Nations that seem strong/weak

[Meglobob]

My observations so far on:-

MA Man - This nation is powerful and very easy to play, especially early on. Mass Longbows with a small shield of infantary/cavalry in front of them slices through indie 5 provinces like butter. I often take 0 losses, many times the indie army has routed before its reached my lines, the rain of longbow arrows take a huge toll on any retreating army. Back this up with a awake combat pretender and u will be number 1 for provinces. Add in all the stealth units, powerful air/nature summons, lightning bolts, wind guide etc, etc... u will be a serious power early/mid game. Take good scales to get the most out of yr large empire.

The weaknesses r lack of fire/death/astral/earth magic, which could seriously dent yr endgame.

I would say its overall balanced and a good nation for a beginner to play, just concentrate on yr strengths.

This is based on 2 MP games with MA Man. (turn 16, turn 10).

LA Ermor

Typical for autospawn nations this is hard to gauge. I can't exactly say if Ermor is weak since i didn't play other LA nations yet to compare, however compared to D2 they took a few very hard hits.
Decent priests are quite hard to come by. No more battlefield undead buff spells for every army from turn 5 onward.
The autospawns are among the weakest troops for LA. The good national troops will wipe the floor with them, even without further boost spells.
Banish has been improved greatly.
Ermor is restricted to ashen empire, which is a lot weaker against indeps than ghost gate was because of a) not ethereal and b) no healing.
Ermor can't use a sleeping or imprisoned pretender.
Besides the pretender, the only magic paths are 3 death and up to two random picks on dusk elders. In LA whith standard settings (35% magic sites) every gem counts, and ermor needs to use a rainbow pretender to get some non-death mages summoned. At least in long games.

So, as i see it, ermors strength now lies in mid-game. Early expansion is slower than before and lategame all useful troops have to come from magic gems which are sparse in LA. after getting a few provinces set up with castles+temples and dom 10, and before the other nations have assembled big groups of LA troops with heavy protection and skills, ermor can still grab provinces with frighteningly large armies.

Conclusion: not terribly weak, but weaker than i'm used to. (well, i'm used to slaughtering my unsuspecting buddy with mass castings of ghost riders in games on really large maps )

[PDF]

There's really a problem with Aby "aged" Warlocks and Anathemants, they die like flies and, given that Warlocks are capitol-only I can't even conceive how you can start a Blood economy with them.
In my test game, even with Growth-1 I had 3 mages diseased by turn 13...OTOH with Shinuyama and Death-1 scale I had only 1 Sorc out of 8 diseased by turn 20 ! Looks like a problem with "old age" at a low value 35.
IMHO in these conditions Aby isn't playable competitively at all and even in SP it's not fun
And don't tell me "yeah, just cast GoH and make boots", Aby isn't supposed to cast GoH, and boots don't cure disease !

[Nerfix]

Yeah, the problem is their low old age cap.

[calmon]

PDF said:
There's really a problem with Aby "aged" Warlocks and Anathemants, they die like flies and, given that Warlocks are capitol-only I can't even conceive how you can start a Blood economy with them.
In my test game, even with Growth-1 I had 3 mages diseased by turn 13...OTOH with Shinuyama and Death-1 scale I had only 1 Sorc out of 8 diseased by turn 20 ! Looks like a problem with "old age" at a low value 35.
IMHO in these conditions Aby isn't playable competitively at all and even in SP it's not fun
And don't tell me "yeah, just cast GoH and make boots", Aby isn't supposed to cast GoH, and boots don't cure disease !

Hmm, maybe there is a bug. I play a Arco Testgame and i've plenty of old Philosophers. Its late Fall in year 3 now and only 2 are diseased and 1 died. I think this is acceptable. Growth 3 here.

[Agrajag]

PDF said:
In my test game, even with Growth-1 I had 3 mages diseased by turn 13...

In my test game, with Growth-0 I had 1 mage diseased by the time I managed to forge boots for everyone. And a second mage mute.

Graeme Dice said:
I would never take a growth scale in any game unless I knew beforehand that the game was going to last for at least 100 turns. Otherwise the benefit is miniscule.
...
Order 3, production 3, heat 3, death 3, drain 3 with a dominion 10, fire 8 Moloch will expand even faster, and still has good scales. Then you can be capturing three provinces per turn if there's room.

Maybe here lies the problem, you are too used to dom2's death scale, which was almost a no-brainer.
This here is dom3, a whole different beast.

[Graeme Dice]

Agrajag said:
Maybe here lies the problem, you are too used to dom2's death scale, which was almost a no-brainer.
This here is dom3, a whole different beast.

Other than the effect on old age afflictions, Dom3's death scale is identical to Dom2. A death 3 scale should be a no-brainer for Abysia, just like a heat 3 scale is, or a drain 3 scale is for Ulm. This is one of the nation's advantages to offset their use of the second weakest type of elemental magic and slightly overpriced troops.

[Agrajag]

Graeme Dice said:
Other than the effect on old age afflictions, Dom3's death scale is identical to Dom2.

But that's a serious effect, don't take it too lightly.

A death 3 scale should be a no-brainer for Abysia, just like a heat 3 scale is, or a drain 3 scale is for Ulm. This is one of the nation's advantages to offset their use of the second weakest type of elemental magic and slightly overpriced troops.

But that's more of a thematic problem than a balance problem. I don't think death should be a no-brainer for Abysia, nor do I think Drain is currently a no-brainer for Ulm (if you don't plan on using your national mages for research [which makes sense, since they aren't very good at it] it can really hurt)

[Graeme Dice]

Agrajag said:
But that's more of a thematic problem than a balance problem. I don't think death should be a no-brainer for Abysia, nor do I think Drain is currently a no-brainer for Ulm (if you don't plan on using your national mages for research [which makes sense, since they aren't very good at it] it can really hurt)

If you aren't planning to use Master Smith's for research, then what _are_ you planning to research with? And how are you going to pay for the almost required productivity 3 scale without taking drain 3? Even worse, your troops will be slaughtered by MR negates effects without the drain scale helping to protect them.

Death should certainly be an automatic choice for Abysia, or else their death scale resistance provides them with no actual benefit. Instead, they suffer worse from it than most nations thanks to their universally old fire mages. Or would you argue that Caelum should sometimes not take cold 3? If playing nations thematically isn't a powerful way to play them, then something is probably wrong with how they are balanced.

[Archonsod]

PDF said:
In my test game, even with Growth-1 I had 3 mages diseased by turn 13...

The first time I played Abyssia I managed to get to turn 20 without losing a mage to old age (one or two limps and someone suffering a battlewound) with no growth scale.
Perhaps the problem is more in the way the afflictions are applied rather than any particular nation. It seems a little too random - I've had old units contract a disease a turn or two after recruitment, while others quite happily exceed their old age score by a couple of decades with nothing worse than a limp.

And don't tell me "yeah, just cast GoH and make boots", Aby isn't supposed to cast GoH, and boots don't cure disease !

Well, it's your choice whether to work around a nation's disadvantage or not. Abyssia is one of the few nations whose only real disadvantage is rather trivial to bypass. I much prefer that than (for example) something like LA Ermor, where your restricted to playing the nation to a specific strategy because of it's flaws.