[Nightfall]

Originally Posted by Excist

I'm happy with calling it as well. I kind of lost interest when all my SC scripts seemed to result in blade winds and summon elemental spells for no reason (targets were self-buffs, so there is no 'no target in range' excuse for the AI).

I'm not sure why your having problems if your using good buff scripting, the only time I ever have an issue is when they miss with an AOE buff, which does tend to happen occasionally. Note that using gems in your buff scripting is never good scripting though.

Originally Posted by Excist

The rather unfair advantages Hinnom gets in their current incarnation, and lack of disadvantages other than 1 minor one that hurts enemies as much as yourself if you are raiding constantly is just an extra irritant - I don't mind playing as an underdog or with imbalanced races (heck, I am playing as Agartha currently which is the most handicapped race in the game that I have seen, and having fun losing with them), but this match has taught how much in the way of training wheels Hinnom gets with

I'm perfectly happy to admit Hinnom has some good strengths, however most of what you follow this with is not correct.

Originally Posted by Excist

a) little in the way of upkeep for armies of sacred SCs that have over 60 hp each,

You have got to be kidding, Hinnom is EASILY the most gold intensive and highest upkeep nation I've ever tried either in single player or multiplayer.

In addition to standard giant upkeep problems you are forced to regularly run key provinces as less than 100% tax. In this game I beelined my expansion to every city province nearby at the cost of expansion effeciency and I manually site searched 2 hidden gold mines, 2 gem deposits and a fountain of rubies before turn 20. These are the reason I quickly established a strong cash flow despite being upkeep heavy.

Originally Posted by Excist

b) heavy Astral and Blood magic,

Yep, this is one of the nations key strengths, although I should point out that Hinnom blood hunting is the least efficient of any blood nation I've played, you have to be really frugal with spending your blood slaves. In my case I used them almost exclusively to sacrifice and remote attack. Oh, and I also used three red seconds to drop an instant fortress on the steel ovens, a spell lots of people consider a waste of slaves. I did also build a few blood stones because I needed them for the booster, but I never had enough slaves to build them just as gem gens.

Originally Posted by Excist

c) access to every other magic school as well,

Wrong, no water at all, and only D1, which is useless for anything except site searching. Also they have almost zero usefull cross path access, which is a huge issue for battlefield magic and forging. I solved the forging problem by finding 2 seperate enchantress sites both two provinces away from my capital.

Originally Posted by Excist

d) national healers,

I think you can make a reasonable arguement that they shouldn't have the healers, although to be honest I found the supply(20) trait on the Acha's more usefull than the Healer(50) trait. It's a moot point in this case since I had complete control of Gift of Health due to my Pretender.

Originally Posted by Excist

e) SCs that are size 6 and have no weaknesses, such as being undead, demonic, magic being, etc.

I'll tell you now that Baal's and Malquart's are nowhere near as good as you think, in fact it's impossible to build them with no weaknesses, I was constantly cycling the gear on them so that they had the right immunity/MR/reinvig build for the fight they were going into.

I was losing them regularly early game despite the fact that most of the points I got from using an imprisoned pretender were fed into a decent bless for them. But I can understand how you may feel that way, since you started fighting them after I was able to give them all robes of invulnerbility. I can't stress enough the HUGE difference that, as well as having gift of health, made to their survivability.

Originally Posted by Excist

f) province defense that is strong enough to repel thugs and SCs for a couple of hundred gold for a caster that can spam 'blind' and elite units that have rather high stats, especially for militia

The province defence is decent but it's not top tier, and it's not as good as you think. A lot of those losses you had to 'a couple of hundred gold' were actually to provinces with 30 or 40 PD.

Originally Posted by Excist

Any others?

I could point out a couple of weaknesses that not one of the four people, well five technically, I was at war with during this game even attempted to exploit.

The biggest one - Hugely Capital Dependant, I spent pretty much the entire game at war without a single dome and my capital was not shut down for A SINGLE TURN.

Blood hunters - Not a single opponent made a concerted effort to raid my blood hunters; which were all set to retreat by the way.

Using the right tool against the right target - All three Baal/Melquart types (depending on the random path) have completely different strengths and weaknesses and should be fought using completely different tactics.

Most of your post didn't annoy me because I understand that a lot of this isn't obvious from the other side of the fence, which is why I've tried to keep this post informative and instructive; and I hope it reads that way.

But I must say I kind of resent the fact that your complaining about feeling like your inability to match my economy is entirely due to an unfair realm advantage when your running -7 scales compared to my +4.