Question about Ulm and iron faith

[Keir Maxwell]

Hiya'll,

There seem to be to parallel discussions going on in this thread. One in which people discuss in abstract the relative power (or lack of) of themes and express concern at on the weakness of IF and another in which people discuss the concrete nature of IF and how to make it work. Reading the Posts of those involved in the general discussion you could almost wonder if they have read the specifics provided by people - as these, to me, condradict the general statements being made yet have not been addressed in any detail.

Nahntanaj spells it out very nicely. High magic pretender does research, provides bless effects, extra long term power, and the abilty to find all sorts of wonderful indie mages if you do it right, Templers conquer indie's and bingo you are away. What comes next is really hard to say and in my MP experiance a big empire tends to find alot of alternate magical options along with some good alternate troop/summoning options. Sure the Templers are vunerable to enemy magic as the game goes on - thats why you rely on them early and just use them later if you get my point.

PDF how can you say no magic? The pretender provides a heap of magic from the get go due to bless effects, high research capability (friend uses the sage), high magic capability, ability to summon mages, and ability to find indie mages. I consider drain 3 to be a perfectly decent approach for many, many races. I have never failed to find sages for research in MP - most games I get two sites - and they research fine under drain. Sages are one of the most important randoms in the game - and quite commen.

The point about themes in the abstract is that there are certain approaches to playing a race which simply become stronger by using the theme. Niefelheim for Jotun is an obvious example of this and yet is still coping some criticism as being weak!? While Tomb's for Ctis may be weak in terms of general Ctis game play I have always found Ctis general gameplay to be weak so hardly worth pursing. So I consider the Tomb and Miasma options to be the ones worth exploring for Ctis. For how I have previously enjoyed playing Ctis I would be insane to choose the normal option instead of Tombs.

I do not have any capability of providing an accurate measure of how weak or strong a particular theme is in abstract from the details of how its is to be played. As people are only just begining to figure out a fraction of the possible approaches to playing Dom II I am unconvinced by most of the abstract discussion.

For each theme/bess option the question is how you can most consistently follow this approach in a whole game strategy. The most important thing is to have an explosive start (though you don't always have to explode province wise) as how you transition to the middle game is dependent on your start. After that it becomes more useful to look at abstracts as its hard to now how things will develop but that very uncertainty is what makes nailing the start so important.

Another important point is that the best race for any individual is not necessarily the best race in abstract. For multi-player I strongly recommmend people to take races which they enjoy the style of play of and feel comfortable with ahead of simply hunting for the most powerful. People play differing strategies with varying capability. Part of optimizing for MP is finding out how you play best. The main stream idea of what is best is important - but don't give it to much weight.

Often the difference between the more powerful and less powerful races are less than the luck of the start thus the importance of speed to counter a poor starting position is what shapes alot of mutli-player possiblities:

"I could take a slow race that will be amazing if things go right or I could take a fast race that can adapt? How many months am I hoping to be playing this game for . . . think I'll choose the fast one."

This sort of logic allows for many long term weaknesses such as those of Templers. I have won with Death 3 using Abysia in Dom I and my core was hammered by the end of the game due to blood hunting and the death dominion. My race had no long term survivability but won due to focus - themes provide possibilites for increasing focus.

Hope that this is of some use.

cheers

Keir