MP: YARG3, non newb MA+ENP2 RAND game. Executor's Ulm winner on turn 76

[Executor]

I used matrixes but I didn't use too many since you need a mage to carry them and mages weren't major parts of my army. Besides, I also had the problem of the 50 item per turn limit and only 15 or so astral smiths, so other stuff took priority.
Things I mostly used astral for were astral caps, coins, eyes of void, spell focus, lucky pendant, crystal ords, AMA, and herald lances.
Had 11 fully equipped mind hunters when AC broke out. Shiny had the pleasure of meeting most of them. Each one of those costs 50-60 gems without hammers now days.

As for crystal shields, I forged those like crazy.
An S1 smith with a crystal shield + astral cap + crystal coin (11 gems total I think) and you can cast WotF.
An A1 mage with helmet + wind bag + crystal shield + matrix (around 25 gems total I think) and you can cast for warriors, mass flight, etc.
A F2 smith with it for flaming arrows.
Earth 3 smith for army of lead, earthquakes and such.
You could pretty much cast any spell A/S/F/E with little to no trouble.

Most of the items forged were used for thugs and SCs though.

I mostly used mages for support and buff spells. Items were used for spells and bows/crossbows for troop support. And of course every army had at least some SCs and thugs. Each army was well rounded and prepared to deal with just about anything.

A typical army which took over Shiny consisted of;

Lighting bows and spirit helms for lightning damage, rods of incineration for fire (I was a BIG fan of those for only 5F gems!), staff of numbness for cold (stun, fatigue) damage.
Herald lances for undead, massed bows of war under flaming arrows, boosted mages for first round flaming arrows, WotF, antimagic, blessings of iron and army of lead. When need arose there was a mage for fog warriors and mass flight as well.
Armies consisted of heavy flail infantry under weapons of sharpness and strength of giants along with the regular battle wide buffs.
Along side those there were always some Treants, Grendels and banes.

The craziest thing for me were probably the 8-15 gem banes which had some pretty insane stats and uses. Banes with 40 defense, anti SC banes, raiding banes, etc. They came in pretty much every variety.

Never had the magic is fading event happen to me in all my Dominions games.

[rdonj]

About mods some more :P

I think it is definitely true that in the case of new modders, they have a tendency to do exactly that. A number of mods were originally made by people with little experience with the game, particularly in multiplayer. And these people do often get sucked into comparing vs iconic units. Some of these nations eventually were taken over by more... sane modders who had a better idea of what sensible balance was and were willing to make changes to them. One of those is Chaos, which started off in crazy town and has been getting slowly pulled back ever since. I'm still not sure if they're balanced yet, but I've not played the most recent version :P They've come a long way though.

With more experienced modders, they do sometimes make mistakes, but I don't think this is really one of them. I know for example that sombre uses a unit balance point that strives for consistency with the rest of the game. However, he likes to experiment with unusual mechanics and abilities that may not exist in vanilla nations. And warhammer nations need to be thematic for the source material, which sometimes makes for a tricky crossover into dominions. Let's look at Warhammer Empire for a moment. In the warhammer universe, they have access to all generic magic paths, but not to race-specific magic paths. If they didn't have access to basically every path in dominions, then it would be highly contrary to the source material. This in itself is a major difficulty for balance as complete diversity is a huge strength in itself. In order to try and lessen the strength of their diversity and prevent the recruitment screen from being excessively cluttered, he made all of the empire's mages into summons, and gave them only incredibly useless 1 path mages for recruits. Initially, people were thinking that if anything being forced to summon their mages using gems would make the empire weaker due to not having many gems for other things. However when people actually got the empire into MP games it was realized that it in fact was a unique and powerful strength for the empire. Despite the fact that they had reasonable upkeep prices, it mostly allowed the empire to divorce itself from having a real gold economy and traditional for time concerns, and their ability to mass mages was eventually deemed too strong. The empire still has amazing magic diversity (all paths but blood), but they now buy their basic mages normally and their military strength has been weakened significantly from its former levels.

There are a number of similar examples in mods where the effect of a unique national ability was decided to be unexpectedly powerful, only to be put in its place later :P Most mod nations start with at least one thing that turns out to fit in this category, but when they are discovered they are usually changed pretty quickly.

Now, with Amos mods, he was open about his lack of worry over balance, and was only concerned with the internal balance between his different nations, ignoring vanilla nations altogether :P


Executor - Ugh, it's ridiculous when it's cheaper to turn a level 1 mage into a level 4 caster than it is to get EDM summons. It sounds like your nation got extremely silly by the end there. That was sounding pretty similar to play under a clamming environment. Except you're the only guy who has them.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by rdonj

About mods some more :P

Thanks for the feedback! This conversation actually has me wanting to start a mod nations game. The Warhammer nations are of course excellent but I tend to be drawn to the Dominions-style nations based on real world cultures. I very briefly subbed as Al-Nadim in one of Exec's games and I really like their theme so maybe I'll organize an ENP2 game once my current game advances a bit more.

[Mightypeon]

Originally Posted by Executor

I used matrixes but I didn't use too many since you need a mage to carry them and mages weren't major parts of my army. Besides, I also had the problem of the 50 item per turn limit and only 15 or so astral smiths, so other stuff took priority.
Things I mostly used astral for were astral caps, coins, eyes of void, spell focus, lucky pendant, crystal ords, AMA, and herald lances.
Had 11 fully equipped mind hunters when AC broke out. Shiny had the pleasure of meeting most of them. Each one of those costs 50-60 gems without hammers now days.

As for crystal shields, I forged those like crazy.
An S1 smith with a crystal shield + astral cap + crystal coin (11 gems total I think) and you can cast WotF.
An A1 mage with helmet + wind bag + crystal shield + matrix (around 25 gems total I think) and you can cast for warriors, mass flight, etc.
A F2 smith with it for flaming arrows.
Earth 3 smith for army of lead, earthquakes and such.
You could pretty much cast any spell A/S/F/E with little to no trouble.

Most of the items forged were used for thugs and SCs though.

I mostly used mages for support and buff spells. Items were used for spells and bows/crossbows for troop support. And of course every army had at least some SCs and thugs. Each army was well rounded and prepared to deal with just about anything.

A typical army which took over Shiny consisted of;

Lighting bows and spirit helms for lightning damage, rods of incineration for fire (I was a BIG fan of those for only 5F gems!), staff of numbness for cold (stun, fatigue) damage.
Herald lances for undead, massed bows of war under flaming arrows, boosted mages for first round flaming arrows, WotF, antimagic, blessings of iron and army of lead. When need arose there was a mage for fog warriors and mass flight as well.
Armies consisted of heavy flail infantry under weapons of sharpness and strength of giants along with the regular battle wide buffs.
Along side those there were always some Treants, Grendels and banes.

The craziest thing for me were probably the 8-15 gem banes which had some pretty insane stats and uses. Banes with 40 defense, anti SC banes, raiding banes, etc. They came in pretty much every variety.

Never had the magic is fading event happen to me in all my Dominions games.

I actually use Smiths in battle, but often, only 50 Smiths can forge items per turn, and if you ahve that number (it may be less if you have some cursed artificats in storage), you will propably still have an excess number of smiths capable of playing battle assist. Strength of Giants, Eart Meld, Destruction and ofc Magma eruption are all usefull spells.
I also like weapons of sharpness a lot, there is not a lot of things that are immune to weapons of sharpness Strength of gianted Flail troops.