are stealth units targeted by flames from afar..?

[Boron]

I don't build clams with my 'excess' water gems. Mostly because I rarely have an 'excess' water gem supply. It's invariably being used. (Note: I don't have a philisophic reasoning for not using Sea King's Court, Murdering Winter, Ice Elementals, Wolven Winter, and if possible Water Queens)

You can not believe it all you want, but thats the way it is. I have and will continue to build clams if I have a need for them (with Atlantis for example) but rarely do I go for a clamhoard as I detailed in my TC guide.

I'm sure you can't find it concievable at all; but there it is. Clamhoarding is a red herring that is going to keep getting newbies killed over and over again by wasting their right now resources for turn 50 peace of mind. This isn't to say that there are not that many good upper end summons for Water Magic and that that could be changed. But with the sheer amounts of Jade Armor I tend to go through, having water gems is usually critical to 2/3's my games.

ok i believe you
but when you play on big maps they are a really good future investment .

boots of quickness or jade armors are really a good investment .
the seakings + water queens are only good if you plan to invade the sea .

zen do you put boots of quickness or a jade armor on all your mages or only on scs ?

because when you use them only for scs and don't plan to conquer the sea you should have excess water income .
or as ermor e.g. you should have a big excess water income in mid-lategame too and because of your amphibian undeads no need for the sea king trolls and little need for waterqueens .
as ermor clamhoard mid-lategame is imho a must .

[deccan]

Heh, I just had a battle where someone carrying a Soul Contract died and someone else found it after the battle, so he's now cursed with it. I wonder if the devil got the soul of the first guy.

[Arryn]

deccan said:
someone else found it after the battle, so he's now cursed with it. I wonder if the devil got the soul of the first guy.

Of course. When the second fellow picked up the contract, he "accepted" the contract's terms, and thus is doomed to the same eventual fate. In this case picking up the contract carries the same consequence of acceptance that breaking shrink-wrap does for software. The moral of the story? You can look at contracts, but you shouldn't touch them. Let your lawyer do that. He's doomed to Hell anyway ...

[atul]

alexti said:
- you're fighting non-cold resistant nation. Wolven Winter+ Murdering winter are very efficient, especially against opponents that rely on a mass of mages in the battles.

I've been wondering about this WW+MW combo. It seems to me that the Wolven Winter causes the temp drop at the "event" phase, which is after all the far-attack spells are resolved and even magic battle phase.

The practical example of this was in one previous MP I cast WW into a province I also teleported my BoF-using pretender to. The battle was fought in a neutral temp (at least I spotted no enc changes due cold), after the battle reports was "unexpected event"-message of a bad winter and on the map I saw that the said province had a heavy cold scale.

I may have missed or overlooked something, but could it be that in order to WW+MW to be effective the Wolven Winter ought to be cast one turn earlier? Which would make hitting moving targets fairly hard... Anyway, MW in itself is fairly good for killing frail mages.

As to fighting against cold-immune nations, it might be worth noting that even them may have non-immune troops. For example, Nornas and Seithkonas freeze to death easily, thank you very much, and other may have indy troops. Also, in battles, assume a lot of cold-immune troops and a few special non-immune mages (like, Jotun troops and Seithkonas). If mages are scripted to cast cold elemental spells, who do they target?

[Stormbinder]

Arryn said:

Of course. When the second fellow picked up the contract, he "accepted" the contract's terms, and thus is doomed to the same eventual fate. In this case picking up the contract carries the same consequence of acceptance that breaking shrink-wrap does for software. The moral of the story? You can look at contracts, but you shouldn't touch them. Let your lawyer do that. He's doomed to Hell anyway ...

[Boron]

atul said:

I've been wondering about this WW+MW combo. It seems to me that the Wolven Winter causes the temp drop at the "event" phase, which is after all the far-attack spells are resolved and even magic battle phase.

The practical example of this was in one previous MP I cast WW into a province I also teleported my BoF-using pretender to. The battle was fought in a neutral temp (at least I spotted no enc changes due cold), after the battle reports was "unexpected event"-message of a bad winter and on the map I saw that the said province had a heavy cold scale.

I may have missed or overlooked something, but could it be that in order to WW+MW to be effective the Wolven Winter ought to be cast one turn earlier? Which would make hitting moving targets fairly hard... Anyway, MW in itself is fairly good for killing frail mages.

As to fighting against cold-immune nations, it might be worth noting that even them may have non-immune troops. For example, Nornas and Seithkonas freeze to death easily, thank you very much, and other may have indy troops. Also, in battles, assume a lot of cold-immune troops and a few special non-immune mages (like, Jotun troops and Seithkonas). If mages are scripted to cast cold elemental spells, who do they target?

hm 5+30 watergems =5 clams
and as you said hit not guaranteed . Furthermore the murdering winter is 5W so hard to reach and not worth imho taking it onto your pretender .

[atul]

Boron said:
hm 5+30 watergems =5 clams
and as you said hit not guaranteed .

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

Boron said:
Furthermore the murdering winter is 5W so hard to reach and not worth imho taking it onto your pretender .

You can boost anything with water-2 or more with items easily (bracelet, that robe, staff of elemental mastery) to 5W, if you have only water-1 mages you probably aren't having enough water gem income for clams or MWs anyway so the issue becomes quite moot.

(okay, forgot about Sea King's Court, but anyway, water-5 is reachable)

[Boron]

atul said:

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .

so the murdering winter is very situational and against e.g. caelum / jotunheim because of CR it doesn't even work .
with clams you can start on about turn 5 when you reach construction 2 so in earlygame .

then in midgame your clams should provide high enough income that you can chose when the special situations occur to convert some either to water or to fire for murdering winter or flames from the sky

clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too :
only your water gems early game and then convert the clam astral income always back to water when you can afford and don't need astralincome items like luck pendant .

when properly done clams provide you doubled - tripled lategame gem income .
and astralpearls are the most valuable gemincome lategame anyway because you can convert them cheap at 2:1 ratio to whatever gems you need or you can wish with them .

once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

[Cainehill]

Boron said:
yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .
(...)
once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer

Gee, speaking of situational, for Wish you need Alteration _9_, and a mage with Astral 9. That's a bit harder to get then Evocation 7 and Water 5, unless you're a strong Astral nation, you have to take it on your pretender. And conventional wisdom is that it's unwise to put Astral on your pretender unless it's immortal.

That Murdering Winter on the other hand can target the other nation's capitals, it can target their library/sage guild provinces and really nail their research (and quite possibly bunches of items on the sages), it can target armies that are about to attack you, quite possibly killing some mages and causing their magic troops to be left out of the attack.

Doesn't seem all _that_ limitted to me.

[Boron]

Cainehill said:

Gee, speaking of situational, for Wish you need Alteration _9_, and a mage with Astral 9. That's a bit harder to get then Evocation 7 and Water 5, unless you're a strong Astral nation, you have to take it on your pretender. And conventional wisdom is that it's unwise to put Astral on your pretender unless it's immortal.

That Murdering Winter on the other hand can target the other nation's capitals, it can target their library/sage guild provinces and really nail their research (and quite possibly bunches of items on the sages), it can target armies that are about to attack you, quite possibly killing some mages and causing their magic troops to be left out of the attack.

Doesn't seem all _that_ limitted to me.

you always only quote parts of my argumentation not the whole

i said the murdering winter is available earliest midgame and costeffective most likely only in mid-lategame too.
when you start to build clams until midgame you can choose what to do :
if you see need for murdering winter you can stop clamproducing for a few turns and use your watergems for that or if quick needed convert clam astral pearls back to water .
BUT with clamhoard you can also cast fires from afar / flames from the sky if you need it .

so you are more flexible and have as bonus a 10-20 higher astral gem income in midgame .
thats what i said or at least what the intention of my previous post was perhaps i had it in mind but didn't say it clear enough

because against lots of nations murdering winter is of little use :
against caelum , ermor , jotunheim

against abysia , r'leh , atlantis you need probably 2-3 wolven winter first to drop temperature from heat 3 to cold 3 .
furthermore finding the r'leh / atlantis capitol is not so easy because your scouts can't go underwater without water breathing items . and only 1 strat move underwater so if the capitol is hidden in the middle of the sea lots of chances for r'lehs pd to find your spy before and kill him .