Quote:
Originally Posted by Shangrila00
Presumably Army of Lead cast by the "earth mothers."
Except what earth mothers? More 50 gem empowerments? Presumably what he actually means are troll kings summoned either by one of the extremely rare E2 crones or a E1 crone after another 30 gem empowerment.
Which is the main problem with the proposed strategy. It assumes you'll have enough gems to throw on super expensive empowerments and summons, and still have enough to do what you were actually after in the first place. There are plenty of games where a 60 gem empowerment sets you back 10 turns.
There is no understanding of the importance of timeliness. Which incidently, is also why the S4 path as a means of boosting A up to 4 is also not practical. Man has no native astral access, and it can take most of the game to scrounge up the 75 pearls for starshine cap+ring of wizardry. F4W4 works because Man has little use for fire gems and no critical uses for water.
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Don't get me wrong. I'm still not arguing that man is a strong nation by any stretch of the imagination. It still has glaring holes.
However, what we're arguing is about the relative strength of various strategies for this weak nation. Basically there are two primary ones we're discussing.
1. A high bless strategy to leverage wardens. Either a water bless or earth bless seem to be the best options both with a little nature thrown in.
2. Some sort of rainbow strategy for magic diversity. With air or astral to get you A4, earth and water to bootstrap you up those paths, death to get that covered, etc.
The standard opinion for man prior to the buffs and recruit anywhere status for wardens was #2. At MM 1 and cap only a bless strat for wardens never made any sense. Now it might. I've tried building both and you end up with about the same scales as long as you're really gearing your pretender to magic diversity.
So what do you really give up going for a bless strat rather than a rainbow?
Not mitigated by indi's
60 Gem Empowerment for Air mother - assuming you don't get an A4 random
Potentially mitigated by indi's
30 Gem Empowerment for an E mother to get earth rolling. Once again assuming you don't get an E2 random.
Guaranteed Astral Access
Guaranteed Death Access
Guaranteed Fire Access
The bottom line is that you're going to find at least a couple of the last category on indi's, especially if you expand fast. So the question really comes down to whether or not you think a strong bless on the wardens is worth 60 air gems and missing a couple of the 2nd category. It's true that if you don't find any indi mages then you're somewhat screwed. But if you do happen on some wizards, or metal orders, or moon mages, or even just some lizard men and some raptors you'll be much better off.
Basically i'll put it this way. The bless strat is high risk, high reward. If you happen on some indies who round out your diversity your going to do very well. If you don't you're going to loose. The rainbow strat is a bit less variance.