Dud nations

[Wish]

uh, a pretender with nature and fire for a great bless on a sacred troop with a morningstar and a shield.

easy access to blood and devils.

relatively strong fire mages for falling flames.

and thats just at a cursory glance

[thejeff]

Isn't one of those 10% randoms Air?

That lets Master Smiths make cheap Quills too. Granted they won't have much air income to work with, but at 2 per, they don't need a lot.

[mivayan]

thejeff said:
Isn't one of those 10% randoms Air?

That lets Master Smiths make cheap Quills too. Granted they won't have much air income to work with, but at 2 per, they don't need a lot.

On average one in 40 smiths have an air random... I think you'll need a searching pretender to get usefull amounts of gems.

tromper said:
In fact, has anyone ever been overrun by LA Abysia? Has LA Abysia ever won a game? Hmmmm.

Cheap anywhere blood hunters, heavy infantry with tower shields, immunity to fire storm/heat from hell... ought to be able to do something?

Guess all usefull mages being old and capitol-only counts for something too.

[Gandalf Parker]

mivayan said:

On average one in 40 smiths have an air random... I think you'll need a searching pretender to get usefull amounts of gems.

Cheap anywhere blood hunters, heavy infantry with tower shields, immunity to fire storm/heat from hell... ought to be able to do something?

Guess all usefull mages being old and capitol-only counts for something too.

Good points. One thing about this game will be finding out whether or not rush tactics will count for anything. If not, then many of the usual nation considerations learned from smaller MP games might need altered. If Abysia plays slowly with a strong heat dominion then things might get interesting. They could even go to heat +3 which would affect others more than it would them. On the other hand, there are nations which will be able to make better use of indepts to push without waiting for their dominion to catch up.

Would Abysia playing a defensive game inside a powerful dominion until they research some power for their mages might be a tactic?

[Micah]

LA Marignon has the same or better blood potential, better magic diversity, 2 mapmove crossbows (which work great with flaming arrows), better researchers, non-cap-only mages that are actually useful, sailing, and spies, along with some kickass national summons and possibly the best PD in the game, along with non-cap H3 priests that can blood sacrifice up a storm, which is especially important with Rlyeh and Ermor's LA dominions being a very real LA threat. Abysia gets...2 free picks from heat 2? And a shot at S3/B4 on their warlocks, which is one higher than the Goetics. FR troops across the board and one extra MR is nice, but that hardly makes up for everything else being vastly inferior to Marignon. They're going to see maybe 2 anathemants all game since they'll be making warlocks the rest of the time, so less potential blood sacrificing abuse on the whole, even though they do have H3 priests as well. Abysia is a clear loser against any opponent that isn't tossing around gobs of fire magic, so their only good matchup is probably the head-to-head with Marignon. Most of the other LA nations won't really care about the FR til the battlefield enchants come out, and by that point Abysia's reliance on cap-mages is going to start to hurt them pretty badly.

[Gandalf Parker]

I didnt realize we were trying to discuss who might actually win. I might try that will a 4 man small-map blitz but not something this big.

Diplomacy and alliances are likely to affect the outcome of this game more than anything we have discussed so far. Second to that is likely to be how closely matched a nation is to the playing style of the person playing it.
If gambling wasnt illegal here Id be tempted to start a paypal betting pool.