Tragic poor pretender design is limiting MA Van!!!

[Baalz]

Your logic is flawed, if I understand you're saying the Vans are too powerful because they're too expensive? (I'm just teasing, what you really mean is that Vanheim is even more powerful than people already think) Aren't vans cap only now though? Even with a ridiculous bless 3 vans aren't gonna go far alone, and 6 have to be careful who they pick a fight with...so you're looking at a real expansion/raiding force once every 2-3 turns? I find this is the real number I look at for very early game - how often can I send out a force capable of taking out most indies, and how long until I can set up a second recruitment location (not for a long time if you're initially based on cap only recruits)? If you plan on riding on the Van's strength taking a 3 dominion seems suboptimal - I'm hardly a Vanheim player but seems much better to have 5-6 vans per turn than an extra minor earth bless. Reducing the number of vans is not the way to go if you're worried about fatigue buildup, and it seems outside of resource constraints that with a rapid expansion it's not difficult to get the gold income to field that many per turn very rapidly.

I also don't personally believe the common wisdom that whoever has the most provinces also has the most gold, gems, and research. Most every game I've played the most aggressive expanders in province count initially fall well behind in research (they're buying expansion parties rather than researchers), gems (site searching gets put off in favor of expansion), and gold (often poor scales to support the rush/rapid expansion). Because of the compounding nature of research/site searching and the fact that successful rushing/rapid expansion often breeds *more* resources put towards expansion it can be well into mid game before the inherent advantage of holding more territories can catch back up compared to somebody with good researchers, good scales and a modest expansion - and that's assuming you can hold all that territory with no problems (rapid expansion tends to breed enemies quickly).