The New Hinnom Nation

[Lingchih]

I posted about this in another thread, but I had a bunch of the pop eating units sieging an enemy castle. They were eating about 500 people a turn, so when I finally took the castle, I only had a few old, skinny unappetizing peasants left.

[Edi]

Hinnom needs a lot more positive scales to work than many of the others. Production is practically required if you intend to use many of the troops at all. Growth is required or you will starve (and you likely will anyway). Order is required or you can't afford anything. Magic is good for research or you'll be recruiting indie mages right left and center to stay in the research game. Drain will kill you for lack of research.

Just try and put a bless strat on top of that...

[Twan]

You don't need a double 9 bless or a combat god with this nation, non sacred troops are good enough for initial expansion (then thugs are the main force).

A double 6 bless, or a single 9 or a triple 4, allow very good scales, considering you'll also take heat 3. And you have also fortune tellers recruitable everywhere to help support high misfortune if you want a better bless. Finally as you'll never have ressources or money to recruit 5+ sacreds a turn you can take a low dominion too (but an high one can be interesting to spread your good scales, and protect your nation only having bad preachers).

You can even use the national pretender chassis for flavour (who has pathcost 60) and still have an interesting triple bless for your thugs.

(I'm currently playing with : imprisoned Son of the Fallen, Order 3, Prod 2, Heat 3, Growth 3, Misf 2, Magic 1, dom 4, earth 4, nature 6, blood 4)

[MaxWilson]

Are fortune-tellers actually cost-effective? Don't they need to be in every province to reduce bad events there?

-Max

[Aezeal]

they do but you usually only really care about bad events in good provinces.

[LDiCesare]

Although they are capitol only, the sacreds have strat move of 3, and access to astral magic means Gateway is possible for them in the late game.
As for blood magic being inexistant in battle magic, that's not entirely true: Hellfire, Hellbind heart, the various Call Horror spells are all usable. Hellfire in particular is nice with a Blood 3+ mage.

[MaxWilson]

Kristoffer O said:
Then you'll miss their best events

Has anyone figured out what this means? Don't spoil the surprise, but maybe someone could hint what scales I should be taking and whether "best" means "good" or "bad"? (I.e. best for the player or for the sadistic designers?) Someone did mention earlier that Azazel [rot13] fgvyy yvxrf gb cynl nebhaq jvgu zbegnyf, v.r. bppnfvbanyyl fverf n Arcuvyvz fcbagnarbhfyl.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

LDiCesare said:
I made a small test where Hinnom's sacreds with a moderate bless (E6N4, earth was for the mages but it's not really useful) ate everyone else. I ran them into T'ien Ch'i with a F9W9 bless and T'ien Ch'i couldn't do anything against them. Considering I don't know how to play Hinnom yet and managed to get some respectable results wiht EA TC in MP, I tend to believe the nation is overpowered.

What does EA T'ien Ch'i usually do against Niefelheim? It seems that the counters which work against Niefel Jarls are likely to work against Avvite Charioteers and Melqartim. (In a general sense. Frozen Heart will replace Incinerate.) Or is Niefelheim >> TC?

Edit: a thought. I suppose T'ien Ch'i probably uses Fire Arrows against Niefelheim, which isn't going to work well against Hinnom. Destruction/Iron Bane seems like a good idea, though.

-Max

[Baalz]

blood rain, leech, bloodletting, rush of strength, hellbind heart, summon imp (haven't really used hellfire much) and later go to hell, blood vengeance, rush of strength are all top shelf battle magic if you use them properly. Life for a life, sabbath slave/master, reinvigoration are all niche, but very useful. Several other blood combat spells are quite useful in small niches (call horror, hellpower, etc.)

How many other paths have that many good combat spells? Blood isn't used much in combat, not because of lack of good spells, but because of the pain of managing blood slaves. Heck, just look at how widely used the inferior (other than the need for blood slaves) versions of the spells I list above are:
terror/panic
strength of giants
drain life
charm (hellbind heart - much better because it's easy to spam with cheap mages)

[Aezeal]

I think it means that if you have luck and one of the 2 "useable" priests there will be procreation events.