EA Arco - uncle moneybags

[Illuminated One]

What I've been wondering is if you could make good use of the sceptics.

You have a lot of castles, probably more then you can build a lab in, your dom isn't to strong and you don't need to much temples.

So in theory you could take drain, get better scales otherwise, and put your research centers at the front, where your masses of bloodhunting sceptics are keeping both your and the enemies dominion out. And if you just see your enemies dom being vulnerable sneaking 20 sceptics into his lands is a nice surprise.
The biggest problem is that once you have drain in a province, you can't do much about it, so you must conquer a good bunch of territory without your god.

[aaminoff]

The swing from magic-1 to drain-2 does get you a significant stack of design points, I like your idea of using skeptics to create a magic scales neutral research center, and in the first year those philosophers are not hurt too badly by it at research 8-1=7.

So I have been wanting for months to try this using the Virtue. My question is, how important is the minor N bless? In my experience with Helheim's Vanjarls, the regen just does not kick in all that often - if you are taking damage, you take enough damage that fairly quickly the mistform gets popped and then a couple large hits and thats it. Whereas most of the time awe + defense + protection keeps the hits off entirely. The exception would be poison, where regen is a great way to be poison-immune, but we can get there by using nature magic instead.

I want to skip the N bless because with the Virtue's new path cost of 70 or so, I can afford only one new path: E4, which also bumps up her naked protection into the range where stray hits that get through from typical indies are fairly minor.

[edit: Im contemplating this under CBM, where the Virtue starts with A and S and is a bit cheaper]

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by aaminoff

So I have been wanting for months to try this using the Virtue. My question is, how important is the minor N bless? In my experience with Helheim's Vanjarls, the regen just does not kick in all that often - if you are taking damage, you take enough damage that fairly quickly the mistform gets popped and then a couple large hits and thats it. Whereas most of the time awe + defense + protection keeps the hits off entirely. The exception would be poison, where regen is a great way to be poison-immune, but we can get there by using nature magic instead.

I want to skip the N bless because with the Virtue's new path cost of 70 or so, I can afford only one new path: E4, which also bumps up her naked protection into the range where stray hits that get through from typical indies are fairly minor.

[edit: Im contemplating this under CBM, where the Virtue starts with A and S and is a bit cheaper]

I don't think a N bless is critical for EA Arco, more nice to have. It is critical for nations like Eriu with a whole lot of lighter thugs, but the oriads can cast regen themselves if they want to and are likley tough enough to make do without in lots of situations. Plus, you're not fielding that many (compared to ie Eriu) so you can stick better equipment on them.

[KissBlade]

I'm actually fond of the Green Dragon chassis in CBM for a bless. mostly because he flies as well!

[Wrana]

Also, the Blue Dragon makes Wind Riders very heavy-hitting while protecting Oreiaedes. Still, Earth bless is very good. And Bull is VERY thematic here.

[Maerlande]

The whole problem with skeptics is simple. Why the heck are you recruiting skeptics instead of mystics?

[Maerlande]

The whole problem with skeptics is simple. Why the heck are you recruiting skeptics instead of mystics?

[Graeme Dice]

If you're mad-castling, it's possible to run into the situation where you can't afford to recruit a mage in every castle. Or where recruiting only mages would be detrimental to your war effort because what you really need is more bodies to either speed sieges or protect those mages you already have out fighting.

[Maerlande]

Fair enough Graeme. But he was talking about spamming 20 heretics. Better to save the money and buy 8 mystics in my opinion.

[aaminoff]

Why the heck are you recruiting skeptics instead of mystics?

It's a matter of choosing which path you want to take to defeat your opponent. Arco is never going to win trying to go toe to toe with the big combat powers. So instead I would invest a bit in sceptics and try for the dom kill. Admittedly even with Dom10 it is harder without blood sacrifice, but certainly the judicious use of a few sceptics to remove the critical few enemy candles seems vastly easier than defeating their uber blessed army / SC pretender / hordes of chaff. Still, 20 seems like hyperbole unless you are talking about late game. I suppose one should be able to figure out the math for how many sceptics it would take to reliably create a neutral magic scale research center against own dominion.

Does anyone have any comments on the necessity of a minor N bless?