1v1 Duels... what are fair nation matches?

[mathusalem]

Saarud, I don't like your solution, because it's force Fire 9/ Water 9 bless rush strategie

[Blofeld]

MA Ermor vs MA Pythium seems an interesting match.
Majority of their troops are the same, with variations in sacreds, elite infantry and lizard cataphracts.
Mages and reanimation make an obvious difference betwwen them, and the background story is perfect for a believable civil war scenario.

[Saarud]

mathusalem said:
Saarud, I don't like your solution, because it's force Fire 9/ Water 9 bless rush strategie

You have a point about F9W9 bless rush strategy but this applies to all 1v1 games. I think with the right settings this can be evened out abit (unless you play Vanheim that is ). It should be a viable strategy but not the only one.

[Maltrease]

I played out the duel over the weekend. It was very interesting. While my opponent (Neifelheim) won almost every major confrontration I was able to win most skirmishes and take over the majority of his lands. With the ability to use call of the winds to rapidly bring in reinforcements for beseiged fortress and to take low PD lands being a large key in the victory.

Probably the biggest turing point is when he attacked with his uber SC god (with beserk) but a lucky arrow pegged him before he could cast the crucial "mistform" buff and he was promptly destroyed by a group of flagrents.

Interestingly he didn't go with the Air9 bless or even use his nations sacred troops (they are very expensive resource and gold). What turned out to be incredibly effective were the skin shifters. With 70 hp (35 in both forms) it takes a good solid 3 thunderstrikes to take one out. An unbuffed (with items) Eagle King can cast 3 thunderstrikes before being fatigued.

As a big plus the shifters don't take any resourcs so a sloth 3 scale is possible, however that wasn't fully apparent when the game began so he was only running Sloth 1.

Two castings of Call of the winds would always take out a PD of 6 (only 3 giants for Neifelheim). If he increased the PD higher (7 or more gives a different message for scouts) then I would bring in an eagle king and some archer chaff to take it out.

Was a fun game... I had thought I had lost before taking his god out in that lucky battle. If we played the same two nations again I'm not sure the result would be the same (although I've got several new ideas to try the next time around).

[alexti]

I'm surprised by that result. Sure, Caelum's raiders can be annoying and eagle kings or serpahs can easily take care of Niefel's PD (no point buying more than 1), but he could just park Niefel Jarls everywhere (with Air-9 bless). There's not much Caelum can't do about that. Lightning doesn't work, favourite magic bows (vision foe, pierceer) miss too often to be practical. And in a single combat eagle kings (even fire-9 blessed) can't match a Niefel Jarl. And to make things worse, Niefel's regular army is better as well...

[Maltrease]

Well the the short nature of the conflict prevents a Niefel Jarl in every provence. Air-9 is 70% shock resistance, so alone is not enough for a Jarl. Of course a Jarl with Air 1 or a ring of lighting resistance takes care of that soon enough.

A lone commander is not enough though. A batch of Iron Crow would quickly kill a loan Jarl. You would get 16 attacking per turn if he was fully swarmed, and the last 10 would likely hit with an average damage slightly above protection.

I'm certainly not saying that Caellium would triumph in a rematch, but it was a lot of fun taking advantage of the various strengths. Big battles almost always went in his favor, but moving three provenes a turn would let me avoid the big battles and attack him everywhere else.

Also with a pretender design you could do things like forge wands of fireballs. Even 5 scouts with skull tailsmans would probably defeat a lone Niefel Jarl.

[alexti]

Maltrease said:
Well the the short nature of the conflict prevents a Niefel Jarl in every provence. Air-9 is 70% shock resistance, so alone is not enough for a Jarl. Of course a Jarl with Air 1 or a ring of lighting resistance takes care of that soon enough.

Just 70% shock resistance is good enough for practical purposes. Some lightning damage passes, but too little to really hurt and part of it gets regenerated. Even to take out stock (unequipped) Niefel Jarl you need 5-6 seraphs and quite a bunch of other troops to have enough time to kill him (and a lot of those troops will die). Besides, seraphs are getting discouraged by inefficiency of the lightning bolts and stop casting them. Of course on defense it may not be that bad as they can probably spam enough phantasmal warriors to stall the jarl. Considering that those jarls appear at 1 per turn rate it's not very efficient way to counter - you just can't hold enough provinces. Then very soon (if not right away) those Jarls will start coming equipped with lucky pendant and air-Jarls can't even be defeated with that plan at all.

Maltrease said:
A lone commander is not enough though. A batch of Iron Crow would quickly kill a loan Jarl. You would get 16 attacking per turn if he was fully swarmed, and the last 10 would likely hit with an average damage slightly above protection.

It never came to my mind to try non-cold-resistance Iron Crows vs Niefel Jarl. I've tried it with completely disastrous results for Caelum. Initial attack did very little - I guess they were passing defense, but not the armour (Jarl had lucky amulet though). Then all nearby crows just got frozen while Jarls was killing them one per turn. Couple of seraphs weren't doing much better and eventually they got tired too. Only seraphines were desperately trying to get through MR until the end. The end happened when most crows were frozen to death (I think many more than Jarl has slayed with a sword). Of course, those crows that were close enough has already passed from chill and they've died too few turns later. I haven't tried to do exact calculations but I think that in your calculations you were underestimating the effects of cold and shield. Crows have virtually no chance to damage through both armor and shield (total protection of around 40) so they have to overcome shield parry (which I believe is irreducible). As they get tired from cold they chances quickly drop, so they really have chance to do any damage in first couple of rounds (and even that didn't happen in a couple of tries I did) which Jarl can regenerate. After that everything is stacked for Jarl - by the time closest crows freeze to death the further ones has already passed out, so nobody even tries to attack him anymore. With more seraphs that battle could be won, but essentially Caelum needs to bring an army to defeat a single Jarl while Niefelheim can just spread those Jarls everywhere while they still have an army to threaten Caelum's strongholds.

I don't see how Caelum can resists - that Air-9 bless just totally destroys any strong sides Caelum might have had. I guess if you're desperate enough you could try to play Caelum with Heat 3(!!) which would make Jarls very vulnerable and negate their chill effect (in your dominion), but it would be very hard on money. Well, maybe taking luck instead of order and hoping for good events...

Maltrease said:
I'm certainly not saying that Caellium would triumph in a rematch, but it was a lot of fun taking advantage of the various strengths. Big battles almost always went in his favor, but moving three provenes a turn would let me avoid the big battles and attack him everywhere else.

Also with a pretender design you could do things like forge wands of fireballs. Even 5 scouts with skull tailsmans would probably defeat a lone Niefel Jarl.

Your pretender would be the only one to search for fire sites and forge those items, so it doesn't really look promising. And I don't see 5 scouts defeating Niefel Jarl - they may stall him (by spamming) if he attacks, but the problem is that Caelum doesn't have any affordable way to defend their provinces. Affordable may not be a right word because they could afford to keep 4 seraphs with small PD per province, but they don't have capacity to produce those seraphs. Scouts (or anything else) with skull talismans would be too expensive in gems.

[Maltrease]

I'll admit I didn't actually try the iron crows. The one Jarl I did manage to kill was done in by a group of lucky flagrents I got. And there is a huge difference between Jarl and Jarls. If you have 4 jarls together then the iron crows can only gang up 6 to 1 and would be slaughtered.

If you are up for a duel alexti we can give it a try. I'm curious to see if an Air-9 would really be as effective as you believe. I'm certainly open to being shown that it is.