Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and more..

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
SC I agree you can with a LOT of effort make an SC who can tank an unlimited number of devils.

A lot of effort? Iron dragon with an amulet of luck and AMA.

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

A lot of effort? Iron dragon with an amulet of luck and AMA.

Interesting Combo .
One question though : Doesn't the Iron dragon than trample around and so a lot of devils ignore him and march further to your mages etc. ?

[Soapyfrog]

Boron said:
Ok . But i can siege the province where the scouts are in.

And they can just sneak away!

And until very lategame you don't have so many soul contracts that you generate each turn 100 new devils , rather 20-50 new ones.

20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

So killing 200-300 of your devils you need a few turns to have them again.

Yes but.. I WILL have them again. With no additional expenditure of resources and no risk... so in addition to being able to do everything else I could do, i.e. equip and use SCs, I get X free devils every turn... which I think you'll agree is a significant advantage.

With staff of storm + a few air casters who cast e.g. thunderstrike + orb lightning the devils don't look too good .

Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

Most important though you have to remember the high costs of soul contracts . 80 slaves , 60 with dwarfen hammer.

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn. To take advantage of this you need only 2 blood 5 casters with dwarven hammers so the setup costs are not super significant... for Abysia its downright trivial, for example. I would be quite happy producing two contracts a turn until I can start wishing for blood and power. Generally this will leave enough excess blood to do other fun stuff with but if you are really diligent you can just produce more soul contracts every so often with the excess.

If you don't take blood 5 on your pretender then you will need construction 6 in order to get 2 boosters to blood 5 to forge the soul contracts.

Yes true but actually it is much faster to empower, especially in a hard research setting, which is not so expensive considering how easy it is to accumulate blood.

And you will use a lot of your initial blood first on the ice/arch devils normally..

Agreed Ice devils and Arch devils take precedence, since they are valuable uniques. In a normal research game playing blood nation you should have all your ice and archies by turn 25 or so, at which point you can start contracting... Although I usually break that rule and setup some contracts early, once I have a few uniques already.

But 15 turns is a long time so the player who uses the lvl 9 blood spell instead will have more forces earlier than you.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.

If you can survive this then it is fine but chances are not bad that the nonhorder overwhelms you before your hoarding really pays off.

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

[Soapyfrog]

Graeme Dice said:
A lot of effort? Iron dragon with an amulet of luck and AMA.

I'd say Construction 9 reuires "a lot of effort" yes, considering you will have to be fighting my mile wide mass o' devils well before that.

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
20-50 is a LOT... it really adds up. Typically you can have 20 soul contracts by turn 40 or so PLUS Ice and Arch devils, and you can be building 2-3 per turn after that.

Doubtful. That's an expenditure of 1200 to 3000 blood slaves, not counting what you spent on the devil commanders. To get 3000 slaves requires about 500-600 mage turns, which means that you had to have 15 mages hunting for the entire game to that point. That's not particularly likely when facing Abysia, but could be possible with Mictlan if they haven't worked on their dominion at all. That's also a minimum of 5 provinces used for blood hunting, with the associated loss of income. You must be playing on absolutely massive maps if you can afford to have that many provinces devoted to blod hunting. After all, 5 provinces would be a quarter of your empire on normally populated maps.

Certainly, that is how you kill devils!! They'll be back though...

That doesn't matter if you kill them without taking losses.

This cost does not seem high to me... A blood nation with 10-12 provinces being hunted can easily generate upwards of 150 blood per turn.

If you have 10-12 provinces being hunted, then your empire must be massive, or else you won't have the gold income to keep up in your research.

You surely wont have level 9 blood before I already have a pretty nice devil factory going.

Level 9 magic in one path with level 5-6 in others by turn 40 is easily doable for any nation with decent researchers.

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

Ice devils in turn 13 won't do you much good because they won't be equipped with anything.

[Graeme Dice]

Soapyfrog said:
I'd say Construction 9 reuires "a lot of effort" yes, considering you will have to be fighting my mile wide mass o' devils well before that.

Construction 9 doesn't require a lot of effort. It's easily reachable by turn 40 without sacrificing any expansion or defense for most living nations. Even Ermor can manage level 9 conjuration, level 6 alteration, level 6 construction, and level 4 enchantment by turn 45 or so.

[Boron]

Soapyfrog said:

Perhaps on a small map. I agree you definitely have to make it to turn 30 or so, although having Ice Devils by turn 13 should be a nice boost to your survivability.

Hm i thought Scouts can't sneak away a besieged castle not sure though .

Ice devils are nice but if you have them unequipped they are not invincible .
Abysia can't clamhoard before they research water bracelet . Your pretender could clamhoard but normally he has more important tasks like conquering provinces earlygame .
So with water bracelet and either spectres or lucky Warlocks you can clamhoard finally .

But getting the astral items early for your Ice devils if you don't trade isn't so easy .
Boots of flying + an Air resistence item can be if you have no luck with your Warlock random take a while too .

Simliar with Mictlan they lack Earth + Air magic too on their mages .

Earlygame Caelum or Vanheim can be pretty hard opponents against your devils and they may have 1-2 Airqueen SCs then too when you have e.g. 100 devils + 3-4 ice devils / arch devils .

Caelum can screw your blood hunting earlygame by false horror raiding strat , Vanheim can do similiar with this + stealthy Vans .


Bloodhunting costs you a lot because you have to use mages for this + get normally no income from the bloodhunted provinces .
So you have less research than other nations + less gold income .

A staff of storms is very common . Basically every better air nation could give you a lot of trouble if they want to wipe you out early .

The resources you invest in Soul Contract hoarding pay off but it maybe too late .

How do you defend as Abysia/Mictlan when you hord against Vanheim/Caelum/Pythium ?
Finally with the blood nations you can have just plain bad luck and neighbor ermor on the one side + have poor provinces on the other side limiting your bloodhunt abilities more than normal .

It all depends , if you survive the early-midgame your hoarding pays off but often you won't survive early-midgame .
So you will perhaps win half of your games or 1/3 with hoarding but lose the rest .

Abysia is very good at hoarding Bloodstones + Soul contracts while Mictlan is good at hoarding Soul contracts + Clams while e.g. Pythium is damn good at site searching + Clamhoarding .
Normally the different ways to hoard pay off all similiar and the nations who suck at horde are very good early-midgame then instead so they can very often compensate this by territory .

You have a lot of good points though .
What makes the Devil so special are his stats + abilities .
18 attack + 16 def make most ( or all ? ) national troops useless .
18 attack + 16 def is almost as good as a banelord early game SC or similiar .

The devil almost forces your opponent to get staffs of storm + use air magic to counter you . If he can't do this he has probably problems .

But about 1/3 of the nations can do this with little or no effort . Another 1/3 has other not too bad means like banefire ( Ctis desert tombs ) or watermagic . Bladewind and magma eruption etc. should not be tooo bad against devils too .
You are probably more mobile though so you can pick your battles easier .

There are too many different factors to think of that you can say if devils are imbalanced or not .
They are probably costwise the best summon but there has always to be 1 best thing in each area .

But earlygame you use your resources setting up your hoarding factory . So you are very vulnerable there .
Midgame airnations can still give you a good fight and lategame everyone else has other strong measures against you in fields where he is good at .

[Cheezeninja]

To me the preferred solution would be making sneaking units targetable by overland spells. While hoarding would still be quite possible, useful, and smart to do, an enemy with good and detailed intelligence could attempt to take out your production base.

I would also very much like to see an overland spell capable of castle destruction, which would open up some very interesting tactical opportunities IMO. If you made it so that the chances of success were predicated on the number of earth gems put into it against the defense rating of the castle it would also encourage people to use the high defense castles alot more.

[Graeme Dice]

Cheezeninja said:
I would also very much like to see an overland spell capable of castle destruction, which would open up some very interesting tactical opportunities IMO.

That role is taken by crumble.

[Cheezeninja]

Crumble hasn't been very effective in my experience... I was refering to a spell that would physically remove the castle, thereby removing the speedbump effect, which crumble does not do.