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Originally Posted by KeithZ
I pretty like the low magic idea, there is not much pressure on the research race and you can send plenty of your mages into the front line much earlier. That's fun.
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I agree and I think the same thing applies to gem usage. I tend to be a gem hoarder, saving them up for globals. Here there's no point in that and once you've completed your key research you're best off summoning and forging so you can increase your combat strength and get more territory.
And I plan on easy research next game so we'll get to the action even faster.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KeithZ
I would be happy to join your new game.
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Great! Feel free to already choose a nation if you'd like (you can of course change it later if you change your mind). So far I'm going with TNN (surprise, surprise
) and shard is going with Lanka. I'm really liking Caelum and am tempted to try to them again but at least on paper I like MA Caelum better than EA. Eagle Kings make nice thugs but playing as much TNN/Eriu as I do I'm hard to impress on that front and to me recruit everywhere High Seraphs win out over cap only Eagle Kings.
I still have to finish going through EA nations in order to make changes to fit the game settings. I'll be using the same guidelines as here: adjusting prices on national blood summons along the same lines as I did here and making other changes to nations to fit the game settings.
I'm pretty happy with the monster summons in terms of utility but I'd appreciate feedback on prices. How do you all feel about the prices of monsters vs. the price of full slot thug options like the wendigo and ettin?
I also want to discuss a couple of EDM summons and some changes I had in mind for them.
First off, the wendigo. I like these guys, both in their normal SC form and in the thug role they have here. But because they take time to develop and I had other research priorities I haven't summoned any this game. But I've seen them around so I know they've seen action. For the next game I was planning on changing their magic from W3D3 to W2D2 and having them autocast soul vortex. They would start at size 2, move to size 3 the next turn and their final size 4 the following turn.
My idea was to focus them on being thugs rather than spellcasters. Reducing their magic to W2D2 would promote the kokythiad as the best way to reach D5 for monstrum summoning. Kokythiads and a variety of other summons would also be better ways to get high level W magic. When it comes to thugging the key D buff that is of use to them is soul vortex and this would give them access to that while not making them very good spellcasters. W2 is also enough for W based combat buffs. Having soul vortex autocast can be a bit of a drawback since there might be some situations where you don't want it; OTOH you get to cast it without incurring fatigue which has advantages. The quicker development I think just makes sense - in an easy research game I think the wendigo needs to be ready to go more quickly.
Just to be clear: I'm not intending this as a nerf to the wendigo but purely to promote it as a thug and other units as better WD spellcasters. But as I mentioned, I haven't had a chance to use them in this game and if you all feel it's a nerf let me know (but the one thing I think we definitely should go for is the quicker development time).
Then there's zmey. To review, I made the following zmey-focused changes for this game: prot 22 --> 20, misc slots 3 --> 2, and (the big one IMO) lychantropos' amulet 5 --> 10 N gems. These nerfs seem pretty light and I figured additional nerfs would likely be necessary. My plan was to reduce prot 2 more points, to 18, continuing with the line of thought that they zmey could dish out a lot of damage but was also vulnerable itself. There's plenty of other changes we could also make if needed (lower attack rating, map move 2, lower HP on each form, etc). Only thing ... I haven't seen a single zmey around. I certainly don't think the nerfs in this game were crippling to them so I assume it's just that people had other priorities. But this is a summon whose changes will depend on the feedback we get from this game.