Air bless: useless?

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I will say this. Do you use garbage?

If you had a strategy that involved Dark Skies or a Gale Gate, would you bother taking advantage of an incidental air bless? Would you see any benefit from that? Or would you ignore the bless completely, despite having taken air anyways.

As a primary bless strategy, there are a lot of problems with an air bless. As you've said, there are ways to get around it. There are also ways to circumvent twist fate and nations where its almost useless. Abysia with def2 sacreds? Jotunheim where you're outnumbered six to one?

With some nations, like certain eras of Atlantis, Agartha, and Ctis, you only get to play the melee game anyways, and you may or may not have certain advantages there- an opponent massing melee sometimes only levels the playing field.

An air bless is not a winning strategy like a fire bless can be. When picking paths for blesses alone, air isn't one of my picks either. But I play a lot of nations where Astral magic is garbage, but Air magic has some real value.

But when you're not basing your entire game strategy around blessed troops, air is a damn solid bless. I don't expect my air blessed Arssartuts to win me the game. If the opponent actually masses melee or kills all my Arssartut - I don't care. I'm only churning out eight a turn, tops. I already got my money's worth from them, doubled their usefulness and versatility, in fact reliably tripling my normal expansion by the end of the first year, surpassing the early value of a supercombatant, IMO. By the time someones' countering them, I'll already have dropped Arssartuts from my plans because of their scarcity. And I'll be using my six points of air magic for key tasks.

I won't let myself loose on the argument of universally cheaper. I'd take it a bit further afield than I should, and get senselessly agitated. I'll simply say that MA Atlantis has no oracle, just a monolith. And with only one astral pick, an astral nine bless will leave an awake pretender with only 22 points. Whereas an Arch Mage with an air 8 bless has 60 points to spare, and my Air Six, 180.

I'm going to stop debating this for now. I took this position in part because I found air blesses useful, and in part to play the devil's advocate. I still believe it's not garbage, but I'm not going to let myself be agitated simply because I'm not getting people in general, or one person in particular to agree with me. And once I stake out a particular thesis, I do tend to get contrary w/o reason.

Maybe I'll revisit later. But I don't want to go stir-crazy and derail the thread into a flamewar for no reason either. Other than the reason that I was arguing, and therefor must win because my ego demands it.

I will give into a little of my inner child for satisfactions sake and say...
Nya nya nya. I'm right and you're wrong. I can't hear you. *Sticks fingers in his ears*.

Ah, that was cathartic.

Okay, I wish you well, but its best I cut myself off for now. Getting off work early (but still needing rest) without any plans gave me too much time to myself with nothing to do but argue. I will continue to read this thread, however. And may chime in later when I'm in less of a bratty mood.

[Jazzepi]

>As a primary bless strategy, there are a lot of problems with an air bless. As you've said, there are ways to get around it. There are also ways to circumvent twist fate and nations where its almost useless. Abysia with def2 sacreds? Jotunheim where you're outnumbered six to one?<

Don't put words in my mouth. I never said I'd bother with twist fate on these nations, it's obviously subpar, but air shield would be /even worse/ which just further proves my point that is has no place as a high level bless. In fact, the only reason I would ever take air on my pretender is to get level 4 air to allow me to easily forge air boosters. And as I said, I would always pick a high astral, enough to get twist fate, over a high air any day.


>I won't let myself loose on the argument of universally cheaper.<

Obviously some nations don't have access to the astral fountain, but most do, or they have access to the sacred statue, and the vast majority of the time a high astral bless is infinitely cheaper than the air bless. Oh, and high astral bless lets you cast much better ritual spells than air. Dispel with a huge added bonus to your roll? Or maybe arcane nexus with your level 8 or 9 caster that's nearly impossible to dispel. Or master enslave with a pretender that's ready to cast it out of box. Or Gate so that you can teleport your entire army into the enemy's capital, and then spam master enslave communion awesomeness while you take it down.

A high air bless will never, ever, be a good bless because it's opportunity cost is far too high, and it doesn't help you enough. Maybe it would be if quickness, twist fate, and flaming weapons weren't around. All of them are vastly superior, and except for the water one, offer better late game casting options. Although the sea of ice is quite useful, as is the ability to summon water queens out of the box.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

My apologies. I did not intend to put words in your mouth. I did not intend to claim you had a stance on Abysia, but in hindsight, I agree that it clearly came out that way.

I'll rewrite that section.

As a primary bless strategy, there are a lot of problems with an air bless. As you've said, there are ways to get around it. There are also ways to circumvent twist fate.

I'll provide an example from a nation I'm familiar with, Agartha. The Ancient Ones really are not a good bless chassis until Darkness is castable, but then blesses are kind of moot. Most blesses are a bit of a waste on them, compared to other nations. But being as I'm not familiar with many nations, they will have to serve as my example.

Twist fate will protect them from one attack. With forty hitpoints, that one attack isn't likely to be significant. With a defense of ten, and a parry of only two, they're going to be hit rather easily by missile and melee attacks unless you've got a secondary bless up. A simple chaff screen or group of slingers will quickly dismiss Twist Fate, unless support spells or secondary blesses are in place.

Body Ethereal, or versions of luck can make them more effective, though you are drastically limited by your national mages.

An air bless, on the other hand, has a permanent affect, fully effective immediately without requiring support spells (which you might not have the mages for) such as body ethereal to reach maximum potential, and has no practical fatigue cost. It also presents capabilities you are unable to reproduce using national mages. Your national mages can boost mr in smaller, less effective capacity via iron will or lead shields, or later on in Army of Lead. Unfortunately, Agartha has nothing approaching the effect of Twist Fate, but they do have a few other ways to prevent attacks from hitting now that cave forts and provinces are properly darkness-ing battles.

If you have a high air bless on Agartha, then you can be more aggressive in your use of Blade Wind. This is especially handy because you have such low precision, Darkness or not. Any level of Blade Wind won't protect your Ancient Ones from friendly fire to the point where you don't need to take precautions, and the cost of the higher levels is way too much as well. But there are specific opportunities- worthwhile ones- to a pretender with air magic. In the case of a titan, you may find a staff of Elemental Mastery useful. The Flying Carpet or Winged Shoes will have a dramatic effect on the mobility of your map-move 1, expensive, capital only Oracles. And it achieves that at construction four, not in any unique item. Anyways, there are a few reasons to take air, and while the effect of an air bless alone is not enough to take air, there are situations where the combined value of a low-middling air bless is higher than that of Astral magic on non-oracle/sacred statue pretenders.

And there are opportunity costs to the sacred statue. Astral magic has a lot of expensive temptations. And it can be tough to get your pearl economy off the ground. You cannot manually move around searching for astral sites, though you may get lucky- probably so in the site rich early age- and find a site with the side effect of producing the pearls necessary for steady (and slow, with only one caster) Arcane Probing. On the positive side, Astral pearls are easier to convert to and from- and Probing costs a low two pearls. If you're unlucky at finding sites, though, forty gems can easily be wasted. It doesn't happen often, but it happens, and even when it doesn't, I really don't like the inconvenience. I'd be more interested in bootstrapping a blood economy off of a pretender.

There. I doubt that was any more convincing, but hopefully less troublesome. I really didn't intend to put words in your mouth, and I hope this straightens things out between us- though we'll still be on opposite sides of this debate.

I kind of was unfocused in this post, but here I have a specific question for you. Focusing solely on a 50% air shield and twist fate - none of the other effects considered - what bless would you rather have on Agartha? Leave the MR boost out only for the moment, because while it is worthy of consideration I'd like to save that for later, please. I don't have much energy left tonight.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

As an attempt to understand (one of) the other perspectives, I'm trying an E9 only Cyclops. The attached game demonstrates the problem that causes- Javelins + Crossbows = hurt.

I'll next be trying the Monolith- the only Astral Chassis I have available. Taking the same scales I have with my AirEarth titan above, what do you suggest I change? I have 202 spare points. 85 is tied directly to chassis costs. I cannot take an Earth 9 bless with this build, unfortunately. Though nature, or lesser water is available. Or drop some of my negative scales. At the moment, I'll experiment with W4, S9, and N6, magic docked.. I'll try what else you might suggest, Jazeppi.

EDIT:
I hate to say this, but Twist Fate is surprisingly effective... even on Atlantis. It's late spring of year 2, and my first two task forces are still intact.
One of them is down to six, but its still intact. And I took on cavalry, as well.

In my defense- the idea behind e9a6 was effective 0 encumberance, long lasting fighters, where they would be taking some cold damage from Grip of Winter.
Grip of Winter would cancel Twist Fate, right? Cold damage?

Anyways. You're right about how effective the S9 bless is. Air was useful- don't get me wrong- I refuse to say it is useless- but its nothing beside this Monolith. Still- I don't have any interest or use for Astral magic.

As well, E9 was essential for one reason not related to bless at all. I can't get a dual 9e9s with a monolith - at least without sacrificing order and productivity completely -about 200 points. I can manage E6 which is _functional_ but unsatisfactory due to dispel risks - and lack of feet for Earth Boots. If I have just enough earth gems on hand, I'd like to have the dispel protection from exceeding the path limits.

For a bless strategy, astral nine is clearly superior.
Relative to it- air stinks- but Air is far from useless (though not dependable...), and had caused a significant reduction in fatalities in my tests. If your game strategy is bless- air is a waste- but If your strategy isn't bless- and does not lie on the astral path- air is worth taking in some situations. If the chassis has one pick of astral, twist fate costs 288 points. The air six bless 200 (with base cost of 50). If, for whatever reason, you have a mobile chassis w/o astral such as the crone- you'll pay at least 362 points, probably more for the S9 bless, whereas an A6 bless cost 170 points.

If you first consideration is bless, then Jazeppi wins- air is useless. If it's only your second or third consideration - than its a good deal cheaper and effective enough.

[Jazzepi]

Two comments.

1. I personally wouldn't bother with a bless on Atlantis. It might be worth trying if the sacred troops weren't capital only. They just feel so... subpar, when compared to most sacred troops.

2. Here's the build that I would do instead, using no bless.

Pretender
Dagon
Dom 9
S3
W3

Scales
O3
P3
C3
D1
Misfortune 2
Magic 1

My reasons are listed below.

In C3 the Ice Guard have a 23 protection + shield which makes them 99.9% immune to regular archers, and even very good against crossbow men (I think) as they have shield block + huge damage reduction. This should give you a front guard which is ready for assembly at all provinces. You can then recruit a combination of extremely cheap seal hunters to place as vanguards on the right and left flanks. With such high productivity you should be able to raise 60-80+ per turn once you have all the territory around your capital. A single turn of those, plus a few turns of the ice guards, should give you an extremely effective fighting force. Armor is also king underwater.

I had a sort of option between Dagon and the Wyrm. With P3 you should have a really strong early game between an awake pretender and your strong infantry. That said, you still want to be able to use your pretender in the mid-late game. Wyrm is useless for this. His chassis is *great* but he lacks the slots to really kite him out as an SC. Dagon, on the other hand, is built for that sort of thing. He has fear, posion immunity, trample, and a touch of the right type of magic built in. By adding astral you do three things.

One is that you give him a huge weakness to being killed by astral dual, which sucks, but this only really matters against astral heavy nations as getting access to astral through summon diversity is terribly difficult.

Two, you give him access to an awesome set of easy to access buffs. Twist fate, personal luck, body ethereal, quicken self, astral shield, and breath of winter. Put all these together and he becomes a real behemoth.

Three, you give yourself some much needed magic diversity. My assumption is that your game would look something like this. Dagon expands, Dagon site searches while you research and build army, around turn 15-20 or so you declare war on a nearby neighbor, and use Dagon to lead your armies into battle with some serious ***-whooping to follow.

Comments on Dagon himself. He desperately needs, just like any trampling SC that isn't either elemental or undead, some reinvigoration items. You have zero access to nature so you have to depend on trade to get these, but securing some + 4 reinvig boots and +5 reinvig amulet should be all you need, though I'm a huge fan of rainbow armor as well. He also does well dual wielding two different types of shields and depending on his trample alone to smash through the lines.

I can't think of anything else to say about the above build, but this is how I would play LA Atlantis. The biggest weakness is the lack of late-game magic diversity. You should be able to easily purchase a boots of earth +1 from the open market, but otherwise you're limited to W/D/E/S, which isn't terrible, but I think you really want to try to get in on some nature as well.

Jazzepi

[Humakty]

I also like to take some air, so that my pretender can come in for a mass murder. To push it to 4 to have some benefits is a luxury with most factions, but a sacred like the assartut can take much support from it.
For all those reasons I think LP is right (may you set back those chtonian things to were they belong), and that an air bless indicates this pretender shoots with surnatural precision.

[Sandman]

Here's an alternative air bless:

Minor bless: 25% lightning resistance. So air-4 gives 25%, air-6 gives 50%, air-8 gives 75% amd air-10 100%. This is still limited, but it does open up more tricky tactics. For example, taking air-6 would be enough to ensure a lightning immune sacred army when combined with Storm Warriors.

Major bless: mirror image. This would stack with casted mirror images and the glamour ability, instantly making this bless desirable for air nations.