MP: Cursed be Iron, a game that ran over a year: winner OSSA, Pangaea, turn 125

[momfreeek]

I haven't got it to work on your harbingers.. yet (or is there some desync issue here?).

[krpeters]

Oh, you're right. I saw the precision 100 and for some reason read range 100 as well instead of range 30.

And no, you haven't nailed any Harbringers yet, but I was just looking ahead at the likely intersection and doing the math. 200 gold and 2 virgins vs. 60 gems doesn't add up well for me

[momfreeek]

It sure does seem brutally effective (and cheap). I don't know if its a particular intended feature of Jotunheim or what.

It seems guys can come back from Kokytos (they are not counted as "dead" in the battle report, held artifacts are still "in play" and there is one artifact that helps "navigate the planes of hell".. one of the tomes).

[Immaculate]

its stupidly overpowered in my opinion but my opinions are often quantifiably wrong. its should be resistible but hard to resist- in my opinion (like +4 penetration?).
In a different game mictlan did a job on agartha with it, sending like three grendels to ice-hell in the first turn before they even got an action.... thats not balanced in my (obviously wrong) opinion.

[momfreeek]

Well, I'm not disagreeing, but I'll sure keep trying to send these damn harbingers to hell ^^

Even if it was resistable I could spam it quite easily and retreat (one non-cap 250g commander + 2 blood slaves). Seems like it could be more expensive to cast.

[krpeters]

In vanilla, it's a 200 fatigue spell, meaning you really do need a 3B 1W mage to cast it or a booster. Either way, you reduce the frequency considerably. It's CBM's change to 100 that really puts the hurt on, allowing any 2B 1W to pop it.

As for intent... well, we can just assume that Mictlan and Jotenheim have "immunity to SC" and see what effect it has on gameplay

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by krpeters

In vanilla, it's a 200 fatigue spell, meaning you really do need a 3B 1W mage to cast it or a booster. Either way, you reduce the frequency considerably. It's CBM's change to 100 that really puts the hurt on, allowing any 2B 1W to pop it.

Quick FYI (before the above point is used in any argument for or against anything)...

You can not use extra slaves to temporarily increase one casting level on the battlefiled in the same way you can use extra gems to do this. So for example, while a S2 mage can be giving 2 Pearls and will use them both to successfully cast Antimagic, you can not give 2 slaves to a B2 mage and expect him to cast Life for Life, as he can not use a slave to temporarily boost himself to the B3 needed to successfully cast this spell. As such a base B2W1 mage still won't be able to cast Claws without some form of help (booster, communion, whatever). So CBM has not changed the minimum base requirements for Claws in this sense. (ie. In both vanilla and CBM.1.92 you need a base B3W1 mage if no path boosting is involved)

Carry on.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Calahan

You can not use extra slaves to temporarily increase one casting level on the battlefiled in the same way you can use extra gems to do this. So for example, while a S2 mage can be giving 2 Pearls and will use them both to successfully cast Antimagic, you can not give 2 slaves to a B2 mage and expect him to cast Life for Life, as he can not use a slave to temporarily boost himself to the B3 needed to successfully cast this spell. As such a base B2W1 mage still won't be able to cast Claws without some form of help (booster, communion, whatever). So CBM has not changed the minimum base requirements for Claws in this sense. (ie. In both vanilla and CBM.1.92 you need a base B3W1 mage if no path boosting is involved)

Fair point, but it's still a bad change since the reduced fatigue means you can script more castings in the first five turns. And the nations that benefit most from this, in particular Jotun with its recruit-everywhere skratti, didn't need the boost. Don't know why this change was made and hopefully it will either be undone or the casting requirements increased.

[momfreeek]

Originally Posted by Calahan

You can not use extra slaves to temporarily increase one casting level on the battlefiled in the same way you can use extra gems to do this.

Oh, thats news, thx.

Can you use extra slaves to reduce fatigue? I'm not quite clear if thats just a side-benefit of the level boosting mechanic..

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Valerius

Fair point, but it's still a bad change since the reduced fatigue means you can script more castings in the first five turns. And the nations that benefit most from this, in particular Jotun with its recruit-everywhere skratti, didn't need the boost. Don't know why this change was made and hopefully it will either be undone or the casting requirements increased.

Oh I didn't say it wasn't a bad change I was just doing my usual correcting people who post faulty mechanics (I did it politely this time as well )

FWIW, I think Blood is horribly broken and OP in CBM (Edit - Removing SDR's is nothing more than a flesh wound), and not far off that in vanilla. But as least in vanilla Blood was kept in check with Gem Gens (Edit - And no, fixing a broken game feature with another broken game feature is not a good idea, in fact it's a truly awful idea. Thought I'd point this out before any Gem Gen lovers jump on this quote and use it for their stupid argument). But without Gem Gens Blood can just rule the game once you get a mega Blood economy going, since every Blood spell/ritual is either ridiculously cheap, ridiculously powerful, or both in most cases. And Blood summons are not exactly bottom of the food chain. But I've ranted about all this before in many CBM chats and nothing's been done about it, so I've just stopped moaning about it now (the community cheers )

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Originally Posted by momfreeek

Oh, thats news, thx.

Can you use extra slaves to reduce fatigue? I'm not quite clear if thats just a side-benefit of the level boosting mechanic..

Oh you can still burn extra slaves to reduce fatigue, as that mechanic has nothing to do with using extra gems to temporarily raise your spell casting level.

In fact with Blood spells it's just about impossible to stop the the AI chomping through the slave pile and using as many slaves as his Blood level allows. As most of the Blood battlefield spells are such high fatigue that the AI will always look to reduce it as much as possible with slave burning. Although you can stop this during the first round of battle (several rounds if you want to get fancy) with clever commander placement, but it's very fiddly to do and generally not worth it since slaves are cheap as hell anyway (hint slaves need to be on a different commander to the mage using them).