[Squirrelloid]

There were more than 3 fires from afar. I saw *at least* 5 messages, and probably more. And turn 23 is sort of like turn 20.

Markata do not help that much, and you're still likely to hit some mages. (I've lost 2 commanders in an army of 300 units before to one Fires from Afar, 40 markata aren't going to help much against spammed FfA. Losing *any* Rishi is unacceptable and potentially game losing, and you probably get 2-3 *per FfA* even with 40 markata.)

Now lets compare
CBM
Frost W4 Ench4 8w +1/trn
Fire F4 Ench4 5f +1/trn
Nature N4 Ench 4 8n
Astral S4 Ench 4 5s +1/trn
Air A4 Ench 5 10a

Vanilla
Frost W5 Ench6 15w +1/trn
Fire F4 Ench7 8f +1/trn
Nature N5 Ench7 10n
Astral S4 Ench6 10s +1/trn
Air A5 Ench6 20a

The only one of those BL could possibly cast sans booster is astral, and it requires pearls and dropping extra pearls into it for longer duration. Its a bad deal. Also level 6 research is literally half my research at that point. And the good domes are either absolutely impossible to cast for BL that early (air), or in enchantment 7 (nature - and it requires boosters). Water would have been plausibly decent, but impossible to cast with a national mage, and requires W5 which would even need boosters on most pretenders. (The astral dome rarely if ever gets cast for good reason - its only 50% block for a huge pearl investment. If it blocked 80% like air it *might* be worth it).

Vanilla in general places domes far too high up the research tree, makes them too hard to cast (about half of them are 5 required path length), and makes them far too expensive. Add to that a team game where there are few targets and remote nukes become far too good.

Oh yeah, and FfA is level what, 3? Against my team you could have just chosen *random* capitals since you knew where they were, and it would have been pretty devastating. Heck, you probably had a 1/2 chance of guessing where BLs capital was unless you thought we stuck them on the front line. Or you could have just paid Atlantis for the intel.

If you are scouting (which I can only assume you were), moving Rishi out doesn't help because they show up in scouting reports, and it costs a turn of research, which is somewhere on the order of 200 total RP at that point. That's a substantial and unacceptable hit in research, and they get nailed anyway when you just nuke the province they moved to.

Hell, in a team game with this few teams, domes should be Ench 0. There isn't enough target saturation to prevent focus fire for teams in a non-conflict situation. You could have been dropping FfA on turn 12, trivially.

(I have never seen someone try to drop FfA on a capital, and rarely seen anyone try to drop a remote on a capital. Its generally assumed they're domed (because in CBM that can happen really early) by the time any serious fighting breaks out, and then generally against an opponent you're actively at war against. Casting an offensive remote like FfA against someone on the other side of the map? It only works because there were only 3 teams, and one of the teams was sucking so badly they didn't matter. We might as well have been playing a team blitz, which wasn't exactly expected going in.)