Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[Yossar]

Huzurdaddi said:You are special yes indeed. No one else has ever obliterated tons of devils.

Never?

[Cohen]

Devils are easily killed under storm, with massive spellfire or wrathful skies.

Devils aren't so strong ...
Stormies are, but they're limited to lightning attack, that could be avoided by Lightn Immunity.

[PDF]

Even if there are ways to deal with Demons, the fact is that they are bloodily (!) cheap when you got them through Contracts. I do think- and other experienced players too- that Contracts are somewhat overpowered. The contract takes some time to pay off for sure, but with a Blood nation you can churn a very high supply of slaves and transform them into Devil-factories without even having to research Blood. Best of all you have to use 1 mage-turn to make the contract but no time is lost summoning the devils, that come automatically after that.
It's not a rush strategy, but an income of 60 slaves/turn is possible relatively early, allowing mass-production of though devils. Tell me about one other good summon for such a low cost ...

[Boron]

PDF said:
Tell me about one other good summon for such a low cost ...

I agree fully with you
3 other "good" summons of relative low cost come to my mind :
- Vampires from vampire lords
- Ghosts from wraithlords
- Demon knights / storm demons via the infernal xxx spell .

Soul contract is the easiest to get . Mictlan needs anyways construction 4 for SDR . Normally to get the second cheap +1 blood item , the bloodthorn you need to go construction 6 though to get 5B mages to forge the soul contracts .
Only vampires + storm demons are almost as useful as demons but given that you need blood 9 to get storm demons in half reasonable quantities and that you need B3D4 on your pretender to summon the first Vampire lord devils are a bit too cheap aquireable via soul contract .

Most important is also the time . In theory you could take e.g. a FoB pretender and start forging soul contracts with it once you reach 80 blood already . As you said you have your SoulContract devil economy probably running 10-30 turns before your enemies get something which is almost as strong summonwise .

You force your enemies almost to get staff(s) of storms .
Later by summoning some storm demons you can use them against the staff of storms battlemage anti-devil armies and the devils for the rest .
Basically the only thing you have to worry are enemy UBERSCs then , especially Airqueens .

[Cohen]

In fact IMO Staff of Storms should be reviewed.
Const-6 and A4 needed, because a mage that cast Storm should be A4, so to channel the storm power into a staff he need to be A4.

[Kel]

Vampires are a great comparison. Same source, same type of product, same rate of production. Still have things to account for (like cursed items and research levels) but it's a lot closer than clams or bloodstones.

- Kel

[Boron]

Kel said:
Vampires are a great comparison. Same source, same type of product, same rate of production. Still have things to account for (like cursed items and research levels) but it's a lot closer than clams or bloodstones.

- Kel

Yep . Vampires + devils serve 2 different purposes imo :
Vampires are mainly defensive weapons , devils allaround weapons . So devils are a bit more useful and as others have said already the scout wastes no magetime while the Vampire lord needs to allysummon and each turn he does something else like forging / casting you lose a vampire .
So the RoI of the soul contract is really a lot better .

With forgeboni like dwarfenhammers , sites and the forge of ancients the soul contracts become really horrible .
You could really try to bring forge up as abysia . Your demonbreds could forge then earth bloodstones , fiever fetishes + your warlocks with only 1 +1blooditem or a lucky bloodrandom without that soul contracts .
So if you save your blood even if the forge gets dispelled after a few turns your gain is huge .

[Kel]

Boron said:
With forgeboni like dwarfenhammers , sites and the forge of ancients the soul contracts become really horrible

I am sure. Of course, I would never assume that I would have 100+ earth gems and site bonuses to boot in any reasonable amount of time and if we start assuming ideal and unlikely things, than a lot of things become possible. We might just as well assume that someone has a 999 reinforced Arcane Nexus up, , has site bonuses and multiple S9 mages available. Maybe throw in a const bonus for clamming, who knows since it's all unlikely and hypothetical.

I don't even remember the Last MP game I played where I found a const site bonus.

- Kel

[Boron]

Cohen said:
Devils are easily killed under storm, with massive spellfire or wrathful skies.

Devils aren't so strong ...
Stormies are, but they're limited to lightning attack, that could be avoided by Lightn Immunity.

Interesting discussion

Cohen is right that especially against Airnations devils are not that useful .

A comparison Soul contracts vs. Clams is not good imo because both need different sources .
So you can compare them with Bloodstones somewhat and mainly with Vampirelords .

After you summoned your unique blood SCs there is not so much left to spend blood on :
- Bloodstones
- Good items like Hellsword / Blood Thorn
- Vampire lords
- The lvl 9 summoning spells for Devils/Storm demons etc.

If you are a 2nd tier bloodnation like pangenea you can bloodhunt a bit and use it only for soul contracts and don't need to research blood at all .
As a 1st tier bloodnation you don't need to research higher than blood 5/6/7 then too urgently if you want e.g. only the Ice devils or the Arch devils .

In the offensive Devils are better , in the defensive Vampire lords with vampires are better .
If e.g. Ulm finds independent bloodmages and brings up the FotA this would be horrible for Soul Contract forging too .

[PvK]

Not putting your income into staying alive during a war is of course a disadvantage and a risk. Winning a war is better than camping and investing, unless the camper attacks soon after you win, when you are still weak.

In general, that seems to all work fine to me.

On huge maps and long-term, peaceful games, hoarding strategies will naturally be more effective than on small ones.

Clearly, it is possible to get huge results from some of these, eventually. In some cases, perhaps some tweaks could help.

Clams - would be good to limit to mages, and/or have a world clam income per turn that caps the total clam astral income (1/water province in the world was my old suggestion).

Soul Contracts - are supposed to be risky, but it seems like the risk is quite low. Might be good to tweak this risk up a bit, and to disallow use on units that don't have souls, or that already have a soul contract (for logical, thematic reasons, mostly).

Fever Fetishes - are supposed to have some additional cost via disease. It'd be good if they didn't work on undead (was that patched yet?), and perhaps if they occasionally diseased a random unit in the same province through contagion (this would have a natural and logical negative effect of hoarding), and perhaps of occasional health crisis for the wearer (take some open-ended damage - possibly fatal, possibly causing affliction).

PvK