Fire vs. Death heavy bless

[Micah]

Basing a strat around alchemizing 200 gems to empower someone up to D1 to site search so your pretender has D gems is pretty absurd.

[K]

Originally Posted by Micah

Basing a strat around alchemizing 200 gems to empower someone up to D1 to site search so your pretender has D gems is pretty absurd.

No more absurd than spending the same amount of gems equipping five thugs or casting a single global that won't win you the game, and that's a staple of Dominions play. Spending gems to set in motion a plan that will win you the game is a far better choice.

And 200 gems is just a worse-case scenario. With Astral gems, a little luck from random events, or just some lucky site searching by finding a mixed-type site and the actual number of gems might be a lot less (and that doesn't even count the chance that you might get a Death random on a Wolf Shaman or some other indie recruitable mage or site mage).

I'm surprised that you consider it absurd. Afraid people might actually win games where you have the superior army and lands?

[LDiCesare]

It's not like Utterdark = you win. If you're facing Ermor, the darkness will be irrelevant to them for instance, and they may not worry about the income loss either. Blood nations will be happy with it too. Spending hundreds of gems to empwoer someone so your pretender can cast a spell which is not a game-winner by itself looks a bit excessive, but it is a strategy. I'm not sure it's necessarily a better strategy than rushing your neighbour with sacreds and killing them before turn 32 and then use a bigger army, gold and gem income to win.

[K]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

It's not like Utterdark = you win. If you're facing Ermor, the darkness will be irrelevant to them for instance, and they may not worry about the income loss either. Blood nations will be happy with it too. Spending hundreds of gems to empwoer someone so your pretender can cast a spell which is not a game-winner by itself looks a bit excessive, but it is a strategy. I'm not sure it's necessarily a better strategy than rushing your neighbour with sacreds and killing them before turn 32 and then use a bigger army, gold and gem income to win.

Ever fought a blood nation in a post-Utterdark game where you have a real army and they only have summons?

I'm not saying that you auto-win. By turn 35 or 40 a few well-scripted mages or thugs/SCs can still turn your armies into goo, but I'd put it in the top three tactics that let you steamroll nations or break the hearts of your enemies and cause them to go AI.

As for Bless Rushes, they are not the top three tactics. Having broken the back of more than one bless rush with such exotic tactics as "archers" or "level 2 magic", I don't rate it terribly high.

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by K

Ever fought a blood nation in a post-Utterdark game where you have a real army and they only have summons?

If you have a real army and they only have summons, why do you need Utterdark?
Why wouldn't they have an army? Many blood nations have units that don't care about darkness (abysia, lanka's kalamukha and Mictlan moon or rain warriors). Furhtermore Agarthans, undead hordes from Ermor or Pangaea, R'lyeh autosummons and mind blasts, that's a lot of units that won't be affected a lot by the Utterdark.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

If you have a real army and they only have summons, why do you need Utterdark?
Why wouldn't they have an army? Many blood nations have units that don't care about darkness (abysia, lanka's kalamukha and Mictlan moon or rain warriors). Furhtermore Agarthans, undead hordes from Ermor or Pangaea, R'lyeh autosummons and mind blasts, that's a lot of units that won't be affected a lot by the Utterdark.

"Many" blood nations? Aren't blood summons demons pretty much by definition, i.e. immune to Darkness?

-Max

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

"Many" blood nations? Aren't blood summons demons pretty much by definition, i.e. immune to Darkness?

-Max

I ment national troops. F.e. Lanka's kalah mukha warriors have darkvision but the recruitable rakshasas don't.

[chrispedersen]

As for Bless Rushes, they are not the top three tactics. Having broken the back of more than one bless rush with such exotic tactics as "archers" or "level 2 magic", I don't rate it terribly high.

I am curious what you mean by this. Personally I can't think of any tactic that wins enough to be called a "top 3" tactic. But I would say that Mictlan, Mictlan, Lanka, and Niefle's bless strategies make them top 10% contenders.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by K

I'm surprised that you consider it absurd. Afraid people might actually win games where you have the superior army and lands?

Now that really is absurd.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by K

No more absurd than spending the same amount of gems equipping five thugs or casting a single global that won't win you the game, and that's a staple of Dominions play. Spending gems to set in motion a plan that will win you the game is a far better choice.

Let's think this through here.

* The goal is to have piles of death gems for your pretender to use for casting Utterdark the first turn he pops out. We'll neglect the Research angle in this post. Assume he's going to pop out on turn 37, giving you 36 turns of gem accumulation.

* Base cost to get a D1 mage without national D: 200 gems (or 100 pearls). I'll neglect the indy angle because you mentioned empowerment specifically. This is a fixed cost which generates no return.

* With only one D1 mage, you'll going to be more limited by mage-time than by province-count. Let's assume (optimistically) that you can get an average return of 1 death gem per turn per 2 provinces searched, by targeting swamps and deserts and by getting lucky with multiple-death-gem-generating sites. (In practice I think it's about 1 for 3 or less.) We'll say that half of these are level 1 sites, discoverable by manual D1 searching.

* Assume for simplicity that you can have a total non-death income which scales linearly with time. We'll say that on turn N, you get 2N non-death gems from national mages searching, etc. And we'll pretend getting to this point doesn't cost any gems or research. That means you can have 210 non-death gems by turn 14, which means that you can have a D1 mage and 20 death gems from alchemy by turn 15. That gives you 22 turns of gem accumulation.

* Under these assumptions, it takes either 8 turns of mage-time (manual site-searching), or 2 turns of mage-time and 6 death gems, or 2 turns of mage-time and 24 non-death gems, to generate an income of 1 death gem per turn. Your best bet is to search with Dark Knowledge until turn 31 (14 turns, cost 42 death gems, yield 2*Sum(1...7)=56, net 14 death gems) and then manually search for the 6 remaining turns because mage-searching wouldn't have time to recoup costs. If you get lucky and find the site on your first manual search, that brings in an extra 6 gems.

* That means you spent 200 gems alchemizing to D1 and searched for 22 turns to net 14 death gems and one D1 mage (and an income of +8 death). If you had just alchemized those 200 gems and kept the death gems you'd be 36 gems ahead.

* It should be clear by this point that if you really do want to Utterdark your way to victory by turn 36, bootstrapping your way to a Death income via alchemy + empowerment is not the way to do it. You'd be better off building on your core national strengths (water, astral, whatever) and alchemizing THOSE for your Utterdark. (By turn 37 you'd have an income of +74 non-death gems, a stockpile of 1406 gems, and you can alchemize that to 351 death gems.)

* You could also trade with someone who does have a core competency in Death (Helheim, Lanka, etc.). Or kill them and take their gems. Either way it's better than trying to bootstrap yourself.

-Max