Niefelheim - Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Baalz

The blessing really is just for the Jarl...ok, it benefits the Niefel giant units as well but that's not a significant factor. You have a darn hard time justifying it with shrouds of the battle saint while simultaneously axing your astral income. All your astral income is going into starshine caps, crystal coins, lucky pendants, amulets of MR, teleports, battlefield spells.... or empowering your pretender as you suggest. The really important factor in my thesis is that practically any 3 gems you scrape up = armor = another SC. Trying to focus more on your pearls is introducing a serious bottleneck.

Nonsense. Shrouds are cheap--3 pearls or 6 of any other gem you have on hand. That's cheaper than most of the other armors you suggest.

-Max

[Baalz]

[quote=MaxWilson;664215]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Nonsense. Shrouds are cheap--3 pearls or 6 of any other gem you have on hand. That's cheaper than most of the other armors you suggest.

-Max

rime haubrick, hydra skin, armor of souls, black steel plate, copper plate, fire plate.

Nope, it's not cheaper. The armor I list are all either 3 gems or in a path you reasonably expect to have a strong income in with not a lot else to spend gems on at that stage. Pearls have a huge competition for opportunity costs, therefore pearls are more valuable. You've got *lots* of stuff to spend pearls on, and are probably dumping all your D into skull mentors. This leaves everything else to go to exactly one thing: armor for your SCs. No other items are necessary, you're forging nothing but armor with your gems and can fall back to using just blood slaves if you can't even manage that. Seems clever to alchemize 6N into a battle shroud, until you realize you just basically got the same thing as the hydra skin only with the added cost of fielding the blessing. The only other thing it possibly makes sense to alchemize is water gems which probably does make sense if you have the blessing anyway, but is a weak argument to justify the whole blessing on.

[AreaOfEffect]

@ Maxwell - What you need to understand about relief is that it doesn't give reinvigoration, but reinvigorates, which is a big difference. Relief reinvigorates each unit using a separate open-ended die roll. You can expect at least 1 point of fatigue to be recovered, but I average it much higher. Because its open-ended I've seen recovery as high as 17 points of fatigue.

@ Kissblade - Your thesis is based on the idea that a jarl without a E9-N4/6 bless is nothing. That isn't remotely close to the truth as that bless provides only a meager boost. A boost that is completely reproducible with magical items or battlefield spells. Jarls start out scary and their bless just makes them slightly scarier. The bless is just an add-on to an amazing unit. Take it away and they are still jarls. Also, you highly underestimate what 3 years of additional earth income amounts to. It isn't one or two extra hammers, but an income to actually do something with your pretender. As for being able to cast anything worth while, a pair of earth boots and the blood stone you picked up after empowering your god in blood lets you cast every earth spell in the game! Even with just the boots you lack the ability to cast Earth Blood Deep Well and that is all. A real earth pretender has skill in other paths so that he can do things like summon Golems, rain down meteors in combat, forge swords that deal non-resistible AoE damage with each swing, and make astral boosters for all his fellow astral mages. In my estimation, the real earth pretender is the master lich described, not some stupid one-eyed monster who got caught!

[KissBlade]

Originally Posted by AreaOfEffect

@ Kissblade - Your thesis is based on the idea that a jarl without a E9-N4/6 bless is nothing. That isn't remotely close to the truth as that bless provides only a meager boost. A boost that is completely reproducible with magical items or battlefield spells. Jarls start out scary and their bless just makes them slightly scarier. The bless is just an add-on to an amazing unit. Take it away and they are still jarls. Also, you highly underestimate what 3 years of additional earth income amounts to. It isn't one or two extra hammers, but an income to actually do something with your pretender. As for being able to cast anything worth while, a pair of earth boots and the blood stone you picked up after empowering your god in blood lets you cast every earth spell in the game! Even with just the boots you lack the ability to cast Earth Blood Deep Well and that is all. A real earth pretender has skill in other paths so that he can do things like summon Golems, rain down meteors in combat, forge swords that deal non-resistible AoE damage with each swing, and make astral boosters for all his fellow astral mages. In my estimation, the real earth pretender is the master lich described, not some stupid one-eyed monster who got caught!

Where do you get the idea my thesis is based on this? A) 3 years = dormant? Last time I checked it was one year. B) E9 globals are significantly tougher to dispel than e4. C) The pretender I mentioned can do all of this ju st as easily. I didn't say anything about a cyclops.

The point is build still allows you to use the same exact strats. NO good niefel players I know neglects skrattis or gygjas even when blessed, that thought's ridiculous. And the ability to toss on shrouds on your skratti's is just an alternative and as I said, regular jotun jarls become great thugs with just the bless. As for the bless being recoverable by items. ANYTHING can be pumped up by items. I can power my indie commanders to be SC's if I get enough gems but that's not cost effective. prot+4, reinvig +4, regen and the extra MR is a lot of slots and gems. Casting "bless" in battle is free.

[Renojustin]

Something very easy to consider here would be to drop your Magic level from 1 to -2. That's 120 points that are going to fall right into your lap for practically free. Any nation that can build skull mentors is losing very little for the trade, and Neifelheim also has nice, high-value researchers who aren't hurt by the research drain.

A nice bonus is that the drain dominion is yet another dominion penalty to force on your opponents, particularly when you're using Earth 9 bless for heavy reinvigoration regardless. (Which you can now do, among other things, with your 120 extra points.)

[thejeff]

Oh! I've never really bothered with relief because it claimed to be only 1 fatigue. If it gets a die roll, then that changes everything.

[Baalz]

@AreaOfEffect: Ah, I also never realized relief was worthwhile, I never once cast it after reading the description. That certainly makes it on the list then.

[Baalz]

Eh, I don't know, I suppose you could pick up drain but it wouldn't be my first choice. It'll drop your researchers from 8 to 6 research, a drop of over a third. You could make it work for sure with your strong early game using no research, but if you're planning on having your pretender out site searching rather than researching this can be a long way up to constr-4, and you're likely not going to have the D gems to do something like what I suggested in the Helheim guide (where several mages are out site searching). All in all I'd say you're better off stacking the mentors on top of already solid research - your research is going to win it for you in the end of the game rather than your blessing.

[Tifone]

Wow, I have to admit I was in the group of the "never bothered with Relief" too. Now those Clockwork Horrors really become worthy!! Thanks a bunch AreaOfEffect

[AreaOfEffect]

@ Kissblade - My apologies, I mistakenly put you in the imprisoned category. I suppose I was temporarily blinded by rage.