[Peter Ebbesen]

They are the single best troop summon in the game and late-game Lankan armies in the final struggle are likely to consist almost entirely of them.

When you only have the blood income to summon a few, it is usually better to go for Rakshasa Warriors or Dakini thugs, but once you have the income rolling in, which you eventually will unless you are losing the game, mass summoning of Davanas is where it is at.

As Lanka, you are practically guaranteed to have a good blessing and there's always room to squeeze in N4 or better when designing that blessing and you should do so.

The thing that makes Davanas so scary when they are massed is that they are natural counters to several strong endgame tactics that are common in MP. Unlike Rakshasas, they have magical weapons, which means they cut through etherealness and (more importantly) mistform from Fog Warriors without problems. Their three magic weapons also have the Halt Sacred property making them exceptional at fighting other nations' sacred national troops and summons. Finally, they have high strength and three attacks with high attack skill, so their attacks are going to hit more often than not, and when they hit, they hurt.

A bunch of blessed Davanas will stand toe to toe with anything and give it a real fight. Sure, they are more vulnerable to single-target no-MR spells than a larger mass of Rakshasa Warriors would be, but on the other hand they come with MR18 rather than the Rakshasa Warriors MR13, which means they stand a very reasonable chance of living through a hail of spells negated by MR and of not being flipped by a Master Enslave.


...I played a very silly MP game recently as Lanka in the CBM version where you got 4 Davanas for 65 blood slaves. I was terribly pressed in the start of the game but once I got the blood economy rolling I began mass summoning of Davanas. Hilarity ensued as my enemies one by one failed to come up with a strong enough counter to my "add more Davanas" solution in time to stem the tide. I think I summoned a grand total of 60-70 Rakshasa Warriors, 8 or 9 Dakinis, the Arch Devils and the Demon Lords, and the rest of the 150-200+ (ending up around 300/turn in the very endgame) was spent on ever more Davanas. I had more than 300 at game end.

The obvious counter (in CBM) is massed Bells of Cleansing and casting the Demon Cleansing spell, but that solution counts on a battle lasting enough turns for the bells to chew through the Davana hordes - and at that time the 20 damage in AOE1 of the bells (changed in later CBMs) just wasn't enough because none of my opponents managed to amass more than 15-20 of them in one battle and most had much fewer than that.

It isn't that they can't be stopped. Of course they can be stopped. But they can absorb a lot of punishment and they can do a lot of damage before they are stopped so long as one uses them massed with a decent blessing. (Mine was a modest W9E4S4N4, which allowed for decent scales and an astral endgame).