Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[K]

Originally Posted by thejeff

From your original post:

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.

Yeh, I used a very conservative model to illustrate a point about expansion on different map sizes. In a more reasonable model, or even an ideal model the rates are much higher.

But how am I going to know that I've been placed in a "constrained by geography" part of a map until after I've started?

Originally Posted by KissBlade

Your impression that a bless strat is somehow worse off in a small map versus a big one due to "dogpiling" is ridiculous as any good player using an uber bless are able to fend off 3-4 non blessed nations early game without very specific counters easily while stomping them one nation at a time with strategic use of chokes and general good planning in expansion tactics.

Oh, you can hold off 3-4 players for a while. You can even take down one of your attackers and take his stuff.

But you won't win the game because while you are embroiled in a war with 3-4 players and holding your own or slowly expanding, other people are in wars with one guy at a time and by midgame and lategame they've been expanding their research and hoarding their gems for globals while you've been sending mages into battle and using gems for spells and combat magic.

But sure, in a perfect game you could win despite all that and take all comers.

Originally Posted by KissBlade

Then you posit this with a paragraph claiming that game winning strategies are "Building badass SCs ... Building a giant stockpile of Blood summons that costs no support and then unleashing them on enemies while you paralyze their troop production with ritual magic and execute armies with Horrors can do that..."

You've never scoured provinces with Horrors and taken them with flying demons? Or seen how effective Horrors can be vs armies without heavy mage support, especially when Astral Corruption is occasionally upgrading Horrors? Or shutdown enemy troop production with Rain of Toads?

Its a viable enddgame strategy if you have been turtling for a while and have a stockpile of blood slaves.

Originally Posted by KissBlade

That whole spiel makes it sound as if you're playing against newbies, AI or players stuck in the stone age of research while you're hitting 9's. On top of the fact that your point of Arcane Nexus shows your inexperience since the spell is either banned or good players WILL dogpile you and significantly more so for casting spells like Nexus or Utterdark than playing a bless nation with an out of the gates province rate.

Yeh, I don't play in a lot of the games the vets run because I think its pretty cowardly to play in a game where the Utterdark and Astral Nexus has been banned. Removing spells that bring a conclusion to the game just means you want to set up a game that favors your strategies because you are afraid someone might beat you.

I also don't play CBM games. Does that make me "out of touch"?

I've played a lot of multiplayer and as far as I can tell the only difference between vets and noobs is that vets know how dangerous each other are and they either turtle until endgame or they dogpile one player at a time (unless they are neighbors to an obviously weak empire). They also pool gems to knock down game-ending globals and trade a fair bit.

Your experience has varied. I get it. The reason I don't respect you or your opinion is because my experience has obviously varied from yours and on more than one occasion I have pulled off plans that "accepted opinion" consider impossible or unwise.

I get it. I take risks you won't. I play in games where someone might cast the Utterdark, and you won't. I'll cast a game-ending global and risk a dogpile by other guys with equal research because its endgame and I consider it the only time you can effectively fight a dogpile off. I play on medium maps because turtling and fighting indies for 20 turns bores the crap out of me.

Seriously. I understand where you are coming from.

Now you can get the last word in to sooth your pride and ego by reiterating the same unconvincing points. Or not. Your choice. I'm done either way.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by K

In all seriousness and semi-friendly jabbing aside, the last time I proved someone wrong about a strategy game by playing a public game with them he ended up in a hospital because he had a nervous breakdown the same day he received the turn where I did the killing stroke to his empire. I'm not going to claim credit for his personal problems, but from then on I decided that being proven right in public is not worth it, especially for a game that is supposed to be about fun.

Yeah don't argue with K, he's so right you might actually GO MAD from, you know, how right he is. OR DIE.

[RabbitDynamite]

D9 Blesses: SERIOUS F'N BUSINESS!

[Hoplosternum]

I have not played as many games as K, Kissblade, CP or theJeff but I think I have played enough to have a healthy respect for heavy bless nations. Quick expansion, not just against indies, but also against other players can often net enough provinces to put them in a very strong position as your nation goes in to the middle game. As more provinces (and capitals) mean more gold (so more mages) and more gems in the medium to long term.

Where I think K has more of a point is that such growth and aggression can lead to gang ups. But it's not a sure thing. While it's in everyone elses interest that the early leader is taken down it is not in most peoples interested that they do much of the actual fighting - except the vital task of grabing provinces after the early leader power has been broken So such gang ups are fraught with difficulties. Plus there is seldom just one early leader or heavy blesser for everyone else to concentrate on. Nor is a successful early rusher easy to take down even in the mid game thanks to their large number of sacreds and the boost the extra lands, income and gems give them.

But while successfully using a dual bless only might result in a gang up, casting Utterdark certainly will. You basically kill the chances of many (most) other nations. They are dead unless your global is dispelled. While there may be some trust issues they are dead if they don't cooperate against you. Thats just not the case with an early bless fuelled leader. He only might be ganged up on and often only half heartedly at that.

I think the risk of a heavy bless strategy is not that it succeeds and puts you in such a strong position that enough enemies gang up against you but that it simply fails. An early bless rush is not a sure thing even against a none bless nation. All none bless nations need to have some defence worked out vs bless rushers. And while it is usually in the long run fatal to be the victim of such a rush you can't always be defeated in time (or even at all) to make the cost of the rush pay for the heavy blesser. And of course having paid in design points for a heavy bless sometimes you may find yourself surrounded by other dual bless nations and so with no comparative early advantage.

I think the original poster suggested that a D9 bless was as useful early on as an F9. Despite marshelling some interesting arguments I and most of the responders don't think this is so in most cases. There may be some scenarios where they are equal. But for early expansion F9 is usually a lot better.

But you don't have to buy in to K's Utterdark strategy to accept that having D9 on your Pretender is more useful spell casting wise than having F9. There are exceptions, but if you were offered a D9 Hero or an F9 one most nations would rather have the former.

Nor is it especially controversial to say by the mid to late game the F9 bless - while not useless - is not that big a plus as it was. F9 is at it's most useful in the first couple of years and declines in importance as the game goes on. You need to make it pay early in most cases and it's certainly strong enough to do that if you have the right kind of sacreds. While the effects of a death bless are still useful even in the end game, possibly more so when spells can affect the whole battlefield. Sure it's better to kill enemy SCs, mages and armies than afflict them, but thats still a useful side effect.

You don't see that many D9 blesses. For anyone to spend the points on a 9 or 10 bless of any kind that final bonus has to be good. And the resitable disease/2 AN just isn't. The main boost of the bless is the extra afflictions and the end game high death caster. But you don't need D9 for those. There are very few nations or scenarios I can think of where I would rather have an imprisoned D9 over a sleeping D6 Pretender. Thats still a +200% affliction boost and gets your Pretender up and about much sooner. Quite frankly Death 4 still gives you an affliction bless and opens the door to the death Thugs, Tartarians and the late game death spells at a fraction of the cost and without all the summoning X to call Y to summon Z needed if you have little to no death on your national mages or pretender.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Hoplosternum

Nor is it especially controversial to say by the mid to late game the F9 bless - while not useless - is not that big a plus as it was. F9 is at it's most useful in the first couple of years and declines in importance as the game goes on. You need to make it pay early in most cases and it's certainly strong enough to do that if you have the right kind of sacreds. While the effects of a death bless are still useful even in the end game, possibly more so when spells can affect the whole battlefield. Sure it's better to kill enemy SCs, mages and armies than afflict them, but thats still a useful side effect.

In my mind, an F9 bless is still useful late in the game, because it increases the amount of chaff the enemy needs to have to protect his mages. (Particularly if your F9 sacreds are buffed with things like SoG/WoS/Fog Warriors/etc.) The limiting factor isn't so much the bless as the fact that most nations don't scale well--unless you have good recruitable-anywhere sacreds (Mictlan) you won't be fighting his chaff with sacreds anyway, making bless irrelevant.

-Max

[KissBlade]

Originally Posted by K

Now you can get the last word in to sooth your pride and ego by reiterating the same unconvincing points. Or not. Your choice. I'm done either way.

Isn't that exactly what you were doing with your whole post ...?

That and you've contradicted yourself so many times in this post and well ... the entire time spent in this thread that I'm not even sure if it's worth the two pages to list and refute them anymore.

[Sombre]

Clearly Kissblade doesn't want to risk going blind or losing a limb from K's devastating arguments.

[Calahan]

K turned me into a newt.........I got better.

[Sombre]

He's not going to take credit for turning you into a newt. But it is the reason he doesn't correct people's grammar in public any more.

[Agema]

As far as I can see it, both the pro- and anti- D9 bless arguments are hedged under a vast stream of "ifs". IF you've been able to collect a huge stock of blood slaves. IF you don't get jumped by 3-4 adversaries. IF you cast utterdark and no-one removes it, IF you can expand freely because geography has been kind. IF no-one has been able to turtle. IF it's a large/medium/small map, IF etc.

All this really tells us is that lots of strategies are viable. The games everyone is talking about have had particular circumstances in game setup, what the other players have done and will also have depended how good they were.