Guide: Bandar Log - you whipped me with what?!?

[Tifone]

The point is the cost-efficiency.

Because (totally imho) the strong bless costs a lot of points and... well... quite... s*cks. 75% SR? Not safe enough to toss around them Thunderstrikes and similar freely (not that you would anyway, you have far better and easier options); good to defend against... Caelum? Some others? Better than high MR and twist fate?

A strong bless is already expensive for the nice ones (F, W). I don't get the points of spending many points for A9, even because as vfb pointed out you just need and A5 caster for Dark Skies. You can have a mage cast it. Why to spend so many design points on A9? For which spells do you need it? S9 gets you Master Enslave on turn1 on battlefield, Arcane Nexus and a very strong Strands of Arcane Power for globals, and Wish as ritual

If you really want to be have an easy Dark Skies and protect your sacreds from arrows go for S9A5 i.e. but I don't really see many advantages over S9N4/6.

Also, I don't get how can you start searching for air sites "quickly" with an A9 pretender. At least you need it dormant, and anyway far less expensive indie mages can do a fair job in searching for those too.

I really liked your analysis of the A bless advantages (as you can see, I thanked you for that too) but if I really want some Air Shield just a minor bless seems enough to me.

[chrispedersen]

Generally I agree with people that an a9 blessing is overkill. However, I believe kailasa is one of the exceptions.

Previous poster made note of some of the points for kailasa. A partial air bless is useful for kailasa. After that you have to look at what to do with your points. Since you are buying sacreds, you need a high dominion. You want a mobile pretender to start with to aid early expansion.

I happen to like the four arm deva that casts lightning bolts. And the way the points turn out, in this particular case, I believe the most effective thing is to run up Air path - the fact that your sacreds are now 75% resistant to the lightning bolts it slings around is just gravy.

PLUS with lightning resistant troops shockwave becomes .. well shockingly effective.

Kailasa can be quite fun this way - you have fun awe, archers - and later on you can cast rusting mist, or armor of achilles or the battlefield equivalent of same...

And then use hordes of markatas!!! to destroy armor - and anything other high prot units. Its quite fun to see markatas mowing through cavalry.......

[Gregstrom]

Add to that the likely investment required to get Arrow Fend on your armies, and an Air bless looks better and better.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

you got it.

but not only is the Air bless worth it. I don't see any point in taking just enough Air on a pretender to cast some spells while not going ahead and getting the strong bless.

There is also another rather nice little synnergy for kailasa.
Dark Skies + Melancholia - which is earth- and what do you know.. kailasa is well equipped for casting earth spells.

[chrispedersen]

Regarding Mictlan:

If you are on a crowded map; or if you are in a game with high resources/high money, an air bless becomes more important than an Astral bless for Mictlan.

Mictlans sacred troop production scales slowly, and linearly. So as the resoure/money % gets higher than 100% the balance of how many your troops your opponents will be fielding to your blessed troops gets higher and higher.

I have seen armies of 200+ archers before turn 10. In these circumstances, mictlan is hard pressed to beat archer armies. An air bless drastically incresses mictlans ability in these cases - and yes, it does have a late game cost. But most nations aren't going to get to the endgame....

Mictlan's other option is to build regular troops. However, if she does that, upkeep costs really start make mictlan feel those horrible scales required for a triple bless....

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

Add to that the likely investment required to get Arrow Fend on your armies, and an Air bless looks better and better.

Seriously. I never understood why the argument against the Air bless, is to cast Arrow Fend - with no national access to Air magic at all.....

[vfb]

National access is through national summons at Conj 6, requiring pearls only.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by vfb

National access is through national summons at Conj 6, requiring pearls only.

That's still a lot of extra researching on top of that already needed to get Arrow Fend. With an Air bless Kailasa is free to get Celestial Music pronto and then work on whatever they need most.

[rdonj]

Why get any bless at all then? Go conjuration 6 for the summon, enchantment 6 for arrow fend, thunder ward and strength of giants, get alteration 6(?) for celestial music, construction 7 for weapons of sharpness to get an ap attack far better than the f9 bless, GoR all your sacreds and empower them to 1S so they can cast twist fate and personal luck and equip them with a burning pearl to replicate the attack skill addition from the fire bless. Research thaum 5 for growing fury and toss in a ring of regeneration to cover the nature bless and boots of the messenger for the earth bless. Then all you have to do is equip them all with baneblades and research alteration 7 for doom and you've got a death bless also! By the time you get all this going you'll have the most powerful recruitable sacreds in the game. They'll be 30 times as expensive as anyone else's but they'll have the benefits of all 8 blesses, how can you go wrong?

Okay, that was a bit heavy on the sarcasm but taking an air bless would make your armies a fair amount less expensive to maintain. Which is always good.

[Trumanator]

For a moment I thought you were serious. Then obviously I read the bottom. I now believe that the biggest problem with forums is the inability of the written word to consistently communicate sarcasm.