[Valerius]

Ok, a lot to respond to.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Cap and Coin? Lol. I never forged a coin all game, and only a single cap.

I cast a total of 6 or 7 mindhunts. Every mindhunt was cast by an S4 rishi.

Most of my pearls went to Kinnara, gear for Kinnara, and Gandharvas.

Interesting info. I'm surprised you cast so few mind hunts. You hit me with, I think, 3 of them after I attacked you, so I figured you were using them more extensively. I had no idea you had that many Kinnara's - but with no indies and limited forts I'd imagine everyone had fewer scouts than usual.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I'm not sure I agree mindhunts should be 3 pearls. A pearl is worth double another gem, and seeking arrow is what, 4a?

I assume you mean that pearls can be alchemized into other gems at 2:1 ratio instead of a 4:1 ratio? Keep in mind that also can make S based spells cheaper to cast than other paths. If you're spamming mind hunt and I'm spamming seeking arrow, once we burn through our S/A gems you can alchemize much more cost effectively than I can in order to keep casting spells. But I think the biggest thing is that gem value is relative. If you're spamming seeking arrow you are likely an air nation and those are gems you won't have available for cloud trapezing. Now in this game we had a low province count and I doubled cap gem income so it was more viable to have a large stockpile of A gems to use against an opponent but normally if I'm spamming seeking arrow it's a sign things aren't going well.

But I think the biggest thing was that without indies or many forts it was difficult to stock armies with decoy commanders to soak up remote attacks. In a normal game decoys can help against mind hunt but they pretty much make seeking arrow pointless. Your typical indie commander will survive a seeking arrow and still be available next round as a decoy (you don't care if he gets afflictions). Decoys are effective against mind hunts but not as much so since usually they will kill the decoy commander so you have to keep restocking them. Mind hunt also has the advantage that it can target stealthy units and doesn't care about HP. So in a normal game seeking arrow is situational as opposed to a staple like mind hunt.

This leads to the question of whether we allow indies for the next game. If we do it will help with dealing with any kind of remote attack on commanders. Very interested in hearing opinions on this and also whether I should include magic sites that allow mage recruitment.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

1) The all-battlefield resistance spells should be made available.

I wasn't too worried about this becuase the Ench. 5 Fend spells have a large AOE and without a need to keep commanders in the lab researching even 2-3 mages can cover a lot of troops. Of course if you don't have fire/water mages and you're facing an opponent using those paths things get trickier. Water's actually not bad because there's several summons that can give you access to that path. Fire is difficult but that's because until you get to elemental royalty and tarts the only summon with fire access that comes to mind is the terrain dependent Hidden in Sand. I can look into removing that or maybe adding an F2 summon so that everyone would have access to a fire mage. But I'd prefer not to have the battlefield wide resistance spells added.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

2) While bloodmagic is underpriced in the normal game, i think the repricing was handled the wrong way in this game.

Well, obviously I nerfed blood heavily. I'm willing to take a look at the blood summon costs and reduce some of them and maybe add some spells back in. But I think the logic you used for your balance mod applies here as well. And it's worth keeping in mind that if you don't care too much about the few spells at level 3 you can basically devote every blood mage to blood hunting from the turn they are recruited.

Originally Posted by LoloMo

We should simplify the initial fort system. I remember that we waited quite a while for all players to submit their fort locations. With this small map, no forts will be constructed. Is it possible to start the game with say 2000 extra gold that can be used for fort construction? Then we can set the initial forced NAP to the first 5 or 6 turns.

If it's not possible to give extra initial gold, then maybe a similar thing can be done by putting gold settings up to the highest.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

As for fort locations, you could just set them in the map and decide the capital to be in the middle. That speeds up the process and is quite easy.

I can check into this but it seems easier to maybe increase gold to 150%. Depending on your scales, you may have to compromise between recruiting your most expensive mages or building your most expensive forts the first few turns but I think that's ok.

As far as the map goes, my thought was that we'd find a new map averaging around 12 provinces per player. But we can reuse this one if we don't get 8 players; either the five player version we ended up using or the original six player version.

If we do use this one again, LDiCesare's suggestion certainly simplifies things.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

To me the most annoying spells were the damn black hawks (impossible to break the walls despite almost all my forces on the fort, and with some wall-breaking bonuses to boot).

Yeah, I actually felt it was a lame tactic. But I really thought if Caelum attacked you'd withdraw and I'd be back in the game - as long as I had managed to keep my cap. But I should mention the reason I was able to hold out was the doubling of my cap A income. Any opinions on this aspect of the game? My intention was to have each nation have a good supply of gems its mages could use but maybe it was too much?

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Also seeking arrows.

I think seeking arrows really paid off for Caelum because he was at peace the longest, there were few decoy commanders on the field and cap gem incomes were doubled. Whether we make the next game a no-indies game is a big question.