are stealth units targeted by flames from afar..?

[atul]

Boron said:
hm 5+30 watergems =5 clams
and as you said hit not guaranteed .

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

Boron said:
Furthermore the murdering winter is 5W so hard to reach and not worth imho taking it onto your pretender .

You can boost anything with water-2 or more with items easily (bracelet, that robe, staff of elemental mastery) to 5W, if you have only water-1 mages you probably aren't having enough water gem income for clams or MWs anyway so the issue becomes quite moot.

(okay, forgot about Sea King's Court, but anyway, water-5 is reachable)

[Boron]

atul said:

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .

so the murdering winter is very situational and against e.g. caelum / jotunheim because of CR it doesn't even work .
with clams you can start on about turn 5 when you reach construction 2 so in earlygame .

then in midgame your clams should provide high enough income that you can chose when the special situations occur to convert some either to water or to fire for murdering winter or flames from the sky

clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too :
only your water gems early game and then convert the clam astral income always back to water when you can afford and don't need astralincome items like luck pendant .

when properly done clams provide you doubled - tripled lategame gem income .
and astralpearls are the most valuable gemincome lategame anyway because you can convert them cheap at 2:1 ratio to whatever gems you need or you can wish with them .

once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .
(...)
once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

Gee, speaking of situational, for Wish you need Alteration _9_, and a mage with Astral 9. That's a bit harder to get then Evocation 7 and Water 5, unless you're a strong Astral nation, you have to take it on your pretender. And conventional wisdom is that it's unwise to put Astral on your pretender unless it's immortal.

That Murdering Winter on the other hand can target the other nation's capitals, it can target their library/sage guild provinces and really nail their research (and quite possibly bunches of items on the sages), it can target armies that are about to attack you, quite possibly killing some mages and causing their magic troops to be left out of the attack.

Doesn't seem all _that_ limitted to me.

[Boron]

Cainehill said:

Gee, speaking of situational, for Wish you need Alteration _9_, and a mage with Astral 9. That's a bit harder to get then Evocation 7 and Water 5, unless you're a strong Astral nation, you have to take it on your pretender. And conventional wisdom is that it's unwise to put Astral on your pretender unless it's immortal.

That Murdering Winter on the other hand can target the other nation's capitals, it can target their library/sage guild provinces and really nail their research (and quite possibly bunches of items on the sages), it can target armies that are about to attack you, quite possibly killing some mages and causing their magic troops to be left out of the attack.

Doesn't seem all _that_ limitted to me.

you always only quote parts of my argumentation not the whole

i said the murdering winter is available earliest midgame and costeffective most likely only in mid-lategame too.
when you start to build clams until midgame you can choose what to do :
if you see need for murdering winter you can stop clamproducing for a few turns and use your watergems for that or if quick needed convert clam astral pearls back to water .
BUT with clamhoard you can also cast fires from afar / flames from the sky if you need it .

so you are more flexible and have as bonus a 10-20 higher astral gem income in midgame .
thats what i said or at least what the intention of my previous post was perhaps i had it in mind but didn't say it clear enough

because against lots of nations murdering winter is of little use :
against caelum , ermor , jotunheim

against abysia , r'leh , atlantis you need probably 2-3 wolven winter first to drop temperature from heat 3 to cold 3 .
furthermore finding the r'leh / atlantis capitol is not so easy because your scouts can't go underwater without water breathing items . and only 1 strat move underwater so if the capitol is hidden in the middle of the sea lots of chances for r'lehs pd to find your spy before and kill him .

[alexti]

Boron said:
yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).

I think you ignore the circumstantial value of Murdering Winter. It doesn't have to kill the huge amount of troops to be worthwhile. For example, in the recent game formidable army was invading my lands. Murdering winter has killed significant number of troops and about half of mages, on the same turn my release army attacked invaders securing victory with minimal losses due to disorder and death of cruicial spellcasters in the opponent's army. After defeating this army military advantage swung to my side and I was able to drive invader back and conquer a number of his lands and castles. Initial murdering winter wasn't probably worthwhile the number of troops it has killed, but the advantage it created was worth much more than 30 water gems.

Boron said:
clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too

50+/100+ astral income looks attractive, but successful expansion can bring you more. How would you fight the nation with 60+ gems income of every kind which would also had much larger gold income? Sitting and clam hoarding is essentially betting that other nations will kill each other and no single nation will be able to emerge dominant. Of course, you can target on the expansion and only forge clams with really spare gems. In this case you're not likely to accumulate that many clams, but that is practical approach, I think.

Again, looking at my example, the single Murdering Winter has allowed me to gain some lands (probably worth 200-300 gold per turn), some forts and 15-20 gems per turn. That's much more than the profit from clams. So in my view, clam forging is for the situation where you have no option to expand, when you actually need more astral gems for your immediate wars or when you have really spare water gems (remember, even if you don't need anything from water yourself, you can forge boots of quickness and trade them for something you need).

[Boron]

alexti said:
50+/100+ astral income looks attractive, but successful expansion can bring you more. How would you fight the nation with 60+ gems income of every kind which would also had much larger gold income? Sitting and clam hoarding is essentially betting that other nations will kill each other and no single nation will be able to emerge dominant. Of course, you can target on the expansion and only forge clams with really spare gems. In this case you're not likely to accumulate that many clams, but that is practical approach, I think.

Again, looking at my example, the single Murdering Winter has allowed me to gain some lands (probably worth 200-300 gold per turn), some forts and 15-20 gems per turn. That's much more than the profit from clams. So in my view, clam forging is for the situation where you have no option to expand, when you actually need more astral gems for your immediate wars or when you have really spare water gems (remember, even if you don't need anything from water yourself, you can forge boots of quickness and trade them for something you need).

ok but 60 gems from each looks really high to me .
first only half nations are able to search via accashic record so only they find all sites .
with the standard 50% site frequenzy in mp games you have about 2-3 sites in average per province depending on terrain .
your 60+ gems of every kind would be 400+ gems / turn .
in average i think you get about 3-4 lets say 4 gems / fully searched province .
to get your 400 gems you need so about 100 fully searched provinces .
if you control this amount either the map ( aran , inland , desert eye ) is finished already or almost finished or you control at least half of the map ( karan , other 200-250 province maps ) .

so for a not already almost winning empire or a faerun game i think 100-200 gem income / turn per sites is already quite high .
furthermore this is only fully true for pythium and other accashic Users , e.g. vanheim , man etc. have normally big trouble finding more than 50% of the sites .

you are probably all right that clams are not worth building a strat around but your example looks a bit too good to me

[alexti]

Boron said:

ok but 60 gems from each looks really high to me .
first only half nations are able to search via accashic record so only they find all sites .
with the standard 50% site frequenzy in mp games you have about 2-3 sites in average per province depending on terrain.

your 60+ gems of every kind would be 400+ gems / turn .
in average i think you get about 3-4 lets say 4 gems / fully searched province .
to get your 400 gems you need so about 100 fully searched provinces .
if you control this amount either the map ( aran , inland , desert eye ) is finished already or almost finished or you control at least half of the map ( karan , other 200-250 province maps ) .

Personally, I rarely search with accashic anyway, as you expand you find various indy mages, some paths you can cover with summoning, so over the time I could search-cast in all paths. Your calculations are about right, but that game was on Orania, I didn't bother to search conquered lands in paths that I thought the previous owners had searched, so probably income was less than it could be, but about half the map on Orania brings quite a lot of gems.

Boron said:
so for a not already almost winning empire or a faerun game i think 100-200 gem income / turn per sites is already quite high .
furthermore this is only fully true for pythium and other accashic Users , e.g. vanheim , man etc. have normally big trouble finding more than 50% of the sites .

Usually by mid-game you can get into most magic paths up to level 2 at least (indies, summon, mercs), so you can find nearly every site if you have time and need.

Boron said:
you are probably all right that clams are not worth building a strat around but your example looks a bit too good to me

My example looks good, because it was example of successful conquest. However, the clam hoarder needs everybody fail in their conquests, so the whole map is in closely fought wars without anybody gaining significant advantage. This is not impossible and may even be a beter bet for some nation, but personally I don't like to rely on strategy which just awaits particular random outcome and when there isn't much difference I can make myself.

So my point was that by the time one could have had 50/100 astral from clams, the successful conquerer will already be wrapping up the game.

[Boron]

alexti said:

Usually by mid-game you can get into most magic paths up to level 2 at least (indies, summon, mercs), so you can find nearly every site if you have time and need.

My example looks good, because it was example of successful conquest. However, the clam hoarder needs everybody fail in their conquests, so the whole map is in closely fought wars without anybody gaining significant advantage. This is not impossible and may even be a beter bet for some nation, but personally I don't like to rely on strategy which just awaits particular random outcome and when there isn't much difference I can make myself.

So my point was that by the time one could have had 50/100 astral from clams, the successful conquerer will already be wrapping up the game.

yep your points are good .
only 2 small additional thoughts :
-on a smaller map ( inland , aran , desert eye ) having 15-25 well defended provinces + clamhoard is good .
because there when you have 150 provinces as you had you have already won .

-on a big map like orania though your conqueror strat has 1 significant disadvantage :
you need lots and lots of troops + battle mages + small scs etc.
furthermore when you have e.g. 60 provinces on orania and are the biggest power then others will ally against you .

the clamhoarder looks weaker and not of a concern instead and does inner growth .
he has the advantage that he can spend most of his money on researchers and he will have in lategame only very powerful summons / scs etc.

i think the clamhoarder will have a higher research then the conqueror .
and the conqueror has to spend his gems on lots of low-midlevel things too because he can't wait and stockpile and techrush .

furthermore many of the best conqueror nations can't accashic and have bad sitesearchers .
so you have to be lucky and conquer e.g. lots of pythium , arco etc. territory which was already fully searched .

at the moment i like mictlan quite much : they can a bit clamhoard and get lots of blood and with the blood can expand very well in most stages of the game .