Message from Abysia

[Archonsod]

PrinzMegaherz said:
The old age itself isn't that bad, but it's one rather unbalanced factor in the game. Best solution to solve the problem is to take a nation with long living mages like Yomi. It's just a shame that my favorite nation (which was never one of the top dogs) has been degraded this badly.

It's the best solution if you don't want to or can't deal with old age. To be honest, I wouldn't agree that it's a disadvantage, apart from in the early game. For any blood nation, research construction and a relatively cheap (10 blood slaves) item is available which negates ageing alltogether. Given that old age is payment for increased abilities or lower than normal value, this is going to give you a cheap, powerful or otherwise advantaged mage which you can ignore the downside of. In other words, you just became slightly more powerful than everyone else.
You could even build a strategy around this. Consider the crone or other pretenders who get a points or abilities break because of old age. Select imprisoned for maximum goodness, and bank on getting one of the age negating spells or items before your pretender breaks free. You can then prevent old age from ever affecting your pretender, thus effectively giving you free points.
It's down to playing style really. Some people are going to rule out nations with older mages because it doesn't suit their style. Others will embrace them and find ways to deal with the ageing problem or even turn it to their advantage.

[Tyrian]

Age system is a good idea for the gestion of effect like burden of time. It is silly than near-immortel creature like the illithid are equally affected than simple human. Age system is a good solution for this problem's type.

[Fate]

Ok, as I mentioned above I was playing a MA Agartha game. I had Growth +1, and my only land opponent (after knocking of Machaka) is Jotunheim, with Death 3.

To date, around 3 - 4 years (I need to check), I have had exactly 2 mages contract disease in my dominion, and 2 others get exactly 1 wound each (neither was disease or feeblemindedness). That was out of at least 16 mages.

I have also sent an army of ~10 mages through Jotunheim's death 3 dominon in the war. They all died in a large attack from Jotunheim, but prior to that 4 got diseased, another 2 got wounds, and none were feeble minded.

So, to recap, I lost 5 to disease (1 got feeblemindedness at the same time, so I think that counts more), 1 to feeblemindedness, and 4 got non-debilitating wounds. Keeping in mind that I have another 10+ turns of use after a mage gets diseased, I don't think it is that bad at all.

It could be that growth scale help. I know death scale really hurts.

[Daynarr]

Precisely. Death scale is no longer 'no brainer' to pick when you play a nation that has commanders/units with old age. Growth scale makes big difference.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Archonsod said:. For any blood nation, research construction and a relatively cheap (10 blood slaves) item is available which negates ageing alltogether.

About those shoes:

Yes, they stop aging. But do they prevent old people from getting diseases?

if that wouldn't be the case, Abysian mages start at around 55 with old age beginning at 35 and you would need to cast rejunevation twice to get them out of old age and would need to construct those shoes. Oh, and you would propably need to boost blood magic as reju is blood 4.

Over 30 bloodslaves just to get one mage that won't die of old age? Sounds not like a good deal to me.

But I did Illwinter injustice with me starting this thread, because Abysia still rocks if you focus on demonbred instead of anathemas for early expansion. They might be a bit weaker in fire magic and a bit less (un)holy, but they fly and have a long lifespan, so there's definitly a reason to use them (never used them in dom 2 because anathema were just better for my purposes)

[Daynarr]

Whenever I used those boots that stop aging, I never saw that commander get affliction from old age including disease.

[Nerfix]

I played LA Man yesterday and Umor, those guys sure get aging problems. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img] I took 1 or 2 Growth and the mages kept dying. It's propably to offset their amazing troops.

[Morkilus]

The more I think about it, the more I think aging is a great concept in this game. Think about all the horrible things that can happen to you in this game and in myth: Barbarians pillaging, vampires, catching a crippling disease, losing your daughters to the local warlock apprentic, being forced into slavery by sea nymphs (maybe that's not too bad...) Through history, fantastic and realistic literature has always illustrated man's fear of those things, but aging has always been prevalent. The Greeks were practically obsessed with it. So I don't mind having this in the game, and without it I wouldn't get that cool Decay effect where my troops age rapidly. The first time I saw that happen (after attacking some TC troops for some reason..? I loled.

I always liked the old Ultima IV and D&D description for the Haste spells, where you took a year of age for casting the spell as a side effect. Anyone know if this happens in the game? It would be a great touch if it did.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think aging also took care of the tactic of heavily defended labs with eternally improving mages that were such a game definition of games with large maps, long running games.

Also for mega-equiped last-forever super combatants (altho not as much) but it can affect your leaders so that they arent eternally improving. It abit of a realistic "use them while they are young" situation now.

[DominionsFan]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think aging also took care of the tactic of heavily defended labs with eternally improving mages that were such a game definition of games with large maps, long running games.

Also for mega-equiped last-forever super combatants (altho not as much) but it can affect your leaders so that they arent eternally improving. It abit of a realistic "use them while they are young" situation now.

Yeap, this is totally true. This way it is more balanced, especially because mage spamming was very annoying in Doms 2. Well we can still spam mages sadly [that is why I've mentioned that mages should be extremely expensive], but now we can also loose them because of the aging system. It is pretty cool imo. Anyways this is my subjective opinion, especially about the mage spamming part, since probably many players never had a problem with that.