Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[thejeff]

Originally Posted by K

You'll note I said "take a province" and not "send out an army". Practical matters such as being able to reach new indies or being forced to go around provinces with something crazy like 30 knights or six Dark Vines or something means you most likely won't be consistently hitting the benchmarks until the turns I outlined. Its more a matter of the geography of your map more than anything else, so you might be much faster if there are lots of connections on your map and no impassable mountains or special indies that require you to merge two or more province-taking armies.

Maybe you play on very different maps than I have. Or maybe we're talking past each other. Obviously there's a difference between taking provinces and sending out armies. I find that becomes more significant later in the indy clearing phase. I don't think I've ever been in a game where, with a little planning I couldn't reliably find provinces to take with at least the 1st and 2nd armies. By the time they have to start back tracking the 3rd army should have targets to attack. And every other turn is slow for a uber bless nation.

From your original post:

Originally Posted by K

It works like this. On a big map, a Bless nation starts taking a province a turn around turn 2 or 3. By turn 7-8, he's taking two a turn. By 15 he's taking 3 a turn(the rate slows as he needs to start backtracking and moving to the front).

I simply don't see how sending out an army at least every other turn can lead to progress like that. Sure there will be some backtracking and some indies you have to bypass or combine to take, but to do that badly most of those armies won't be attacking most turns. If you're that constrained by geography, skip the bless and just use regular troops. You should be able to do as well.

Originally Posted by K

But yeh, on very large maps where you can actually enter 48 indie provinces before meeting a neighbor, you don't need any other tactic. I totally said that. In fact, I wrote a page explaining that.

And as I said, you need more of a plan than just bless rush. I'm not disagreeing with that. But you're claiming an uber-bless is ineffective even at what it's good at.