I can't seem get Vanheim to work. Need some help.

[quantum_mechani]

FrankTrollman said:
Sacred Troops is a stupid pet trick.

eh.... say that to an army of f9 w9 blessed vans knocking at your capital on turn 10

Even more modest blesses can be well worth it, C'tis serpent dancers for instance with f4 w4 a4 are very cost effective compared to most troops.

[Turin]

or hydras with earth 9 nature 9,

or ice devils with a shroud of the battle saint and water9 nature 9,

or jotuns with earth9 nature 9, the hirdman becomes pretty awesome and you can recruit them en masse with resource cost 11.
Jotunjarls become super cheap thugs, just give them a hell sword lucky pendant,quickness armor +5 attack ring and winged boots and they can take down pretty much every SC/Thug for the price of 15 blood/20 gems 130 gold.
One of mine won against an emberwilding heliophagus.

generally you´re right the game is dominated by mages and bless strategies aren´t costeffective, but if you think astral/fire9 flagellants are the best blessings, you need to play around a bit more with other sacred troops.

[quantum_mechani]

Turin said:
or hydras with earth 9 nature 9,

Sorry, but I've tested this a lot, and they suck no matter what the bless.

[HotNifeThruButr]

Ah. Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. I'd really prefer to not have to use ultra-blessed Vans or mini-supercombatant Vanherse, since they kinda take the fun out of the game for me. Is that the only way to win as Vanheim?

[Truper]

quantum_mechani said:

eh.... say that to an army of f9 w9 blessed vans knocking at your capital on turn 10

Yep, all 3 of them

[ioticus]

Don't you have to take really crappy scales to afford F9 W9 or some such?

[Huzurdaddi]

I totally disagree with FrankTrollman here. Sacred troops with the matching bless ( Truper did a good job describing a few ) whomp normal troops very, very badly.

The only national troop that is cost effective aginst a highly blessed troops is crossbows. Every other troops dollar for dollar gets whomped and whmoped badly. For a demonstration come to the IRC channel and play one of the bliztes. Some yahoo is always trying out a bless stragetgy and they generally rock for blitzes.

[Boron]

Huzurdaddi said:
I totally disagree with FrankTrollman here. Sacred troops with the matching bless ( Truper did a good job describing a few ) whomp normal troops very, very badly.

Exactly. Especially with a f9w9 bless you get a ****load of attacks and any normal melee troops, even good ones like Principes have a hard time hitting the f9w9 blessed troop while during a quickness round this blessed troop dishes out up to 8 attacks with a really good attack rating of 14+.

Huzurdaddi said:

The only national troop that is cost effective aginst a highly blessed troops is crossbows.

I find targeting with X-bows difficult if the bless troop user uses a few decoys.
Then you can't target the main bunch of blessed troops and with the quickness bless they usually need not long to get to the X-bows.

[FrankTrollman]

Don't you have to take really crappy scales to afford F9 W9 or some such?

Yes. Yes you do.

Let's assume for the moment a dominion score of 6 (the minimum needed to keep a Ceremonial Faith Man from just Preaching you off the map), and Fire 9, and Water 9.

That costs a variable amount depending upon what god you take, because magic picks cost 8 points triangular past the starting value and Dominion costs 7 points triangular past the starting dominion.

The cheapest is a Moloch, which costs only 707 points for that set-up.

Other options include a Dragon (Blue or Red) at 776 points, a Golden Naga at 801 points, a Frost Father at 810 points, and a Monolith at a cool 845 points (with the advantage that you actually have a point of Nature and a point of Astral, so for only 48 more points your blessed troops can have berserking or bonus MR).

That's all well and good, but as Vanheim you only get 540 points to start with (assuming the Cold 1 that Vanheim already gets as a gimme), so even the cheapest option there is going to require a total of 5 net points of negative scales. Good luck with that.

-Frank

[Graeme Dice]

FrankTrollman said:
That's all well and good, but as Vanheim you only get 540 points to start with (assuming the Cold 1 that Vanheim already gets as a gimme), so even the cheapest option there is going to require a total of 5 net points of negative scales. Good luck with that.

5 negative scales are pretty easy to run with for many nations, especially when using sacred troops that cost few resources. For Vanheim, you have an easy F9W9 Moloch with order 3, sloth 3, cold 1, death 2, misfortune 3, neutral magic and dominion 7.