[Boron]

curtadams said:
I have to disagree with leaving the demon army so vulnerable to exorcism both on thematic and game grounds. On game ground the decision is easy - when a half dozen cheap priests, available to anybody, can cripple any demon army you don't have a good game balance. There's a rough balance between Ermor and cheap priests - so if demon armies are to be playable they have to be almost as easy to produce as an undead horde, and that's far, far, from the case

Priests are not so easy to get in dom3 as in dom2!
500 gold per temple for indy priests.
So only if you have national priest mages like dryads or arco priestesses a nation will have many priests in early game at least because it takes time to build new castles.

If you build only temples you are vulnerable to raiding then. And the yomo player could also do skelspam, then those skellis will have to be banished as well.

And magic resistence is ok for the dai oni demons anyways imho. 13-15, that is not bad!

But all in all i am not a too big fan of most of the demons neither!

Corwin said:


You make some very good points Boron. I completely agree, Dai Oni are more flexable (and potentially more powerful) than Niefel Jarls. That's why I like them more, and as I said earlier, in the end game with good buffs and items they make better SCs than Jarls.

I haven't tried E9 bless with Oni. I suspect you are rigth, and it might work reasonably well. However I would expect your Dai Oni to suffer and collect afflictions quickly, if you use them butt naked from the very begining.

Still it maybe worth it because of faster expansion. It's hard to know for sure before you actually try it. An interesting idea in any case. Personally if I would be trying something along these lines, I would probably throw N4 into the mix, to make my Dai Oni last longer without becoming walking wreck due to injuries. And at the very least I would get them before sending them on their own or with only missile support against tough indeps.

Overall I think your and mine perception of Oni are not too far from each other. I agree than Dai Oni are great, and the archers are cheap and low resources. But all my suggestions, as you can see, were centered on Oni demon troops, which, as pretty much all people here seem to agree, including yourself, are very weak and need some boost, or there is not much point of using them at all in MP.

And playing Oni Kings nation while only using single demon king SC and bunch or human archers/infantry, without using any of 6 demon troops, just doesn't seems as a elegant solution to me from the design/balance point of view, if you know what I mean. I think Oni overall balance and diversity would increase a lot, if the actual demon troops would be made efficient in MP by few tweaks. My suggestions are an attempt to do just that.

Hm yes that is indeed problematic.

The problem is that imho most of the demon troops cost too much.
The Ko-Oni is useful imho, 12 cost is much too but he is easy to amass with his 1 resource cost and he has imho more combat power than the bakemono sho.
Once you can cast end of weakness they should be even more useful.

The other 4 demon troops are all too expensive though imho. I would also suggest they need price balancing.

Yomo is complicated with troops, i would only use 3 troop types:
Bandit archers when i have money shortages, otherwise pump bakemono archers. And in special cases a horde of ku onis.

The ku onis have various advantages imho:
need not eat, still ok price, size 1, so ultraswarming, 2nd form, so they need to be killed twice and 1 resource cost.

If your enemy does not have either really good spammable battle magic (blade wind and magma eruption mainly) or has SCs with fireshield the ku onis are decent.
They can swarm and they have only 1 encumberance.
So once you have a horde of them they become a problem.
They still die en masse, but that is not the problem because you can replace them much faster than your enemy.
They are like lobo guards. Only an average unit, but because they are so mass produceable they overwhelm the enemy .

Maybe they should only cost 10 gold though. But the other Yomo demon troops cost way too much and the non-demon non-missile troops of dai oni are nearly useless as well.

Price balances should do the trick though .