Quote:
Originally Posted by WingedDog
Don’t miss our special offer: let your Dragon out expanding without awe, collect all possible afflictions and get a free title ‘Dragon of thousand wounds’.
Seriously, I have seen in several MP games aweless Dragons of my opponents been killed by independents, or had mass afflictions after expansion stage.
Another thing I understood through my experience: Pretender SC’s should be expandable.
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Well, of course they are more vulnerable without awe, but awe+0 costs 250(!) design points on a dragon.
Granted, my aweless dragon would simply be a caster by midgame, maybe with an affliction or two, but having awe isn't really going to change that situation; the midgame is simply a dangerous place for a big green monster with few slots.
I guess I just see the dragon as a cheap early expander who is a good choice for nations that lack decent starting troops but need good scales. I lack your bad experiences with the dragon too, though there is a significant risk of getting afflictions, true.
However, I did try something similar to your example for a recent game (that's now going poorly for me
)
As MA Ctis I chose an awake, dom4, earth4, n4 dragon with good scales (O3H3D1M3). I took earth for a few reasons: 1: ctis has none of it and earth is one of the hardest magics to bootstrap. 2: it boosted his protection by 2. I know that sounds funny, but in tests that seemed to make a significant difference in how often he would get early-expansion-afflictions. Lastly the E/N bless is helpful (but maybe not worth it in retrospect) for some of their sacreds.
In tests and in that particular game, the dragon fulfilled his job quite well, boosting initial expansion without being too vulnerable. When he got himself killed in that particular game, I found that (when resurrected) in druid form he still had N3E3! I'm not sure why this happened, perhaps because he was killed in dragon form? Anyway, it was a bonus because he was still a valuable earth-caster-forger in that case.
Anyway, I think we just have a different cost-benefit opinion of early SCs, a dragon with awe still looks tasty to me, just not my flavor.
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OmikronWarrior
You make good points but I think that you are mixing up the CBM green dragon with its Vanilla counterparts. I was referring to the CBM dragons.
In CBM, the dragons all have boosted aoe attacks, I don't know how else the stats have been modified. But still, the green dragon may be the best for the reasons you mentioned.