Are devils worth 7 blood each?

[CUnknown]

I think we should take another look at the numbers real quick.

Clam/fetish hoarding: Costs 10 gems, gives 1 a turn. This will repay itself in 10 turns.

Soul contracts: Costs 80 slaves, gives 7 slaves a turn. This will repay itself in.. what was it? 11.5 turns?

So, in reality (not including any additional bonuses), clams are actually a better investment, but the problem is they don't give you the finished product. You have to spend a character action to actually use what you get, as opposed to Soul contracts, which don't require this.

Yet, as others have pointed out, Soul contracts have the downside of inflexibility. Once the appropriate counters are in place, you might wish you had spent those blood slaves in another way.

So, Soul contracts have advantages and disadvantages when compared to clamming/fetishing. Seems balanced to me.

Whether devils are actually worth 7 slaves though, is a different question. They may be worth more...so possibly Soul contracts are unbalanced after all, even compared to clamming (a strategy many think is unbalanced). We'd have to compare stats of similar summoned units of the same research level for that.

[nakomus]

I don’t think Soul Contracts are all that great if you have easy access to the summing spell as well.

If you assume that devils are what you need, Soul Contract is only desirable if you either a) cannot easily summon devils directly or
b) Do not need your devils right away.

If you need an Army right now it matters not at all how good a return on investment a Soul Contract has. And who can really be sure what the game situation will be like in 5 or 10 turns?

If you are playing Abysia (the only nation I’ve seriously used Devils with), its quite easy to just summon them. You need level three blood and one demonbred per devil per turn. The Demonbreds can cast the spell without items or empowerment. At 260 gold and sacred the cost of the mages to support the summoning is not too severe.

Soul Contract requires 5(!) Blood. No Abysian mages can cast this without a boost. Your closest bet is a Warlock with 3 blood and a random pick. If you don’t have a warlock with a random pick in blood you need con4 and two boosters in order to forge the item at all. 11 turns after that, your first soul contract will make its return on investment. If you count the cost of the boosters (60 additional blood, I think), that first contract actually takes 20 turns to payback. Of course you could amortize that over later contracts.

Still, the cost of that first contract is 140 slaves and some time. By the time that you get your first devil out of the soul contract, someone summoning devils directly could have an army of 20 Devils out in the field. My money is on the guy with the army

As to Huzurdaddi’s point that I would be spending the Blood on SCs instead anyway, this is probably true a bit later, but Abysia can get Devils out with less research and boosting.

I’m assuming the game is played on a small enough map that you cannot reasonably expect to just be left alone. Certainly if you have 20 or 30 turns without major conflict, Soul Contract is a better deal.

This doesn’t address whether Devils are themselves balanced of course.

[Arryn]

nakomus said:
I don’t think Soul Contracts are all that great if you have easy access to the summing spell as well.

Very well-reasoned. Good work!

[Soapyfrog]

I dont like the fact that if someone is lucky enough to get left alone for a bit they can grow their gem income exponentially and/or produce a devil factory of scary proportions.

I think exponential/quadratic growth is not a good thing in a fantasy game that doesn't scale well past turn 60 or so. Who wants to see Doom Horrors getting summoned 1 or even 2 per turn? Who wants to see an army of 120 devils wiped out at great cost to return completely regenerated a turn later? Even worse, who wants to fight their way through an mile-wide mass of vampires which respawns every turn no matter how often you kill it and keeps growing to boot?

The worst part is there are essentially only 3 or 4 ROI quadratic/exponential growth strategies that really pay off: clamming, fetishing, soul contracts, and vampire lords. That doesnt exactly give the game a lot of depth, or a much of an nteresting end game... in a 17 player game SOMEONE is going to carry off one or more of these strategies more that likely and, assuming some level competetance, dominate because of it.

Those empires that had to fight tooth and nail to survive and could not put the neccessary resources into clamming or whatever, get steamrolled.

Eliminating these strategies would surely result in a more balanced game.

[Kel]

If one nation gets left alone until turn 60 while everyone expends resources fighting, they will be way ahead anyway. Whether it is that they have the prime artifacts, the unique summons (since theirs aren't dying off), they have castled (having nothing else to do with gold), they have set up the hard to get to spells (wishing, tartarians, etc.), they have taken all the indies and the CC'd player territories, searched their sites more thoroughly, have more mages because they didn't die off, have more gems because they weren't lost in battle, have better provinces because they weren't raided/pillaged, you name it.

As far as eliminating strategies, this might lead to a more balanced game because it is much easier to balance simplicity and the more strategies you eliminate, the simpler the game is. And a fine, balanced, simple game is quite fine and enjoyable at times...I just don't think that's why most people like Dom2. No offense but getting rid of strategies entirely is, imo, not a good idea.

- Kel

[Arryn]

Kel said:
No offense but getting rid of strategies entirely is, imo, not a good idea.

Right. There's a word for what it'd make the game: BORING.

[Yossar]

Kel said:
If one nation gets left alone until turn 60 while everyone expends resources fighting, they will be way ahead anyway.

No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.

[Cainehill]

Yossar said:

No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.

Not necessarily. Posit a small map - 80 provinces, 6 nations. If one nation acquires 10 provinces - less than average - but isn't fighting until turn 60, it's quite possibly ahead of the game. Another nation might have 20 provinces - but has spent most of its gold, and gems, on troops and magic items which are dead and gone.

Others have 5-15, say. The nation that has built its strength undisturbed is almost certainly better than those others, even the ones with 15.

I'm half in agreement with you - the way the game is, land is power. If you have 20 provinces to my 10, all other things being equal, you're likely going to win.

Clams, fetishes, etc, are simply a mechanism whereby a nation with less territory can attempt to balance the scales. The conqueror is using her gems to forge weapons and summon monsters; the lurker is saving those gems to use in major spells, major forgings, and also possibly using the gems as an investment instead of spending them right away.

Both strategies (in a hundred flavors, including Spam) can work. And as Arryn and Kel both said - getting rid of strategies is a bad thing, makes the game boring. If this wasn't the case, we could all play Chinese Checkers, with the understanding that the winner was Dog.

[Kel]

Yossar said:
No way. If you've gone 60 turns without attacking anyone, you're most likely irrelevant. You're going to lose to the two or three other nations that have been taking all the land and are three times as large as you are. Unless you're playing with newbies or on a HUGE map, or some other strange setting.

Well, most MP games...well, let me rephrase, most MP games that start here, *are* huge maps so maybe my experience is tainted by that. However, even without a huge map, you still have a lot of situations where you pick up land without being 'disturbed' by other players. Aside from the fact that you can clean up every indie province, you can also clean up territories from players who get thrashed and go computer control next to you. Heck, even if they don't go CC, you can still take a bunch of territory from them. On top of that, your territory will be substantially better than theirs, pound for pound, as yours will be more thoroughly site searched, castled and unpillaged.

Start a game with 3 people. Let the first two go to war while the third just takes indies and builds power. It's not a sure bet but my money is on the third guy.

- Kel

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:
I think exponential/quadratic growth is not a good thing in a fantasy game that doesn't scale well past turn 60 or so. Who wants to see Doom Horrors getting summoned 1 or even 2 per turn? Who wants to see an army of 120 devils wiped out at great cost to return completely regenerated a turn later? Even worse, who wants to fight their way through an mile-wide mass of vampires which respawns every turn no matter how often you kill it and keeps growing to boot?

The worst part is there are essentially only 3 or 4 ROI quadratic/exponential growth strategies that really pay off: clamming, fetishing, soul contracts, and vampire lords. That doesnt exactly give the game a lot of depth, or a much of an nteresting end game... in a 17 player game SOMEONE is going to carry off one or more of these strategies more that likely and, assuming some level competetance, dominate because of it.

Those empires that had to fight tooth and nail to survive and could not put the neccessary resources into clamming or whatever, get steamrolled.

Eliminating these strategies would surely result in a more balanced game.

Yeah . The worst thing is that clamming together with wishing gives you access to everything then . You can wish for a bit blood to get then the blood autosummons started , can wish the unique SCs you want in endless amounts etc. etc.
So once it comes to real lategame the nations who can't wish because they have no good astral mages + couldn't clamhoard well are severely disadvantaged .

And before especially the devilhoarding is evil .

After about turn 50-60 normally the ability to use one or more of these hoard strategies with exponential growth is the most important thing .
Furthermore normally nations don't get too big that quick and if they do they fight for lots of turns against their neighbors so they are actually weakened .

Especially Caelum + Abysia are here probably a problem because they are so strong in early game already too .