The next patch

[Graeme Dice]

[quote]Originally posted by Jasper:
Sea Trolls, Water Queens, Frost Blades, Quickness boots, Quickening, Frozen Heart, and Murdering Winter are all effective.

Sea trolls have a gold upkeep that will ruin your economy if you try and make a good sized army of them. Frozen heart is nice, but not useful at all against a sixth of the enemies you will face. Water elementals are also probably the weakest of the lot in a normal temperature dominion.

[QB]The contention that Murdering Winter isn't usefull borders on ludicrious IMHO.

Murdering winter is not particularly useful. It requires you to cast several wolven winters in the same turn to do enough damage to kill even normal troops, and in a heat dominion this gets even worse. In heat 2 it will routinely only kill 10 troops out of over a hundred. It is also completely useless against Caelum, Jotunheim and Ermor.

[Zapmeister]

Why do the magic paths need to be balanced? If water is seen to be weaker than the others, that doesn't mean it won't get used. If your national mages have water, and you get water gems, you'll obviously use them for one of the uses that have been listed in this thread.

The problem arises if one of those uses (clams) is clearly better than the others, and leads to an arguably straightforward, difficult-to-stop winning strategy (clams -> astrals -> wishes).

I believe that this is the case (let's not argue it again) and while I would prefer the nature-1,water-1 solution because I think it would supply the necessary balance, and keep the item on a par with fever fetishes cost-wise, I would also be happy with the water-3 solution.

The main hurdle at this point, though, is that there's no consensus that clams are broken. Jasper, Wendigo and the devs constitute a powerful lobby, by anyone's reckoning.

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
No, growth from conquest is _not_ exponential, and neither is growth from clams. Growth from conquest is linear. Growth from clams is geometric. You capture a province, search it for magic sites, and once you've done that you've received all the benefits you are ever going to receive from that province. Your gem income from there does not double every few turns, and your gold income does not either. The clams on the other hand, double in the amount of gems they produce without requiring any expansion whatsoever.

You're right, geometric is definitely the right word, not exponential. However, conquest growth is every bit as geometric as clam investment: just as you can reinvest a clam's astrals into clams, so can you reinvest conquered gold income into conquest. True, there is a ceiling for returns from conquest, but as this comes when you've conquered the _entire_ map IMHO it can be safely ignored.

Why don't you explain just how, exactly, making clams from astral and water gems hurts your ability to defend yourself? Please don't mention spells such as murdering winter, since it is useless even when combined with wolven winter in a heat dominion, and even more useless once the clam hoarder has put multiple domes over their capital.

Simple: spending your gems on water summons is effective, and not doing so will give you a weaker army. Researching Construction right off is a very real cost as well, as typically other paths are more usefull for expansion. Similarily, Astral gems have uses better than losing half of them to alchemy in order to make more Astrals in the distant future.

Also, in my experience Murdering Winter is quite effective; one can always find or make a cold dominion in which to use it. Domes are a very limited defense against it, and aren't limited to clam hoarders anyway.

Honestly, I've tried the Clam strategy, and found it just too slow -- even on a fairly small scale, when I defintely had use for Astrals and had no immediate use for Water gems. I would have done better if I had saved them and either forged Frost Blades or summoned Sea Trolls/Water Queens.

Yes, Clams kick *** if you can count on everyone leaving you peacefully alone for 40 turns, and nobody else conquering much. I haven't yet seen this happen in Dominions, but I have seen games that were effectively decided by 40 turns.

The biggest advantage I see from Clams is that they let you have some secret growth (assuming statistics turned off) without the diplomatic problems that can come with conquest. They're also a good deal if you're planning to transmute water gems to astrals anyway.

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
Murdering winter is not particularly useful. It requires you to cast several wolven winters in the same turn to do enough damage to kill even normal troops, and in a heat dominion this gets even worse. In heat 2 it will routinely only kill 10 troops out of over a hundred. It is also completely useless against Caelum, Jotunheim and Ermor.

You're the first person I've heard say this, although I've heard quite a few chime in (although not I) thinking Murdering Winter is broken... IMHO the burden clearly rests on your shoulders to show that Murdering Winter is weak. Your argument above rests on exactly the wrong context to use Murdering Winter, and so isn't very convincing.

Whether it works in heat 2 or not is moot, as even if it were only usefull in one's own cold dominion it would still be powerfull. Domes offer limited protection because they're not mobile, and in practice heat dominion similarily isn't a practical defense. And this is without taking into account that one can indeed enforce cold dominion with Wolven Winter (which is usefull in it's own right), or the tactic of blowing through domes with cheap rituals.

[ April 06, 2004, 07:03: Message edited by: Jasper ]

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Zapmeister:
Why do the magic paths need to be balanced? If water is seen to be weaker than the others, that doesn't mean it won't get used. If your national mages have water, and you get water gems, you'll obviously use them for one of the uses that have been listed in this thread.

It's true that all the paths don't need to be balanced, as you could balance nations with water magic in other ways (e.g. I wouldn't call Atlantis, R'lyeh, or Caelum weak).

However, IMHO the game would be more enjoyable if they were more balanced. I also think it wouldn't take much change to make water more interesting at lower levels of research, and so this would be an easy way to improve the game. As it stands the only reason I can see to take water on anything other than a Rainbow pretender is for the nice Water 9 blessing.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Jasper:
As it stands the only reason I can see to take water on anything other than a Rainbow pretender is for the nice Water 9 blessing.

I take water 2-3 on my combat pretenders quite often.

[Yossar]

Water is great on pretenders for:

1) Quickness, one of the best combat spells in the game

2) To mix with blood for easy access to ice devils.

Breath of winter is really good for taking independents too.

If you're going to be doing any fighting with your pretender, a few points in water is never a waste.

[Jasper]

I used to do that a bit as well, but found I got better battle results out of Fire, Earth, Air, or Astral. Mostly because Water's main benefit to a combat pretender is quickness, which can be easily received from Quickness Boots. Being able to go underwater is nice too (unless R'lyeh, Atlantis, or Ermor or playing), but this too is available through Construction.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Jasper:
I used to do that a bit as well, but found I got better battle results out of Fire, Earth, Air, or Astral. Mostly because Water's main benefit to a combat pretender is quickness, which can be easily received from Quickness Boots.

Many pretenders haven't the required appendages to put boots on.

For battle magic, my own Favorites paths are Water, Earth, Death. With Air and Nature as outsiders.

[Stormbinder]

Originally posted by Nagot Gick Fel:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jasper:
I used to do that a bit as well, but found I got better battle results out of Fire, Earth, Air, or Astral. Mostly because Water's main benefit to a combat pretender is quickness, which can be easily received from Quickness Boots.

Many pretenders haven't the required appendages to put boots on.

For battle magic, my own Favorites paths are Water, Earth, Death. With Air and Nature as outsiders.

---

I like air, especailly air 2 - I often take it of my SC pretenders. Mistform+mirror is quite efficint combo.

[ April 06, 2004, 10:32: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]