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Originally Posted by Torgon
Not really sure where the comparison to Fomoria comes from, seems like there are too many differences to name. No recruit anywhere glamour mages and commanders, only recruit anywhere mage is the druid with only A1 + random. No recruit anywhere stealth troops. No access to earth or nature for big troop buffs. Etc. Fomoria is a giant nation that relies on capital only kings and sorceresses. I agree they may be an overall stronger nation than TNN, but hardly a good comparison when trying to think about a strategy.
Seems the better comparisons would be Vanhiem or Hellheim, with either blood or death respectively, and access to heavy earth at their capitals. How do they deal with SC's?
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It's not that far fetched a comparison.
- Firbolgs ? Firbolgs.
- Zappy storm ? Zappy storm.
- Fomoria has all the magic paths TNN has, and then some. High Air ? Check. High N ? Not really, but as a giant nation your god will most assuredly have at least 4N, which starts you on the nature path. Water ? Check. The only missing piece is Earth, which TNN probably needs to have on their gods too anyway. Oh, and the W/N combo, which is admittedly worthwhile in vanilla for clams, but more or less worthless in CBM.
- Stealth raiders ? Fomoria can do that just fine by focusing on their capital only units early on, or on Morrigans later. Of course, every time you recruit a stealth leader you're not recruiting an SC - but then TNN can *only* recruit stealth leaders. No SC option.
- Teleporting raiders: Fomorian kings say hi. Hell, with Soul Vortex they don't even need gear to wipe out PD.
- Fomorian druids have the same magic paths as Shidhe Champions; in fact they have better paths since they're not constrained to A1N1. Hell, they can even make better use of A1N1 than them since they have twice the hit points, thus can take advantage of Personal Regen (although in that case they admittedly need forged armour).
- Granted, most of them lack Glamour. Then again, since the nerf Glamour is crap that can be dealt with a dozen shortbows. Since EA is when huge packs of shortbows shine anyway... yes.
Oh, and they're also giants with Death magic and holy undead. I stand by my statement: anything TNN can do, Fomoria can do it and then some.
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Originally Posted by Torgon
My point is that to create a good argument about whether a strategy is worse or better off after the removal you have to look at an analysis like this. Just talking about when the hammers pay for themselves, or relative usefulness of a specific type of gem doesn't cut it. These problems are similar between strategies. What really changed is the amount of one resource that you have to invest in that strategy relative to other resources: gold, production turns, gems used in summoning, etc.
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My reasoning was far from that involved, but it led me to a simple deduction: SC races (like Fomoria) used to be more or less required to squeeze Earth and sleeping on their pretenders, so they'd be able to make hammers early enough for it to matter.
This, in turn, meant they had worse scales and worse end game options than other nations.
Remove hammers and a full-on bless or scales strat becomes not only viable but a no-brainer for them since there's no opportunity cost any more. Which ironically means that removing the forge whore item from the game makes forge whore nations *more* powerful than they ever were.