MA Man in latest CBM

[Kuritza]

If Mothers start their training in Avalon and then travel the world so you can recruit them everywhere, they are accompanied by their Wardens. Who hail from Avalon and have Sidhe blood in them and are trained in one and the only place called whatever it is called, but travel the world with Mothers of Avalon.

[Squirrelloid]

Besides, flavor can always be rewritten. Anything can be justified as being thematic. Game mechanics are far more important because MP fails if nations aren't roughly comparable.

In this case, the flavor is even fine as is - its not about where they're trained, its about where they are *available*, and since they seem to roam the world after training, they are available everywhere.

[Redeyes]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

In this case, the flavor is even fine as is - its not about where they're trained, its about where they are *available*, and since they seem to roam the world after training, they are available everywhere.

The other problem might be that there is too many of them - the Wardens are supposedly the elite few.
But then, players have a habit of recruiting the elites exclusively...

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Redeyes

The other problem might be that there is too many of them - the Wardens are supposedly the elite few.
But then, players have a habit of recruiting the elites exclusively...

The problem is that resources are in general stupidly high so that they're the limiting factor on recruiting heavily armored troops of any quality, even with Productivity 3. At which point, if you're going to be spending all those resources for n+-2 units anyway, you might as well get the best units for those resources. Gold costs do not serve to effectively discriminate in the case of armored troops because gold is a liquid asset while resources are not.

Basically, its a question of massability. If two units are within epsilon of each other in massability, the better unit will always be chosen over the other because it will out perform and is approximately as easy to mass.

[Illuminated One]

Well, the one thing to fix that is not having "better" but different troops.
Bowmen and Knights (which are Man's army according to the nation description) would both be recruited if you couldn't spend your gold on clearly better sacreds.

[Redeyes]

Originally Posted by Illuminated One

Bowmen and Knights (which are Man's army according to the nation description) would both be recruited if you couldn't spend your gold on clearly better sacreds.

The other aspect is the question of upkeep, as is you can have roughly 2 knights, 5 wardens, or 7 Longbowmen in you army for the same cost. With those numbers I think Wardens are a rather apparent better choice for your standing army.

Anyway, this problem is much deeper ingrained in the system and can't be solved easily.
A starter might be to rebalance the cost of the knights - they are 50% more expensive than Marignon's equivalent, for instance.

[thejeff]

Well, the sacreds are only clearly better if you've sunk the points into a strong bless at pretender creation.
And the blesses suggested for them are not path the nation particularly needs on its pretender.

I haven't spent a lot of time with the new Man, none in MP. My impression was the the change made using a bless strategy possible, but far from the obvious choice. Wardens aren't that good. The stealth is nice, but they're still expensive, hard to mass, slow, unshielded humans.
And taking the obvious EN bless does nothing to address Man's serious magic diversity problem.

[Kuritza]

How about borrowing a bit from LA Man and giving MA Man some scholar with a minor access to Astral and Earth? A mediocre researcher with a 25% chance for 1S and another 25% for 1E.
Or perhaps a 'learned monks' theme - give these monks same 25% chance to have 1E or 1S. Its not much, but even S1 is a big boost to a non-astral nation.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by quantum_mechani

Better stealth is also quite possible (though personally I consider that a minor consideration compared to price).

Every little helps And if given say 10 stealth, I can see the Monk having a use again (at least from my view). As that would make it more difficult to discover him and any troops he may be leading, and if you are using him for stealthy preaching, you won't have to keep sending him back in when his current 0 stealth makes him get discovered all the time.

Originally Posted by Kuritza

Or perhaps a 'learned monks' theme - give these monks same 25% chance to have 1E or 1S. Its not much, but even S1 is a big boost to a non-astral nation.

Quite like this idea, although maybe the theme purists would take issue (although it could easily fit in with their transition to LA). Maybe 25% ES or 25% E and S is a bit much, but if the Monk had say 10% chance of getting S, then that would see them getting recruited for sure. As landing just one of those S1's would make a world of difference to MA Man.

[thejeff]

What I've long thought about for Man is something that would tie into the Curse that's on LA Man. Some particularly horrible late-game summon that could have unleashed the curse, perhaps.