Blood Magic

[Jasper]

I think you guys might get a more productive discussion if you narrowed the scope of debate a bit...

For instance, how do the blood economies of Abysia compare between Dom 1 and Dom 2? How does the income difference between them look when scaled by the diminished Dom 2 gold income? How much worse are the patrolling side effects in Dom 2 than Dom 1?

[apoger]

The point of this thread was issues with blood magics low costs and ease of hunting. That is what I made my "strong argument" about.

The reason I failed to make a strong argument for 'These counters have been lost, and the gain of these others does not make up for it' is beacuse that was not the topic that I was arguing for.

There has been commentary about super combatant counters in other threads. I saw no reason to add such discussion to this thread as it had little to do with my testing or the blood slave economy issues.

Since this seems to be the central theme to your criticism, perhaps you would like start up a thread dedicated to discussing it.

[apoger]

>I think you guys might get a more productive discussion if you narrowed the scope of debate a bit...

Focus is good.

>For instance, how do the blood economies of Abysia compare between Dom 1 and Dom 2? How does the income difference between them look when scaled by the diminished Dom 2 gold income?

Now that's a complex issue! I'll give that some thought and start a new thread on it.

>How much worse are the patrolling side effects in Dom 2 than Dom 1?

I have found that lowering taxes supresses unrest totally until blood hunting gets moderately heavy. So you can get away with -no patrols- for some time. Longer if you spread out the hunters. In some ways this makes things faster than in Dom I. In Dom I it was hard to shut down taxes totally since each province provided more revenue. Since less gold is generated in Dom II, lowering one or two provinces to 0% seems inconsequential.

Patrols in Dom II seem to do more population damage. However since we are talking about 0% taxes, the gold/population is already being sacrificed.

Again, a complex issue. I'll do some testing and see if I can put together some coherent thoughts on the matter.

[ November 03, 2003, 23:41: Message edited by: apoger ]

[LordArioch]

In my limited blood experience so far I had 5 apprentice warlocks blood search for 1 turn in a 0 tax province. I got 17 blood slaves and the unrest shot up above 100. Unless that was a really unlucky blood search turn it seems to me that unrest will be a major problem for blood.

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by apoger:
>>but I cannot follow how you conclude from that that Blood will be worse in Dom II than in Dom I.

>Could be due to the (in practice) lower costs of the big blood summons.

I don't think you have proved that they are lower cost.

I'd like to see the total amount of gold you spent on buying the scouts, paying upkeep on the scouts, and lowering taxes to 0% in several provinces.

Oh, and buying and paying upkeep on the extra researchers so that you can research Blood Magic while remaining competitive in other research areas.

I think that if you look at that amount of gold (much of it spent or not collected in the crucial early turns) and compare what else you could have gotten with it (including faster expansion) you will see that blood is not so cheap.

Or, on the other hand, it may be that slave hunting by unskilled hunters (or possibly by anyone) needs to have a lower chance of success than currently, or be more limited by province population (obviously the cost to lower taxes to 0% in a high population province is quite significant, even aside from the upkeep of the hunters).

>This is a circular argument that doesn't hold. If scout empowering makes blood summons cheaper in Dom II, scout empowering + rod makes them even cheaper in Dom I.

How is this a circular argument?
I said it was the lower costs. I didn't say scout empowering was the reason why blood magic is worse in Dom II than I. You are misreading what I said.

Scout empowerment is an issue that needs to be looked at. But that is not what I answered in response to your question.

I think part of the problem is that you are not stating your point clearly.

I believe you are not saying that blood slave hunting is cheaper in Dom II than in Dom I, but rather that other things have had their costs increased more in Dom II while blood magic has had its costs increased relatively little (thus blood magic is relatively cheaper in Dom II).

However, I don't think that the cost to obtain gems has increased much in Dom II, while the cost to obtain blood slaves clearly has increased (you need more expensive hunters or get lower success rates, and it's harder to counter the unrest - even if your test reveals that both effects are smaller than one might suppose) - so a straight comparison of gem costs vs. slave costs is flawed.

>Soul slay is now 100 range, paralyze is stronger IMO, same with mind bLast, spiders, that maggot thing, missile weapons & in particular the magic ones are more usable, blessed troops, stronger pretenders...probably more that escape me.

Soul slay - needs the extra range due to larger battlefields.
Paralyze is stronger.
Mind bLast doesn't seem better. Perhaps I'm missing someting there.

I thought mind bLast now did a paralyze effect instead of fatigue damage. But I haven't played R'lyeh in the demo .

Spiders as a counter for SC. Possibly, but I'd need to see more before commenting.

I wouldn't consider this an adequate counter anyway - only Machaka gets it. (Or are there spider summons I'm forgetting? Independent provinces with spider riders?)

Maggots - Only works versus undead. The blood SC are now demons.

There may now be inadequate demon counters. Banish Demon is only available to blood mages (and there is no equivalent of Wither Bones, Control the Dead or Undead Mastery for demons, even for blood mages).
Most holy effects (Holy Pyre, Just Mans Cross, Herald Lance, Solar Brilliance) still work on both, IIRC - but some allow an MR check, and demons have high MR. Maybe these types of spells should have higher base magic penetration, to counter the expected higher MR of their targets.

IMO, demons shouldn't have 0 base encumbrance - they aren't lifeless anymore (IIRC). Low base encumbrance is fine, maybe even some built in reinvigoration for the more powerful ones. But 0 encumbrance also makes you immune to item-based encumbrance and is thus an extremely powerful ability. It's fine for undead which have lots of counters, but with demons having so few, it is unbalancing for them to be fatigue immune.

Magic Missile weapons. Possibly, but will have to be seen.

The new Vision Foe is scary. Automatic eye loss with no MR save. A couple Firbolg or even Druids packing those things could really ruin your day (except for Old Wormface of course ).

Blessed troops - I don't think they'll make a dent in most SC.
Stronger Pretenders - Yes, but that's a balance issue in itself.

Considering what's been lost, that's not a very big list. I'd trade that all in for Dom I's star fire and the ability to use control the dead and wither bones versus 'demons'.

(snip some personal attacks - can we calm down please?)


I think the whole issue should be re-evaluated once the full game ships (or more precisely, arrives). For now I would say that there may be inadequate counters to demons, and they probably shouldn't have 0 base enc anymore.

Also, blood slave hunting by unskilled hunters may have too good a success rate. However, if I understand your post right, you had dozens or maybe even hundreds of scouts hunting to get "20-50" (a pretty wide range) slaves per turn. Even a scout costs 2 upkeep, so I make that roughly 5 gold per slave - not counting the lost income from the provinces. And of course if you don't have a blood skilled pretender you need a lot of items and/or empowerment to be able to summon anything big.

It's certainly possible for other nations to get into blood magic. But I question whether it is cost-effective compared to other things they could do with that much gold.

[Saber Cherry]

I'm blood hunting with 3 scouts and 5 generic commanders in a 4250 pop province (is this too small?). That's 210 gold initially, 14 upkeep, and 22 forgone gold per turn, plus another 25 archers and commander on patrol (230/15) for a total of 440 gold and 51 gold/turn lost. I get about 4-10 slaves per turn, averaging maybe 8.

Of course, I haven't tried optimizing it, so maybe I don't need the patrol (though unrest sometimes spiked previously) and maybe I should use a bigger province.

But in this example... it does not seem very efficient.

[apoger]

I am still doing the Abysian tests. (results soon)

As to the gold cost of the scout strategy...

I need to do some more tests to try to optimize the situation. In the test from the first post I did no patrols, nor did I farm the best provinces (I farmed some big expensive ones).

However I can tally up the approximate costs and results from that slightly sub-optimal test:

Gold costs of taxes lost, scout costs, and upkeep = 3005 gold (approximate, I had to estimate the times of acquiring some provinces, but I'm pretty close)

For this 3000 gold I got 420 blood slaves.

That comes to 7.14 gold per slave.
Think of it as 214 gold for a Horde from Hell or perhaps 392 gold for an Ice Devil.

As per Pocus's "20 turn challenge", it seems that competitive play yields a turn 20ish income of about 1500.


420 blood slaves could be;
almost 8 Ice Devils (3 more than exist)
14 Hordes from Hell (14 Devils and 350 Imps)
21 Lifelong Protection Contracts
The ability for Jotunhiem to cast the global spell Illwinter 3 times (and have 60 slaves to spare)


I think this might help put things into perspective.

[ November 04, 2003, 04:12: Message edited by: apoger ]