[kianduatha]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

You'll have to excuse that I can't remember the names of the games, but several games have been won quite suddenly in this way. When it happens it's a bit of a game ruiner - it only takes a few turns, the players closest to the blood saccing nation can be wiped out before they can take any real action, and so in effect it's virtually uncounterable.

The reason for this is the bug whereby each slave sacrificed generates two temple checks. So an H3 priest with a jade knife can sacrifice 5 slaves for a total of 11 temple checks (including the one from the temple). With a dom10 nation that's 11 candles per turn per temple - quite extreme. Removing the jade knife reduces this to 7 candles/turn/temple. So, it's still a very powerful strategy and you shouldn't feel that it's been nerfed to oblivion.

Edit: I forgot that there is an issue whereby preaching doesn't help much. I think it's to do with turn order - perhaps the preaching happens first, and can then be overruled by the blood sac. That would make sense - say you have loads of H3 priests in your capital, your last remaining dominion stronghold. They all preach and raise your dominion to 10 (for the sake of argument - actually preaching can't raise dominion that high). Then 20 black candles from blood sac appear and you're left on -10 dominion and lose the game.

I think the SDR thing is very complex and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think probably I would be in favour of restoring the SDR and increasing the costs of all blood spells by say 50%. I could easily automatically write a mod to do this if people thought ut was a good idea. However this solution only addresses the balance part of the issue, and not the micromanagement issue. I have never played a blood nation into mid game, so I don't know how annoying SDRs are.

I've been in games where Pangaea just domkills an entire map and there's nothing any of the further away nations can do about it at all. In the proper hands it was disgustingly powerful.

Unfortunately just increasing the cost of blood spells runs into problems because you can't alter the cost of blood items.

I think a lot of the Tartarian kneejerking is forgetting the fact that you'll still get commander Tartarians about 1/5 of the time. They haven't disappeared--they're just more expensive in mageturns and gems. That being said, Shattered Soul can probably go back down to 10% and their HP nerf can be reverted and they'd still be fine.