Quote:
Originally Posted by Septimius Severus
The whole idea is foster a common identity and get people into character and a team mind set. So this therefore is the most important reason why I am doing this the way I am, because you chose it. It'd be nice if players really get into this and have fun with it, instead of playing games that are more of just the same, that follow that ultra competitive, narrow minded, mindset. I want each team to have their own exclusive "toolkit", there own path to victory. But the option is there for teams to tailor things as they see fit, if they don't wish to role play.
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This sounds really nice in theory, but it overlooks some rather important facts. Namely, nature magic doesn't offer a path to victory. At all.
There are four strategies that work in endgame: tarts, wish, angels, blood. That's it. Tarts are by far the most efficient, but clams make wish spam possibly competitive. And blood eschews efficiency because slaves are cheap. Most nations are going to access angels via wish, so we can collapse that down to 3 real options.
So, of those options, we'll note 1 death, 1 astral, and 1 blood.
Then we note that blood magic is really weak in MA overall, making the blood route much less appealing. And since everyone clams, and tarts aren't notably vulnerable to armageddon, tart spam will rule the game, especially since the death nations are already otherwise strong!
Hence death team > astral team > blood team, and that's just endgame. You'll note the death team also has an amazingly strong early and mid game.
So what does nature do? Other than die I mean. I can't see any real options. Their early game is pretty bad (mictlan is the only one with a good early game, Man's is ok, the other two suck). Their mid game is craptastic in vanilla (machaka might have the best one of them, but with dragonmaster at a ridiculous Ench 8 the usual fever fetish spam -> fire drake spam doesn't work quite so well, and Eriu raiders come online - but there's no muscle to back them up on the entire team). And their late game is nonexistent. No, seriously, they have absolutely nothing going on.
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If you must go with pre-set teams, these are better (although not perfect by any means):
Twilight of the Empire: Pythium, Ermor, C'tis, Arcocephale
Barbarians at the Gates: Marignon, Vanheim, Jotunheim, (Ulm/Man)
Partha Reborn: Caelum, Abysia, Bandar Log, Agartha? (or I suppose Machaka, but its not as nice a fit. Ashdod *could* go here, if they were remotely balanced for play.)
The Golden Horde: TC, Shinuyama, Pangaea (representing wild areas north or east of the black sea), ??? (Eriu would be ok, if not entirely thematic. Could justify Mictlan by arguing our mythical china was the first to discover the new world.)
Yes, that was entirely geographic. Its also remarkably closer to being balanced. Partha Reborn might be a little weak, and Twilight of the Empire might be a little strong, but it isn't nearly as overwhelming.