HINNOM EATS EVERYTHING

[chrispedersen]

I've played probably 60 games, with Hinnom, 2-3 mp. I'm very confident the chariots are a great unit, SP or MP.

I *love* bless strategies. To my mind, they are the most fun, and I always start any race with a predisposition - hey.. how can I make a bless work with this nation.

Don't get me wrong - Hinnoms sacreds are solid units. But with morale checks for groups of units under 4, and openended die rolling on individual direct damage spells, you could flee due to one unit being killed.

I don't like the very small forces you would have going a sacred route. Plus, sacreds require a priest which each construction thereof, is one less researcher.

[Ming]

chrispederson,

Let us just agree to disagree and leave it at that.

You certainly have more experience than me. So I won't tell you not to use chariots - you may know some tricks with chariots that I am not aware of. However, I certainly do not find them particularly effective without haste.

BTW, have you tried using Hinnom's sacreds the way I described? Against indies the chance of losing a F4E4N4 blessed sacred troop is quite small if you are careful. If you start with 5 you need to lose 2 to risk being routed. That is a very unlikley event. (The greater risk by far is to lose your priest commander due to flanking - which can be minimised by having some indie bodyguards and careful placement).

Furthermore, Hinnom can get access to blade wind (conj3 and evo4, with falling fire not far behind at evo5) or wooden warrior (alt5, with protection, body ethereal and luck en-route) with less research points than haste (constr4 and Ench4). I am not sure if chariots + haste is necessary better than sacred troops + wooden warrior or sacred troops + blade wind.

Finally, using indie priests to lead Hinnom's sacred troops do not reduce the number of researchers. Using Kohen to lead chariots do.



Anyway, happy gaming!

[thejeff]

The problem with taking sacreds for early expansion with Hinnom isn't that they don't work. It's that they don't need them. As Baalz suggested, I tried a scales build in SP, expanding with groups of 4 chariots and a couple groups of 12 Dawn Guard. Once I had a couple provinces under my belt I could start a new group or 2 every turn. I think 26 provinces by the end of the first year and that mostly because I'd run out of room.
Use the Dawn Guard for anything that looks extra tough, but 4 Chariots can take cavalry or barbarian provinces, usually without losses.
You'll need to combine those expansion parties once you start fighting other nations, but against indies there's no need.
I used indy commanders and my starting prophet. All my capital recruitment went towards research. No need to wait on building a temple to recruit indy priests or use Kohen.

If I was going to consider a bless, it would be for mid/late game Baal use, not expansion.

[konming]

Yes, I agree with thejeff. There is not much need for the sacred. They hardly bring anything that chariot and dawn guards don't bring, even with substantial bless. The only case you might want the sacred is when you face super blessed F9 troops. Also each rephaite warrior devour as much population as a ba'al. (source:dom3db). This, my friend, is really bad.

However, I do find the single path mages somewhat lacking in the mid and maybe late game. You cannot forge most useful stuff, and level 2 is not really that great for many single path spells.

Also they are easy to lose focus. If you go blood, you probably will lose the artifacts war. On the other hand, you need evo to help your troops, thu and conj to site search, alt for useful spells for your SCs. The choice are many and hard. It would be challenging to play them well.

[Baalz]

Level 2 F, E & S lets you self buff to level 3, level 3 lets you cast all the main line battle spells - falling fire, blade wind, soul slay, etc. Level 2 Air lets you spread some air gems around and lay down thunder strike - a tad expensive, but certainly worthwhile in the right situation. N2 gives you everything from haste to panic to charm (with a booster). I find their battlemages very worthwhile and quite flexible.

For multipathed forge mages, yes this can be a bit of a uphill struggle, though you're site searching the crap out of everything and it's early age so you shouldn't have too much trouble finding tons of indie mages throughout your abnormally large empire. Also, empowering is a real option with your solid income of every type other than water.

[Zenzei]

While not the most awesome thing Hinnom can do, the Horite Shamans can forge shadow brands with a single D-booster, which I think helps a lot when making Thugs/SCs.

[konming]

Baalz, does it make sense to make an imprisoned rainbow pretender? This way, you get a lot of magical diversity (in terms of artifacts forging and some summons) at the price of losing some dominion strength (maybe reduced to 6) and 2 to 3 levels of luck? If temple check is indeed only determined by initial dominion strength, then this would be bad.

[Baalz]

That's not a terrible idea Konming, though I want to reiterate that the blood fountain pretender is not a "throwaway" choice picked solely for the price, he brings a couple nice things to the table.

Higher dominion than you'd otherwise get. Remember, aside from being an awesome dominion you'll want to spread, being heat-3 it's also a strategic weapon against everybody but Abyssia. Helherdlings fare a lot worse with extra encumbrance...

The ease of casting the lords of civilization combined with the fact you're already hitting the blood research hard means it makes sense to push for blood-9 fairly early. You can start deploying these guys earlish late game rather than late end game when seraphs and tartarians are common.

A blood bless has very good synergy with Se'irim who are a fantastically good alternative to what your enemy is probably expecting you to throw at them. The thought of facing these guys buffed with any combination of will of the fates, army of lead, fog warriors, air shield, weapons of sharpness.....the mind boggles.

[Ming]

thejeff,

I understand your point, but fighting against indies only last 5 turns or so (at least in the maps that I play in). Investing in troops that only do well in those five/six turns is in my opinion false economy.

I have found that 4 chariots only work against the weaker indies (and scouting reports are not 100% accurate). For others you'll need more and even then you will occasionaly take losses. With Hinnom's sacred troops you can start a new exploration group every turn too if you take production 3 [but that is a P3 vs S1 issue and not chariots vs sacreds. Anyway that'll only give you an extra 2-3 provinces on balance before coming up against other nations in the maps I play - so you could say my comments are based on very different map set-ups - as I find crowded maps to be more challenging in SP. So from my experience the faster expansion is not necessary sufficient to compensate for the extra 160 design points difference between P3 and S1]. So the saving from using chariots is not great. On the other hand you can only recruit a limited amount of sacred troops every turn and they are extremely cost effective in the long run. So it pays to start early.

[thejeff]

You are playing very crowded maps then. Since you're only going to have a difference of a few provinces anyway, expansion against indies can be largely ignored, which might make a difference.

Dawn Guard mixed with Chariots seems to slaughter AI nations as well as sacred troops, and can be raised in closer forts and in greater numbers as you expand.

And claiming a 160 pt difference (P3 -> S1) for using chariots ignores the points used to get that bless. Hardly a fair comparison.

Once you've expanded a bit, it's hard to get replacements from the capital to the front and you risk disaster if you do manage to lose a lot of your built up sacreds. Might not happen in SP, but is pretty much guaranteed in MP.

Which brings me back to my earlier suggestion of gearing any bless towards SCs rather than the troops.

I haven't played too much with the sacreds. How much have you noticed them eating population or other troops?