Re: Air bless: useless?
I will say this. Do you use garbage?
If you had a strategy that involved Dark Skies or a Gale Gate, would you bother taking advantage of an incidental air bless? Would you see any benefit from that? Or would you ignore the bless completely, despite having taken air anyways.
As a primary bless strategy, there are a lot of problems with an air bless. As you've said, there are ways to get around it. There are also ways to circumvent twist fate and nations where its almost useless. Abysia with def2 sacreds? Jotunheim where you're outnumbered six to one?
With some nations, like certain eras of Atlantis, Agartha, and Ctis, you only get to play the melee game anyways, and you may or may not have certain advantages there- an opponent massing melee sometimes only levels the playing field.
An air bless is not a winning strategy like a fire bless can be. When picking paths for blesses alone, air isn't one of my picks either. But I play a lot of nations where Astral magic is garbage, but Air magic has some real value.
But when you're not basing your entire game strategy around blessed troops, air is a damn solid bless. I don't expect my air blessed Arssartuts to win me the game. If the opponent actually masses melee or kills all my Arssartut - I don't care. I'm only churning out eight a turn, tops. I already got my money's worth from them, doubled their usefulness and versatility, in fact reliably tripling my normal expansion by the end of the first year, surpassing the early value of a supercombatant, IMO. By the time someones' countering them, I'll already have dropped Arssartuts from my plans because of their scarcity. And I'll be using my six points of air magic for key tasks.
I won't let myself loose on the argument of universally cheaper. I'd take it a bit further afield than I should, and get senselessly agitated. I'll simply say that MA Atlantis has no oracle, just a monolith. And with only one astral pick, an astral nine bless will leave an awake pretender with only 22 points. Whereas an Arch Mage with an air 8 bless has 60 points to spare, and my Air Six, 180.
I'm going to stop debating this for now. I took this position in part because I found air blesses useful, and in part to play the devil's advocate. I still believe it's not garbage, but I'm not going to let myself be agitated simply because I'm not getting people in general, or one person in particular to agree with me. And once I stake out a particular thesis, I do tend to get contrary w/o reason.
Maybe I'll revisit later. But I don't want to go stir-crazy and derail the thread into a flamewar for no reason either. Other than the reason that I was arguing, and therefor must win because my ego demands it.
I will give into a little of my inner child for satisfactions sake and say...
Nya nya nya. I'm right and you're wrong. I can't hear you. *Sticks fingers in his ears*.
Ah, that was cathartic.
Okay, I wish you well, but its best I cut myself off for now. Getting off work early (but still needing rest) without any plans gave me too much time to myself with nothing to do but argue. I will continue to read this thread, however. And may chime in later when I'm in less of a bratty mood.
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