Will Vanheim Ever Become Spayed?

[DrPraetorious]

If you are going to propose altering the game, write a mod that carries your alterations, that's all I'm saying.

It's true that you can't nerf glamour directly - but you can nerf all the units that *have* glamour - I recall lowering their protection was proposed at one point. You can make them cost more gold. You can lower their combat stats. You can make them trade their light lances for swords or axes. There are all sorts of things you can try doing, and we can load up the mod and see how it affects the various sources of complaint.

Personally, I don't think anyone has made a persuasive argument that the glamour rushers are stronger positions than the other double-bless rushers - Abyssia is my favorite, by I think a double-blessed Niefelheim is probably the strongest, and Niefelheim has some of the best (if most expensive) magic even in the early era. Since I find the argument that glamour troops are uniquely broken (as opposed to the other double-bless rushers) unconvincing, I'm not inclined to code this up myself.

Now, the counters to these nations are more obvious, perhaps, than the counters to glamour, but they are every bit as capable of early expansion - in SP I've always expanded faster as Neifelheim with a 9N dragon than as Helheim with a 9W dragon.

On the subject of making light infantry irrelevant - a spell with a large area of effect that does ~3 damage is less of a threat to light infantry (since they usually live) than existing spells like falling foo, let alone blade wind.

On the other hand, it is death to vans (since they almost always lose their images,) and you can legitimately put it earlier in the research tree, especially as a national spell.

So if you're worried about vanheim's rush, as opposed to other rushes, you can fix that by giving a low damage area of effect spell to the nations most vulnerable to the rush - which probably isn't Caelum, but Caelum has other problems.

If, on the other hand, you are concerned about rushers period, see my original post.