The Bogarus Problem

[K]

Micah said:
Yes, K, a naked PoD has issues with cav, and archers as well. You also get scouting reports for a reason. Pick a prov without either on turn 2 and make an enchanted shield, alchemizing for the 5th pearl. Turn 3 you should hopefully have another province you can take that's adjacent to your cap...doesn't matter which one, since your PoD flies. Have your PoD kill the indies and your starting scout bring the shield over and give it to your Prince. He's now pretty much able to solo any indie province between the arrow blocking and the increased defense to stand up to a cavalry charge until the fear kicks in. Avoid the cav altogether if you want, there plenty of other stuff for your flying pretender to pick from. And this is just using national resources, you can do better if you trade.

And that's no more interesting or effective than setting up smite armies to do the same. The effect of "more provinces" is the exact same, you just don't have to pay hundreds of design points for it.

Micah said:
If by "a little resistant" you mean "completely immune to" then yes, you're right about fear assassins. Fear doesn't work on morale-30 units, end of story.

I'm not quite sure what you are talking about because I've seen Pretenders route. If you route during an assassination, you die.

Micah said:
There are a number of effective SC counters, it's true, but if you're letting troops that can kill your SC get into combat with your SC you're not using it very well. Flight is your friend.

So you are saying that you'll avoid combat with this SC god.... then why even have it? It is still vulnerable to teleport ambushes and other enemy magic, so it just looks like a liability from my standpoint.

Micah said:
And no, you didn't say anything about evo-5, but you did say "powerful magic" so I figured falling fires or something of that level was what you had in mind, since teleporting in mages to spam mind burn, rage and bonds of fire is pretty laughable. Maybe Flaming Arrows, which is level 4 instead of 5, but still, my point is that you're losing over half of your research by going with early priests. You'll have to forgive the naming confusion on my part.

I think you must be joking with me because I can't imagine you do not know about Thaum 5 which in total gives you Gateway, Teleports, Communions, Soul Slay, Confusion, Leeching Darkness and a host of other spells that can seriously alter a war or battlefield. Being able to move armies from your castles straight to a war zone is a great power, but if powerful battlemagic is only a Communion and some equipment away, that's just icing on the cake.

Micah said:And sure, you might be able to have all that by turn 17, but I bet I can have it quicker than that with an awake pretender and still have a highly mobile raider on top of a well-developed nation.

Your "well developed nation" is going to get twice as many afflicted old mages every winter because you went G1 instead of G3 (1/3 instead of 1/6 by my tests), and who knows how much income you'll have lost from not having provinces grow as fast (and how much you'll lose once you start blood hunting).

But it is a good thing you have a flying raider. With your Misfortune, you'll need it to put down the barbarian and knight invasions that crop up even in an Order 3.

Whatever. I've made my point. I'll let this go.

[Micah]

K - The proof is in the pudding, as they say. You've got a total of 1 win vs 4 other opponents in a newbie game, whereas I think I've got a pretty solid track record of MP wins. You can present all of the misleading evidence you'd like, but at the end of the day you simply don't have the same level of understanding of the game as some of the MP vets, myself included.

Take, for example, your statement about fear. Pretenders are immune to it, at least from everything I've tested and seen. This is a clear-cut issue of game mechanics. They can and do rout when they are injured badly enough, or when they are part of a general army rout, but fear doesn't bother them. It's hard to truly grasp the subtleties of strategy decisions when you don't even grasp the game mechanics.

Your statements about efficiency and general game flow are also flawed, although it is somewhat harder to prove, especially when you swap around your arguments. You said "And on a final note, are you seriously trying to tell me that Con4(Carpets of Flying) and Thaum3(Teleport) are not doable by turn 16 with Bogarus" and all of a sudden you start talking about having thaum-5, which is another 420RP, and Leeching Darkness, which is a D3 spell when you only have D1 mages. Sure, I guess you can communion together enough mages to get that to go off, but it's a pretty lousy idea in terms of efficiency. Plus you don't have S3 on the D starets without a 10% random, so you can't actually teleport in at that point.

Teleport ambushes and other magic can kill a pretender, it's true. Saying that's a liability is like saying having a queen is bad in chess because your opponent will be trying really hard to eliminate her. Resources are finite, and if he's aiming his magic at your pretender he's not aiming it at your other assets.

[K]

Micah said:
K - The proof is in the pudding, as they say. You've got a total of 1 win vs 4 other opponents in a newbie game, whereas I think I've got a pretty solid track record of MP wins. You can present all of the misleading evidence you'd like, but at the end of the day you simply don't have the same level of understanding of the game as some of the MP vets, myself included.

Interesting fallacy.

When I've played almost a hundred games and won just over 7% of them, do I get to dismiss people's facts like that too?

Micah said:
Take, for example, your statement about fear. Pretenders are immune to it, at least from everything I've tested and seen. This is a clear-cut issue of game mechanics. They can and do rout when they are injured badly enough, or when they are part of a general army rout, but fear doesn't bother them. It's hard to truly grasp the subtleties of strategy decisions when you don't even grasp the game mechanics.

You make a lot of assumptions, like assuming I was talking about the fear mechanic instead of the routing mechanic. I'll admit I wasn't clear.

From that you make assumptions about my ability which are not warranted, and you do so in an attempt to "win" the argument.

Here's my advice: if you are going to try to win an argument, do so on the merits and not by attempts to discredit your opponent. Personal attacks don't work, and they make you look like you don't have valid arguments to counter your opponent.

Micah said:
Your statements about efficiency and general game flow are also flawed, although it is somewhat harder to prove, especially when you swap around your arguments. You said "And on a final note, are you seriously trying to tell me that Con4(Carpets of Flying) and Thaum3(Teleport) are not doable by turn 16 with Bogarus" and all of a sudden you start talking about having thaum-5, which is another 420RP, and Leeching Darkness, which is a D3 spell when you only have D1 mages. Sure, I guess you can communion together enough mages to get that to go off, but it's a pretty lousy idea in terms of efficiency. Plus you don't have S3 on the D starets without a 10% random, so you can't actually teleport in at that point.

Teleport ambushes and other magic can kill a pretender, it's true. Saying that's a liability is like saying having a queen is bad in chess because your opponent will be trying really hard to eliminate her. Resources are finite, and if he's aiming his magic at your pretender he's not aiming it at your other assets.

Again, you make a lot of assumptions. You assume I'm talking about taking Starets into battle when I never actually said that. I said:

"Then you send your Eparchs into position for your first war. By then you have a second castle pumping out Masters of Names for great research, and when you meet your enemies around turn 17 or 19 you teleport in with powerful magic backing you up and if you were smart you now have those Eparch on Carpets of Flying with something interesting as guard."

One out of four Masters of Names can actually Teleport natively if they have the right picks, and the others can use items like Crystal Coins and boosters in their non-Astral Paths to cast bigger magics. Of course, bringing in an Occultist to use his native Death magic will mean that he'll walk or fly instead of boosting his Astral because it is not efficient without Starshine Skullcaps, but his Communion slaves (and Blood Slaves) can all be Teleported in.

Considering that I showed that a half-hearted game I played can get Thaum 3, Conj3, Evo5, and Con4 by Turn 20 (my mistake, it was not 21 in the test game I posted as I said earlier) means that by your very criteria a flippant comment about Teleporting in on Turn 17-19 with "powerful magic" is definitely within the realm of possibility. I'm sorry that I confused you and the issue by talking about how efficient it is to save research points by using the powerful magic in Thaumaturgy where someone had already invested points as per my example.

Of course, this example proves that instead of diverting points into Conj and Evo you could also spend the 820 points gained on something else like taking one of the Paths I talked about from 3 or 4 to 6, or picking different Paths at 3 and 5.

To summarize my points:

-Yes, an Awake SC is valuable right up until you contact an MP player who gets tired of you raiding their back provinces.

-Yes, the ten to twenty of gems they spend to kill your god are a real expenditure, but probably not worth hundreds of design points that you are paying for the privilege(and the equipment you'll lose when they do and which may actually mean that you lose more gems than them).

-Is it "necessary"? Clearly not considering your other strengths like smite armies, especially if you must sacrifice scales like Production or Growth.

-Is this the kind of discussion I like, but which clearly aggravates people to the point of personal attack? Clearly yes.

My apologies. I'll stop reading this thread so that I'm not tempted to post another response.

[Micah]

"and an SC God is just an investment that ends the instant that someone...gets a Fear-based Assassin to cause him to route during an Assassination attempt."

You're clearly talking about fear mechanics there, not general rout.

You also vastly underestimate the difficulty of killing a properly cared for SC.

But how about this, instead of arguing over theory why don't we play a few duels? Caelum seems like a good rush nation to play against with their mammoths, but that's just a suggestion. We can swap off playing as Bogarus and see who fares better. Willing to step up and test your scale build?

[Sombre]

Yes he was talking about fear mechanics. I have no idea why he'd seriously try and pretend he wasn't.

But are you sure fear doesn't effect 30 morale creatures Micah? I might test this tomorrow.

[DrPraetorious]

I should add that I agree with Micah - this is in many ways a 4X game, and getting an awake SC is a good way to bootstrap into some early expansion as Bogarus.

To an extent, I also agree with K - this SC God does not answer the question of what you do when someone rushes you (die), but nothing about having an awake SC God prevents you from using your national forces and priests, if those will be sufficient to blunt the rush, you'll probably have more of them on turn 12 with a SC than with super-scales; this is especially true as you can afford an awake SC and still have positive scales.

Consider the obvious:
Awake Dom 10 Prince of Death, Earth 3, Death 5
Order 3, Sloth 1, Cold 3, Growth 1, Misf 2, Magic 1

vs the king of scales:
Imprisoned Dom 7 Forge Lord, Fire 4, Water 3, Earth 3
Order 3, Prod 3, Cold 3, Growth 3, Misf 1, Magic 1

Now this guy is a *fantastic* God. He's got great scales, a forge bonus, he makes rune smashers and earth items and staves of elemental mastery all for cheap.

Fact remains - in a MP game, I'm taking the awake SC God every time.

[Micah]

Sombre said:
Yes he was talking about fear mechanics. I have no idea why he'd seriously try and pretend he wasn't.

But are you sure fear doesn't effect 30 morale creatures Micah? I might test this tomorrow.

I made 2 D10 cyclops since it was the easiest way to get a bunch of fear quickly and had them swing away at each other for a battle, they lasted the full 50 rounds before the attacker ran away, so I'm pretty sure. I just added 3 behemoths to one side and didn't get a rout, nor did his morale number drop off of 30. QM said there might be some weird situations where it might work (spells maybe?) but it seems quite rare at best and likely impossible. Certainly not something a single assassin could trigger.

[MaxWilson]

Micah said:
Take, for example, your statement about fear. Pretenders are immune to it, at least from everything I've tested and seen. This is a clear-cut issue of game mechanics. They can and do rout when they are injured badly enough, or when they are part of a general army rout, but fear doesn't bother them. It's hard to truly grasp the subtleties of strategy decisions when you don't even grasp the game mechanics.

Hunh. I've been confused about this for a while, since Baalz posted about using Send Lesser Horror to kill SCs, and this post made me finally good and check it out... and it appears that Morale 30 does make you (virtually?) immune to fear. Conclusions:

1.) Thanks Micah. If nothing else, you straightened that issue out for me.

2.) I love Banquet for the Dead even more now. Not only do Ditanim have Fear +0, but they're immune to fear themselves. E10N6 Ditanu are cool.

-Max

[Tifone]

Excuse the question of a poor n00b.

Doesn't a H3 priest destroy an assassin? I mean, he is already set to smite on turn 1 no? And surely he isn't on the front line? One turn, possibly two for the assassin before landing the killin blow, shouldn't he already be smited and gone?

For the main theme, I don't understand why wouldn't both the ways be viable - I think we're used to see nations played in 2 or even more different ways I think. Surely the SC provides more "moral deterrent" then the smiters - but with DrPraetorious' build and scales, for example, and K's strategy, I think you would expand almost as faster but not trashing your mid-to-late game's national advantage of a strong research with a Drain-2...

[Agema]

Smite has a magic resistance check, the assassin may survive. Besides, few people will make an assassin early on when there are more important things to make, and they won't be preferentially aiming for H3 priests, I suspect.

* * *

I think people are overlooking what K originally stated. He wasn't suggesting Bogarus would be rushproof without an awake SC pretender. I think he was suggesting partly he'd take the chance of non-rushing neighbours for an advanced mid to late game. I'd imagine the likes of mammoth-wielding Caelum or dual-bless Mictlan would fancy rushing Bogarus whether or not they had an SC.

To this end, Bogarus could avoid sloth scales (making the points back and more on a cheaper pretender and delayed arrival) and build stronger troops instead.