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

[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.

[Cohen]

Crumble is damn good!!!
It damages even the troops inside the castle, and I saw a Tartarian get killed by crumble! (well it disappeared, and there was in only a crumble in that province).

[Cheezeninja]

It seems to me that almost every time im using crumble, im doing so because there's a large number of defenders inside the castle keeping me from beating down the walls. When this is the case all that seems to happen is that crumble beats down the walls but then the defender vs besieger check happens afterwards and I get the message saying the defenders are repairing the wall faster than I can beat it down and I dont actually get a chance to storm the castle. While some damage is implied in the spell description I have never seen any statistics on it, or any noticable damage when I cast it.

[Graeme Dice]

Cheezeninja said:
While some damage is implied in the spell description I have never seen any statistics on it, or any noticable damage when I cast it.

The spell description tells you right out that it does 150 damage to the defense of the castle, with an additional 25 for each level of skill above 5.