Is black plate worth it?

[Lord_Drakken]

I know I am not a long time veteran of these forums or anything... but if you are not having money problems in this game then you don't have enough forces on board. Resources are not the limiting factor in this game, gold is. Unused resources are lost gold is stored. Upkeep is only in gold and that is what limits your force size.

This being said I will take the black plate. It is as an archer shield that they are useful. the Arbelasts do a decent job of harming the enemy along with any mounted troops. Throw in a little magic to reinvigorate the black plate and they love you long time...

Someone do a test with archers pelting chain vs plate for a period of time and watch the results. They will be much more dramatic...

[Sombre]

Well obviously black plate is better vs archers. But is it that much better than chain + shield that you want to use an extra 10 resources on it? Hell no.

And in my experience resources are a serious limiting factor in the early game. Gold is also a limit, but when you're trying to grab indies and possibly muscle another nation, high resource cost is a serious factor. If you're taking prod 3 then that's even more that resource costs are limiting you, actually taking away design points. After the early game, these troops basically become useless anyway, because battlemagic renders them largely obsolete. Sure you can use them as a walking shield, but there are better units for that purpose, including (imo) the chainmail guys, who you can replace quicker.

[jaif]

I would say that if gold is your issue, then you aren't balancing our check book well. You have a maintenance cost, so once you get an army big enough for your purposes, all you do is maintain it.

But resources are killer. I just checked my current game - ulm has 435 resources per turn. So if an army gets wiped out, I can replace with roughly 12 black plate infantry per turn, or 17 chain infantry per turn. Sure I can also build at other locations, but then I have to ship them to the point of contact.

Now this would be ok if those 12 could do the job of the 17, but I don't think they can in my experience. I think the margin of difference is too narrow - only in the early game, only for short fights, only with the right support, and even with all of that, they are only a little better.

One thing I'm trying now - assuming black plate is so great, then I shouldn't need shields. Arrows are going to bounce off anyways, so why bother, right? I tried out battle axes and pikeneers, and I've quickly moved to all pikeneer forces as lasting far longer than battleaxes. It does seem to work against the weak archers/slingers - the little stuff bounces off the armor and the pikes hold back the melee damage.

But I'm still not convinced that black plate is all that big of a deal. It doesn't seem that wonderful, and I don't think I've expanded any better than I would have just buying chain.

-Jeff

[Velusion]

jaif said:
I would say that if gold is your issue, then you aren't balancing our check book well. You have a maintenance cost, so once you get an army big enough for your purposes, all you do is maintain it.

But you miss the point that someone with more gold income has a high ceiling so his army can be much larger. An army can never be "big enough for *my* purposes". Don't forget gold can easily be spent on mages. In the late game resources are worthless, while you can at least still use gold to buy more mages.

[jaif]

Velusion said:In the late game resources are worthless, while you can at least still use gold to buy more mages.

Originally I said:

More importantly, I don't find the black plate all that usefull. In the beginning, it's too expensive, and the chainmail guys get the job done nicely. Later on, black plate is nice and all, but by then spells are doing the job and the black plate boys aren't that usefull any more.

So we completely agree on the end-game: at that point, magic rules all.

But in the early ot mid-game (being loose), where you are balancing multiple opponents and a budget and still waiting to form a dominant gem economy, troops matter. For ulm, that's supposed to be the hey-day of black plate. I can field about 1.4 chain for every plate. Does the plate make up that difference? I haven't seen it.

-Jeff

[Baalz]

When I play Ulm I recruit chainmail for the first 2 or 3 turns, after which I usually switch to plate. At that point I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of expansion speed to hoard my gold and focus on getting a second castle up so I can leverage one of Ulm's primary strengths - cheap units. Cheap smiths, cheap infantry. With Ulm you generally have more gold than other nations so you should put up more castles. More castles mean more smiths which you should be recruiting as fast as possible at that price. As a side effect, having lots of castles means you've got lots of places to recruit infantry, and I find that by the time I'm a little less desperate about throwing up additional castles I usually have more resources than I need to field all the black plate I want. The limiting factor is gold - I'm much more concerned about how many smiths I have than how much infantry. If I'm gonna spend a set amount of gold on my infantry I'd rather have the plate. If you're getting 1.4 chainmail guys, I'm getting 1.4 smiths instead with linebackers at 24 protection. I'll stack that up against your 1.4 chainmail guys any day of the week.

[Sombre]

In what sense do you get 1.4 smiths? That's a gross oversimplification. You haven't even shown that you get more gold or castles by building black plate over chainmail after the first couple of turns. You say you save gold, but you admit they aren't as good for quick expansion. I could argue that quick expansion nets more gold, which means more castles and smiths, therefore I have 1.4 (Since we're going to apply this figure to everything apparently) smiths to your one and it would make just as much sense as what you're saying.

[B0rsuk]

I can field about 1.4 chain for every plate. Does the plate make up that difference? I haven't seen it.

-Jeff

Black plate is better in some cases, yet still overpriced. Still, I need to point out a few things:
- 1.4 chain mail costs 40% more gold to recruit
- 40% more gold in upkeep
- 40% more supplies (probably never an issue considering you're going to have small number of troops anyway)
- you need 40% more water breathing items
- you neede 40% more flying carpets, pocket ships etc.
- 40% more space on battlefield (this cuts both ways: easier to block enemies from reaching your mages, harder to get all guys enchanted, but also harder to get all of them wiped out with a single panzerfaust, I mean, fireball)
- alas, black plate are 40% more vulnerable to low MR abuse. You need smaller number of mages to enchant them.

By the way: am I the only one who dislikes built-in vulnerabilities for mass buff spells ? Is there any reason players should be discouraged from using hordes of cheap units creatively ? I can see why personal buffs were changed in Dom3 to have downsides, but mass spells ?
I think horde strategies are underpowered in Dominions3 . It's very very hard to overwhelm your enemy with masses of cheap units, because those cheap units ... cost much more gold. I'd say Black Plate should actually be considered the cheaper unit, and it makes sense it's overall less useful than more expensive chain mail.

[jaif]

I just noticed something. There's an alt-6 spell called "Iron Bane" that destroys all armor on the battlefield except magic armor. Is black plate "magic"? This would be a dang handy spell if so.

-Jeff

[Lord_Bob]

- alas, black plate are 40% more vulnerable to low MR abuse. You need smaller number of mages to enchant them.

Is it worth it having low level astral mages spamming mind burn/paralze/soul slay?

And yes, Ulm can have Astral on it's pretender for antimagic. Unless it's very high, if I'm playing an astral race, I'm going to Magic Duel him to death. Kill his pretender! Kill him! Plus, Ulm can only have one pretender, and having the requirement of very high astral and awake or sleeping really kills the points. Summoned astral casters are going to get off Antimagic and then die. On defence. On offence, they are just going to die.

And people who don't think flails can "do killing" has never witnessed the little death machines in action. They do 14 damage twice a round. 18 damage with Strength of Giants. Each one. They hit more because they lower Defence. After Weapons of Sharpness? I know it's a very high level spell, but Ulm WANTS Constr-6 for the Lightless Laterns. So Constr-7 is one, now much cheaper, step away. With Weapons of Sharpness and Strength of Giants you have a unit that deals 18 points of AP damage twice per turn. Each and every one of them. It laughs at feeble "dual bless" troops. As well it should, for they are nothing before it's wrath.