Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and more..

[Arryn]

Gandalf, while your point about 'frog's persistance may be true, he also raised a valid point when he said:

"Soul contracts invalidate huge swathes of blood summons. Most never get used becuase it is much much much more cost effective to create soul contracts."

Of course the same argument could be said about only summoning Bane Lords with your death gems, or Vine Ogres with nature gems (well, Fairy Queens are very nice too).

The real argument is whether a player is an optimizer (aka min-maxer), a strategist, or a RPer. Each camp vehemently expounds its views, and never will members from one camp sway those of another. Hence the perpetual bickering.

[Soapyfrog]

Arryn said:
Of course the same argument could be said about only summoning Bane Lords with your death gems, or Vine Ogres with nature gems (well, Fairy Queens are very nice too).

Yes its true there are optimal summons for all paths. however you do frequently summon other stuff too, and thats useful too... sometimes you will summon wraith lords, or demi-liches, or lamia queens. You will cast arouse hunger and ghost riders and call of the wild, etc etc. There are many useful things to put your nature and and death gems (well nature gems mostly go into fetishes if you are diligent, but still.)

The point is that while there are optimizations, they dont invalidate other strategies in the way that, say, soul contracts do. You cant compete with a soul contract in terms of regular units with any other blood summons. At least in the other arenas, the optimizations are not so blindingly obvious...

[Arryn]

Soapy, you've made your point, as Gandalf (and I) have tried to point out. Hammering away at it over and over again won't help further your cause, unless your intent is really that of trolling for someone to argue with.

Some people believe (fervently, or dare I say it, religiously) that SCs are too strong in the game, or that clams are unbalancing, or creature X is too cheap/expensive/strong/weak, or item Y is too cheap/expensive/strong/weak, or that feature Z is broken. And they are entitled to their opinions. But they are just that, opinions. Common courtesy (and common sense) asks that said pet opinions not be crammed down the throats of those who don't agree, since it's pointless and unpleasant.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:
The point is that while there are optimizations, they dont invalidate other strategies in the way that, say, soul contracts do. You cant compete with a soul contract in terms of regular units with any other blood summons. At least in the other arenas, the optimizations are not so blindingly obvious...

Well storm demons beat the devils . A SC beats them too etc. etc. .
So soul contract hoarding doesn't ensure you a win .

With clams etc. it is the same though not so severe :
If you only convert your water gems to clams then you don't lose too much but then it is a rather slow process .

If you convert back your gained astral pearls to speedup the clamhoarding process though then you lack them for some time and are vulnerable until you start to use them .
And there are too many factors to evaluate if your clamhoarding is good enough . If the other player intead gets 1 province more as you every 1-2 turns while you get 2-3 clams more the other player has still an advantage over you because he gets more gold , gems from sites , perhaps freespawns etc. .

I thought exactly like you do a few weeks before but i think now that hoarding is not a no-brainer .

[Soapyfrog]

Boron said:
Well storm demons beat the devils . A SC beats them too etc. etc..

I agree 1 on 1 a storm demon beats a devil. The problem is that I will have 300 devils and you will have 30 storm demons...

SC I agree you can with a LOT of effort make an SC who can tank an unlimited number of devils. However of course there are more devils where they came from (for free!!) AND of course I can use anti-SC tactics against your devil-tanking SC.

Since my devil army is endless replenishable, losing it is not a crippling blow. Your SC on the other hand, well, you will have to expend those considerable resources all over again, since the devil problem wont go away just ebcuase you killed a bunch of them.

You have to kill the source... and you cant becuase they are hidden on scouts...

[Kel]

Soapyfrog said:
However of course there are more devils where they came from (for free!!)

They aren't free. They just have a form of payment that rewards in the long term, rather than in the short term. Do you think it would be fair to pay 80 slaves for a single devil ? Of course not. To get many devils out of a soul contract, you consume many different kinds of resources and one which most people seem to ignore is the resource of Time.

Since my devil army is endless replenishable

Gem sites do not run out. Every army and summon is "endlessly replenishable". What you mean is that you have to reinvest gems. With contracts, though, you still have to reinvest Time. You don't think that's important ?

losing it is not a crippling blow. Your SC on the other hand, well, you will have to expend those considerable resources all over again, since the devil problem wont go away just ebcuase you killed a bunch of them.

That's true ! Of course, if I kill my opponents Bane Lord army, I doubt the problem will go away, either. Unless I actually start taking his resources away from him. Now, the obvious counter-point here is that the devils don't really take a lot of resources to rebuild, other than time (actually, even that has a caveat since we haven't talked about who is leading these devils). Even then, the answer is Time. If you can summon SCs faster than his contracts can produce devils (obviously not on a 1 for 1 basis), even in the short run, you should be able to take some of his resources away from him.

Now, I am not taking a stance on whether contracts are balanced or not. I am just beginning to explore them heavily, myself. I just wanted to point out that Time, as a resource, is something that all of the investment item discussions seem to overlook.

- Kel

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

I agree 1 on 1 a storm demon beats a devil. The problem is that I will have 300 devils and you will have 30 storm demons...

SC I agree you can with a LOT of effort make an SC who can tank an unlimited number of devils. However of course there are more devils where they came from (for free!!) AND of course I can use anti-SC tactics against your devil-tanking SC.

Since my devil army is endless replenishable, losing it is not a crippling blow. Your SC on the other hand, well, you will have to expend those considerable resources all over again, since the devil problem wont go away just ebcuase you killed a bunch of them.

You have to kill the source... and you cant becuase they are hidden on scouts...

Ok . But i can siege the province where the scouts are in .
And until very lategame you don't have so many soul contracts that you generate each turn 100 new devils , rather 20-50 new ones .
So killing 200-300 of your devils you need a few turns to have them again .
With staff of storm + a few air casters who cast e.g. thunderstrike + orb lightning the devils don't look too good .
And they have -50% cold resistence so ice strike and falling frost can do some damage too .


The devils are of course tough but fortunately you can ground them via storm and as a sideeffect the storm makes fire magic harder to use as well .



Most important though you have to remember the high costs of soul contracts .
80 slaves , 60 with dwarfen hammer .
A dwarfen hammer costs though 20 earthgems and the blood nations are not the best sitesearchers . Abysia and Mictlan both lack earthmagic , Mictlan lacks it total and Abysia can only get E on warlocks , then you can forge a bloodstone and earth boots for earth 3 but that takes some time .
If you don't take blood 5 on your pretender then you will need construction 6 in order to get 2 boosters to blood 5 to forge the soul contracts .
And you will use a lot of your initial blood first on the ice/arch devils normally .

So by turn 30 you have i think if you don't go only on soul contracts about 10 and produce each turn 1-2 new .
By turn 50 you have then like 20-50 soul contracts but on turn 50 the others will have other good things .
Only when you reach 100+ soul contracts at turn 70-100 they start to really get out of control .

Soul contracts are good but unless you manage to get FoTa running or find a constructionbonus site they are not really overpowered .
With forces of darkness you get 14 Fiends for 50 blood that's not bad too . A fiend of darkness has about the same combat power like a Devil .
So only after 15 turns the soul contract starts to get a higher output .
But 15 turns is a long time so the player who uses the lvl 9 blood spell instead will have more forces earlier than you .
If you can survive this then it is fine but chances are not bad that the nonhorder overwhelms you before your hoarding really pays off .

[Soapyfrog]

Boron said:
Ok . But i can siege the province where the scouts are in.

And they can just sneak away!

And until very lategame you don't have so many soul contracts that you generate each turn 100 new devils , rather 20-50 new ones.

20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

So killing 200-300 of your devils you need a few turns to have them again.

Yes but.. I WILL have them again. With no additional expenditure of resources and no risk... so in addition to being able to do everything else I could do, i.e. equip and use SCs, I get X free devils every turn... which I think you'll agree is a significant advantage.

With staff of storm + a few air casters who cast e.g. thunderstrike + orb lightning the devils don't look too good .

Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

Most important though you have to remember the high costs of soul contracts . 80 slaves , 60 with dwarfen hammer.

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn. To take advantage of this you need only 2 blood 5 casters with dwarven hammers so the setup costs are not super significant... for Abysia its downright trivial, for example. I would be quite happy producing two contracts a turn until I can start wishing for blood and power. Generally this will leave enough excess blood to do other fun stuff with but if you are really diligent you can just produce more soul contracts every so often with the excess.

If you don't take blood 5 on your pretender then you will need construction 6 in order to get 2 boosters to blood 5 to forge the soul contracts.

Yes true but actually it is much faster to empower, especially in a hard research setting, which is not so expensive considering how easy it is to accumulate blood.

And you will use a lot of your initial blood first on the ice/arch devils normally..

Agreed Ice devils and Arch devils take precedence, since they are valuable uniques. In a normal research game playing blood nation you should have all your ice and archies by turn 25 or so, at which point you can start contracting... Although I usually break that rule and setup some contracts early, once I have a few uniques already.

But 15 turns is a long time so the player who uses the lvl 9 blood spell instead will have more forces earlier than you.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.

If you can survive this then it is fine but chances are not bad that the nonhorder overwhelms you before your hoarding really pays off.

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

Doubtful. That's an expenditure of 1200 to 3000 blood slaves, not counting what you spent on the devil commanders. To get 3000 slaves requires about 500-600 mage turns, which means that you had to have 15 mages hunting for the entire game to that point. That's not particularly likely when facing Abysia, but could be possible with Mictlan if they haven't worked on their dominion at all. That's also a minimum of 5 provinces used for blood hunting, with the associated loss of income. You must be playing on absolutely massive maps if you can afford to have that many provinces devoted to blod hunting. After all, 5 provinces would be a quarter of your empire on normally populated maps.

Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

That doesn't matter if you kill them without taking losses.

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn.

If you have 10-12 provinces being hunted, then your empire must be massive, or else you won't have the gold income to keep up in your research.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.

Level 9 magic in one path with level 5-6 in others by turn 40 is easily doable for any nation with decent researchers.

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

Ice devils in turn 13 won't do you much good because they won't be equipped with anything.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

Hm i thought Scouts can't sneak away a besieged castle not sure though .

Ice devils are nice but if you have them unequipped they are not invincible .
Abysia can't clamhoard before they research water bracelet . Your pretender could clamhoard but normally he has more important tasks like conquering provinces earlygame .
So with water bracelet and either spectres or lucky Warlocks you can clamhoard finally .

But getting the astral items early for your Ice devils if you don't trade isn't so easy .
Boots of flying + an Air resistence item can be if you have no luck with your Warlock random take a while too .

Simliar with Mictlan they lack Earth + Air magic too on their mages .

Earlygame Caelum or Vanheim can be pretty hard opponents against your devils and they may have 1-2 Airqueen SCs then too when you have e.g. 100 devils + 3-4 ice devils / arch devils .

Caelum can screw your blood hunting earlygame by false horror raiding strat , Vanheim can do similiar with this + stealthy Vans .


Bloodhunting costs you a lot because you have to use mages for this + get normally no income from the bloodhunted provinces .
So you have less research than other nations + less gold income .

A staff of storms is very common . Basically every better air nation could give you a lot of trouble if they want to wipe you out early .

The resources you invest in Soul Contract hoarding pay off but it maybe too late .

How do you defend as Abysia/Mictlan when you hord against Vanheim/Caelum/Pythium ?
Finally with the blood nations you can have just plain bad luck and neighbor ermor on the one side + have poor provinces on the other side limiting your bloodhunt abilities more than normal .

It all depends , if you survive the early-midgame your hoarding pays off but often you won't survive early-midgame .
So you will perhaps win half of your games or 1/3 with hoarding but lose the rest .

Abysia is very good at hoarding Bloodstones + Soul contracts while Mictlan is good at hoarding Soul contracts + Clams while e.g. Pythium is damn good at site searching + Clamhoarding .
Normally the different ways to hoard pay off all similiar and the nations who suck at horde are very good early-midgame then instead so they can very often compensate this by territory .

You have a lot of good points though .
What makes the Devil so special are his stats + abilities .
18 attack + 16 def make most ( or all ? ) national troops useless .
18 attack + 16 def is almost as good as a banelord early game SC or similiar .

The devil almost forces your opponent to get staffs of storm + use air magic to counter you . If he can't do this he has probably problems .

But about 1/3 of the nations can do this with little or no effort . Another 1/3 has other not too bad means like banefire ( Ctis desert tombs ) or watermagic . Bladewind and magma eruption etc. should not be tooo bad against devils too .
You are probably more mobile though so you can pick your battles easier .

There are too many different factors to think of that you can say if devils are imbalanced or not .
They are probably costwise the best summon but there has always to be 1 best thing in each area .

But earlygame you use your resources setting up your hoarding factory . So you are very vulnerable there .
Midgame airnations can still give you a good fight and lategame everyone else has other strong measures against you in fields where he is good at .