Abysia, Age and Death: a suggestion

[Chris_Byler]

It seems to me that since Dom 1, Abysia has been balanced around their 240 free points: they prefer heat-3, and they're immune to (what used to be) the most important effect of death scale, reduced supply. So they turn their dominion into a hellish wasteland where others suffer but they don't, and get the points to afford Order-3 Prod-3 for their expensive high resource troops.

This was fine for Dom 1 and 2. Now it doesn't work so well, and if you play Abysia with classic Abysian scales you'll quickly see why: old age. Old age is an interesting addition to the game and I don't intend to suggest that it should be removed altogether, or even that Abysians shouldn't suffer from it. They're a nation full of old mages with no nature or death magic; that's not necessarily bad, so long as they have compensating strengths.

What I am suggesting is that Abysians shouldn't suffer *more* from it if they take the death scale that their nation was apparently intended to have. Why should the fact that they're living in a burning, hellish wasteland make them more likely to get afflictions? They *like* burning, hellish wastelands. It's unthematic and unbalanced to push them to take growth to stay alive.

Please consider making Abysians (the race, not the nation; indies and mercs would still be affected) ignore death scales for purposes of old age afflictions - that is, they get age afflictions as if the scale were death-0 rather than what it actually is. If they only aged and died at normal rates rather than at quadruple rates (or whatever it is, it's pretty severe though), then they could be played close to the way they used to instead of shelling out 120+ points (relative to Dom 1/2 Abysia) to get a scale that will keep your old guys alive a little longer.

As it is now, Abysia has gone from being immune to the strongest effect of death scales to being super-vulnerable to the *new* strongest effect of death scales, and immune to one of the now-secondary effects. That's a huge swing for a nation that relied on those points (and the doubly-hostile dominion for invaders) to stay even close to competitive.