Quote:
Originally Posted by brxbrx
I still don't understand why you'd need so much money late-game.
You can only recruit one spellcaster from each castle a turn, and you could easily sustain that with the amount of provinces you should have by then. Assuming you're playing SP. I don't know much about how many provinces players typically hold in MP.
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Okay, let me give you an example from an ongoing MP game under CBM 1.6
The setting is EA, the map is Aran. We are into the late game and the remaining nations are Ulm, Fomoria, C'tis, and my own Lanka.
As we entered the late game Fomoria and Ulm launched a joint attack on me as being the most dangerous player, while C'tis basically chose to bunker down while chain-summoning Tartarians. I cut a deal with C'tis whereby I, fundamentally, didn't do anything to stop his accumulation of Tartarians, not even touching his recently cast Well of Misery or other globals in return for his not touching my globals. The clear understanding was that he'd attack Fomoria or Ulm when it damn well suited him (after they had bled me) leaving the two of us to face off at the end should I prevail against my attackers.
The next turn I cast Gift of Nature's Bounty, a spell that under normal circumstances would have caused every player to ally against me immediately, but which under those circumstances the C'tis player could accept. (Whether that was wise of him or not I do not rightly know yet as the game isn't done)
I controlled about 25% of Aran at the outbreak of war - the poor NE region, much of which had been devastated by Helheim's death dominion earlier in the game - and was only able to bloodhunt for approximately 150 blood slaves per turn while affording 3 or 4 commanders (and for MP, that is a
low number of commanders to recruit per turn when you are at turn 50-something as we were)
With GoNB, the situation changed completely. I could set the tax percentage to zero in the vast majority of my provinces while bloodhunting them, recruiting a mage in every fortification ever turn, building ever more fortresses, building temples everywhere, and building 40 or 50 or 60 PD wherever I wanted to throw a surprise for any small group of Ulm raiders without blinking at the cost. (Normal for Lanka is to use 0, 1, or 10 PD as their PD is utter crap, but when you have a surplus of thousands of gold AFTER recruiting and building each turn, hey, why not use them for that? If the raiding parties destroy the PD, hell, who cares?)
If it wasn't because I was morbidly afraid of full penetration Master Enslave used on MR 10 troops, I could have been recruiting my sacred Kala-Mukha warriors in every fortress each turn as well, but I chose to stick with my blood summons (for the most part).
Now, many turns of grueling warfare later I control half of Aran and recruit 29 Kala-Mukha mage-priests
per turn while only taxing one province in six and gaining about 350 blood slaves (should have been more, but as I said, much of the land had been devastated in earlier wars). On the battlefield, huge +5 and +6 blood sabbaths are easily put together and I can afford their loss should things go wrong.
This is an extreme case, admittedly, and if Fomoria's and Ulm's players had had more MP experience they'd have paid whatever it took to dispel GoNB even without C'tis help, but even when playing non-blood nations it is
very common in MP to not be able to afford recruiting a mage in every fortress each turn.
After all, if you are ever in a situation where you can afford to recruit a mage in every fortress each turn with money left over,
you have built few fortresses and should use the extra money to build another fortress. You can
never have "too many mages" in MP.
The sort of half-arsed mage-effort one can get away with in SP is only possible because the AI is utterly incapable of putting up a fight and doesn't know how to use its mages.
In MP, you may face situations like "How to assault Ulm's fortress when it is defended by a screen of
very tough troops that'll take ages for even Danavas to chop through who are guarding 135 mages, most of whom are the national shamans and smiths but at least one of whom will fling a round 1 Master Enslave at you, and all of whom will be protected by Army of Gold, Warriors of Niefelheim, Anti-magic, Demon Cleansing, Storm Warriors, Mass Regeneration, Fog Warriors, Mass Relief, Storm (so no flying) and possibly a few more spells. Oh, and he probably has dozens of Bells of Cleansing present too - at least one score - so chopping your way slowly through the screen using demon troops is going to be exceptionally costly if it is even possible". And sometimes you may be in a situation where you cannot afford the time it would take to go for a dominion kill but will
have to assault.
You can
never have enough mages in MP.
Re: Gift of Nature
Well that's wrong because the spell ruined the game !! But truthfully yes a bit more money would have been usefull, even in mid-game. I was in a game with *3 magic scale, playing MA CTIS and yes to propagate my miasma I had DOM 10, playing with an emprisoned pretender (I mostly play SP, that shows !).
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