Dominions Nations Evaluations ;)

[quantum_mechani]

MaxWilson said:
QM,

I'll note up front that I waited until Jim lifted the "experience" restriction until I posted. There's a lot I don't know about the game. Nevertheless:

I see Ulm being quite strong early on because they have great troops, but as the game wears on that matters less and less. I'm less impressed than you are by Ulm's weak mages. Forge bonus is nice, but if you're just using that bonus to forge equipment to bring you up to the same level everybody else has naked I don't see that as much of an advantage. Ulm kind of peters out in my eyes as its troops become less relevant.

C'tis has a strong expansion story in the early game largely because of the Elite Warriors and the charioteers. I do have trouble with them if I run into cold scales, and maybe I should have rated them lower on the "ease of use" because of that. But the troops are very good, skelly spam is easy to research, and Sauromancers are cheap.

Perhaps I'm overestimating Marverni--it's been a while since I played them--but I quite liked their Ambibate Nobles and all the javelin-carrying troops. I thought they were pretty solid, especially after you cast Strength of Giants.

Basically, "early game" to me means "before mages are really relevant." So my early game ratings are mostly about troops.

-Max

The problem is, your ratings seem to be largely based on the strength of Ea Ulm/Marverni/C'tis regular troops, when that tends to not be all that relevant when in an EA early game fight. You can have troops far better for the price as similar indies (ulm archers and c'tis elite warriors come to mind), but they can still be shredded by a few properly blessed helhirdlings or niefel giants. If you remove mages from the equation, these nations have almost no chance in such a situation.

I also strongly disagree about Ulm's forge bonus wearing down with time. The late game revolves around thugs and SCs for the most part, and while there is little worthwhile to forge early, you are pouring maybe even the majority of your gems into it by the late game.

[JimMorrison]

Ooohh, this is good, I like it.

You are free to debate these issues in this thread QM, it helps increase interest and overall accuracy. Just as long as you don't scare people off, but so far you come off as knowledgeable rather than arrogant (someone would have to be pretty thin skinned to make that leap with you, I think), then we're doing good things here. 8 )

[dirtywick]

quantum_mechani said:

I also strongly disagree about Ulm's forge bonus wearing down with time. The late game revolves around thugs and SCs for the most part, and while there is little worthwhile to forge early, you are pouring maybe even the majority of your gems into it by the late game.

The forge bonus is pretty significant throughout the game. You can reasonable afford to produce a lot of quills without a lot of air income, and forge a lot of earth boots (followed by dwarven hammers), girdles of might, and if you want to empower a smith, thistle maces among other things. E3N3 antlered shamans are a lot better than E2N2, and it's not a big investment at 50% the gems to do it often. Plus gearing up standard commanders with longbows of accuracy or scepters of fire isn't a big investment.

I don't know, I find it pretty useful in conserving earth gems at least. The earth boots are pretty popular items for my mages.

[MaxWilson]

quantum_mechani said:
The problem is, your ratings seem to be largely based on the strength of Ea Ulm/Marverni/C'tis regular troops, when that tends to not be all that relevant when in an EA early game fight. You can have troops far better for the price as similar indies (ulm archers and c'tis elite warriors come to mind), but they can still be shredded by a few properly blessed helhirdlings or niefel giants. If you remove mages from the equation, these nations have almost no chance in such a situation.

I also strongly disagree about Ulm's forge bonus wearing down with time. The late game revolves around thugs and SCs for the most part, and while there is little worthwhile to forge early, you are pouring maybe even the majority of your gems into it by the late game.

That's why Helheim and Niefelheim are 5s in the early game. There really aren't many normal troops that can stand up to them at all--you NEED mages to fight them. Edit: I've revised my early-game rating of EA Ermor to reflect this. Their troops are solid but can't compete with Helheim and Niefelheim.

Ulm's forge bonus is like a 50% boost in gem production relative to just hammers. That's non-negligible, but considering how little their mages can actually forge it seems more a midgame issue to me than a true lategame strategy. By the time people are throwing around Tartarians and Seraphs, how much does it really matter that Ulm can forge Earth Boots for 5 gems instead of 7? The lack of high-level mages and poor Astral/Death, unmitigated by access to good thug chassises, seems to me a serious weakness.

Not that that has to stop Ulm. As noted several times elsewhere (including by yourself), the endgame ratings are iffy anyway because there's a good chance you can leverage a strong beginning into a good ending, and you can diversify your magic with indies or your pretender.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Indeed, there's always the "can" and "potential" factors. It's interesting when you isolate them down to their core, the "ease of play" takes a severe hit when you start to see that pretender choice is severely limited based on the needs of the stock nation, and that not taking the right pretender, will ultimately leave you noncompetitive. By the same token, all of the severely path limited nations can benefit greatly from various mage recruitment sites, but you never know what you're going to find, and for example I find it disheartening and almost insulting (in a lighthearted way) when every game I play an aquatic race, I find one of the sites (or 2, or 3) that let you train water mages.

And by the same token, while you can assume that you will find at least ONE special site of some kind, maybe it's a Conj bonus site but you're a blood nation, or it just lets you train mages of a path you already have, there's so many variables.


Hopefully in the next few days, more people feel emboldened to post their ratings here. Remember there are no wrong answers, just maybe some that aren't thought all the way through, no one will hate for those, though they may ask you why you think that way.

[quantum_mechani]

MaxWilson said:


That's why Helheim and Niefelheim are 5s in the early game. There really aren't many normal troops that can stand up to them at all--you NEED mages to fight them.

Ulm's forge bonus is a 33% boost in gem production relative to just hammers. That's non-negligible, but considering how little their mages can actually forge it seems more a midgame issue to me than a true lategame strategy. By the time people are throwing around Tartarians and Seraphs, how much does it really matter that Ulm can forge Earth Boots for 5 gems instead of 7? The lack of high-level mages and poor Astral/Death, unmitigated by access to good thug chassises, seems to me a serious weakness.

Not that that has to stop Ulm. As noted several times elsewhere (including by yourself), the endgame ratings are iffy anyway because there's a good chance you can diversify your magic with indies or your pretender.

-Max

Well let me put it this way, if Marverni rates a 4 in troops, what could possibly rate a 1? I agree that helhiem and niefelhiem are in their own tier, but there is a whole range underneath them, largely revolving around the power of their sacred troops.


As far as the late game rating, the reason why for the most part I would not put much stock in it specifically because access to high astral/death is the sort of thing easily fixed by anyone. An additional 25% forge bonus (stacked with hammers and maybe even forge of ancients) on the other hand is one the very few things a nation can off that can't be reproduced. And it's hardly just earth boots, those smiths can get to probably half the most important bits of SC equpment- fire shields, marble armor, frost brands, boots of flying, resistance rings (also very important to protect against flames from the sky), etc. Anyway, my point was less how outstanding they are later, but just that they hardly go down hill.

[MaxWilson]

Hmmm. A fair point. 4 is probably too high for Marverni's troops considering the competition. "Adequate" = 3 is probably more appropriate, since their elites (Ambibate nobles) are not deficient but not unusual outstanding for elites.

Of course, that means Agartha has to go down to 2.

-Max

[Zeldor]

There is really a reason why only experienced people's opinions should make the real ranking. Even if there aren't so many opinions.

Marverni probalby scales 1-2 in troops That's as challenging as expanding with just LA Bogarus armies.

[Twan]

Some more :

LA Atlantis 4 3 3 4 3 (cheap sacreds and/or Dagon pretender + amphibiousity allow fast expansion in all directions, but nation become weaker in mid-late game due to weak mages and lack of diversity out of capitol, nation remain capable in endgame as capitol ones are tough and have correct death levels + access to interesting water-death summons)
LA Mictlan 4 3 4 1 2 (bad learning note due to the sacrifice dom ; nation is strong in early game due to its sacred and in late with summoned demon uniques and unlimited slave income ; nation is weaker in midgame as blood researchs/hunting take a moment to pay)
LA Patala 4 4 3 4 2 (elephants allow good expansion, mages are very powerful for late age, and magical economy is excellent, with easy forge of both hammers and clams - nation looks harder to play in MP due to the vulnerability of nagarishis against magic duel)
LA Arco 2 3 3 4 2 (heavy elephants slow your expansion compared to ME ones, they remain as useless in mid-late game due to poor MR and aren't really harder to kill or better as you will have a 2 or 3 time smaller number of them -except if you sacrify a lot of points in production, but so you'll have bad other scales-, correct other troops and very diverse magic allow a rather good mid-late game, but the nation is far to be dominating -the loss of one astral level on the best mages is an heavy price for more nature and a weak access to death ; also 8hp and low def sybyls are easily killed by a simple earthquake ; I prefer by far ME for Arco)
LA Ulm 2 2? 4? 1 ? (started several games with this nation which seem to have a rather good potential with its vampires and spawned wolfs, mix of heavy and stealthy troops, sacred and anti-sacred units etc... but I find it very hard to play, handicaped in research, and too much relying on its pretender)
LA Caelum 4 3 3 3 3 (a medium nation, with good mammoth based expansion, but the lose of astral access is a big price for more death, and the nation is more capitol dependant than in other eras)
LA Chelm 3 3 2 4 2 (longbowmen as less usefull in LA due to more heavy indies, rather good troops and diversified magic give the nation a good midgame potential, but mages are not really powerful especially for late game)

[MaxWilson]

By the way, a quick test shows 23 F9W9 Helhirdlings get consistently pwned by the equivalent gold-cost of indy slingers. Marverni's slingers are slightly more expensive but still work better than the warriors, so if you get in a war with Helheim go for the cheap troops.

-Max