Abysian Yes, Black Forest No

[SurvivalistMerc]

The protection from misfortune from fortune tellers either is very slim or doesn't exist at all.

I started a black forest ulm game. And by turn 15, after having built a fortune teller on turn 1, I had 7 bad events in my home province.

This was with order0 and misfortune1, which is required for the theme. Misfortune1 is required for the theme, but order0 is not. This was really a test of the scales.

I had the fortune teller researching. Maybe they don't act when researching.

But by turn 15, I had lost 1/4 population, lost tax revenue on 3 separate turns in the home province, and lost dominion due to lack of faith. There were others that I don't recall.

But with this and my death dominion, I gave up on the game. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but that much bad luck where I had a fortune teller in only the base misfortune level was just "too much" for me.

[Saber Cherry]

Oops. Maybe they prevent good luck

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by SurvivalistMerc:
But with this and my death dominion, I gave up on the game. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but that much bad luck where I had a fortune teller in only the base misfortune level was just "too much" for me.

You had extremely bad luck there. With the same scales, and only building a single fortune teller, I have had:
A handful of magic astral pearls.
Good harvest increasing gol by 50 and 20 less unrest.
A festival held in my honour.
Province defense increased by 10.

That's after turn 15.

By turn 30.
A handful of magic death gems.
An earthquake killed many people (Province pop now at 27K) and destroyed the temple.(Turn 26)
A fire destroyed the lab.(Turn 27)
A barbarian horde.(Pop now 24K)

Between turns 30 and 60.
Heavy snowfalls costing 100 gold.
Handful of magic earth gems.
Great tax collection (+100 gold)
Barbarian horde.
Earthquake.(20K population left)
A handful of magic death gems.
Barbarian horde (17K population left.)
A handful of magic nature gems.
Heavy snowfalls.
Heavy snowfalls.

Note that this is with only one province, so all the bad events are concentrated. The overall efect would be much smaller with more provinces.

All in all, it looks like misfortune might be annoying with order 0, but not that bad.

I don't know if I'd even categorize Black Forest as a "Blood Nation".

They start with a blood supercombatant and can go throughout a game without even researching blood if they don't wish while having a great use of their blood slaves.

They are by far the quickest blood nation and overall I personally feel strongest. They can get so may provinces so quickly they can create a massive blood foundation probably 5-10 turns before opponents. They don't need strong blood mages, as they can make blood items (which there are quite a few) with such a strong blood economy. Their real 'limitation' is the forced death scale, which makes you pillage provinces for blood slaves and have no way to compensate for it. However, by the time you are doing this, you have so many highly equipped Vampires, Devils, running around, with a very, very strong army in the rangers (with Wind Guide and Flaming Xbows, look for indeps or use fortune tellers) and powerful communions making them able to use many different spells. Their only real downfall is being able to search for whatever elements they need, which you can do by building the right kind of pretender with the magics you need.

Black Forest is easily in my Top 3 picks of the game in it's current state. If you are their nearest enemy, you had better hope you get paralyze before they get a count, and you better get storm or arrow fend soon after.

[Kristoffer O]

The fortune tellers each have something like 5% chance of eliminating a bad event. Nothing like the 75% of the great seer of the deeps or 15% of the norns.

[Pocus]

hard datas catched! my preciousss hoard of data nuggetsssss

[gibson]

I tried out Black Forest Last night, hoping to duplicate the results of people from the other Black Forest thread. I found them to be disappointing, but I must have been doing something wrong. While expansion was no real trouble against indy 3, it was all done the old fashioned way (pikes and shields). I stuck a blood 1 mage in each conquered province and started hunting, but didn't have enough slaves until at least turn 7. I made a vamp on turn 8, sent him off to an independent and he was promptly killed by a group of archers. Tried again against a different province, same result.

A build order or some basic strategy on how to exploit the uniqueness of Black Forest would be appreciated by this newb (especially with blood magic). While I can do well with Black Forest, the start doesn't really feel any different than it would with a normal Ulm (or plenty of other nations that I don't really know how to play).