Death scale on Abyssia
 

It would seem appropriate still, but how bad does it really mess with with old age?

And how much does it run down your blood economy before you realyl get it started?

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

I'm playing MA Aby in a game right now, with Death-3. I think it's important to take Luck-3 too, to avoid horrible events. Luck-3 scales with itself: you get more events, and they are better. And when your population is all dead, you'll still have the luck income.

There has been no impact at all on getting my blood economy started. I'm suspecting that it'll hit me harder down the road. So I've just got to make sure that I've got some provinces that I can expand into.

You'll get some expensive units diseased in Late Winter, but with N4 on your god you can make shrouds. Another option is to teleport any diseased Warlocks to the front lines, and use Astral Healing in battle to restore their HP.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

Never been brave enough to try on either count! Old age is definitely an issue for abysian mages though

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

This seems to be one of those "the theme has nothing to do with the actual play."

You need high pops for resources for all your troops and for blood hunting, and for the gold to buy your expensive troops and to offset provinces set to no taxes because of the blood hunting. You have old fire mages. You can spread your Dominion really well with Blood sacrifices.

None of that says "take Death."

In fact, I'd argue that the theme is more "can survive in someone else's bad Death Dominion."

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

The Death scale immunity is old, dating back to the first game of the series. Old age is new to Dom3. The two mechanics don't work properly together. Personally, I don't think it'd be unbalanced to make Abysia immune to increased old age afflictions from Death scale.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

I agree, taking death for Abysia is, well, a death-wish. The one game that I took death scales had my mages dropping like flies at their lab-tables. Ironically, growth can be a very useful trait for Abysia, more-so in MA because almost all of their mages are old.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

Oh, you unthematic no-fun people. Just take the damned deaths when they come and suck it up! K, you're always on about people not using their mages in combat ... well, when they've got 3 months to live, it's additional incentive to get them to the front lines. :)

And what's wrong with a death wish? It's a doomed race! The land that burns brightest burns fastest, or something along those lines anyway.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

I feel that EA and MA Abyssia having nothing but capital-only blood mages is more disruptive then having growth scales. I guess I spoiled myself blood hunting with Mictlan prior to playing less able nations.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

With recruitable blood mages, there should be no problem stopping the old-age problems via Boots of Youth.

Growth has always seemed like a tough sell to me: the primary benefit of growth (compound interest population increase) only really starts to pay off just toward the endgame, just in time for Black Death and Armageddon. The landscape is going to be a nuclear wasteland; get your money upfront with Order and later on with Luck.

Re: Death scale on Abyssia
 

If you are taking order and luck you are minimizing the usefulness of luck, and if you also take death you are minimizing the usefulness of order (mid/late game).

Seems to me it would be interesting to look at T3P3H3L3D3 and whatever you can pull in magic/drain depending on what points you have left.

Of course T3 is painful early game if you don't get some BIG luck events to even it out, but then again you can alchemize your fire gems if you really need to.

Alternatively don't take T3, just keep it neutral and drop your production back to 1 or 2. I would imagine that early game you are hurting more for production than gold, and luck cannot help (well not as often anyway) with production as it can with gold.

I'm also pretty sure that the best bless to take is E9, and not so sure you really need anyother bless at all, which makes an awake cyclops interesting as if you nab a dom9 you can just plow through indies like mad (other than knights). Taking an awake scorpian king is also interesting as you can fairly easilly sneak in a f4.

Then again you don't have much magic diversity (in any age I think), but what do you really need the diversity for again? Blood and Astral are already givens, and those can form the backbone of any mid/late game strategy. Nature might be nice, but nature is really easy to pick up with indies. Death is probably the one with the most potential synergy for you, but meh, I wouldn't necessarily just take it on a pretender for a few extra blood summons.