Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by K

Ever fought a blood nation in a post-Utterdark game where you have a real army and they only have summons?

If you have a real army and they only have summons, why do you need Utterdark?
Why wouldn't they have an army? Many blood nations have units that don't care about darkness (abysia, lanka's kalamukha and Mictlan moon or rain warriors). Furhtermore Agarthans, undead hordes from Ermor or Pangaea, R'lyeh autosummons and mind blasts, that's a lot of units that won't be affected a lot by the Utterdark.

[chrispedersen]

As for Bless Rushes, they are not the top three tactics. Having broken the back of more than one bless rush with such exotic tactics as "archers" or "level 2 magic", I don't rate it terribly high.

I am curious what you mean by this. Personally I can't think of any tactic that wins enough to be called a "top 3" tactic. But I would say that Mictlan, Mictlan, Lanka, and Niefle's bless strategies make them top 10% contenders.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by K

I'm surprised that you consider it absurd. Afraid people might actually win games where you have the superior army and lands?

Now that really is absurd.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by K

No more absurd than spending the same amount of gems equipping five thugs or casting a single global that won't win you the game, and that's a staple of Dominions play. Spending gems to set in motion a plan that will win you the game is a far better choice.

Let's think this through here.

* The goal is to have piles of death gems for your pretender to use for casting Utterdark the first turn he pops out. We'll neglect the Research angle in this post. Assume he's going to pop out on turn 37, giving you 36 turns of gem accumulation.

* Base cost to get a D1 mage without national D: 200 gems (or 100 pearls). I'll neglect the indy angle because you mentioned empowerment specifically. This is a fixed cost which generates no return.

* With only one D1 mage, you'll going to be more limited by mage-time than by province-count. Let's assume (optimistically) that you can get an average return of 1 death gem per turn per 2 provinces searched, by targeting swamps and deserts and by getting lucky with multiple-death-gem-generating sites. (In practice I think it's about 1 for 3 or less.) We'll say that half of these are level 1 sites, discoverable by manual D1 searching.

* Assume for simplicity that you can have a total non-death income which scales linearly with time. We'll say that on turn N, you get 2N non-death gems from national mages searching, etc. And we'll pretend getting to this point doesn't cost any gems or research. That means you can have 210 non-death gems by turn 14, which means that you can have a D1 mage and 20 death gems from alchemy by turn 15. That gives you 22 turns of gem accumulation.

* Under these assumptions, it takes either 8 turns of mage-time (manual site-searching), or 2 turns of mage-time and 6 death gems, or 2 turns of mage-time and 24 non-death gems, to generate an income of 1 death gem per turn. Your best bet is to search with Dark Knowledge until turn 31 (14 turns, cost 42 death gems, yield 2*Sum(1...7)=56, net 14 death gems) and then manually search for the 6 remaining turns because mage-searching wouldn't have time to recoup costs. If you get lucky and find the site on your first manual search, that brings in an extra 6 gems.

* That means you spent 200 gems alchemizing to D1 and searched for 22 turns to net 14 death gems and one D1 mage (and an income of +8 death). If you had just alchemized those 200 gems and kept the death gems you'd be 36 gems ahead.

* It should be clear by this point that if you really do want to Utterdark your way to victory by turn 36, bootstrapping your way to a Death income via alchemy + empowerment is not the way to do it. You'd be better off building on your core national strengths (water, astral, whatever) and alchemizing THOSE for your Utterdark. (By turn 37 you'd have an income of +74 non-death gems, a stockpile of 1406 gems, and you can alchemize that to 351 death gems.)

* You could also trade with someone who does have a core competency in Death (Helheim, Lanka, etc.). Or kill them and take their gems. Either way it's better than trying to bootstrap yourself.

-Max

[Sombre]

Ironically it'd be far more viable with a F9 bless.

[Micah]

Thugs don't get dispelled.

I have no concept of how you're proposing to get an Utterdark cast by a non-D nation to actually stick unless you save up your gems until well past turn 100.

It's 70 gems more expensive than a dispel (And dispel has a decent chance of getting a few bonus gems from a high-level caster), in a non-native gemtype that's twice as difficult to alchemize to compared to pearls for a dispel, and you can't even start site searching until you figure out how to actually GET a D mage, at which point you still only have one site searcher, and DKing 20 provs still takes 20 turns and 60 gems from that point. If this is a duel situation you also have to be fending off those 5 thugs you didn't spend your gems on while you research up to alt-9, and if it's a bigger game you have to contend with universal hate, and more importantly, gem-pooling for a dispel.

And I was replying to your statement that "Even a nation that does not natively get Death can easily alchemize gems, Empower one guy with D1, have that guy cast Dark Knowledge, and have a huge stockpile of Death gems by the time his Pretender arrives." Using a wolf tribe shaman to site search D is a perfectly reasonable strat, though still far from reliable enough to base a pretender build on since finding them and then lucking out on a random can be difficult.

[Baalz]

I agree empowering to D1 is quite silly, but there is another angle that make *much* more sense for a blood nation that I've used before - Mictlan. Taking D on your pretender and empower into *blood* (assuming you didn't have the design points), this is immensely easier for a blood nation and gets you vampire lords (and for Mictlan some nice national summons). Of course you're not going to be dropping UD on turn 36 like this, but it's a much more realistic way to actually get it up around the time you're ready to switch to a blood only economy.

Note (I bet Micah remembers this game) do *not* go with burden of time under the assumption that boots of youth will protect your mages. Miserable, miserable way to end the game by killing off all your own good mages...

[Agema]

I think betting a strategy on a gem type or mage you can't easily access is a recipe for disaster.

I think we'll all have played games where we've had shockingly bad, or even no income, in certain gem types, including gems that are fairly integral to the nations (I've played EA Agartha, 30 provinces fully searched, total death income of 3). Finding mages is even worse: I want to weep when I read guides that blithely say things like "Get an indy X mage" (unless X = nature), because sure as hell I've played quite enough games where I can't find any.

[K]

Originally Posted by Agema

I think betting a strategy on a gem type or mage you can't easily access is a recipe for disaster.

I think we'll all have played games where we've had shockingly bad, or even no income, in certain gem types, including gems that are fairly integral to the nations (I've played EA Agartha, 30 provinces fully searched, total death income of 3). Finding mages is even worse: I want to weep when I read guides that blithely say things like "Get an indy X mage" (unless X = nature), because sure as hell I've played quite enough games where I can't find any.

Oh I agree. I can't tell you the number of times I've played an Air nation like Caelum only to find my provinces have no air income or played a Blood nation and found that all my provinces have like 2K people or that someone beat me to the unique demons and suddenly all my endgame plans are dust.

But some plan is better than no plan. It's a self-deception if you think you can just make a nation based on a few battle tactics and respond to the conditions of the game and pull out a win.

I guess that was the point I was trying to make. Is getting a decent bless with endgame uses and searching for Death gems with the plan of casting the Utterdark the "super-winna of all planz"?

No. But it does beat "and then I Bless Rush people and just have more stuff." Bless Rushes are fine if you are playing vs one opponent and once he's dead you win the game. Bless Rushes are also fine if you are playing on a very large map and can expect to own 30-40 provinces before you meet your next neighbor (and he'll own 10-15 by then).

But for any other situation, a Bless Rush is just an early game tactic and not a game-winning strategy.

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). By turn 20 when he runs out of indie provinces he attacks his first enemy and he has a ton of crap and he grinds down lesser nations.

On a merely large or medium map, he runs out of provinces and attacks his first enemy on turn 12. Instead of having three or four times the provinces of his enemy, he has maybe 150% the provinces. If the enemy can smash his initial army, chances are good they can be on his doorstep before he can even build a replacement. Game over.

And that's your gamble. You have invested heavily in your early game in the hopes that it will bootstrap you into a strong late game.

But, it still won't win the game. A game-winning strategy sounds like this: "and then I do it, and start taking five or more enemy provinces a turn while losing almost no troops and none of my own provinces."

Casting the Utterdark when properly prepared can do that. Building badass SCs when other people can't can do that. 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. Building unbreakable armies like Blessed Gandarvas, or Mandaha-backed Demon armies, or armies backed by mages with gem-producing items who cast battlefield-destroying magic that they are immune to can win you the game. Putting up the Astral Nexus and getting a gem income in the hundreds and then using that to get piles of summons or ritual magics can do that too. Running around with ten tough armies who can Astral Travel or otherwise skip over enemy armies and dissect enemy empires can do that. Building Master Enslave mages who usurp entire enemy armies can do that.

The list is long, but "bless rush" is not on it.

So yes, I rate Death higher than Fire because it opens a tactic to winning the game you otherwise might not have. Opinions will vary.

[chrispedersen]

It doesn't work like that *at all*

As a bless nation I take
1 the second turn.
2 the third.
3 the fourth.

Somewhere after that you start to be limited by geography.
But my usual target for mictlan or lanka is 48 or so territories before the end of year 2. And usually I avoid players as long as I can.

Of course I prefer maps with many adjacent territories. And bless strategies have won me *many* games.