are stealth units targeted by flames from afar..?

[Boron]

More games are won without clamhoarding than with by a large degree. Too many people have been influenced by the horror stories of people who have either cheated or play lactic games.

Or feel that their SP tactics can work in MP. Of course, maybe in games of negligable and variant skill levels, such things are much more common than where you can afford to waste your time/resources for a 10 turn return.

yeah sure but imho ( and one of the most experienced / best players who norfleet still is though he cheated shared this opinion too ) you have little other uses for water gems as nonunderwater nation .
you can forge a few boots of quickness , use some sea troll kings courts and 5 water are needed for a jade armor . but this is already almost everything else where it is good to spend water on .
so you gather a big surplus of water gems with many nations and then clam hoarding is the most profitable investition . producing 1-2 clam(s) / turn from midgame on doesn't hurt you but help you greatly . so lategame this is a huge advantage .

i am sure that most skilled players clamhoard and i don't believe you if you say you don't build clams with all your excess water gem income when you can build clams .

i still claim that clamhoarding is almost a "no-brainer" when you can do this with your nation .

[Pickles]

You can analyse all you like but until you have played a significant number of games the analysis is likely to differ from real play experience. Took me 15 years to figure this out but there you are.

Quoting Wendigo
"IMO, the most important factors are, in order:
-skill/knowledge of players involved, in particular regarding early expansion, strategic development of the nation played (design, research goals...) & battlefield tactical performance.
-diplomacy.
-starting location & map choice."

In my very limited experience the most important things I have found are

- Achieving a basic level of competence in the nation you are playing
- Diplomacy
- Winning battles
- Learning to transition from creeping to playing real enemies
- Map position

Hmm these are actually pretty close to yours Wendigo

It is hard to credit Norfleet with any real play ability but I too think the high level water spells are not very good.

Pickles

I don't build clams with my 'excess' water gems. Mostly because I rarely have an 'excess' water gem supply. It's invariably being used. (Note: I don't have a philisophic reasoning for not using Sea King's Court, Murdering Winter, Ice Elementals, Wolven Winter, and if possible Water Queens)

You can not believe it all you want, but thats the way it is. I have and will continue to build clams if I have a need for them (with Atlantis for example) but rarely do I go for a clamhoard as I detailed in my TC guide.

I'm sure you can't find it concievable at all; but there it is. Clamhoarding is a red herring that is going to keep getting newbies killed over and over again by wasting their right now resources for turn 50 peace of mind. This isn't to say that there are not that many good upper end summons for Water Magic and that that could be changed. But with the sheer amounts of Jade Armor I tend to go through, having water gems is usually critical to 2/3's my games.

[Boron]

I don't build clams with my 'excess' water gems. Mostly because I rarely have an 'excess' water gem supply. It's invariably being used. (Note: I don't have a philisophic reasoning for not using Sea King's Court, Murdering Winter, Ice Elementals, Wolven Winter, and if possible Water Queens)

You can not believe it all you want, but thats the way it is. I have and will continue to build clams if I have a need for them (with Atlantis for example) but rarely do I go for a clamhoard as I detailed in my TC guide.

I'm sure you can't find it concievable at all; but there it is. Clamhoarding is a red herring that is going to keep getting newbies killed over and over again by wasting their right now resources for turn 50 peace of mind. This isn't to say that there are not that many good upper end summons for Water Magic and that that could be changed. But with the sheer amounts of Jade Armor I tend to go through, having water gems is usually critical to 2/3's my games.

ok i believe you
but when you play on big maps they are a really good future investment .

boots of quickness or jade armors are really a good investment .
the seakings + water queens are only good if you plan to invade the sea .

zen do you put boots of quickness or a jade armor on all your mages or only on scs ?

because when you use them only for scs and don't plan to conquer the sea you should have excess water income .
or as ermor e.g. you should have a big excess water income in mid-lategame too and because of your amphibian undeads no need for the sea king trolls and little need for waterqueens .
as ermor clamhoard mid-lategame is imho a must .

[alexti]

yeah sure but imho ( and one of the most experienced / best players who norfleet still is though he cheated shared this opinion too ) you have little other uses for water gems as nonunderwater nation .
you can forge a few boots of quickness , use some sea troll kings courts and 5 water are needed for a jade armor . but this is already almost everything else where it is good to spend water on .
so you gather a big surplus of water gems with many nations and then clam hoarding is the most profitable investition . producing 1-2 clam(s) / turn from midgame on doesn't hurt you but help you greatly . so lategame this is a huge advantage .

Consider several possible situations:
- you're fighting non-cold resistant nation. Wolven Winter+ Murdering winter are very efficient, especially against opponents that rely on a mass of mages in the battles. This combo is quite costly though, so you're not likely to have any spare.
- you're SC intensive nation. Then you need *a lot* of boots of quickness and jade armors. In this case you'd want to have a lot of antimagic amulets and eitheri lucky coins or pendant of luck. This means that you need about 2 astral per one water, so I'd typically try to forge few clams to have such a ratio of gem income.
- if you're land nation and you're near the water, you want Sea Trolls and Water Queens (if you can get them in time), which again means water gems.

This leaves clam-hoarding strategy restricted to special cases. For example, if you're stuck in the corner, with nearby nations tough for you (Marignon for Ermor, or 2 allied nations for anybody), clam-hoarding (and any gem producing items -hoardig) is a good way to grow power without expanding. Atlantis vs land nations is essentially the same situation: difficult to wage aggressive war and easy to defend.

[atul]

alexti said:
- you're fighting non-cold resistant nation. Wolven Winter+ Murdering winter are very efficient, especially against opponents that rely on a mass of mages in the battles.

I've been wondering about this WW+MW combo. It seems to me that the Wolven Winter causes the temp drop at the "event" phase, which is after all the far-attack spells are resolved and even magic battle phase.

The practical example of this was in one previous MP I cast WW into a province I also teleported my BoF-using pretender to. The battle was fought in a neutral temp (at least I spotted no enc changes due cold), after the battle reports was "unexpected event"-message of a bad winter and on the map I saw that the said province had a heavy cold scale.

I may have missed or overlooked something, but could it be that in order to WW+MW to be effective the Wolven Winter ought to be cast one turn earlier? Which would make hitting moving targets fairly hard... Anyway, MW in itself is fairly good for killing frail mages.

As to fighting against cold-immune nations, it might be worth noting that even them may have non-immune troops. For example, Nornas and Seithkonas freeze to death easily, thank you very much, and other may have indy troops. Also, in battles, assume a lot of cold-immune troops and a few special non-immune mages (like, Jotun troops and Seithkonas). If mages are scripted to cast cold elemental spells, who do they target?

[Boron]

atul said:

I've been wondering about this WW+MW combo. It seems to me that the Wolven Winter causes the temp drop at the "event" phase, which is after all the far-attack spells are resolved and even magic battle phase.

The practical example of this was in one previous MP I cast WW into a province I also teleported my BoF-using pretender to. The battle was fought in a neutral temp (at least I spotted no enc changes due cold), after the battle reports was "unexpected event"-message of a bad winter and on the map I saw that the said province had a heavy cold scale.

I may have missed or overlooked something, but could it be that in order to WW+MW to be effective the Wolven Winter ought to be cast one turn earlier? Which would make hitting moving targets fairly hard... Anyway, MW in itself is fairly good for killing frail mages.

As to fighting against cold-immune nations, it might be worth noting that even them may have non-immune troops. For example, Nornas and Seithkonas freeze to death easily, thank you very much, and other may have indy troops. Also, in battles, assume a lot of cold-immune troops and a few special non-immune mages (like, Jotun troops and Seithkonas). If mages are scripted to cast cold elemental spells, who do they target?

hm 5+30 watergems =5 clams
and as you said hit not guaranteed . Furthermore the murdering winter is 5W so hard to reach and not worth imho taking it onto your pretender .

[atul]

Boron said:
hm 5+30 watergems =5 clams
and as you said hit not guaranteed .

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

Boron said:
Furthermore the murdering winter is 5W so hard to reach and not worth imho taking it onto your pretender .

You can boost anything with water-2 or more with items easily (bracelet, that robe, staff of elemental mastery) to 5W, if you have only water-1 mages you probably aren't having enough water gem income for clams or MWs anyway so the issue becomes quite moot.

(okay, forgot about Sea King's Court, but anyway, water-5 is reachable)

[Boron]

atul said:

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .

so the murdering winter is very situational and against e.g. caelum / jotunheim because of CR it doesn't even work .
with clams you can start on about turn 5 when you reach construction 2 so in earlygame .

then in midgame your clams should provide high enough income that you can chose when the special situations occur to convert some either to water or to fire for murdering winter or flames from the sky

clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too :
only your water gems early game and then convert the clam astral income always back to water when you can afford and don't need astralincome items like luck pendant .

when properly done clams provide you doubled - tripled lategame gem income .
and astralpearls are the most valuable gemincome lategame anyway because you can convert them cheap at 2:1 ratio to whatever gems you need or you can wish with them .

once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .
(...)
once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

Gee, speaking of situational, for Wish you need Alteration _9_, and a mage with Astral 9. That's a bit harder to get then Evocation 7 and Water 5, unless you're a strong Astral nation, you have to take it on your pretender. And conventional wisdom is that it's unwise to put Astral on your pretender unless it's immortal.

That Murdering Winter on the other hand can target the other nation's capitals, it can target their library/sage guild provinces and really nail their research (and quite possibly bunches of items on the sages), it can target armies that are about to attack you, quite possibly killing some mages and causing their magic troops to be left out of the attack.

Doesn't seem all _that_ limitted to me.