Question about EA Tir Na N'og

[Torgon]

Agree with the problems with lack of SC counters. I'm looking for ideas. What generally works well for other nations without their own SC chassis?

One solution might be using Sidhe champions instead of the lords as anit-SC squads. Significantly cheaper with similar stats, main diff is one less air and 17 def vs. 20. Give a few of them hero's blades (12 AP damage + additional to larger creatures). Script flight, attack large creatures. A squad of them coming in on the middle of a buff cycle seems like it would work nicely. 4 cost the same amount as a Niefel jarl, and they're recruit anywhere, plus 10E gems a piece for the blades, plus any other trinkets you want to throw on them (amulets of luck might work nicely, if you can forge them. Obviously another problem, but you could just outfit your pretender to summon Spectres to get a little astral if you can't find lizards). They have glamour so it has to be popped first, gives them a couple of rounds to wail away. Would have to test it out but seems like a possible strategy. As long as you don't lose more than 4 in each SC exchange you're coming out ahead in terms of gold and gems. Not sure if this would work, any thoughts?

Not really sure where the comparison to Fomoria comes from, seems like there are too many differences to name. No recruit anywhere glamour mages and commanders, only recruit anywhere mage is the druid with only A1 + random. No recruit anywhere stealth troops. No access to earth or nature for big troop buffs. Etc. Fomoria is a giant nation that relies on capital only kings and sorceresses. I agree they may be an overall stronger nation than TNN, but hardly a good comparison when trying to think about a strategy.

Seems the better comparisons would be Vanhiem or Hellheim, with either blood or death respectively, and access to heavy earth at their capitals. How do they deal with SC's?

[Torgon]

Another possibility is vine bow or vine whip on one commander plus the hero's blades on a few others. Lock the big guy down and then chop away.

[Kobal2]

Originally Posted by Torgon

Not really sure where the comparison to Fomoria comes from, seems like there are too many differences to name. No recruit anywhere glamour mages and commanders, only recruit anywhere mage is the druid with only A1 + random. No recruit anywhere stealth troops. No access to earth or nature for big troop buffs. Etc. Fomoria is a giant nation that relies on capital only kings and sorceresses. I agree they may be an overall stronger nation than TNN, but hardly a good comparison when trying to think about a strategy.

Seems the better comparisons would be Vanhiem or Hellheim, with either blood or death respectively, and access to heavy earth at their capitals. How do they deal with SC's?

It's not that far fetched a comparison.

- Firbolgs ? Firbolgs.

- Zappy storm ? Zappy storm.

- Fomoria has all the magic paths TNN has, and then some. High Air ? Check. High N ? Not really, but as a giant nation your god will most assuredly have at least 4N, which starts you on the nature path. Water ? Check. The only missing piece is Earth, which TNN probably needs to have on their gods too anyway. Oh, and the W/N combo, which is admittedly worthwhile in vanilla for clams, but more or less worthless in CBM.

- Stealth raiders ? Fomoria can do that just fine by focusing on their capital only units early on, or on Morrigans later. Of course, every time you recruit a stealth leader you're not recruiting an SC - but then TNN can *only* recruit stealth leaders. No SC option.

- Teleporting raiders: Fomorian kings say hi. Hell, with Soul Vortex they don't even need gear to wipe out PD.

- Fomorian druids have the same magic paths as Shidhe Champions; in fact they have better paths since they're not constrained to A1N1. Hell, they can even make better use of A1N1 than them since they have twice the hit points, thus can take advantage of Personal Regen (although in that case they admittedly need forged armour).

- Granted, most of them lack Glamour. Then again, since the nerf Glamour is crap that can be dealt with a dozen shortbows. Since EA is when huge packs of shortbows shine anyway... yes.

Oh, and they're also giants with Death magic and holy undead. I stand by my statement: anything TNN can do, Fomoria can do it and then some.

Originally Posted by Torgon

My point is that to create a good argument about whether a strategy is worse or better off after the removal you have to look at an analysis like this. Just talking about when the hammers pay for themselves, or relative usefulness of a specific type of gem doesn't cut it. These problems are similar between strategies. What really changed is the amount of one resource that you have to invest in that strategy relative to other resources: gold, production turns, gems used in summoning, etc.

My reasoning was far from that involved, but it led me to a simple deduction: SC races (like Fomoria) used to be more or less required to squeeze Earth and sleeping on their pretenders, so they'd be able to make hammers early enough for it to matter.
This, in turn, meant they had worse scales and worse end game options than other nations.
Remove hammers and a full-on bless or scales strat becomes not only viable but a no-brainer for them since there's no opportunity cost any more. Which ironically means that removing the forge whore item from the game makes forge whore nations *more* powerful than they ever were.

[Baalz]

Caveate: I haven't played Tir yet. That said, I can offer some suggestions as to some specific questions raised. Tir, like Eriu seems likely to do very well with a heavy forging focus. Sidhe raiders obviously are exactly the same, but cheap items can go a long way towards overcoming some of the other weaknesses.

A couple indie commanders with ice pebble staffs will go a very long way towards compensating for your low damage output and will quite vex the guy who managed lightning resistant troops. Generally though lightning casters + soothing storm will bring all the damage you need.

Sidhe champions have an 18 precision once you cast eagle eyes. Bows of war and piercers can be pretty nasty when you field double digits of them, particularly on stealthy guys.

Enemy SCs shouldn't be a problem. Anybody not lightning/frost immune is trivial to bring down, and hero blades are an obvious default answer to anybody that doesn't have a more specific weakness.

[thejeff]

All of that becomes harder without hammers.

Everyone else is hurt too, but if you're relying on items for almost everything you're much worse off. Taking a Forge lord helps, but is still only 1 item a turn.

[Torgon]

Originally Posted by thejeff

All of that becomes harder without hammers.

Everyone else is hurt too, but if you're relying on items for almost everything you're much worse off. Taking a Forge lord helps, but is still only 1 item a turn.

But what nation isn't relying heavily on forging? The SC's still have to be kitted out.

What's more expensive? 6 guys with bows of war is 30 gems. 4 guys with hero's blades are 40 gems. How many gems is a fully equipped SC? Plus the guys with blades and bows are all stealthy and so are much more flexible in their deployment; you don't know where they are until they attack. Plus the non-summonable SCs are mainly capital only mages.

Once were talking about summonable guys TNN isn't doing too badly with Rocs, Asynjas, and Shishis. All lightning immune except the Asynja. But the asynja can travel with the remainder of your stealthy armies. Can also get treants or any of the other late game summons if you want to crank your pretender for them. But those three are the ones that obviously fit with what you might want to do with them.

Also is fairy court any good? Seems like she would also fit in with what we'd be trying to do with TNN. The fairy queen herself kinda sucks, not a bad mage but not powerful at all. What catches my eye are the sprites she can summon. 100 armor negating stun damage per shot. MR negates but if you've got a ton of these things (and you do since I think she can summon three each turn) then everyone on the battle field just falls asleep, including SC's. There only 2 hp but 19 defense so hitting the buggers before they get you is damn near impossible. Counter would seem to be AOE spells or big battlefield evocations, also only 9 moral so fear would also be useful to counter. But they're stealthy so once again, you never know where they are. Use a conventional army or SC to distract, make them prepare for a traditional fight or a SC fight, then knock out their force with just a horde of little fairies and some lightning spamming mages instead.

[Baalz]

Well, as I posted elsewhere I don't think the hammer nerf is quite as crippling as everyone makes out. Take, for instance my suggestion to crank out piercers because that particularly makes the comparison easy with everything is in E gems. With a hammer you're saving 2 gems apiece - but you sank 11 or 15 gems into the hammer so you're not even breaking even until you've made 6 (or 8) of them. This is compounded by the fact that if you've got hammers available you're not just forging a single one so it's not unlikely that it's late game before hammers really pay off. True, they do pay off in a big way by end game when you're forging big things and can easily save 50 gems per turn, but that's not really where the sweet spot is for this sort of nation.

[Festin]

In practice, I think TNN suffers heavily without hammers. When hammers were in, you could take E on pretender (not a bad idea anyway for sacred thug nation, so no wasted points), and you had little use for E gems except for hammers. Without them, things like Vine Shields (which are key items for TNN) are suddenly very costly.

I think game experience with newest CBM so far supports my words: thugs have become rare.

Concerning the anti-SC options for TNN - how about airdropping a couple of Sidhe Lords dual-wielding Axes of Hate?

[Torgon]

What we really need to know too tell if this is a huge hit to thug nations is the average gem outlay per thug, the average gem outlay per sc, and the average ratio of thugs/SC fielded in any given game prior to the removal of hammers.

If gems/thug / gems/SC = thug/SC then removal of hammers should have relatively little effect. E.g. if people were putting 15 gems worth of stuff on thugs, 45 on SC, but the average ratio of thugs to SC was 3/1 then the cost in gems for both was unchanged. You raised the price of both equivalently. 1.33 * 45 and 1.33 * 45.

If gems/thug / gems/sc > thug/SC then removal of hammers did nerf thugs. E.g. people were putting 20 gems into each thug, 40 into each SC but ratio of thug/SC was still 3/1. This effectively increased the price of the thugs. 1.33 * 60 vs 1.33 * 40.

if gems/thug / gems/SC < thug/SC then removal of hammers hurt the SC nations. Opposite of above.

So the question I have for those more experienced, what were these ratios?

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Torgon

So the question I have for those more experienced, what were these ratios?

Very hard to determine .

Don't think you can really put numbers to those values, they depend totally on situation and play style.