Which nations need bennies?

[HoneyBadger]

Niefel province defense is awful, and I can't decide if it should be that way or not. Mythologically-speaking, Jotunheim was pretty well-guarded, unless you were Thor, but at the same time, I'm not sure how well organized the Jotun were until Utgard-Loki showed up. Still, Niefel is supposedly one of the strongest nations out there. I kind of disagree with that, they're a logistics nightmare, but I doubt too many people are going to jump on the "poor Niefelheim" bandwagon.

[HoneyBadger]

Atlantis Living Pillars are great troops, but one area in which they are weak is that if you have an Earth sacred bless, it only seems to raise their prot up to 22 from 20. Unless I'm viewing this wrong, this makes them weaker than they ought to be. Is this a bug? I hope so, because Living Pillars are extremely hard to mass and should have the full effect of a bless strategy, should someone choose to go that way with EA Atlantis, just because their are very few advantages to doing so already. At Prot 24, (20 + 4 earth bless) 1 Living Pillar would be worth buying over 3 coral guards. It's a small thing, but it's enough to tip the balance against using Living Pillars, which is a shame, because they're such a cool unit, otherwise (one of the few units who don't take explitive from Helheim's best-I've seen one berserk Living Pillar take out 3 blessed Helheim troops and keep coming), and already lack a lot of love.

[Endoperez]

Living Pillars have Basalt Armor (prot 18), natural protection (9), and they don't have a helmet. Because natural and armor protection don't stack straight, their final protection is Head (9) and Body (23). Legions of Steel and Earth 9 bless both only raise armor protection, and unfortunately, Living Pillars don't wear any head armor.

The protection value shown in the unit screen is only an approximation. You should always check the actual protection values.

[HoneyBadger]

I think I have, but you could be right. I'm glad it's not a bug. You'd think they'd get helmets though, having to hold up the basalt city on their heads like they do. I bet they get migraines.

[Cainehill]

Endoperez said:
Legions of Steel and Earth 9 bless both only raise armor protection, and unfortunately, Living Pillars don't wear any head armor.

Oh, goodie! Finally a blessing made almost totally useless for _some_ nations. God I love all the new mechanics in Dom3. [/sarcasmoff]

So now E9 blessing gives _no_ protection benefit to the sacred troops of a number of nations, and sacred priests/mages have to put on some armor to get the benefit.

I could see that (somewhat) with Legions of Steel, but the bleeding earth blessing?!? Feh.

[FrankTrollman]

Deleted

[HoneyBadger]

My opinion on the subject (for whatever that's worth) is that Earth Bless should affect the unit's base Prot value, regardless of what the unit happens to be wearing. After all-unless the unit is wearing that sacred shroud thing, it is the unit who is sacred, not the unit's clothing.

Armor upgrade (ala Legions of Steel etc.) is, obviously, a different matter entirely.

[DrPraetorious]

The problem with that is for the majority of sacred units, the earth bless prot bonus would then be half as big. And the remainder (shadow vestels, sacred serpents, werejaguars, yavanas, gibodai) still wouldn't care much - spending a nine-point blessing to boost your protection all the way up to 11 is not exciting. You could make the bonus +8 to base armor - a 15 protection sacred serpent starts to look interesting. I'm not sure if there are any sacred rhino lizards for which this would be ungamebalanced, though. Certainly it would make putting the throud of the battle saint on someone very interesting indeed.