Some ideas: raiding, seiging, spell AI and more..

[Kel]

Soapyfrog said:
However of course there are more devils where they came from (for free!!)

They aren't free. They just have a form of payment that rewards in the long term, rather than in the short term. Do you think it would be fair to pay 80 slaves for a single devil ? Of course not. To get many devils out of a soul contract, you consume many different kinds of resources and one which most people seem to ignore is the resource of Time.

Since my devil army is endless replenishable

Gem sites do not run out. Every army and summon is "endlessly replenishable". What you mean is that you have to reinvest gems. With contracts, though, you still have to reinvest Time. You don't think that's important ?

losing it is not a crippling blow. Your SC on the other hand, well, you will have to expend those considerable resources all over again, since the devil problem wont go away just ebcuase you killed a bunch of them.

That's true ! Of course, if I kill my opponents Bane Lord army, I doubt the problem will go away, either. Unless I actually start taking his resources away from him. Now, the obvious counter-point here is that the devils don't really take a lot of resources to rebuild, other than time (actually, even that has a caveat since we haven't talked about who is leading these devils). Even then, the answer is Time. If you can summon SCs faster than his contracts can produce devils (obviously not on a 1 for 1 basis), even in the short run, you should be able to take some of his resources away from him.

Now, I am not taking a stance on whether contracts are balanced or not. I am just beginning to explore them heavily, myself. I just wanted to point out that Time, as a resource, is something that all of the investment item discussions seem to overlook.

- Kel