Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92

[Valerius]

Ok, so I don't expect this suggestion to be taken seriously but I've thinking about reconciling blood magic costs with gem based costs and it occured to me what if they used the same metric and non-unique blood summons cost gems, not slaves? Because so many blood summons are cross path it would be easy to assign the appropriate gem type for most of them. Then you could ask, for instance, how many E gems is a demon knight worth compared to the other available E summons? For single path cases like fiends of darkness you could have a couple of versions of the spell using different gem types to keep the spell available to most/all blood nations. Ritual of the five gates maybe just go with S gems (probably do the same for send horror even though it's not a summon).

National blood spells could take the same approach, generally matching single path blood spells with that nation's dominant paths.

Added bonus: reduced micro since you'd only have to blood hunt to the extent of fueling battlefield magic, blood sacrificing and summoning uniques. Sure, blood nations would have to pay "real money" for their summons but OTOH they'd have some extra gold from not hunting quite as many provinces. Though if they did keep hunting to the same degree it would be interesting to see how that translated to additional power on the battlefield (more life for a life casters, etc.)

And yes, they likely wouldn't have the gem income to mass the numbers of blood summons they have now, but that just puts them on the same footing with non-blood nations.

Like I said, I'm not seriously suggesting this as a CBM change but maybe one day I'll run an experimental game with these settings.

[Redeyes]

Originally Posted by Valerius

Ok, so I don't expect this suggestion to be taken seriously but I've thinking about reconciling blood magic costs with gem based costs and it occured to me what if they used the same metric and non-unique blood summons cost gems, not slaves? Because so many blood summons are cross path it would be easy to assign the appropriate gem type for most of them. Then you could ask, for instance, how many E gems is a demon knight worth compared to the other available E summons? For single path cases like fiends of darkness you could have a couple of versions of the spell using different gem types to keep the spell available to most/all blood nations. Ritual of the five gates maybe just go with S gems (probably do the same for send horror even though it's not a summon).

I would price most troop blood summons as being worth 2 gems.

[Shardphoenix]

Originally Posted by Valerius

what if they used the same metric and non-unique blood summons cost gems, not slaves?

What for? Just to nerf all blood powerhouses to the level of pre-CBM EA Agartha?

[Redeyes]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

What for? Just to nerf all blood powerhouses to the level of pre-CBM EA Agartha?

Isn't the question mostly something like "just for fun?" I mean, the suggestion is anti-good and the gem cost system has a large dose of arbitrary already (why does ghosts initially cost 4 death gems when you get a troll for 1 earth?) No blood summons seems more like a house-rule for specific games than anything else.

I don't know why you figure blood nations would be close-to-useless (I figure that's what you were describing when comparing it to old Agharta) even without blood summons, some of them still have large enough strengths to go around.

Comparing blood summons to the others isn't easily done either, as you can usually get a lot more blood summons from a province than you can get other summons, even as things are now. At 2 gems I compare the blood summons to the individuals summons others get. I think blood deserves a reduction in the amount of units it allows you to field, but different strokes and all that, some people seem to not just bother with setting up decent-sized parallel blood economies.