The next patch

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
A wish for power brings your attack, defense and magic resist up to over 30, and you are completely immune to the elements. There are very few spells that will get through at this point. You'll also regenerate something like 15 hitpoints per turn. I've had one wipe out an army with about 15 deep seers, 5 kings of the deeps, and 50+ sea trolls.

A wish for power does not grant improved magic resistance. It is impossible to improve magic resistance in such a way: Power only is +50 HP, +20 Str, +10 Atk/Def/Prec. And 15 deep seers, 5 Kings of the Deep, and sea trolls are weaklings anyway. They are by far not equal in cost, so it's hardly a surprise that they failed.

[Chris Byler]

BTW, whoever posted that a nature-1 water-1 clam would be beyond the reach of any national mage without a lucky random pick was wrong: he reckoned without the Marshmaster (Miasma C'tis) and the Master of Five Elements (Spring&Autumn T'ien Ch'i). Both have fixed water and nature magic. So those two nations would become the new favored clam hoarders - but hey, at least they can be easily attacked, having most of their powerbase on land. (Of course, jade priestesses would also be able to forge clams, and any nation with water *or* nature and random picks would be a potential clam hoarder - so add Pangaea, Man, and IIRC Machaka to the list.)

Even before clam hoarding was introduced, I'd already decided not to play any MP game with the graphs off. So that doesn't affect me. I still wouldn't mind seeing the clam raised to Water-3 though, if it really is a problem. It already takes 20 clam-turns to pay for a clam; raising it to 40 would pretty much eliminate clams as anything other than a slow form of alchemy for "excess" water gems. (I don't see how your water gems can be excess unless your *only* opponents are Caelum and Jotunheim and you're playing on a map with no seas, and even then you can probably find some use.)

[Taqwus]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

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Originally posted by Nephelim:
Hrm... Why a vampire queen instead of a doom horror?

More item slots, and immortality. Think of a vampire queen pretender with rainbow 5, astral 10, and 150 hitpoints in a dominion 10 province. Give her a sword of swiftness or some other weapon, charcoal shield, starshine skullcap, elemental armour, quickness boots, luck pendant and anti-magic amulet. A wish for power brings your attack, defense and magic resist up to over 30, and you are completely immune to the elements. There are very few spells that will get through at this point. You'll also regenerate something like 15 hitpoints per turn. I've had one wipe out an army with about 15 deep seers, 5 kings of the deeps, and 50+ sea trolls.

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A Vampire Queen that's rainbow 5 is also an incredibly enormous investment. Empower up to Astral 6, lend 3 astral boosters (could rely on items more if you don't mind horror-marking), that's somewhere around 350 extra astral above the initial 100-astral VQ wish.

Wish for power, that's +100. Wish for magic power x 5, that's plus +500. Now you're at 1050 astral. Then throw in the cost of the gear too.

You could get 10 doom horrors for that price, for instance, which gives you a lot more strategic flexibility (raid 10 back-end provinces in a turn, for instance; oh, can also fly all-weather IIRC) and won't all die to a single unlucky die roll or get auto-paralyzed by Petrify or fall to a lucky hit from a Golem with a gate cleaver or what-have-you.

The doom horrow on the other hand, suffers from a relative lack of item slots, and is still vulnerable to elemental damage. They definetly are superior raiders to undefended provinces in my opinion, since its a rare map that they can't traverse in one turn.

It also is pretty decent even without gear or a massive investment in empowering.

[ April 09, 2004, 01:51: Message edited by: Taqwus ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Chris Byler:
Even before clam hoarding was introduced, I'd already decided not to play any MP game with the graphs off. So that doesn't affect me.

Graphs do not effectively reveal clam hoarding, since clam income, like fever fetishes, earth blood stones, and certain summoned units, receive their gems directly and not in the score graph. Besides, clam hoarding wasn't "introduced", it's always been around. The concept of accumulating things that give you income is as old as time itself, and this is generally a rather slow investment process anyway, barring some lucky sites. Since there are no nations that can naturally produce all of the apparatus involved in the creation of clams, this is a greatly exaggerated issue.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Teraswaerto:
Limiting the amount of Clams that can exist in the world at the same time would stop excessive hoarding while still leaving Clams useful.

I agree. This is about the same as my earlier suggestion, which I like a little better but would be a little for complex (but perhaps more fun) to code. That was, that there are only so many pearls generated by all the clams in the world per turn, split between all the clams, max 1 per clam. The number could be say equal to the number of sea provinces in the world, or perhaps twice that number. Clams work normally until that number is exceeded, but beyond that start having a less and less chance of getting one of the limited number of pearls that will be generated.

PvK

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
and won't all die to a single unlucky die roll or get auto-paralyzed by Petrify or fall to a lucky hit from a Golem with a gate cleaver or what-have-you.

Petrify is about a 4 turn paralysis, that's not nearly enough to kill a beast that regenerates 15 per turn with invulnerability. That's also a rather lucky die roll. Magic resist of 35 gives about a 0.004% chance for an effect to take hold with standard penetration. If you do manage to kill the VQ, then it's only a couple of turns till it's back and ready to fight again, even if it dies outside of its dominion.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Since there are no nations that can naturally produce all of the apparatus involved in the creation of clams, this is a greatly exaggerated issue.

Every nation with a water 1 national mage, or a relatively inexpensive random pick has the "apparatus" to build clams.