Blood?

[Bowlingballhead]

And yes, I'm saying SCs are not all that. They were the first direction I moved in - I love building magic items. Then I learned the hard way that any decently large army will mow a SC down, if by no other process than statistical probability. Wounds, the chance of running into ugly spells - a SC strategy is no better than any other. And Ice Devils? I've looked them over. Good stats. If you want to go the SC direction, they're as good as anybody else for the job, I suppose. Don't come crying to me when a bunch of knights lance your killer demon to death and you have to rebuild, though.

Now, there is ONE thing here that might change my mind. Up until today I had never heard of this 'using scouts to blood hunt' thing. If there's a trick to make blood slaves much more accessable, especially to traditionally non-blood races, the balance of power shifts towards demons considerably by sheer ease of access. After all, the *potential* for blood slave income and efficiency as a source of magic is tremendous, but in my experience it's always taken too long to get going unless you're a blood magic race - and if you are, you're generally magically restricted enough that making good uber-equipment is hard.

So by all means, convince me. Tell me this blood slave reaping trick.

Although I still might just stick to demon knights. They're tremendously efficient themselves.

[Keir Maxwell]

Jasper I read what Illwinter siad on what they were trying to do with blood and in my opinion the scout thing is a major gliche. Thats why Alex made a big deal of pointing it out - so they could correct it. With scouts blood hunting its back to anyone having access to blood.

I have been playing blood hard for the Last few days, I have summoned Ice Devils, Arch Devils, Fallen Angels and every sort of little blood summon and my honest opinion is that blood is the worst path of magic. I have done worse in the games I have used blood than using Tien Ch'i Barbarian Kingdoms. I do better with Mictlan when I largely ignore blood and go for mass protection instead.

In PBEM I aim to play in games with a high level of experiance and the pace is generally fast and cut throat. This is not a style question but a survival question. In this sort of game I think blood is crap. Playing SP, for me, blood is crap because I do so much better when I ignore it. So for me blood is crap and thats very sad.

I think people got carried away on the whole anti-blood thing in Dom1 and there was alot of miss information around about what the problem was - many seem to think the blood SC's in Dom1 are simply overpowered as opposed to overpresent. My experiance using fuly equipped ID's is that they are very expensive and somewhat vunerable - and that was before paralyse.

Jasper have you played blood much? Your comments about blood SC's are just so wrong. Sure Ice Devils and Illearth are good SC's - thats one Illearth and some of the 7 ID's. The other big demonic summonings are not great for the job. In general ID's are nowhere near as good as people think. I used them as suggested in Dom1 and lost them. I learnt and used them in packs after that. A good army (including mages generally) will crush a small number of fully equipped SC's in my experiance. And this isn't even taking paralyse into account.

SC's have fallen along way in Dom2 and I suspect that even if you could still summon theorericaly unlimited numbers of ID's it wouldn't be a problem in practice. Blood used to be the mid/late game SC path but now mid/late game SC's are vastly weaker and blood is much weaker. The combined affect is under impressive.

When is blood good then? On a big map, in a slow paced game, using the dodgy (MM intensive) scout hunting trick.

I have tried really hard to make blood work. In the process I have managed to make Mictlan work ok but I still haven't got blood to work. Blood the only thing worse than Mictlan? Nah Abysia using blood is still better than Mictlan.



Cheers

Keir

[Keir Maxwell]

Just had a minor break through - easy research. I'll be playing with this for the next period as in general I find mundane approaches overpowered in Dom2 - see thread on subject.

Cheers

Keir

[apoger]

>many seem to think the blood SC's in Dom1 are simply overpowered as opposed to overpresent.


No, they were very overpowered, although it wasn't just the ID's, it was the ID's in conjunction with easy hunting and the Blood Fountain.


>My experiance using fuly equipped ID's is that they are very expensive and somewhat vunerable - and that was before paralyse.

In Dom1... they kicked butt every which way. There was no downside.


>In general ID's are nowhere near as good as people think.

Obviously, but you must be missing something.


>I used them as suggested in Dom1 and lost them.

Nobody said they were invincible, just too powerful for the costs.


>I learnt and used them in packs after that.

In Dom1? Where you equiping them well? They should only be sent in packs if naked.


>A good army (including mages generally) will crush a small number of fully equipped SC's in my experiance. And this isn't even taking paralyse into account.

In Dom1? You'd better cross your fingers on those mages. Good luck on massing enough before the ID's showed up. That was the issue.

In Dom2, things are MUCH more sane. The Blood Fountain is no longer absurd, SDR's are weaker, and the ID more expensive. I would never want to go back to the Dom1 path of blood, as it was crazy overpowered.


>Blood used to be the mid/late game SC path but now mid/late game SC's are vastly weaker and blood is much weaker. The combined affect is under impressive.

In Dom1 it wasn't mid/late game at all. Often there would be ID's roaming about before turn ten.

In Dom2 they have been relagated to later in the game. Rightly so. All the summonable supercombatant "chassis" should be relegated to the mid game at the earliest.


>When is blood good then? On a big map, in a slow paced game, using the dodgy (MM intensive) scout hunting trick.


Playing on small maps has biased your impressions. Play in longer games and you'll get an idea of why high level magics including blood are critical.

[Truper]

ID anecdote:

I was using a fairly buffed ID (Wraith Sword, Rainbow Armor, Boots of Quickness IIRC) in its vaunted "take provinces by itself" role. I used it to take a couple provinces from C'tis, and then it withstood a counter-attack or two. I then noted that another attack by the Lizards got it, so I watched the battle to see what did him in. Turns out the army that did it had one squad of Manikins. The ID took them out a 2 per round, but the rest were able to hit him enough to put him to sleep.

I am of the opinion that SCs are fun, but I think I'd ignore them if I were trying to maximize my efficiency, rather than my fun quotient

Blood magic as a whole is nearly useless in a small map or short game. That is more of a production war.

Where it really shines is the mid to late game. As should be seen.

[Jasper]

Alex's opinion mirrors mine exactly, so I won't repeat it. IMHO several of the people who don't think Ice Devils are effective are misusing them (trying to take on large mage backed armies alone) or misequipping them (missing regeneration rings or antimagic amulets). These details make all the difference.

In response to Keir, no I haven't played Ice Devils competitively myself, but I have faced them. Without paralyzation it was not so easy to fight them as people suggest. Large mage backed armies are fairly easy for IDs to avoid -- but cost more than IDs and are less mobile. Such armies are also severely curtailed once Murdering Winter is in use.