The Gaming Den

K wrote:Air!

Air is a tricky suite. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to toss down Lightning Bolts or Thunder Strike and call it a day. Armor negating damage is really nice and no one will blame you for going crazy with it.

That being said, Air has a lot of tricks.

First, the small stuff. Tossing down a Air Shield or a Mirror Image is a nice defense, and things like Flight seem nice, but it doesn't hold a candle to Mistform. This little spell lets you suddenly start taking only 1 HP for each hit you take on anything less than a hit from a giant or a crit.

This means that all the nations you've been looking at who seem to have Air on slightly thug-like units, but you don't understand why, this is it: Mistform turns a decent unit into a very difficult to kill unit and that means you can thug or meatshield or just not get hurt by stuff. That's useful.

So, you can imagine what happens when you slap this on your whole army. Fog Warriors does this and you dance a little dance each time you pull it off because it requires a very large caster or a Communion.

Then there is your battle summoning. Air has among the best elementals because they do that sexy armor-negating attack on top of fun elemental stuff and I've lost more than one army when the AI decided to spam Air Elementals. They also get False Horrors that are almost as good as real Horrors and are super-cheap to summon and don't eat your face, so that's neat. There are also some little Phantasmal Warriors and Ghost Wolves and they have a talent for being a waste of fatigue but they catch arrows passably well.

That being said, don't summon things. Everything is overpriced, and aside from Spring Hawks I don't see the appeal.

Mists of Deception is pretty big noise because it basically starts tossing down a pile of Air summons every turn of battle. Back in the day we used to use them to destroy armies because mages could leave a battle and the battlefield enchantment would hang out (and murder people if there are still units there... and it was creating units), but now you have to live with the fact that it's going to produce lots of little and some big units each turn from all ends of the battlefield to kill your enemies. Poor you.

Then you get some other neat stuff. I mean, if you are facing some heavy spellcasting spam then you could do worse than using Mist to drop the ranges on things and force his AI to cast dumb things. Arrow Fend make you heavily resistant to arrows, Wind Guide makes your arrows hit really often, and Mass Flight can turn a slow and stupid army into a fast and deadly one on the battlefield. These are all things you want to do.

Storm is also useful. It costs a gem, but it borks everyone's arrows and lets you use the A1 Summon Storm Power and turn a tiny caster into a Lightning-tossing badass (with terrible accuracy using a good accuracy spell). Because many Air spells are about half as cheap as they should be, it makes even A1 researchers into a deadly force.

There also some other BS. Sometimes your AI will cast it and you will weep a little.

As for your gems, your boosters are stupid. They both come in at A4 so they are both hard to make and stupidly expensive. One of them gets you a tiny elemental...so that's not much of a consolation.

There is also a Storm Staff. For a archer-less nation, you could do worse than an expensive staff that borks everyone's arrows and let's you spam Lightning Bolts.

Chances are good you are going to make Air armors because it's all awesome in one way or another. Of note is that fact that lots of Air armors are low or no encumbrance. Winged Boots are nice because flying is great and turning slow walking commanders into flying ones is great (Carpets of Flying are also equally neat, and making Air Corps. is a dream of many an Air nation).

There are also Lightning Bows which are cheap and great lightning casters and Bows of War that you toss onto high Precision Commanders who don't have anything better to do than shoot arrows.

The rest of the items are dross. I mean, I like Dancing Tridents as much as the next guy.... I just don't like them as much as Lightning Bows.

At the end of the day, you really want to be spending Air gems on the battlefield because you get battlefield enchantments that win you battles.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Orion wrote:Quickness Boots for itemspam too.

Yeah, Water is an amazingly good forging suit. Quickness Boots are not only at the top of SC equipment for their slot (standing right next to winged sandals), but they are also a perfect combo with any casting item. They damn near double the effectiveness of a Flambeau or Rod of the Phoenix, and they cost less. For the weapon slot they provide the Sword of Quickness and the Frost Brand, both of which are top grade SC weapons. For armor they make the Rhyme Hauberk, which is very good SC armor, and the Blue Dragon Scale, which you'd seriously make for fatigue reasons except that your water gems are too valuable. For the misc slot we have Bottle of Living Water, which is one of the best pieces of assassin equipment on the market in addition to being a fairly decent chunk of army that you can shuttle from lab to lab to get it to any war front you want. Water has probably the best set of combat boosters. The Robe is expensive when compared with Boots of Earth, but it's cheap compared to everything else, and the Water Bracelet is obscene. And of course, if you do want to invade under water, you need a big pile of water for Tridents and Goblets, that's not even up for discussion.

And that's before we get to artifacts or cross/colored items. Jade Armor is fabulous for a Queen of Thunder or Tartarian Spirit who wants to murder things but lacks feet. Winter Bringer is one of the nastiest and cheapest item spellspam items, and the Ice/Fire sword is possibly the best weapon, and certainly the best sword for its price.

But bottom line: a big pile of water gems is incredibly versatile. It can get you an army, it can get you thugs, it can get you casters, it can get you you line holding monsters, it can help equip your thugs, it can help equip your casters, it can equip your assassins, and it can send armies under water. Also you can load it onto battlefield casters and throw some pretty impressive battle spells.

Now if you're playing for the long game, you are going to need a big pile of Astral Pearls, because sooner or later your late game plan is going to involve a Ring of Wizardry. So in the long run, you're probably going to want to have built some clams. But spending gems on clams is something with very fierce competition.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Nature is a weird suit because its most salient feature is the fact that it has incredibly shitty battle magic until quite late in the game. Vine Arrow isn't exactly bad, but it's bad for Evocation 2, and not much comes online for some time after that. Nature nuking really never gets that good, Evocation 7 is a long walk, and while Storm of Thorns is an awesome spell, if you got it in Water, Fire, or Death at level 6, you'd rarely even care. But the late game mass combat spells... those are amazing. Mass Protection gives barkskin to every one of your units, it's not not Fog Warriors, or Armor of Lead, but it's a lot cheaper. Mass Regeneration is basically insane, and I can't really say enough good things about it. But the core of Nature battle magic is the spell Relief. It throws a random Reinvig on all your troops every round for the rest of the battle, which means that whatever the rest of your battle mages are doing, they get to do more of it.

Nature is perhaps best known for The Gift of Health, which is a spell that gives all your troops a bonus to hit points while they are in your dominion. This makes your PD a lot harder to cut through and reduces defensive losses substantially. But beyond that, it also removes battle afflictions from your units in your dominion. And it does it pretty fast. And most importantly: it affects afflictions handed out by age and the ones that come with Tartarians and all that shit. Whoever has the Gift of Health not only has a much easier time using old troops and mages, but is basically guaranteed a spot making Tartarians later on. And Nature generates that Gift of Health pretty easily, since it can also make the Mother Oak. But while hop skotching from Mother Oak to Gift of Health is a nice dream, only one faction is going to do that, and it's probably not going to be you.

Nature is also known for Gift of Reason. Because most of the late game stupidity involves taking ridiculous high end stuff and turning them into commanders so that you can deck them out with equipment to make even more ridiculous high end stuff. But a lot of those things are actually over rated. You need some thugs and SCs, but often as not you could get that ball rolling cheaper and faster with like Bane Lords or something.

Nature has some great magic items. In the boot slot you have Birch Boots (50% cold and poison res and 2 points reinvig) and boots of the messenger (4 points reinvig). These are among the best boots in the game. They are both moderately helpful for a SC and probably the go-to if you can't get or can't use winged sandals or boots of quickness. But mostly they are absolutely the go-to boots for any combat caster. Next up we got the Armor slot, where you have Hydra Armor, which is light encumbrance, gives 100% poison res, and also makes you regenerate. The only thing it doesn't do particularly well is provide actual protection. Green Dragon Scale is light medium armor with good poison res. Either one could make an appearance on a thug. Shields are where Nature really shines in thug equipment. The Vine Shield and the Eye shield both really hose enemies who are mobbing you. For helmets you get the Horned Helmet, which gives a bonus attack and a lot of protection, and competes with Horror Helms for standard thug gear. The big deals for the Misc Slot are the Ring of Regeneration which is standard issue thug gear across the world, and the Amulet of Resilience which is 5 points of reinvig that is standard issue battle caster gear. But there's also the Cat Charm, which gives you a bonus to Seduction attempts, so if you're EA Arco or Lanka you'll end up making a bunch of those. Weapons is the only place where Nature kind of falls down - the only one of note is the Snake Bladder Stick, and that makes a giant poison cloud - which is great for grinding away armies of living troops but frighteningly worthless against undead or enemy thugs. And of course, there are the boosters (Thistle Mace or Treelord Staff). And the food items. And the whole Vine Ogre pyramid scheme.

Nature combo items are pretty strong. The Summer Sword (Nature/Earth) provides a hundred supplies and on top of that it lets you itemspam tangle vines (no big deal, but a lot better than the nothing your supply commanders are normally doing). It's also a decent magic sword in its own right, no matter what the description says. The Rainbow Armor (Nature/Air) is low encumbrance and provides more reinvig than it costs in casting fatigue, and also raises MR, making it some of the best caster armor on the market. The Totem Shield (Nature/Astral) is zero encumbrance and curses the enemy army with no actions on your part. Then there's the Thorn Armor (Nature/Blood) that boosts Nature and Blood from an armor slot. Bottom line: if you literally filled up every slot on a thug or battle caster with items made out of nature gems, I would understand.

Nature has a fuck tonne of summons. Most of these are crap. You only ever use Horned Serpents because you are desperate for bulk and you have a Nature 1 mage in a castle under siege. It's better than not having the option, but it's never going to be part of long term plans. The big ones to point to are Vine Ogres, Wooden Constructs, and Lamias. Lamias regenerate at "stupid fast" so if you boost them with stuff like Mass Protection or Cloud Warriors they become extremely hard to kill. And if you have a big nature mage, they come out extremely quickly. Vine Ogres and Wooden Constructs are just big piles of hit points that never run away. This makes them draw fire (because of their high hit points) but not really hurt your army if they get stabbed. True story: the AI targets Lumber Constructs in preference to Arch Devils. Very late in the game, you can seriously do worse than Tarrasques. They are nigh invulnerable and surrounded by a huge poison cloud. So unless your enemy is Ermor, they are good front line troops.

But Nature can also give you access to caster summons. The basic is the Ivy King, who is part of the Vine Ogre pyramid scheme, and is also just plain a Nature 3 caster with good stats. But you're also looking at Lamia Queens (a great way to expand into Death and Blood), and Faerie Queens (a great way to expand into Air).

But yes, there is no limit to how many Nature Gems you could spend. If nothing else, you'd crank out Treelord Staves and Ivy Kings and have them crank out huge piles of Vine Ogres and then back it all up with Mass Regeneration, Storm of Thorns, and Charm. Or outfit your battle casters or thugs in bling bling. Or have your Nature Cyclops make 11 Lamias a turn for a while.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Sounds reasonable.

Fire

OK first off: you basically cannot summon fire mages with fire gems. There are two fire kings to be had, but that's it. If you bootstrap a commander into fire, you have one commander who can use fire. There is no pyramid scheme on the table.

That having been said, it is also true that Fire is very poor at putting troops on the table. Fire Snakes are not a bad deal, but they are slow as fuck and come online at Conjuration 6. Summer Lions are very powerful, but over priced. Fire Drakes are also very powerful, but even more over priced. It's basically all for emergencies only except the Fire Snakes, and those things are heavy infantry that come four at a time, so if you need an army that is in any way fast, they won't do. Fire is so hard to get into and so bad at creating thugs, mages, or army mass that many factions just turn the gems into money - fire gems convert into gold at the best exchange rate. LA Ermor often notes that an Ermorian Castle costs "80 fire gems".

So let's talk about what fire does do: Fire Damage. If your enemies are not immune to fire, Fire does an admirable shit tonne of damage. I never stop singing the praises of Falling Frost, and Falling Fires hits even harder in almost all cases. You start with the best bullshit 0-level attack spell (Fire Flies), and there is a new exciting way to kill people with Fire damage in every level of Evocation (although from level 6 on, they are mostly weird and situational uses). Fire magic hits hard, and it does so at incredibly low level. Fire Bolt is 22 points of armor piercing damage, and you get it with Evocation one. And you rarely cast it because Fire Ball hits an entire square and has a fatigue inducing heat blast that extends beyond that.

Fire resistance of any kind is very rare. Hinnom has partial and Abyssia has full, and that's pretty much it. People can pull in some earth based constructs (clockwork horrors, mechanical men, and iron dragons are all fire immune), and a lot of thug gear provides fire resistance, but if your opponent has any kind of army, you can expect valid fire targets to be in there (unless you are fighting Abyssia or Gath of course). Which is good, because Fire's options for when the opponent doesn't take damage from fire are pretty slim. Here is the entire list of what your casters can do: Blindness, provide Fire Resistance to your other troops, Rage, enchant the arrows of your soldiers. I'm not even joking, that's the entire list of battlefield fire spells that are effective against fire immune targets. And even then, the arrow enchanting spell is called Flaming Arrows" and the accuracy boost is usually considered secondary to the pile of fire damage that the spell inflicts. Even the battlefield summons seriously create creatures made of living fire whose attacks are fire damage.

Flaming Arrows deserves its own paragraph, because it is crazy. The first thing it does is make all your arrows and javelins and stuff get a little icon where they are on fire. This is awesome. But the first important thing it does is to make all the arrows fired by your whole side count as magic. This gives them +2 on the roll to determine if they hit an actual enemy or lodge in a shield or the ground, which is huge. Also it bypasses etherealness and breaks mist form and all that. But the thing people really know it for is that every arrow does a pile of armor piercing fire damage. And that absolutely shreds things. Even short bows turn into death machines. And Flaming Arrows buffs your entire army. It's enchantment 4 and it will change your life. You can cast it as a Fire 2 if you buff up with Phoenix Power and spend an extra gem.

Fire also has not one but two whole battlefield destruction spells. Heat From Hell and Fire Storm. You can cast both and they stack.

Now let's talk about Forging. Pure Fire items rarely make it onto high grade thugs. The Burning Pearl is some fire resistance and a boost to Attack skill. That's a misc item you'd throw on a gargoyle or something if you didn't have anything good to use instead. The Dragon Helm is 15 points of protection with no downsides and a boost to morale of all things. Again, this is something you would use if you didn't have access to something good like a Horror Helm or didn't feel the need to shill out that many gems to protect the head of a character. Fire Plate lives in the same eco-niche. Red Dragon Scale is actually very nice low-fatigue armor, but it's the only thing that seriously tempts many SCs. What fire forging is for, is item spam. The Rod of Authority lets you spam Fire Bolt, the Wand of Wildfire lets you spam Fireball, the Rod of the Phoenix lets you spam Incinerate, and the Flambeau lets you spam Holy Pire. The Flambeau is also a 13 damage armor piercing sword that does triple damage against Undead, and is actually used as an actual Thug Weapon against certain kinds of Undead (notably Tartarians). It's also important to note that Holy Pyre does Holy damage, not Fire damage, and is otherwise only castable by Marignon.

All of those itemspam spells are very very good. Fire Bolt is bigger than a double strength crossbow bolt. Fireball is 16 damage AP to a whole square, has a very long range, and sets shit on fire. Incinerate ignores armor and magic resistance and always hits for 18 damage. Holy Pyre is three squares of modest AP damage but against Demons and Undead it is 3 squares of twenty one armor piercing damage, with again a very long range. There are a few fringe things you can do involving Medallions of Vengeance, but honestly if you just spent all your gems on battle magic and forging itemspam for even more battle magic, I would totally understand.

But Fire also plays very well with others. Water + Fire builds Rune Smashers, which are like double strength Spell Foci in a hand slot. Fire + Death gives you Banefire, which is the second most damaging spell in the game (after Gifts From Heaven) at 53 points, Armor Piercing; and unlocks Reanimate Archers. Fire + Astral unlocks Astral Fires, which is an Astral spell that is actually good at killing large numbers of chaff troops. Fire + Earth unlocks the entire run of Magma spells (that hit very hard and have good areas) and a quite substantial run of SC gear. The Fire Brand is pretty much the go-to Thug sword, since it hits an area with fire (that almost no one is immune to) and the base attack itself is armor piercing. The Charcoal Shield damages everyone who attacks you with fire, while the Gleaming shield gives you Awe. Both are incredibly competitive for the shield slot. Also it gives you Elemental Armor, which presents 50% resistance to Fire, Ice, and Shock (may be vital, depending on how your enemies are fighting your thugs). Fire + Blood gives you the coveted Arch Devils (one of the few ways to summon a fucking fire caster), as well as ushering in the Soul Contract Devil factories and the Hellsword (one of the better two handed weapons). And of course provides the best anti-SC spell ever: Banish to Inferno. Truly, whatever magic you do, it is extremely likely that Empowering a point in Fire is actually a reasonable use of your time.

Rituals are pretty simple. You're not going to put up the Second Sun because it is generally pointless even if you are Abyssia. The Eternal Pyre is pretty sweet but all it really does is give you more Fire Gems, so you're no closer to figuring out a long term plan with them than before. Fires From Afar is situationally quite nice. What it does is causes up to 10+ units in the target province to be hit with a 15 point armor piercing attack. It is randomly assigned between units in the province and has an equal chance of targeting a commander or a troop. That means that if you find a province with a research park, you can blow the fuck out of it and laugh. In that situation it's like 10 gems and one unit of commander time for 10 supercharged Seeking Arrows. If the enemy has hundreds of chaff troops, it's pretty much useless. But if you dump it on a castle full of Loremasters or something, you get an intense return. At Evocation 9 you unlock the stupidly titanic version of that spell: Flames From The Sky. It works pretty much oppositely, in that it is a 15 point armor piercing hit to half the units in the province, randomly selected. So if your opponent has a thousand undead in a pile, it'll hit five hundred units. Also note that since it's a 50/50 shot to nail any particular enemy, the troops don't protect leaders at all, and you'll hit fully half the enemy mages no matter how many soldiers are there or not there. It's huge.

So that's Fire. Used in a bunch of cross path high end gear and used to mass produce indie commanders who spam really fearsome evocations. And that's mostly what you do with Fire gems.

-Username17

K wrote:Here's my take on Fire:

Fire is the gem type the game wants you to spend in battle. There are a lot of really great Fire battlefield spells that cost gems with Flaming Arrows being one of the best and easiest, but Heat from Hell and Fire Storm (not to be confused with Flame Storm, the ritual spell that attacks half the units for a pretty cheap cost of 35 gems).

That being said, Fire is a weird thing to break into. If you can ever get 50 Fire gems at a time, you can take one of the Shamans who appear in every era and Empower him. From there, you can make Fever Fetishes.

Fever Fetishes get their own paragraph. Now, they make the guy holding them diseased, and they make gems when he is below 70%ish HPs. The upshot is that if you can put some regen on him after he hits 50% HPs, he'll stop losing HPs and you now have a gem gen. (The cheapest regen is a N4+ Bless and a Shroud). This all makes them the easiest gem gens to make, and you can just toss them onto Scouts if you don't want to slap regen on them and live with scouts dying all the time.

As for getting Fire mages, you aren't going to do Tartarians. The chances of getting a non-Feebleminded one are just really bad, and even with Tar factory you aren't getting many.

That leaves Hidden in Sand (E3/D). This spell costs Earth gems... you know, the completely awesome gem type that makes the best items and has the best summons and some of the best battlefield spells? The upshot is that when you cast it it also gives you around 30-50 wights (and some leaders are Holy, which can be a big deal) and 0-2 mages (F/E/D2/H2 with two F/E/D randoms and a rare S2 random). The downside is that the chance for a mages is random (0-2), the spell can only be cast in a Wasteland, it's Enchantment 7 (but near Fire and Erath gem gen Globals), and it gets more mages in Fortune and Magic and more units in Order. Other than that, they are great little units with high HPs, good att and Def with Fire Power, Heat Auras, and Fire resistance.

Being Fire and Death casters, they let you make Flaming Skulls(F/D). With a little luck, you can grab an F3, Skull him for F4 to make a Flaming Helmet for a grand total of F5... more than enough to do big Fire action.

Fire gems often get places in the "well, we can't do much them so I'll make this instead" category. For example, drakes are generally an awful use of gems, but Fire drakes are pretty neat because you aren't going to use the gems for other things. They spit low range Fireballs (only 5) and are a decent 96 HP unit to boot if you don't mind blowing the mage time and with a little regen and protection magic they are nice little meatshields. Scorpion Beasts are really quit nice and also cost Fire gems, and have 56 HPs and Death Poison. Both have terrible Att and Def.

From there, we have the items. The Rod of the Phoenix is just awesome, and at 25 gems it seems really expensive, but you are using Fire gems that you don't care about. Put 4-5 on guys with Boots of Quickness and you can destroy armies that most people think are impossible.

Basically, all the item spams are winners.

I've talked about the BS cheap armors, but there are also the great armors that come if you mix with other things. For example, a Gleaming Shield gives Awe and is one of the best SC shields out there, but the Charcoal Shield gives Fire Shield and is equally neat for an SC. Both need Earth, as does a Flaming Sword.

Fire also gets converted into gold at 1 gem to 15 gold. There are worse things than making gold gens, especially in long games.

If I was forced to chose one master plan with Fire and I wasn't a Fire nation and my Earth income was commited to something else, I'd probably Empower casters. I'd either choose Blood or Astral casters for Communion goodness and the big battlefield-smashing Fire magic, or Blood casters for Infernal Prison, or just get some random dudes and Empower to 1, Flaming Skull for 2, Phoenix Power for 3, and cast with an extra gem for Flaming Arrows (with Fever Fetished Scouts tagging along to fuel it).

Akula wrote:Death magic, finished

People want a write up for death, and I have been thinking of ways to spend my massive income in revenge, so this is a short primer. One thing to keep in mind with death is that there is no "summon death power" equivalent spell, any caster will have what he has an no more. The other general point I want to make is that it is very easy to go from "occasional D1 mage" to "serious death power" because there are a lot of options for summoning death mages with several types of gems.

Death is possibly the easiest path to get in to if you do not recruit death mages. A D1 mage can cast the site searching spell, and you can summon D3 mages with a spell that takes D3 to cast. So if you are not a death power, you will spend your initial death income on casting Dark Knowledge (Conjuration 2, 3 gems) and then casting Summon Mound Fiend (Conjuration 7, 28 gems). Mound Fiends can then do your heavy D lifting, and are worth looking into even for strong death factions; as they are one of the few non-national spells which summons a priest, and undead priests can raise the dead. Which gives you free patrollers and chaff to block for your mages in the late game.

From their you will forge the death boosters, one of which is a badass itemspam helmet (Skullface, Construction 6, 25 gems). Given it's expense and utility as a booster, you will rarely use it for itemspam, but if you do choose to, remember to include at least one leader with undead leadership otherwise the spell will create immobile and useless chaff. Other death gear is generally less interesting, there is a brand (Shadowbrand, Construction 6, D2 E1) which is both higher research and more expensive than the frost or fire varieties. It's unique gimmick is to have a larger AoE with a MR negates AN damage effect. This means that the brand's own user will sometime be hit. The best death item for a thug is the Horror Helmet (Construction 4, 10 gems), it is an alright helmet statwise but its main draw is that it's user gets fear (or more fear if it already has some), which is a tremendously effective ability (fear can both route troops, and, in combination with awe, deflect attacks). If death gems didn't have so many good ways to spend your gems, this would be the only helmet I would ever use.

Most of the other items are a bit niche. If you took drain on your pretender, it is generally a good idea to forge Skull Mentors (Construction 4, 10 gems) if you are able. The skull mentor is more expensive than a lightless lantern per RP, but it generates 9 research by itself. If you can afford to produce more than 1 a turn in year 2, you can easily blow your competition away in research. The other death item I will mention is the Duskdagger (Construction 2, D1 S1) it deals AN damage with an attack bonus and low length, in the hands of a thug with high strength, these can easily shred SCs.

As a sorcery path, death excels at making units. At low levels, you have the ability to make ethereal units like shades (Conjuration 3, 4 for 5 gems) or shade beasts (Conjuration 4, 15 for 20 gems), which a little more than chaff, but with their ethereality and cold+poison immunity they play very well into a fatigue or poison based strategy. At mid to high levels you have some of the best troops in the game. Legion of Wights (Conjuration 9, 20 for 30 gems) summons very heavy infantry with high Str, Att, and a magic weapon. Even without buffs, they are scary; with spells they are almost thugs. Speaking of scary, we also have ghosts (Conjuration 6, 2+ for 9 gems). Stacking fear effects is extremely badass, and anything with moral of less than 30 will route in a few rounds at most while fighting ghosts. Ghosts are also much powerful if you buff their protection, so laying down marble warriors or wooden warriors is advisable.

But don't think that death cannot be leveraged on the battlefield. In the early game, skellispam (raise skeletons and raise dead, Enchantment 3, D2 40 fatigue) can drown smaller forces in enough chaff to fatigue out and kill them, bring enough mages and you can destroy large armies. In the vein of summoning stuff, you have Summon Lammashtas (Conjuration 4, D2, 100 fatigue), which gets you badass flying ethereal units with a good amount of HP and a magic weapon, at 2 per cast, it is a great deal; the only problem is that they don't exclusively attack your enemy, like horrors, they are neutral, but they will sometimes attack mages and cause havoc, so they have a niche. The other low research option is to spam fear effects (Frighten and Terror, Thaumaturgy 1 and 4, death 1 and 2, negligible fatigue), generally you cannot make the critical mass of mages to do this easily, but if someone is attacking a fort you hold, you can drive them away with nothing but a small amount of starting chaff, raise skeletons, fear, and your tower weapons.

As your research matures, more options start to open to you. Shadow Blast (Evocation 5 D2, 100 fatigue) costs a gem each time you cast it, but the effects are dramatic. AN damage and a paralysis in a decent AoE can destroy any force that isn't almost solely undead. Disintegrate (Alteration 8, D2, 10 fatigue) instantly slays a target that fails an MR check. Note: a death/fire mage can cast Banefire (Evocation 6, D3 F1, 30 fatigue), which is worth a mention because it deals a lot of damage and there is no way to resist it. Though few nations meet the requirements easily, Banefire is an SC killer and worth your time to cast. Soul Vortex (Alteration 6, D3, fatigue is a nonissue) is possibly the best buff spell in the game, it damages anyone around the caster and gives that damage back to the caster as bonus HP and removes the caster's fatigue. SV is great for SCs, but also has a use for any caster you want to run forever, stick some trolls or other beefy regenerators on guard commander orders and let their excess HP get converted into less fatigue for your Undead Mastery caster or something.

If you are basing your plan on undead mages and troops, you should cast Rigor Mortis (Enchantment 6, D4, 1 gem to cast) in every battle. It makes all non undead get a chance at additional fatigue every round, so not only does it make you win, but if you do, the enemy doesn't even get to retreat most times. Be sure you have enough force to kill the enemy as all mindless units die on turn 50. And if you are bringing undead to the fight, you might as well throw up darkness (Alteration 6, D4, 400 fatigue), which makes everyone that isn't 1) undead, 2) a demon, 3) 100% darkvision take crippling stat penalties (1/2 att, def, 1/4 precsion).

Speaking of undead, death magic has some of the best tools for killing or otherwise dealing with them. Wither Bones (Thaumaturgy 6, D3, 50 fatigue) kills undead in a large (and path level dependent) AoE without checking armor or MR. Its little brother Dust to Dust (Thaumaturgy 1, D1, 20) has a smaller AoE and less damage, but because it is so easy to research, it can destroy the most popular SC pretenders (Lich, Prince of Death, Awakened Oracle, Ghost King).

Death also has a number of things you can do to disrupt someone's army and economy. Bane Venom Charms (Construction 4, D2) cause pop death and disease units in the province in which they reside. The downside is that they disease the unit that carries them, so stick them on a Black Servant (Conjuration 1, D2, 5 gems) and run them into the land of a person you will soon attack or are at war with. A lategame upgrade to that strategy is to summon a Harvester of Sorrows (Conjuration 7, D4, 20 gems) Who has a built in bane venom charm on a flying stealthy raider chasis (don't expect it to take large armies of unsupported troops, it has no protection and no body or feet slots to boost it).

If you want your diseased enemies without summoning or the tedium of moving units, Leprosy (thaumaturgy 6, D5, 10 gems) can make up to half of the units in a province suddenly sick. It is best as part of the opening rounds of a war, to make slower moving mages or units get afflicted into uselessness or die before you even fight them. If you want to kill the enemy more directly though, Manifestation (Conjuration 8, D5, 4 gems) will go through the commanders in a target province and flip a coin for them one by one, the first flip to come up wrong will cause the selected commander to have a fight with an Ashen Angel, who stands a reasonable chance to kill poorly scripted mages. The downside is that if the game decides that all the commanders in the province are not going to get a fight today, the angel instead comes to kill the caster.

But how will death hit him where he will really feel it, in the provinces? Well, depending on your research you have 3 good options. Arouse Hunger (Alteration 4, D3, 5 gems) is the weakest, it summons a bunch of ghouls in a far away province to do battle with the PD. Ghouls are shit, and so this has a real chance of being driven off by even a handful of PD, but for someone that bought 1 PD all over, this can really bleed them for provinces in the opening rounds of a war. The other two options require a lot of research to pull off, but they are able to take even well defended provinces. Ghost Riders (Conjuration 9, D6, 5 gems) is the best remote in the game for taking away provinces, you get a lot of longdead horsemen and a thuggish wraith lord in a province of your choosing. These guys will take all but the heaviest PD. The drawback is that they do not stick around or claim the province for you, so the first guy to walk in will get it (which can lead to fierce indy scout on indy commander battles). It still has a lot of uses for territory denial, and if you take a province that the enemy was moving through or moving to with it, you can stop the movement of a ground based army (Yes Frank, I tested, and you can). The last option is Army of the Dead (Enchantment 9, D5, 10 gems) which gets a ton of longdead and soulless to fight for you in a distant province, while not as capable as the force you get with Ghost Riders, the upside is that you get to keep the province (and maybe the force? Someone confirm?).

But this isn't enough you say, you want to attack the WHOLE WORLD at once. No problem, death has you covered. There are 3 globals in death that fuck over the entire world, while astral can wish for the end times, and blood can make casting suicide, no one makes the world quite as fucked, quite as fast, as death. Burden of Time (Thaumaturgy 5, D5, 70+ gems) makes everything, everywhere, age and die rapidly. If you are a long lived, or undead, nation, you can laugh while the humans and abbysians waste away under it. It also has a niche against blood nations as it makes it harder to find good blood hunting provinces. Even items that make the user immune to the aging checks in winter are not supposed to work against it. Foul Air (Thaumaturgy 6, D5 A1, 75+ gems) is weaker but still annoying. It causes worldwide unrest which can wreck the economies of your enemies (also you) and it causes anyone wounded anywhere to get a disease affliction. This can be a real double edged sword, and the only nation that gets real leverage from this is LA Ermor, but if you already have burden and want to hurt the world more, this is only a hop, skip and jump away.

The final fuck the world, I wanna get off global is Utterdark (Alteration 9, D9, 100 gems). And boy is it ever a kick in the teeth. It reduces everyone's income to 10% of what it was, and makes all fights happen under darkness. If you are prepared and your enemies are not, having this up for even a few turns can make them penniless and devoid of any chaff that needs payment. Of course if you have armies of demons, you get even more benefit from this as you don't have to cart around a powerful death mage to cast darkness for you (demons also won't dessert you so they can stumble around in the dark). The downside is that you will also be broke and the global is kinda easy to dispel what with it's very high casting requirements and initial cost. If someone cast this, you can at least be happy that that was not another 10 tartarians running around.

I saved the best for last, one thing that death does better than any other path is make mages and commanders. Death is the king of summoning stuff that you care about, from early game thugs, to midgame mages, to late game SCs.

In the early game, the death summons that should stand out to you are Black Servant (see earlier) and Revive Bane Lord (Conjuration 5, D4, 12 death gems) both can fill the role of cheap thugs. The Bane Lord can clear pretty much endless PD with just a brand sword and a good shield, his weakness is that low level undeath counters really ruin his day so any caster support can be deadly and he isn't the most mobile of thugs. The Black Servant really needs armor and a shield (Blacksteel will do, Construction 0, E1), and even then he is really only useful against small amounts of weaker PD. His main advantage is that he is extremely cheap (around 10 gems [hammer] with the gear I outlined, you can skip the shield against some enemies) and can be deployed in year one. That is really the only good thing about him, he hits the field on like turn 5 and can take a few provinces in an early war while your army crushes resistance (after that you can make him a prophet and get some longdead out of the deal).

Now on to the good stuff. I already discussed Summon Mound Fiend, but you have a few other options for making death mages with death gems. First is Summon Spectre (Conjuration 6, D3, 20 gems) which gets you a stealthy mage with the possibility of E D W and S. Though they have decent stats, they are kinda expensive for thugging. The primary use of specters is to get you astral of last resort. The astral is stealthy though, so probably the most common use it to boost to S3 and sit where you expect mind hunts to fall. Given the expense, these guys should only get used if you need diversity in some or all of the paths they cover. Next up is the big mage spell in death, Lichcraft (Enchantment 8, D5, 30 gems) you get an immortal Demilich with D4 base, which is enough to cast pretty much anything short of Utterdark with off the rack boosters. If you are bootstrapping, this is your end goal.

Now there are a couple of ways to turn death gems into SCs. One is to cast Call Wraith Lord (Conjuration 7, D5, 40 gems) which gets you an immortal, ethereal, and decently tough undead with D3 (enough to cast soul vortex). Which is alright, and if all you have is D should be a goto, but there is a better option.

Tartarian Gate (Conjuration 9, D7, 10 gems) gets its own paragraph. As you can see it is very cheap, and it spits out a 150+ hp undead pretender chasis with highly random paths. Some are better than others (male titan and lightening cyclops are the best), but almost all can take provinces on their own with no gear, and with gear are full SCs. And 10 gems is damn cheap...well, there is a catch. Most tarts are troops (1 in 5 are commanders) and need to get a Gift of Reason (Thaumaturgy 4, N4, 20 gems [nature often becomes a bottleneck]) to start taking land on their own, and beyond that most are heavily afflicted. This is a problem as normal healing doesn't work on undead, you need either the Chalice (which is an artifact and unique) or Gift of Health (which is a global enchantment, visible to everyone and might as well say. "I have tarts and am a huge threat to win the game!" so while it won't draw wars like the forge, or Arcane Nexus, it will make people uneasy and is a heavy target for overwrites). Tartarian are also insane from long imprisonment in Tartarus and have a 25% chance to stand around and do something stupid each turn, this is a huge disadvantage and can easily get them killed. But Tarts are still worth the investment, they can break you into any path you lack and form a powerful corps of late game casters even if you don't use them as SCs. And I really cannot overstate how cheap 10 D is. If you have a lot of death in the endgame, your goal is to spend it cranking out tarts.

There are a lot of ways to make death casters without death gems, here is a list, I will not go into them as they are not part using death magic:

Contact Lamia Queen (Conjuration, Nature)
Bind Helliophagus (Blood, Blood [2 of 4])
Curse of Blood (Blood, Blood)
Streams from Hades (Conjuration, water)
Hidden in Snow (Enchantment, Water)
Hidden in Sand (Enchantment, Earth [needs a wasteland province to cast])
Ether Gate (Conjuration, Astral)

K wrote:Blood!

Forget everything you know about magic when you do Blood.

Blood relies on blood slaves for 99% of the spells, and that means that it has massive fatigue costs for basically everything. This means that you need to be comfortable with the fact that Blood magic is going only be effective when you have set it up perfectly AND you've been doing a lot of blood hunting and slave shuttling.

Blood slaves also turn into units on the battlefield that hang around the caster, and that means you can be stripped of your spellcasting ability by spells that target the whole battlefield (like Earthquake) or general battle stuff like archers.

Ok, now for the good news.

Blood does some crazy crap. It has no MR check spells that send people off the map(Claws of Cocytus and Infernal Prison), it has a pile of AN AoE spells (Harm, Agony, Bloodletting, Leech, Life for a Life), some that use Fear, some that Lifedrain with AN (Bloodletting, Leech), one that removes all fatigue from the caster (Reinvigoration), a mirror to Communion (the Sabbath spells), one that adds mad path bonuses in exchange for summoning Horrors, and a Charm (Hellbind Heart).

Crazy crap is pretty much why you get into Blood. Be the head of a Communion/Sabbath and cast Reinvig and everyone gets fatigue set to 0. Use Agony at Blood 2 for early battle devastation. Use Life for a Life or the "send to Hell" spells to toss unbeatable SCs out of the game (or just ruin big units). Hellbind Heart is at path 4 and is the earliest mind control. Hell Power is +3 path and can probably get you into the big battlefield magic if your casters generally suck.

That being said, the summons are also really good. Even at lowish paths, the summons are just really nice and the way blood hunting sends slaves to you means that you have an incentive to make something.

Storm Demons toss AN lightning bolts and have AN attacks and fly in storms. Devils are a good solid attacker that flies. Demon Knights are lancers with Fear and good armor. Vampires are immortal and can't be permanently killed in your Dominion and so are the perfect chaff as they fly, regen, and have an lifedrain attack and seem made to be buffed by spells. Dark Vines are giant HP stun whipping monsters with no minds and really want someone to use a Regen effect on them.

There are some sucky summons too, but they tend to exist to make bulk to resist sieges. Crossbreeding gives you piles of crap, but it's pile of crap that can resist a siege (the rare manticore and ettin you sometimes get is just to tease you). Frost Demons should be good, but they aren't and imps are something that usually gets handed out in fives.

Since you are generally getting lots of blood slaves, building demon armies is an actually a thing you will do and it becomes really fast at Blood 9 and slow before that.

There are also really good uniques. For most people, they will break into paths via Blood by empowering one guy and then getting the associated demon unique, but turning them into SCs is also a perfectly acceptable thing to do. There is a H3 hiding in the Ice Devils, but the real winner is the Demon Lord who gets three free blood slaves a turn, making him the best blood caster in the game.

The commander Vampires are also a good Death caster(D3B3) since you can put them in a Communion/Sabbath for the big Death magic.

If you are Mictlan or Lanka, you have crazy nice national summons that are Holy and totally work with your Bless.

Some of the rituals are also really nice. Send Horror is a spell that really can take armies when used in numbers and there are few remote spells that can do that, and it gets better with Astral Corruption. Horde from Hell is a pile of imps and a Devil commander and can take poorly defended commanders.

There are also a lot of niche tactics. Casting Hell Power while Horror Marking with Astral can send piles of Horrors at your enemies (but you will need to kill them later in the battle, so be prepared). Blood Vengeance can be brutal on enemy spellcasters if they are targeting your units.

The globals are mostly used to knock down other people's globals since you can use crazy high numbers of slaves to out-spend everyone, but otherwise kind of suck. Even Astral Corruption tends to kind of suck since people can usually take Horrors at the point in the game when you can cast the spell.

Blood items are anemic. Soul Armor is decent armor with some extra MR on it, and mostly people just make that if not making a booster. Contracts are nice, but I find the turn advantage of just making summons directly is much better. Other than that, there is a nice Astral/Blood shield you'll never make, boots that stop aging, and a robe with +1 paths that also costs a crap-ton of Air gems.

Artifact-wise, there's nothing that Blood makes that's a must-have.

Zinegata wrote:

Mister_Sinister wrote:Would someone be able to write a Frank-style guide for Astral and Blood magic? Alternatively, information on 'shit that fvcking kills people' or useful stuff in those two would be very much appreciated.

Astral!

Astral is not really the kind of magic that you want in combat without having other paths with it. Pure Astral has some neat spells for one-on-one killing, like Paralyze, Magic Duel, or Soul Slay. You can buff yourself to become ethereal via... body ethereal. This is improved MUCH later on by Will of Fates, which makes all your troops lucky. You can keep your Pretender safe by scripting them to cast Returning. And you can enslave an entire army in the end game with Master Enslave.

But for most of the game Astral simply won't have battlefield killing powers on its own. You can use Fire magic to set the whole battlefield on fire. Youv'e got armor-negating evocations with Air, plus battlefield-wide buffs. You can mass Water casters and drop cold damage on them. Astral... doesn't really do any of this.

Astral has very few of these mass-damage spells, and most of these spells will require having other paths to work (i.e. Death for Nether Darts, Fire for Astral Fires). Plus, high MR will often ruin your day, as opposed to lightning just cooking stuff.

But while Astral isn't a true battlefield killer until the end game, it's absolutely fantastic for supporting other spells.

First, let's talk gems. While not recommended, you can convert any gem type to Astral, and Astral can be converted to any gem type - using Alchemy. So if you've got a big supply of Astral gems and need something else, you can convert them to Air, Fire, or whatever you want. But again, only do it in a pinch.

Secondly, communions. Communions scare and intimidate a lot of players due to complexity, and one wrong script can result in spectacular self-immolations, but realize that communions are one of the few ways to artificially increase the power of your casters without needing gems or items. For every exponent of 2 slaves in a communion, you get 1 extra boost to EVERY path to EVERY member in the communion (2 slaves = 1 boost. 4 slaves = 2 boosts. 8 Slaves = 3 boosts. And so on). Unfortunately, Slaves only get that bonus for purpose of soaking fatigue for everyone else, but consider that you can seriously go from having a bunch of Air 3/4 commanders to Air 6 or even higher with a few slaves in support. You'll go from Lightning Bolts and Thunderstrikes to Shimmering Fields - which is like the first two spells but on steroids and covering an area of 50 squares. That's seriously going to wipe the board clean of enemy troops if you pull it off.

Plus, any buff a master casts on themselves will still be applied to all of the slaves, so you can have two Masters casting Power of the Sphere and another booster, and suddenly all your slaves are +2 paths. Even bullshit Astral 1 mages can suddenly start throwing stuff like Soul Slay or Stellar Cascades.

But wait, there's more! Astral also gives you a spell which boosts all your magic paths (Power of the Spheres) without needing to risk horrors or other crap like in Blood. And realize that if a master casts this as part of the communion, then everyone in the communion gets it too!

And this is all even before we get to the items and rituals, which are pretty leet.

Astral could seriously have just two items on the list, and people would still love it. Rings of Sorcery and Wizardry are two of the most important items in the game, as the former boosts a lot of paths by 1 (Nature, Death, Astral, Blood), while the latter boosts ALL paths by 1.

Now, I don't recommend giving everyone an RoS or RoW (if your mage only has death magic, it's cheaper to just give him/her a Death booster). But they are incredibly useful because this often means you don't have to spend 30-50 gems to empower a weak mage, and instead just slap a RoS/RoW on him, let him/her do his stuff, then send the RoS/RoW to someone else later.

For instance... let's say you want to make an Air Booster, but your best mage is only Air 3. Instead of spending a ton of Air gems to empower him, just slap an RoW on him, bring him up to Air 4, and then forge the Air Booster. On the next turn, take the RoW off the mage, slap on the Air Booster, and you can now forge Air Boosters with your Air 4 mage for the rest of the game while you use your RoW elsewhere.

But Astral seriously has other stuff than just these items. You've got Shroud of the Saint, which makes your unit get all your blessings even if they're not sacred. You've got the Master and Slave Matrixes, which auto-casts communion before the battle for folks who don't have Astral and lets them join in. You've got Crystal Shields, which casts Power of the Spheres on the wielder before battles (and yes, this Power of the Sphere effect ALSO applies to all members of a Master/Slave Matrix communion. The Crystal Tower folks were very smart mages). Plus, there's a smattering of other "okay" items which grant luck (50% miss chance against all attacks!) and additional MR.

Finally, let's get to the Rituals.

Astral has the standard gem-generating global, and a global that lets you get half of the gems everyone else used (Arcane Nexus). The latter in particular puts you squarely in the "threat to world peace" category. But don't worry, if somebody else gets these "threat to world peace" globals you can just Dispel them - because that's in the Astral suite too! (albeit it's costly gem-wise)

They also have some decent remote-attack spell, namely in the form of Mind Hunt. This is one of the premiere ways of getting rid of raiders, as it can target even stealthed enemy commanders.

But one of the overlooked rituals that really makes Astral shine are its two teleport spells - Teleport and Gateway. The former lets you move mages around anywhere on the map (and there's an artifact that gives you this ability too), while the latter lets you move entire armies around (and there's an artifact for this too!). And while casting Gateway can be expensive (10 Astral!) realize that the end game is very much about having the best logistics network and you're often going to fight far from your home territory; strategic mobility is a must!

Summon-wise, Astral doesn't have a wide array of options, but the Golems (which can be had when paired with Earth) are pretty strong. But a few nations like Bandar Log and Marignon have some neat summons that you should look into if you play those powers.

Mass Enslave is technically a battlefield spell, but it's crazily hard to cast to the point I'm tempted t lump it in this section. If you pull it off, then everyone on the enemy army who fails an MR check becomes your friend unless they're a Magical creature. In which case cast Arcane Domination and make them your friends too!

To help you cast Mass Enslave, Astral even helps you with the "Light of the Northern Star" spell, which improves the Astral of all casters on the battlefield by 1! That's unlike all other path-boosting spells which only affect the caster, and it stacks with Power of the Spheres. If you can't be bothered to cast the spell, worry not - have somebody carry a Banner of the Northern Star and you get the same effect.

Finally... we have Wish.

There are a ton of things you can do with Wish, but ignore all of them except for three things:

1) Wish for gems, which gives you 175 gems (25 of each type except blood), which nets you a 75 gem profit from the 100 casting cost.

2) Wish for an artifact that somebody else already has (i.e. The Chalice)

3) Wish for ANY unit in the game (albeit you need to Gift of Reason them). Want a Seraphim? You wish is possible with Astral's command!

On some occassions, you can also wish to nuke the world (which does devastating damage to all populations) but... I would generally not recommend it unless you're one of the more apocalyptic Gods.

Finally, one last note: One strong strategy to support Astral is to produce Clams. They cost a lot of water and nature gems (mitigated by forge bonuses), but each gives you one Astral Pearl a turn. If you keep making them diligently, you should be able to pump 100 Astral gems every turn by the end game, letting you cast Wish every turn, and essentially double your income.

In short, Astral is one of the kings of the endgame. It gives you access to stronger magic all around, and its end game spells can literally cause apocalyptic levels of damage. If you don't have Blood, then try to have Astral.

K wrote:Earth!

Earth makes bad things into better things.

For example, it's the premier way to armor up a mage who might otherwise be walking around naked. Stoneskin, Ironskin, and Invulnerability are all ways to compensate for mages who aren't wearing pants. Summon Earthpower is free Reinvig and a point of Earth (remember, each point of Earth is a point of armor too).

Other than that, there aren't a lot of low-level apps and you have to wait for mid levels for the crazy. (Earth Meld should get a shout out because it can be devastating when used by a large number of mages, but otherwise can be ignored.)

The mid-level magic does get nice. Strip a bunch of enemy soldiers people's armor with Destruction or get them all with Ironbane, make an enemy army fatigue out with Curse of Stones, or just make everyone slightly better with Strength of Giants or Legions of Steel.

Evocations tend to be tricky. The mixed path Rust Mist and Magma Shards are fine if over-priced, but most people will use Flying Shards, Bladewind, and Earthquake. The first is like a few shortbow guys with the mage's Precision, the second is like a full unit of longbow guys with the mage's precision (for a few rounds before you fatigue out), and the last is like hitting half the battlefield with a shortbow attack and can be a great mage-killer and Communion-breaker.

Gifts from Heaven is the real winner. When it hits, it kills things super-dead, and there is nothing more satisfying than seeing something like high-armor elephants or SCs die in droves at the hands of Earth/Astral casters. The big problem is that its never going to hit what you want it to hit because the accuracy is so bad, so it's best when the enemy is fielding large amounts of valuable units AND you don't mind some of your own guys getting auto-killed.

At high level, Earth gets the unique ability to turn crap units into good units. Army of Lead or Gold grants heavy armor to your whole army, and Weapons of Sharpness makes their hits Armor-piercing. Combine these and even terrible units like Militia can be turned into a decent fighting force.

Petrify is a great SC-killer since when the MR check fails, the unit is paralyzed.

Ritual are meh. Earth attack is a premier assassin spell, but you won't be casting spells like Blight. Crumble is busted and seems to always open up a castle, and Iron Walls never seems to work.

Forge of the Ancients (forge bonus) is a goto for many people, and it's usually paired with Earth Blood Deep Well (gem gen).

Earth summons are among the best in the game. Mechanical men are the perfect anti-evocation force with their giant immunities, Marble Warriors are good for everything else with their giant Protection and lack of battle fatigue, and clockwork horrors make a fine early shock trooper.

Commander summons are decent. Gargoyles are also an SC chassis of choice for many people since they fly, are beefy, have high armor, and are Lifeless, but they need a lifedrain weapon. Trolls are usually summoned for the commander with E3, but the troops are decent enough and tend to see action quickly since they cost gold to maintain. Hidden in Sand is one of the few Fire mage summons in the game that doesn't require Fire and gets you a pack of wights to boot, so that's nice.

Golems also use some Earth, and tend to make fine teleporting raiders.

Earth items are underwhelming. Once you've made Dwarven Hammers for the Forge bonus, you'll realize that Earth makes great armor that is too heavy and you won't do that. Robes of Invulnerability aren't worth the 40 gems, but they are nice for SCs. There are some cheap AP weapons and you might make at Con2, but only a Flaming Sword at E1/F1 is worth after that. You might also make Gate Cleavers to open castles.

Earth/Astral gets you Crystal Matrixes and Slave Matrixes to get non-astral/blood guys into communions are are great for that. There is also a Crystal shield that battle casts Power of the Spheres, but it's heavy as crap so it's a toss-up to use it. The Gatestone is also E/S.

Earth has one artifact hammer that is awesome for the forge bonus, but that's your one great artifact.

Chances are good that you'll do Blood and make as many Blood Stones as possible with your spare Earth income since they are a gem gen and a booster, and there is nothing wrong with that.

le petit caporal wrote:Korwin

Thanks for your effort. It may be the unit guides that are harder to find. You know a list of units for each power. What they cost and their resource requirements and stat's. Especially, the statistics for the list of recruitable mages. I can seem to find a listing of units .... by nation.

If you could point me in the right direction ... I'd really appreciate it. I have looked everywhere. Again, thanks.

Bless!

Rather than try to give specific examples, I'll lay down the principles behind why people take certain blesses.

Air (Minor Effect: Air Shield vs Missils. Major Effect: 75% Shock Resistance)

This is sadly a loser bless. It can help protect your sacreds against arrows, but that's contingent upon your opponents using ranged weapons a lot. You'll look VERY silly if you pack this bless and end up fighting Abysia, which has basically no archers.

The 75% shock resistance isn't anything to sing about either. Again, it's gonna look very silly packing 75% shock resistance when Abysia starts throwing fireballs at your troops.

The main reason to get shock resistance that high is to make yourself immune to lightning spells from your own side, which means that at best the pay off for it will be at the end game. Bluntly though, I suspect that anyone taking this kind of bless will be dead LONG before they reach the end game.

So unless you really want Air magic on your Pretender), don't take a lot of Air magic for its bless. There are no good air spells beyond Air 6 anyway to justify taking so much Air magic.

Death (Minor Effect: Increased Chance of Inflicting Afflictions. Major Effect: Get additional AN2 damage, but can be resisted by MR)

A mostly loser bless. Most of the time you want to kill enemy troops, not make them have a life-long limp. Only occassionally will you encounter big things that you want to cripple - such as Elephants, SCs, and the like - which again makes this bless's usefulness limited. Likewise, the 2 extra AN damage isn't much to sing about.

However, it has some nice uses, especially for sacred spellcasters who can cast battlefield spells. You see, the bless affects damage from mass-kill spells like Earthquake, so if you have a sacred caster casting Earthquake he can seriously turn an enemy army into an army of cripples.

Death does require a lot more ranks for endgame casting - you may need Death 7, 8, or even 9 for some spells. So again, if you're aiming to have a very powerful Death caster, then consider your sacre troop's ability to maim the enemy Pretender a bonus.

Blood (Minor Bless: Adds Strength, Major Bless: When the unit is slain, the enemy that killed it is cursed).

The minor bless is kinda nice, especially if paired with other blesses that improve your combat performance. Additional Str doesn't matter much unless you also have attack bonuses (and extra attacks) because it only affects damage, not probability to hit.

The major bless totally sucks though, as it only triggers when your sacred unit dies. And all it does is to curse the enemy that killed it. Not a great return for spending Blood 9.

Overall, getting the minor bless as a supplement to other blesses could prove useful. Getting the major bless should happen only purely by accident because you wanted Blood 9 on your Pretender for spellcasting, not blessing.

Astral (Minor Bless: Improved Magic Resistance. Major Bless: Ignore first hit)

The minor bless is almost always strictly a late-game bless, but it's nice when only half the army defects due to Mass Enslave rather than 3/4s of it.

The Twist Fate major bless is honestly not that great. It can potentially save a unit from a death blow, or it can be wasted on a 1-damage hit. Not great compared to the other early game rush blesses.

However, do note that Astral 9 on your Pretender is a very good thing to have for the late game. Having the major bless "incidentally" is not a bad thing.

Nature (Minor Bless: Regeneration, Major Bless: Berserk)

A nice bless.

Regeneration works based on a percentage of hitpoints, so you'll get more mileage out of it if your sacreds are big, beefy units. If you sacred unit has 10 HP, you only get 1 HP back per turn, but if he's at 80HP, you get 8 back per turn. This is why giants love it.

Even puny humans can get mileage out of it though, especially Air commanders. If an Air commander can cast mistform, he can reduce all physical damage against him down to just 1 HP, which can then be regenerated away.

As an added bonuse, regen helps combat afflictions which inevitably ruin good units.

Berserk is kinda situational though. It improves the unit's attacking abilities for a defense penalty... but the thing that really makes berserk shine is how berserked units are now basically unbreakable from a morale perspective, and ignore stuff like awe that make killing some SCs so hard.

Overall I would say that getting the minor bless is an okay choice, becoming very good for giants and Air nations. The major bless is only so-so, and you don't need more than 6 Nature magic in most cases anyway.

Earth (Minor Bless: Reinvigoration. Major Bless: Improved Armor)

Possibly the best all-around bless. Reinvigoration lowers your fatigue every turn, which helps EVERYONE. Soldiers can keep fighting longer. Mages can cast more spells. I would take this bless even if I wasn't planning on a bless rush as long as I had good sacred spellcasters.

The major bless is highly conditional however. It only affects sacreds wearing armor, so if you have a naked sacred you won't get a protection bonus at all. Plus, protection isn't a guarantee that you won't take damage - you'll still take a few cuts every turn and this could be fatal over a long battle. For best effect, pair it with a high-HP unit with regeneration (maybe via the Nature bless!) and give yourself an army of nigh invulnerable sacreds!

Besides which, like most other paths, there isn't anything you really need Earth 9 to cast, so only get the major bless if you can really get a lot of mileage out of it.

Fire (Minor Bless: Attack bonus. Major bless: Extra AP Fire damage)

One of the best bless rush choices, Fire improves the attack skill of your troops. This lets them hit more often and kill more often. For best effect, give it to units with multiple attacks (the bonus affects all attacks).

Add in the extra fire damage from the major bless for even more fun. This is really one of the most synergistic blesses as not only will you be hitting more with the minor bless, but you'll be doing more damage if you also get the major bless.

Please don't forget that the fire damage only applies when you use MELEE weapons however. Your arrows are still not gonna be on fire.

Not many spells need Fire 9 to cast however, so do try to overrun the world before the folks who took Astral 9 start Wishing you away.

Water (Minor Bless: Defense Bonus, Major Bless: Quickness)

Not as good as fire, but Defense also helps keep your troops alive longer.

But what really shines is the Major Bless. Being able to do an extra attack is huge, especially if you have other blesses to augment your extra attack. Got Fire 9? You now have an extra attack at +4 roll with fire damage. Got Blood 4? You get an extra 2 Str damage for that.

The only problem as noted above is that it will tire troops out more, but if you've got supplementary blesses (Fire, and maybe blood) you can probably wipe the floor clean before this becomes an issue.