Bless nation recommendation, please

[KissBlade]

Originally Posted by 13lackGu4rd

how does TC vs Lanka go in favour of TC? assuming both go for a bless strategy...? Palashankas>Warriors of the 5 Elements by a lot...

Hohoho, you are quite wrong here sir ... F9w9 Warriors destroys Lanka/Niefel

[rdonj]

Unless niefel achieves critical mass of fatigue auras, at which point the TC warriors will destroy them, until they all pass out and are butchered by the niefels. But until that point, F/W W5E are just amazing.

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by rdonj

Unless niefel achieves critical mass of fatigue auras, at which point the TC warriors will destroy them, until they all pass out and are butchered by the niefels. But until that point, F/W W5E are just amazing.

Warriors of the 5 elements have cold resistance and don't care about the cold aura of Niefelheim.
When I say TC sacred beat Lanka sacreds, I speak out of experience. Just try it.

[rdonj]

I've tried the niefel on TC one before. I used to duel a friend of mine who liked niefel, and would build jarls with bunches of popsicle friends. The problem is that, unless you're 100% cold immune, eventually the fatigue from the jarls will get you. TC definitely wins against relatively small numbers of giants. But once you get 10+ in one province, it is really hard to carve through them before the cold aura knocks everyone unconscious.

[Jarkko]

Having witnessed the power of Dual Bless Wot5E on the wrong side (chrispedersen used those in the Magellan game), I can say you don't have a snowballs chance in hell if you don't use some devious evil trick (which will then be nerfed in next version of CBM ) while also having 10:1 advantage in numbers...

[thejeff]

10+ Jarls? Or 10+ Jarls & Neifel Giants together?

The first will be hard, the second is really just 3-4 expansion parties meeting up. Turn 5-6 if you're close enough together.

OTOH even 10 Neifel Giants is 1500 gold. 1500 gold worth of W5E or even Jaguars with FW bless will do a lot of damage before they freeze up.

[rdonj]

Yeah, not just jarls but jarls and giants. It's certainly a very expensive army, but since W5E are cap only, there's a point at which, with enough giants gathered in one place, you can never kill them with JUST W5E. That is all I am saying. Niefels will lose any sane matchup on a gold to gold basis, but on a basis of maximum production vs maximum production, they will win by fatiguing everyone out within 2-3 turns.

[LDiCesare]

Considering both Niefel and W5E are cap-only, after a few turns expanding and earning lots of gold, the limiting factor becomes the dominion value, which limits the number of sacreds. I tested such setups this afternoon, and W5E tend to freeze after 4 or 5 rounds, whereas jag warriors freeze after 2 rounds. The thing is, to assemble Niefel army, I had to spend all my money, whereas TC or Mictlan both had much more money left to spend on whatever they liked. Mostly wizards for research in the case of TC, and you could probably buy enough archers to make them painful enough for the giants (although I had picked E9N6 bless for the Niefel, so arrows wouldn't really be an issue unless flaming).
I thought the W5E would do better because I know they can shrug heat auras from Abysia fairly easily, but Niefel's cold is much stronger.

[thejeff]

If you're relying on capital only sacreds, you've probably gone for a high dominion, maybe not 9-10, but at least 7-8. Likely higher for TC than Neifel since it's going to be longer than a few turns before you have the gold to max out Neifel production.

With either Mictlan or TC you'll probably be maxed out from the beginning, or at worst after taking 1-2 provinces. Only 250 gold/turn if you went for 10 dominion and you have cheap mage-priests to lead them.

You won't be maxing out on Neifel giants for a long time. Even 7 giants and a Jotun Jarl to lead them is over 1000 gold a turn. That's a lot more than a few turns expanding. The gold cost is the main limitation for most of the first year.

I haven't experimented with actual W5E/Niefel Giant battles, but I'd expect them to do a lot of damage in those 4-5 rounds. If you've got 3-1 odds, which isn't unlikely given the 6-1 cost ratio, do they really freeze up before dropping giants?

[LDiCesare]

At 3-1 odds, they freeze because there are 3 man-sized warriors per tile against 1 giant, so they're all frozen fast as they are all in the cold aura from the start. At 6-1, they'd fare better. It also depends on the exact bless you pick. For instance, W9S9 isn't very effective against Niefel, whereas W9F9 is. Minor earth bless helps too.