Quote:
Originally Posted by Calahan
FWIW, I think Blood is horribly broken and OP in CBM (Edit - Removing SDR's is nothing more than a flesh wound), and not far off that in vanilla. But as least in vanilla Blood was kept in check with Gem Gens (Edit - And no, fixing a broken game feature with another broken game feature is not a good idea, in fact it's a truly awful idea. Thought I'd point this out before any Gem Gen lovers jump on this quote and use it for their stupid argument). But without Gem Gens Blood can just rule the game once you get a mega Blood economy going, since every Blood spell/ritual is either ridiculously cheap, ridiculously powerful, or both in most cases. And Blood summons are not exactly bottom of the food chain. But I've ranted about all this before in many CBM chats and nothing's been done about it, so I've just stopped moaning about it now (the community cheers  ) |
Calahan made the above comment in an exchange regarding claws of kokytos and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to talk about the current state of blood magic. I think I'm definitely more optimistic than him as there have been some significant CBM nerfs with regards to blood magic recently (jade knives unique, vampire lords more expensive and infernal disease more expensive) but blood is certainly still very powerful - especially once you reach the late game.
The great (and problematic) thing about blood is that it basically alchemizes gold into "gem quality" summons and powerful battlefield and ritual magic. In this sense blood nations have gems + blood, while non-blood nations have only gems to work with. Now initially of course there is an opportunity cost involved. Individual demonic summons may be cheap but they also require a turn of mage time (in addition to the lost gold from the provinces being blood hunted). But as the game goes on this opportunity cost starts to disappear while at the same time you get access to spells that summon large numbers of a demons at a time as well as powerful battlefield spells.
The utility of gold late game depends on the nation you're playing. Giant nations have mages that are tough enough to survive the late game battlefield. Stealth nations can pick their fights. And of course magic paths factor in. If your mages are throwing around elemental magic that has less utility than if they have S/D/B. If they need a lot of boosters to reach effective levels of magic then gems are the limiting factor, not gold.
So while I don't think gold is useless late game, its utility does go down as the game goes on. Unless you are a blood nation - then you can translate that gold into magic power. And as your need for recruitment decreases, the more of that power you can access.
I'll start the conversation by focusing on one aspect of blood: demonic troop summons. Some highlights of these troops:
High HP and MR (these two are key for late game use)
Morale 30
Low encumbrance
Not effected by darkness
Mobility (usually flight)
Magic weapons
Varying elemental immunities
Specials such as fear, auras, dark power
No upkeep
When you consider the fact that they can stand up to late game magic ranging from master enslave to rain of stones better than national units and that they don't cost a single gem to summon (meaning you can save those gems for forging, summoning SCs and global casting) I'd say these are the best troops in the game.
And it's not just that they're good - they're massable. Even if you haven't gone the route of soul contracts or don't have a trick such as beast bat spawning onaqui, you can still generate large numbers of top flight troops quickly, meaning you can recover quickly from setbacks.
I had a funny situation in a recently completed game where utterdark was up. While everyone, including myself, had their gold income largely eliminated, as the only blood nation in the game I didn't mind this turn of events at all since my blood hunting continued unimpeded - and it was actually an incentive to flip more provinces to being blood hunted to increase my advantage. Btw, in this same game I did most of my blood hunting in just three provinces. Two were in the typical 7-8,000 pop range and another had around 14,000. Under growth 3, in 30 turns of hunting the two smaller provinces with 4-5 B2/3s (and with patrolling to keep down unrest) each province lost only around 1,500 pop. The 14k province was hunted with up to 10 B2/3s for 20 turns (again with heavy patrolling) and only lost about 2k pop during that time.
In another game I had GoNB up and was recruiting mages like crazy. Of course my upkeep shot up as well but my plan was that if I lost GoNB I'd just switch all my provinces to blood hunting and still get value from them despite operating at a loss. But you don't need GoNB for this mechanic to apply - if your upkeep gets too high just convert as many provinces as possible to blood hunting and once again get full value from them.
In short, blood gains strength as the game goes on. Once you reach the endgame I think blood nations have a significant advantage over non-blood nations of equal research and (especially) equal gem income. They are certainly not undefeatable (only MA Ulm is undefeatable
) but since the mechanics of blood magic are what they are I think there's a case to be made for some price adjustments to high end blood magic along the lines of what was done with vampire lords.
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