Broken Nations

[DominionsFan]

Peter Ebbesen said:

Lesson one about fighting Ashen Empire: The REAL war has little to do with number of troops and everything to do with commanders.

So long as you focus on number of troops where Ashen Empire is concerned, you are worrying about the wrong thing and are setting yourself up for defeat if fighting a human controlled Ermor.

There are lots of ways to deal with the troops (drive-by-priesting for attrition, archery and high protection units shielding ranks of mages using the anti-undead spells or priests banishing for all they are worth, and later in the game you can use mass casualty battlefield spells) - the real war is killing off their commanders. As a rule of thumb, the loss of a single Dusk Elder or Arch Bishop hurts an Ermorian player more than the loss of a few thousand troops on all but the smallest of maps.

The only nations I consider close to broken are those with sacred units with high survivability, high overall stats, preferably two attacks, AND cheap production costs. Very few nations have the combination of all four, but those that do are absolute monsters with a F9W9 blessing strategy.

A few nations, mainly from the early age, come to mind as being in the "those sacred should cost way more gold and resources than they do currently" category, namely Vanheim, Helheim, and, to a lesser degree due to lesser survivability, Sauromatia. Their sacred units would still be good for high-bless strategies if their gold and resource costs were doubled.

mictlan, and tienchi are also very strong in the EA in blitz games. You can mass produce the cheap and good sacreds. Nifelheim is also very good, however their sacreds at least expensive.

AE Ermor is a special nation, and dont think that you can beat AE Ermor with a simple priest - banish tactic.

[Peter Ebbesen]

DominionsFan said:
mictlan, and tienchi are also very strong in the EA in blitz games. You can mass produce the cheap and good sacreds. Nifelheim is also very good, however their sacreds at least expensive.

Sure they are good, but both Mictlan's and Tien Chi's troops lack the survivability of the 'heims which makes other strategies viable counters to them in the early game - unless you are playing blitzes on a small map (in which case you deserve what you get, since you've chosen the single best setup for blessing strategies ), which is why I didn't include them in my "closest to broken" list. Mictlan's particularly, though you can produce hordes of them, are vulnerable to a well-balanced army backed up with a bit of magic.

Somebody primarily playing blitzes on small maps with no house rules restricting pretender design might evaluate them differently, but that's not so much a question of the strength of the nation in general nor an indication of a nation that is "broken" as it is a question of choosing a particular setup that strongly favours one strategy and the nations most suited for that strategy.

AE Ermor is a special nation, and dont think that you can beat AE Ermor with a simple priest - banish tactic.

I never claimed that was the case. I claimed, and I'll insist on it though you might reasonably differ, that a player who focuses on trying to match a human played Ermor's troops rather than focusing on Ermor's commanders is not going to beat any competently played Ermor.

[KissBlade]

DominionsFan said:


mictlan, and tienchi are also very strong in the EA in blitz games. You can mass produce the cheap and good sacreds.

You and I have a very different definition of "mass producing" something ... W5E's are capital ONLY, fragile and requires a duel bless to really make them effective. This is quite balanced IMO. Tien Chi gets summonable sacreds to somewhat add bulk to their troops but aside from Water Demons, I tend to have better uses for their gems.

[Nerfix]

W5E's are terribly fragile to missiles. Real glass cannons.

[Sandman]

Take a phoenix with F9A9 then. Cheaper than a F9W9, and still pretty good. Stack the warriors with hordes of composite bowmen and you can carve up enemy armies with ease.

[Nerfix]

I can see that working very well. Hmmm, that would also give them lightning immunity when blessed. Hmmmm....

[Theonlystd]

meh when i played as LE R'yleh, Dreamscape i never got anything better than a large otherness.


The free units they get are wrothless outisde of killing tritons and if the army is triton guards it can be quite diffucult o and i guess good "chaff" i think they call em..

All your commanders but you StarSpawn Mages going insane is a big pain..

[JaydedOne]

I think LE R'lyeh is very good at what it does (irritate neighbors with Dominion, stock up on cheap units, offer most of the same advantages of ME R'lyeh) but the insanity on your own commanders can be very offputting and LE has a number of amphibious nations that, in my opinion, are -very- dangerous to R'lyeh if they decide they want to compete for the waters -- after all, I think a double-blessed Atlantis/Mictlan horde coming into the water is going to make life -extremely- ugly for R'lyeh even if they've recruited scads of dreaming fodder along the way. Let's also just say that I prefer the (amphibious!) sacreds those two nations can buy multiples of -every turn- a great deal more than I do the sacreds that R'lyeh MIGHT be able to spawn through the Gate every few turns if they're lucky.

I love R'lyeh. I'm a huge enthusiast and think the Dreamlands theme is fun. But calling it broken is, I think, overstating the case.

[KissBlade]

Sandman said:
Take a phoenix with F9A9 then. Cheaper than a F9W9, and still pretty good. Stack the warriors with hordes of composite bowmen and you can carve up enemy armies with ease.

Nah you don't actually need to. To defend against archers, just deposit lots of archer decoys around the map. Also try to coordinate your attacks so that the bulk of them happen during spring. you get about double the hit points on your w5e's. Plus F9W9 is just way too good to pass up.

[Corwin]

KissBlade said:

Nah you don't actually need to. To defend against archers, just deposit lots of archer decoys around the map. Also try to coordinate your attacks so that the bulk of them happen during spring. you get about double the hit points on your w5e's. Plus F9W9 is just way too good to pass up.

Isn't it 1.5 more hitpoints? (18 vs normal 12)