Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[Cohen]

Clam is effectively strong, but you can handle a loner clamming if you're stronger.

But investing in clams requires a good amount of water gems, especially at starting. Sadly none can see you're clamming til lyou reveal your strenght, and this IMO is the bad thing.
If people could see you're raising your gem income every turn far beyond your province ownage chance by finding sites, probably will gang up unless they want to find themselves against dozens of horrors that run in a totally unpredictable way in your land, to have to face some wish empowered SCs or such. In a long term game you'll find yourself without any chance of global spell during more than 1 turn too.
The other bad stuff is that a scout can keep the clam and so is immune to most ranged spells and raiding (but usually they're inside a castle)
IMO Clams should work only on mages (they know how to take care of those trinkets and such) and the mage should be set to research (unless we want to change the clam working system, as the mage is required to do an action to "alchemize" the free pearls out from the clams he's bringing).

[johan osterman]

Sopyfrog:

I would say that players have to make difficult decisions. And more importantly adopt and modify their strategies to the circumstances they find themselves in. I am not sure what you mean by devalued here, are you saying high end summons are not effective thus lack value or that they cost to little in the long run? I guess the second reading is the only one that makes sense taken with your other opinions, but then I do not quite see what you mean by that the game does not scale as your economy grows. Would you care to elaborate.

[johan osterman]

Soapyfrog said:
...

If you play on a SMALL map you should STILL pursue a clamming strategy as it will ensure your final victory if you come out of the dogfight alive, although I TOTALLY AGREE that in this case it is much harder to do because you SHOULD be in conflict much earlier and more continuously.

I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.

[Thufir]

Cohen said:
IMO Clams should work only on mages (they know how to take care of those trinkets and such) and the mage should be set to research (unless we want to change the clam working system, as the mage is required to do an action to "alchemize" the free pearls out from the clams he's bringing).

I like this idea! This sounds (to my novice mind) like a change that wouldn't be too dangerous to make, and is worth consideration of including in a patch. Although perhaps there's some difficulty in coding this, I think this is a very appropriate change to the way clams are handled.

[Soapyfrog]

What I mean by devalued is that you wont care so much if you lost that doom horror you summoned because you are summoning two more PER TURN.

Thats devalued. When high end is no longer high end!

If you want "high end" to really MEAN something throughout the game, then you have to make sure that resources are constrained so that the upper limit of you game is always tough to reach.

I think dom2 has a plethora of strategies that can be pursued that can kleep the game interesting for very very long games as long as you disallow the investment strategies that create wealth out thin air. In the real world investing works of course (not at 14% mind you, generally speaking!!) but resources are always being consumed. If wealth is created out of thin air you have inflation.

So here would be my suggestions to make these investment strategies a little more interesting in dom2:

Added Restrictions:
Only mages can equip clams/fetishes/blood stones (I see cohen agrees with me on this one!)
Only blood mages can equip soul contracts
Random horror attacks on soul contract bearers should actually work

Gem producing items:
Clams allow the bearer to convert (via an action) 1 water gem into 2 astral gems.
Fetishes allow the bearer to convert (via an action) 1 nature gem to 2 fire gems.
Blood Stones allow the bearer to convert (via an action) any 1 gem of any type to an earth gem.

The action could be like "summon allies" you can just switch it on and forget about it, so no crazy micro-management neccessary.

Vampire Lords and Fallen Angels:
Ideally imho only uniques should be able to summon allies (outside of combat summons). There are tons of mass summoning spells if you want to summon batches of stuff, no need to have unit "factories". For example, vampire lors can cast blood rite instead of having the cummon allies ability...

[Soapyfrog]

johan osterman said:
I disagree completely with this, in small agressive games resources are better spent in more direct ways then clam hoarding, especially if you are in a war.

Oh hey I said it would be harder to clamhoard for the reasons you mention, but if you can make it out of the dogfight intact it will win you the game, so it seems like a good plan to me!

[Boron]

I like dominions and i like the lategame . I am a little clamhoarder myself

But i think it is a bit too good . I list a few things which i think are problematic :

- Clams require exactly water gems . Water is one of the weakest schools . If you are not an underwaternation you basically only spend a few watergems on boots of quickness / jade armours . You could summon sea trolls but since they require upkeep and are rather expensive they are not a top choice . In the water queens you don't invest normally too because the underwater nation will have them already probably .

So normally almost all your watergemincome goes into clams . If you are not in danger you can always convert your astral gems back to water and get clams quite quick .

- Clams and the other items are absolutely save from everything when stocked on stealth units . So you never lose this income unless you are dead .

- There could be no better output for clams than astral gems . This makes them for every nation worthy since every nation can convert the astral gems quite cheap in exactly the magic they need .

- The soul contracts give you one of the strongest troops of all , devils . Devils and Storm demons are probably the strongest troops of all costwise . If you don't look at costs then torrasquen and abominations would be good too .
The time you get the soul contracts is very interesting too : if you have a blood 5 pretender once you have 80 slaves and even without you only need Construction 6 .
Construction 6 is anyways a very important research goal for most nations and as blood nation since you have blood for summoned troops you can invest all your earthincome on dwarfen hammers making Soul contracts even more profitable .

- False horror spell : Stormbinder started a long thread about this 1 month ago . False horrors make almost all national troops worthless . 2-3 false horror casters are normally already enough to scare away even 50-100 national troops .


Finally Johan you are right that Mictlan can be defeated earlygame by rushing them . But with Caelum / Abysia this requires lots of effort .
These 2 nations are earlygame horrible strong already .
Every player is glad being at peace with Caelum in the first 20-30 turns , probably a lot longer because he knows that Caelum normally always wins the economic warfare earlygame .

I think most ppl will agree here with me :
Earlygame wars are normally not very profitable because they tend to Last very long and hurt both participants because of movement guessing / enemy dominion / castle siege . Only if the enemy is extremely weak earlygame because of special things like he chose a crappy pretender / got hurt too bad with lots of bad events like early lab/temple blow , indy attacks etc .

Last but not least most games are played with scoregraphs on . People tend to gangbang the "leader" . Because clamincome is hidden the main criterias to estimate who the leader is are provinces/income/gem income/army size .
So the early warmonger is normally very often attacked and this way kept busy while the "boomer" grows secretly and when you recognize it finally it is too late .

[Ygorl]

Or you could play in a game with difficult research; low site frequency might help slow down clamhoarding and its end results as well.

[Soapyfrog]

Boron: Well said!

[Cohen]

Random attack on Soul Contract bearers works!
I can assure, at least in 2.12 ... where I didn't known that Soul Contracts attracted horrors and assigned them to Warlocks and such ...
I'd agree in fact that only Blood Mages could get the Soul Contract.

Warlock:"Hey Scout, come there, I've sold your soul to Hell Lord"
Scout: "A well, what I've gained? Eternal Life? Neverending youth? All the women I want? To become the richest of the world?"
Warlock:"Oh yes everything of this ... put a sign on those contract"
Scout: "Wow" ... and signs
Here the first Devil appears but the Scout can't issue him any order and the Devil start rampaging for all the countryside in a frenzy killakilla.
Scout: "Mmmm there should be something wrong in that ... unless that red stuff is my first female"



About Fallen Angels, nothing to say to they Summon Allied Imps ... since Imps are good only as sieging and defending force (don't eat, and fly). Even Fallen Angel itself is far weaker than an ID for his Blood Slave cost (I know he's more magic, but why it is far less used? Probably because it's too weak even if it is not unique).

About Vamps, I'd agree to remove them the Summon Allies skill. They can easily cast the vampire summoning spell.
Otherwise may I suggest a rule that a Vampire in a province feeds himself with X population at turn (1 to 10), I mean Vampire, Lords, Count, Queen or whatever.
If the Vampire in question doesn't find any suitable pop victim, he'll dissanguate 1 troop non lifeless non undead non magical of your army (note: Commanders won't get touched by Vampires). If there're no living soldiers the Vampires that aren't fed should become an indipendant force proclaming a vampire a vampire commander (perhaps upgrading to count) and revolting against the army they're in, or they simply migrates in the next friendly owned province to seek new feeding.
This could prevent you to keep vampires in your land, going to attack forcefully unless you want to see your lands get depopulated as an Ermorian province. And usually to go in enemy land you'll need a strong dominion at least ... well not so difficult to reach with Aby or Mic that can sacrifice however, but however they eat pop of provinces that are going to become yours.
If Vamps goes hiding and eat in enemy provinces, a message like the unrest caused by spies should appear.
Solar Brillance spell should be mostly effective too against Vamps, killing them asap it is cast in battle.
The Second Sun global could burn them out too. (beware all ppl will be interested in dispelling it or attaking you because their provinces will get warmer)

If you have to issue an order to produce gems, even for a better alchemize, you probably have too many mages spending time creating gems, making this strategy totally wothless considering you strip resources to your research and combat firepower.