MP: ThreeFort - Experimental game - Squirrelloid/Bandar Log wins!

[Squirrelloid]

Cap and Coin? Lol. I never forged a coin all game, and only a single cap.

I cast a total of 6 or 7 mindhunts. Every mindhunt was cast by an S4 rishi.

Most of my pearls went to Kinnara, gear for Kinnara, and Gandharvas. I think i forged a total of 3 boosters in total, and most of those late in the game. I simply couldn't afford to use gems on such things regularly, I needed troops and I needed Kinnara for the air access, holy, or thugging ability. (In particular, arrow fend was *necessary* against Agartha's bladewind spam, so early on that need was especially dire). Kinnara's holy magic let me use divine blessing while communioned without my prophet being there (my priests otherwise are all H1).

Now, at the end I had 7 Kinnara and an 8th on the way. That's 200 pearls right there. That's about half my pearl budget for the game in Kinnara alone. Figure another 4x18 for Gandharvas, 50 pearls in gear for thugs (ethereal robes + pendants x5), and a decent number of pearls spent for LotNS/PotS in combat, plus some sundry other forgings (some void eyes, the one cap), and you start to realize just how tight my pearl budget was. Now, arco may have *nothing better to do* than cast mindhunts. But BL certainly does.

So honestly, I didn't see much impact of mindhunt on my end. I agree there were likely *metagame* effects because I *could* cast mindhunt. But my pearls were being used in entirely different ways.

I'm not sure I agree mindhunts should be 3 pearls. A pearl is worth double another gem, and seeking arrow is what, 4a? Of course, its not MR negates, but does have to deal sufficient damage to kill (Eriu, you were targetting the entirely wrong province if you wanted to actually kill something). And even when it fails to kill it might inflict a wound or can be built on by other arrows. Mindhunt is defendable against by a few items, is a lot more expensive to boost penetration (and less total boosting), so the actual cost to kill a commander that matters is expensive (multiple mindhunts from mages with good gear), and then you're gambling that your opponent doesn't have a sneaky astral mage in the province or didn't teleport one in before your mindhunt went off. I made very sparing use of mindhunt because its so expensive to use well and because of the risk.

I do have some suggestions for the next game regarding spell access:
1) The all-battlefield resistance spells should be made available. I know they're normally Ench 8, but without them its much too hard to defend against a number of elemental strategies at all, and its only 50% resistance so its not like it even makes you immune. There is no good counter to things like Grip of Winter or Heat from Hell without access to them.
2) While bloodmagic is underpriced in the normal game, i think the repricing was handled the wrong way in this game. It was no surprise that no one even tried to do anything with blood magic (that i saw - did Mictlan even try to use their national blood spells?). Given the gem economy was basically online immediately, but you'd have to start up the blood economy from scratch, slaves should have been treated as more valuable than in a normal game, if nothing else. The ultimate take-home here is that a number of blood spells probably needed to increase in price, but it wasn't all of them, and many of the price increases were probably too much.