Blood Magic

[apoger]

I have seen a great deal of foolishness writen in the Last few days concerning blood magic.

A lot of this has to do with the numbers. Yes the number of blood slaves required to summon the big blood guys has been raised. However we must compare that to the other game economies that have also been changed.

Conjured elementals now cost 100% more fatigue and cost gems. Seasonal spirits now cost 100% more. Star Fire costs quadruple the fatigue and does about 50% damage. Furthermore the gold economy in Dom II is much weaker than in Dom I.

In comparison the blood magics had a cost increase of about 50%. While the cost did in fact go up, when considered in relation to the rest of the game the practical cost is effectively lower!

The blood summons were a huge balance issue in Dom I. Now that they are effectively cheaper, I cannot see how this has done anything but make a bad situation worse.

Keep in mind also that many spells that were vital for countering the big blood summons, are changed or gone. So not only are they cheaper, but there are less counters for them.

There have been two changes that in theory should counter blood magic.

First there are a limited number of summons. Unfortunately there are still plenty of big demons to summon. Enough that most blood nations will have plenty to work with. Furthermore after using up the big summons (if possible) there are plenty of other blood magics that can be used for great effect. I fear that blood nations will have no shortage of things to spend slaves on.

Second the sanguine dowsing rod is no longer useable by non-blood mages. This is good since it will help keep some non-blood nations out of the blood business (more on this shortly) but it does nothing to slow down the potential abuse from the blood nations.

Illwinter got pretty heavey handed in it's attempt to supress player economic investment. They removed patrols, depleted the economic scales, and playing with taxes gets population killed but not grown. I find this ironic since the blood economy is vastly more controllable by the players and is much more of a threat than extra gold ever was.


I just got finished doing some testbeds for blood magic and the results are sickening.

Even without the SDR's players will be plenty able to abuse blood magic.

Please feel free to duplicate my testing.

Playing Arcoscephale, a non-blood nation.
I took a beefy pretender (a dragon in this case).
I used the dragon and one army to cruise around grabbing provinces. I took about a province per turn. Not fast expansion by any stretch.
At any province that produced scouts, I would start making scouts every turn (not counting the capital, I made no hunter scouts there). I lowered the tax rate to 0% and had the scouts do blood hunting. I used nothing for hunting except scouts from expansion provinces. I did zero patrolling. If I had used patrols or had also thrown in cheapie commanders and capital scouts, I could have accelerated the process, but I didn't. I made one mage, whose only duty was to go to the provinces that had blood hunting and place a lab there in order to ease slave pooling.

By turn 21 I had three provinces doing good hunting, and two more that were just getting started.

At about turn 10-11 I made two scouts at my capital. As I gathered slaves, I empowered my two capital scouts with blood magic.

The result? On turn 21 I had two blood-4 mages built from scratch, and was bringing in 20-50 slaves per turn.

If I had empowered mages instead of scouts I could have started summoning big blood summons. As it stands I could do some serious damage with 'hordes from hell'. All this starting from nothing and only using spare scouts (and a few labs).

It is my opinion that blood magic is cheap and controllable to the point of being a major problem.

[ November 03, 2003, 18:14: Message edited by: apoger ]