out at this point that we have seen a number of artifacts in their possession and suspect the hammer of the forge lord and the chalice to be among them. While it is true that, as ulm, I am an excellent forging nation, I do quite a bit of forging for my team without using smiths. We've also had a bit of difficulty scraping up earth gems, so we have far fewer dwarven hammers than you would expect us to have by now. The disparity is not as bad as it looks. And need I remind you that sauromatia has had the well of misery up for quite some time....
Now research, that is clearly not in our favor. I am the only member of my team with respectable research at this point. Every single member of team ACGHHS is above every other member of my team in research (though it looks as though caelum may soon overtake pangaea). I would also be willing to wager that team ACGHHS's research has been much more optimal than ours. Between sauromatia and arcosephale, it is obvious that they have at least level 8 in conjuration and construction, and I would be willing to bet mictlan is up there in blood. Can anyone say elemental royalty, artifacts, and unique blood summons? All on the same team? With a very obvious road to late game tartarian dominance? Meanwhile my team chooses to focus on things like evocation
. Of course I have more than just this, but for the moment I'll leave you to keep guessing.
So, just think about what I've said, and ask yourself. Is the slight edge in raw material wealth that the devas possess, coupled with strong natural raiding potential, decent recruitable SCs and forge bonii sufficient to overcome team ACGHHS' far superior troop line up, artifact possession, significant research advantage, and tartarian spam coupled with access to all of the unique SCs in the game? It is definitely much closer than the score graphs imply.
This has been a public service announcement from the Devas Department of Looking Less Scary and Enabling the Greater Enjoyment of the Easy-Slay brand
