Mod: New Nation: Dragons, Magic Incarnate V1.01

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Aezeal

if it doesn't work then I'll give the stargazers H1 yes.

Figure they're already your least cost effective mage,a nd capital only.

So far (after fixng their claw attacks), the Bonebiters are obliterating everything I toss them against. Most indies die with no losses to 10 of them, and tough indies + medium strength forces crumble to 20.

I'm under the distinct impression though, that the race as it is balanced, will never be competitive in MP. First, research is far far too slow. It forces you to take a Magic3 scale to even get anywhere. But this is a major problem. You recommend a rainbow mage for the summons who are all over all of the paths (except Blood), and then you request people do so with one of the dragon pretenders. Well, the only one that is even remotely viable as such is the Ivy Dragon.

Now, the problem here is that most of the summons are cross-path, which guarantees that without huge investments in Empowerment (did I mention site searching is expensive, with all of these non-sacred mages needed?), so you do need to cast them all with your pretender, except for the Wave Dragon, which can be summoned by an Ice Scale with a Water Bracelet. So, your paths needed for summons are: 5F/3A/4W/4E/6S/4N/4D. Taking into account the Wave Dragon, and assuming the use of RoW+RoS (and a Flaming Skull + Crystal Coin + Starshine Skullcap + Moonvine Bracelet swapped in for Nature summons), you are left needing 3F/2A/3E/3S/2N/2D. At a Dominion of 5, you are left with 218 points, enough for 5 scales. Putting 3 of those into Magic, leaves you with a pretty hampered economy. Misfortune is bad because of poor PD, and great national heroes.

Ultimately, just to get a slightly better setup, I felt forced to take the Enchantress (starts with A/E/S in CBM), which allowed me to push a couple of paths to 4 to at least get a little bonus to the Stargazers and give her more late game utility herself (other than summons botch), and ended up with 1Sloth/3Luck/3Magic. While I'm doing well enough against the AI (Ermor NOT included), the small number of real troops, the slow research, and the poor income would make the nation a sitting duck in any kind of MP setup.


I'd make 3 suggestions to rectify this. First, add 1 level to the leader/mages present in the game. This will boost research accordingly, as well as compensate for the fact that you lack the ability to use most boosters (and pay full price for everything, since no one can hold a hammer). The other option there that might help a little, would be to add a random path to each instead, so you can get a little bit of cross-path access. Second, reduce the cross-path requirements for the summons somewhat - so that you are not essentially forced to have 1 caster responsible for summoning all of them. And third, perhaps give them some sort of recruitable slave race that is a smaller size, to at least give them some sort of chaff that they can use in larger battles (no Wyrmlings don't count, they are as bad as Militia). Make it something that flies, of course, like Draconians or something - something that is size 3 or less.

Then perhaps balance this a bit with slight cost increases to their current units, or a small reduction in power of the "younger" dragons.


I haven't gotten to the actual late game yet, so those are my impressions so far. I'll probably do a little more tonight, it's fun taking over the world with dragons.