Tourmaline - Mod Nations Game (Finished)

[Alpine Joe]

Originally Posted by rdonj

Yeah, ferrosol has done pretty well with alugra. Even if his pretender died, he is almost finished with his first war and is one of the leading researchers. Alugra is a nation to be feared. But I don't think he performed unreasonably well. Perhaps once alpine joe is defeated he'll have a different opinion to share, however. Sombre's nations sure don't seem to be doing well in this game. It's just me and the ogres remaining out of 5 nations now.

Sucks about all the pop killing. Stygia has those very nice composite bowmen who would be handy additions to the undead horde you have assembled.

Well I'm completely dead now,so i'll feel free to comment a bit on relative nation strength.

First off congratulations to ferrosol for killing me off. He used a nice mix of troops, and managed to concentrate strength where I was weak. Other than a few small tactical victories (killing his pretender) he significantly outplayed me. Part of the reason was simply my over-confidence. I took a pretender focused on midgame, and took sloth scales. i didn't expect to get attacked with quite that much focus

However, as perhaps the first nation ever defeated by Alugra (or have they been in mod nation games before?) I will make some commentary on their relative strength.

Alugra is a powerful nation. I don't know if I would say overpowered, but they are very very powerful. The alugran smiths caused me no end of grief. 20 natural protection on an encumbrance three unit.....I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to kill those guys. My red achilleans, supposedly the finest infantry in the world, and balanced by gluttony, low map move and magic vulnerability, had their butts handed to them royally by the smiths, by virtue of the fact they simply couldn't scratch that huge protection stat. Eventually I just rushed researching Harm, and that was moderately effective, but by then it was too late, and I ran out of blood slaves because blood battlefield mages are idiotic with their slave use..... I can't imagine what a normal MA human nation without access to good (nonfire!) battle magic would do against the smiths.

Watchmen are also an extremely nice unit, and Ferro used them very well by mixing them with a GoR watchmen spamming shockwave.

I don't think either the smiths of the watchmen are overpowered, but both in the same nation, without that nation being the nation of WTFBBQ elite troops, might be a little excessive.

Also Alugra has access to a ton of magic paths, and thugs of various types, a unit with a forge bonus, and big communions.

Its a lot of really good stuff to cram into one nation, and Ferro used it all extremely well. Arga dis certainly isn't a weak nation, but in that situation I definitely felt i was playing with a much weaker hand of cards, metaphorically speaking (although a lot of that was my own poor planning) I've never been defeated so quickly after such a good early start.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

Alugra is a powerful nation. I don't know if I would say overpowered, but they are very very powerful. The alugran smiths caused me no end of grief. 20 natural protection on an encumbrance three unit.....I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to kill those guys. My red achilleans, supposedly the finest infantry in the world, and balanced by gluttony, low map move and magic vulnerability, had their butts handed to them royally by the smiths, by virtue of the fact they simply couldn't scratch that huge protection stat. Eventually I just rushed researching Harm, and that was moderately effective, but by then it was too late, and I ran out of blood slaves because blood battlefield mages are idiotic with their slave use..... I can't imagine what a normal MA human nation without access to good (nonfire!) battle magic would do against the smiths.

Watchmen are also an extremely nice unit, and Ferro used them very well by mixing them with a GoR watchmen spamming shockwave.

I don't think either the smiths of the watchmen are overpowered, but both in the same nation, without that nation being the nation of WTFBBQ elite troops, might be a little excessive.

Also Alugra has access to a ton of magic paths, and thugs of various types, a unit with a forge bonus, and big communions.

Its a lot of really good stuff to cram into one nation, and Ferro used it all extremely well. Arga dis certainly isn't a weak nation, but in that situation I definitely felt i was playing with a much weaker hand of cards, metaphorically speaking (although a lot of that was my own poor planning) I've never been defeated so quickly after such a good early start.

It's worth noting that Red Achilleans are one of the worst units to go up against Smiths because while they are superb fighters and themselves pretty damn hard to kill, they just don't do that much damage. I can easily imagine how they'd get completely stuck against a wall of prot 20 units with very little fatigue.

Arga Dis does have a couple of units that do significantly more damage though - those with berserk for example. Though against smiths where a hit is usually a kill, I guess they might not get to berserk too much.

[Alpine Joe]

Originally Posted by Sombre

It's worth noting that Red Achilleans are one of the worst units to go up against Smiths because while they are superb fighters and themselves pretty damn hard to kill, they just don't do that much damage. I can easily imagine how they'd get completely stuck against a wall of prot 20 units with very little fatigue.

Arga Dis does have a couple of units that do significantly more damage though - those with berserk for example. Though against smiths where a hit is usually a kill, I guess they might not get to berserk too much.

Well, their only berserking recruitable has only claw attacks, so total damage is still pretty low, not to mention they wouldn't survive a single hit from smiths. THe only arg dis troops that do more damage than the achilleans are the disgustingly expensive cavalry (which I ended up switching too) and the glaive wielding fliers who are also very expensive and resource intensive. Perhaps I should have massed them from the beginning, but i simply was unaware of the protection of the troops I was facing until too late.....

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

Well, their only berserking recruitable has only claw attacks, so total damage is still pretty low, not to mention they wouldn't survive a single hit from smiths. THe only arg dis troops that do more damage than the achilleans are the disgustingly expensive cavalry (which I ended up switching too) and the glaive wielding fliers who are also very expensive and resource intensive. Perhaps I should have massed them from the beginning, but i simply was unaware of the protection of the troops I was facing until too late.....

There are other ways of triggering your berserk units too, using blood magic like bloodletting - but this was probably too early in the game for that. Sworn Brothers in their second form have str 16 also, so they would probably be best for cracking that prot.