[Torgon]

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

I don't think that's how damage with exploding dice rolls works. It would make the B4 bless as good as the W9, at 50% greater damage. Do we have a mathmatician here?

So damage is STR + weapon damage + DRN (two exploding 6 six sided dice)

Protection roll is protection at location + DRN

Defender takes damage in hit points equal to the difference. So yes, you are correct that when STR + weapon = protection the expected value of the damage is greater than 0 since the lower half of the distribution is cut off.

Use a little monte carlo with protection of 17. Str + weapon = 18 has an expected value of around 2.66. Str + weapon = 21 has an expected value of 4.75. So around 180%, about double the expected damage output.

So you're correct, I overstated the effectiveness. It just about doubles your damage vs. protection 17 forces. Against protection 12 forces its 6.45 vs 9.23.

In any case, any well played Man will have both knights and Wardens, and longbowmen too regardless of bless. It's just relative proportions that change. It's not like Mictlan where the bless multiplies the effectiveness of the entire army and extends to the endgame summons.

Agree 100%. I just find that KoA out of the cap generally fill all the need I have for knights when I've played with a high bless. And yes, archers are still definitely worth recruiting in the right circumstances.

Like Song of Power which you left out of your list, and Man's the only nation that has it and can actually make good if unpredictable use of it, with its expendable N3s.

I had it in there. Just said all the spellsongs rather than listing all of them. IMO SoP is just really hard to use effectively, as you have to script and set it up perfectly or its just an unmitigated disaster. It seems like a cool spell, but I've never been able to use it in practice unless i was just going up against someone who didn't remember that man has it. If you've found a way to make it effective I'm all ears.

I've had some success with a F4A4 Phoenix in tests. Okay, it does very little either for diversity or bless, but it does give you early high air magic, and it's pretty much ideal for supercharging your archers with the mobility to support more than one archer army if necessary.

Phoenix is good. It just seems like that build makes man just as much of a one trick pony as the bless option. And its a trick thats much more easily countered than just a load of heavily armored, high damage, high stat stealth wardens.