Ritual bonus from magic sites

[Aleph]

Ignorant aside - Utterdark is "I win" for LA Ermor. Anyone else?

[Micah]

Alright, maybe an autowin only applies to LE Ermor, but the following will sure get a lot of mileage out of Utterdark:

Dreamlands would probably do pretty well with it, all the real troops have darkvision 50 or 100, they have freespawns, and by the time they can get it off their population's gonna be pretty beat up anyhow, so the income reduction hurts a lot less.

Agartha: darkvision and solid death summons to avoid the income hit (they also have a great incentive to take death scales, so again, later game the income hit will kill the income gap between them and growth players). EA agartha at least also benefits a heck of a lot from halving enemy defense skills, and tends to be heavy on sacred troops, so upkeep hurts less.

Any blood nation will similarly have darksighted demons and a mediocre economy, and I don't think blood hunts are impacted by the utterdark.

Any nation with reanimation.

Other nations will have more problems with the income hit, but if they know they'll be casting it they'll have the advantage of having a gold reserve, and can leverage the darkness to help their troops out:

Yomi/Lanka and Shinuyama: More darksight.

Aquatic nations in general tend to have darkvision, and even if they don't I'd take a 5 attack wave warrior against a 10 defense van over a 10 attack wave warrior against a 20 defense van any day, and archers pose much less of a threat...again, when you suck already you're a lot better off if everyone else sucks too.

Plus there are the random attacks on enemy territories that occur, which is never a bad thing. I think that's a pretty significant list of nations that can get some use from the spell though.

[Baalz]

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think that the magic site discount for globals would be useful in most situations, so long as you're aware of how the mechanics work. I haven't really played that many MP games that progressed that far yet, but it seems like you've either got a global that's unlikely to be dispelled (it's not that threatening, there aren't enemy astral mages, there is a MORE threatening global, etc) or (more likely) one you're pretty sure is gonna get hit as soon as the opposition has a chance. In either case, if you've got a site bonus it's a good idea to cast it with the minimum cost for the reason I outline above....the enemy has no idea how many gems you put in (or probably even that you have a site bonus). Either your global is dispelled, or it's not, but in either case you're getting an advantage from the site.

Really, the only situation I see where the site wouldn't make much of a difference is if you're trying to compete for control of a global with somebody else by casting the biggest version of it. When you're competing with a dispell, you've always got a big advantage...as long as you understand the mechanics.

I guess if you've got enough gems that saving 50% of 50 gems is insignificant then it wouldn't be much of an advantage (even after several times), but it does seem like in that situation allowing your 500 gems to count as 1000 would be quite a bit too powerful. Of course, EVEN then the game is to get your opponent to cast a 1000 pearl dispell on your 25 gem enchantment, so cast it often at the cheapest price, then every now and then cast it at 100 gems so a minimal dispell won't work. How many pearls will he throw in then? If you've got so many gems, the site makes it more feasible to spam the global and your opponent never knows how many gems he needs to use to dispell...