Helheim - lets burn some rubber

[Aezeal]

Sombre, Niefel w/o a heavy bless isn't that just not making optimal usage of the nation.. sure advice for use of skratti's will never hurt, but Niefel w/o a bless is well.. sub optimal and I don't think a guide should be about a sub optimal strat really.

[MaxWilson]

Skrattis can have a bless. IIRC they have pretty good natural Prot and a torso slot in their werewolf form, which makes a Shroud (forged by Gygjas) a workable option.

Edit: Oops, sorry, Aezeal, I think I misunderstood your point because I had missed seeing Sombre's original post that you were replying to.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

...and once your economy is cranking 180 RP is a drop in the bucket....

A lot of your argument is somewhat persuasive, but unless you are talking about very large maps, with Hard/VH research, 180 points is a lot. Typically I find that many nations peak out at around 800 or so by the time they are completing their research. 180 is ~25% of that total, and talking about a jump from 600 to 800 is a big deal. But Baalz was talking about more than 20 Mentors.

However, that leads me to my problem with this scenario. To push 3 Mentors per month, you are looking at 21 Death gems needed every month, after your hammers. I have done a LOT of starts, and given the typical MP paradigm of 15 provinces/player, even on a good start where you end up with 20 provinces, and using remote (level 9) searches rather than manual searches, ~20 is typically the absolutely high end of Death gem income. I think it's entirely possible that manually searching all of your starting provinces may only net you ~10 or so income. Granted, you do get 4 in the cap, so baseline income will be higher, but it highlights my problem with strategies that are too highly defined, and too highly optimized. You are wholly reliant on getting a robust gem income to succeed - your build absolutely requires it, and if you don't get it, you are pretty invested into the game as far as your time goes, and left holding an empty bag.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

A lot of your argument is somewhat persuasive, but unless you are talking about very large maps, with Hard/VH research, 180 points is a lot. Typically I find that many nations peak out at around 800 or so by the time they are completing their research. 180 is ~25% of that total, and talking about a jump from 600 to 800 is a big deal. But Baalz was talking about more than 20 Mentors.

Yeah, I probably overstated the case against skull mentors here. 180 RP is never really "a drop in the bucket."

-Max

P.S. I agree with you, Jim, in that I'd rather have a flexible build (or nation) which can respond as luck and circumstances dictate, rather than having a set strategy before the game even starts. That said, Helheim is actually pretty good for just that kind of flexible play, especially with the E9N4W4 bless Baalz suggests. You can do everything from blood stones to Cloud-Trapezing thugs to Magma Eruption to Thunderstrike to Rigor Mortis to Stygian Paths. The only major hole that I miss in Helheim is Astral, but they have a lot of flexibility and mobility.

[KissBlade]

I'm not certain if I see helheim being a weak late game nation. Access to death and earth is pretty strong and death opens astral for you anyway. With an imprisoned master druid under cbm, you get something like e9w9n4s1 with order 3, sloth 3, cold 3, death 1, misf 1, magic 1 dom 4(or splash to some other chassis for b4 instead of n4 ) and your valkyries will absolutely dominate any standard troops you face. Archers get screened by serfs easily if you really worry (you start with like 20 screens anyway). mid game you still have access to the same skull mentors and your valkyries will still kick the crap out of any pd's with thug Han's if they really crank it up. Late game you still get blood/death magic which is better than a lot of other nations can garner. The only real advantage to an awake pretender IMO is that you're gambling on enough death sites to make conjuration 4 pay off big time and that's a bit too idealistic isn't it? Not to mention, the BIG graphs that good players look at are your research and gem income so with a subpar bless and an assumable lead in those two researching construction 8 as your priority, you're not making many friends any time soon.

[Baalz]

The thing is you have a very large cascade factor. You take an imprisoned pretender to get the design points for magic scales because 29 research points doesn’t seem like that much. Now you can take one of two choices, either essentially do no research in year one, or forego site searching and try to line up indie priests to lead and bless your troops (or not use your blessing at all). The difference between having constr-4 researched in time for your first engagement is *huge* considering the strategy I suggest of Vanjarl thugs. This is an extremely strong strategy at first which relatively rapidly loses steam as people tool up anti-thug tactics. These guys are pretty much unstoppable using normal troops, but not so much once enemy mages are a significant factor.

The thing is, almost everything in dominions has a very large inflation factor which drops its value as the game progresses. Getting an extra 3000 gold on turn one is game changing, towards the end of year one it’s very nice, in the end game it’s merely good. Extra gems at the point you’re trying to scrape up enough to site search is huge, in the middle of the game it’s very nice while one extra summon can make a significant impact, by the end of the game it’s barely noticeable. Likewise, you can’t compare the 350 research an awake pretender can contribute in the first year to what you can make up in the 3rd year – their values aren’t even close to the same. The difference between trying to fight a war with no research and modest research is huge, it’s the difference between having a swarm of thugs hitting everywhere at once and having just your recruitable troops which your opponent has been preparing counters for the second his scouts showed you as a neighbor.

I’d also like to expound upon my assertion that there is no way you can catch up to the skull mentor strategy using magic scales instead. Of course you can’t assume you’ll be the leader in research, and you can’t guarantee you’ll find death sites but for the sake of argument lets make a couple of fairly reasonable assumptions. Following my suggested strategy you’re explicitly targeting provinces with higher magic site levels, and this is EA which has a higher magic site rate. You’ve had several mages out site searching, you can expect to generally have found 3 or more sites by the end of year one. With just the income from your capital (4d) you’ve got 48 death gems at this point, so you can reasonably plan on having 60-80 D counting the income from sites you’ve found with an income of 10+. Of course it’s not guaranteed, but likely enough you can make plans around it. Likewise, you’ve got 1E income from your cap so we’ll assume you’ve either got or are close to having your 3rd dwarven hammer.

Cranking out 3 skull mentors per turn takes 21D, but remember you’re pulling in 10+ per turn, so net you’re only going down less than 11D per turn from your pool of 60-80. You’re still site searching remember, and just one or two more sites at this point can easily put you to the point you’re only dropping 7 or less D per turn, putting you roughly in the ball park of cranking out 3 skull mentors per turn for one full year, year two. You might be a little under that if my assumptions about finding sites is optimistic, but you should be in that ballpark and it’s not hard to imagine if you get lucky you’re doing more like 4 skull mentors per turn. It’s not *that* uncommon to hit two death sites when searching mountains/swamps/waste, and that’ll bump you up 3-5D per turn right there. At this point you’re probably not gonna keep cranking out the mentors anyway, it’s time to start saving for the well of misery.

So, 3 skull mentors + 3 mages puts you at the 41 research points per turn I suggested, and to the roughly 500 research points per turn by the end of year two I suggested. Yes, you can’t guarantee that you’re leading in research, but you certainly have a good shot at it and the strategy doesn’t exactly fall apart if you’re not the only guy hitting the research hard. To put it in perspective, that’s 100, 5rp mages hitting the books - it’ll be a very rare game that somebody is pulling in more than 500 research points per turn in two years.

Magic scales and skull mentors are not mutually exclusive…yet you suggest taking an imprisoned pretender and thus having no possible way to get to construction-4 in the same time frame I suggest – certainly not with the gem income necessary. Here’s the nature of the catchup, lets say you somehow manage to get in a position to crank out 3 skull mentors with a magic-3 scale a mere 6 turns later than you would with drain and an awake pretender (though I can’t imagine how you’d manage that). Just examine the impact that skull mentors make in those 6 turns I’ve generated 27 + 54 + 81 + 108 + 135 + 162 = 567 research points plus the 522 research my pretender outputs in those first 18 turns. That’s a hell of a hurdle to make up, even assuming you were able to close the gap in output immediately (which you won’t because I’m still cranking out more skull mentors myself)…particularly given the inflation time value of research I point out above. And for what exactly? You originally suggested that this would make sense if you didn’t want to burn your death gems, which would mean you’d most definitely remain far behind the skull mentor research. If you’re planning on skull mentors anyway why try so hard to play catchup? Number crunching aside let me just tell you anecdotally that the research output of this strategy is stunningly better than “standard” strong research, you’ve got to see it in the score graph to really appreciate it.

The real beauty of this to is that you’re not sacrificing your short term strength for the sake of a long term payoff – you’re pumping the other gems you managed to gather into swarms of thugs who are very competitive year two (and don’t really want your D gems anyway). This is important because as I mention (and KissBlade reiterates) you’re not gonna make many friends with this very aggressive muscle car approach, and you need to immediately have the teeth to back up the roar.

Now of course I’m not saying this is the only way you can play Helheim competitively, but it still works just fine even if you get a bit of bad luck or a slow start – 400 research per turn by year 3 is not gonna invalidate this strategy and you’ve always got to roll with the punches and take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by KissBlade

I'm not certain if I see helheim being a weak late game nation. Access to death and earth is pretty strong and death opens astral for you anyway.

Via Tartarians, or is there some other path I'm missing? (Maybe spectral mages? I haven't used them much.) Tartarians require bootstrapping into Nature first for some builds without a N pretender. Obviously that's not a problem with the build Baalz has recommended but I want to understand KissBlade's comment.

-Max

[KissBlade]

Specters are 1d2random ,both of which has a 25% shot of being astrals.

[MaxWilson]

Hmmm. S1 will get you site-searching, but it's really no better than you get from a lizard shaman. IMO you need S3 at minimum in order to really consider yourself to have opened up Astral, which means either hoping for an S2 spectre and forging him a skullcap, or empowering, or just waiting for Tartarians. Helheim for sure isn't going to be doing communions or Master Enslave.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Well, dipping into your pre-forging income, to keep the Mentors rolling, makes a lot of sense, I wasn't really thinking about the amount of momentum those initial gems would add.

Mentors are really quite powerful, if you can spare the gems. The difference from Drain2 to Magic1 is 2RP, making each Mentor make up the difference of 4.5 mages. Or looked at another way, even only forging 2 Mentors a turn, is 18RP, so if you and an opponent train 2 identical mages that turn, he still has 14RP to make up somewhere. At a certain point when you stop forging Mentors, that opponent can then more realistically begin to "catch up", but the disparity will be huge if you really focus on the strategy. Of course, if that opponent went Magic3 it changes the math a bit, but that's a lot of design points. There's only a couple of nations that I have built strats for involving Magic3, but it's not for "OMG these mages are such horrible researchers, I need to improve them", it's always "wow these researchers are SO cheap, I want to superpower them".

It just makes me wonder what Vanheim can do to bolster their similarly sad research prospects (other than train expensive indies). IMO forging Quills is like wearing a skirt in a prison.....