Fixing PD?

[Verjigorm]

Certain nations like Pythium have very nice groups of castle hirables, but extraordinarily crappy province defense. One has to consider a nation's individual propensity toward offense or defense when assigning province defense. I think that GR/Horror/etc should be useful in beating province defense, but that certain (expensive) levels of province defense should not be so easily dispatched. 40 province defense costs 820 gold. Should such an alottment of resources be susceptible to a cheap (5 gem) attack? OF COURSE, GR isn't really "cheap" considering the amount of research that must be done to acquire it AND the investment in wizards who can cast it. Lesser Horrors on the other hand are from a LEVEL 5 spell costing only 9 slaves (with moderately difficult paths) can scare away sizable PD. 9 slaves is very cheap....

Drawing units from those available in the province would be neat--perhaps each tier could "hire" an appropriate number of a certain valuation of troop e.g. Militia at 1-10, Archers at 11-20, Light Infantry at 21-30, Heavy at 31-40, Cavalry at 41-50, etc... I especially like the idea of adding more commanders--having few commanders makes PD susceptible to flying unit attacks (imps/horrors). Mages (in provinces with labs) and priests (in those with temples) would also be very nice to see.

[Jurri]

Verjigorm said:
I think that GR/Horror/etc should be useful in beating province defense, but that certain (expensive) levels of province defense should not be so easily dispatched. 40 province defense costs 820 gold. Should such an alottment of resources be susceptible to a cheap (5 gem) attack? OF COURSE, GR isn't really "cheap" considering the amount of research that must be done to acquire it AND the investment in wizards who can cast it. Lesser Horrors on the other hand are from a LEVEL 5 spell costing only 9 slaves (with moderately difficult paths) can scare away sizable PD. 9 slaves is very cheap....

How come Lesser Horrors are cast so seldom if it is only moderately difficult and very cheap? At least in my experience it is very rare too see send lesser horror except from a gift of kurgi, and not that, even, too often. ('Cause the Gift is so damn expensive!) Abysia can utilize them but to others B2S3 is quite a lot; giving two or three boosters for a mage to cast a lesser horror is far too much usually. And 9 slaves is a third of a Horde from Hell. I'd go so far as to say that a single HfH is better for the purpose than three send lesser horrors, especially if mage/booster time is taken into account.

Ghost Riders has been discussed to death earlier, I think, but in my opinion defeating PD is exactly the niche for it. A single GR can't beat even that if there's proper mage/priest support available. It's not like one must leave PD to cope on its own, is it?