Yet another new person with a question...

[Cosian]

Originally Posted by thejeff

What those provinces probably were was regular indy provinces where one of the commanders had generated with a magic item. Specifically, a Soul Contract. One devil/turn. If you hit those late enough in the game they can be brutal.

Hmmm...ya something was clearly up because these two provinces were substantially harder than anything else I faced. On the plus side, one of the provinces was adjacent to the enemy capital and clearly doing a good job of keeping him pen'd in there as well.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Cosian

Now I need to see if there is way to heal afflictions...the victory was not without its costs...

There are a couple of ways to do this, pretty much all requiring nature magic and some research. Luckily for you you went with a N bless, so your pretender should be able to take care of this. (If he's broken free already?)

In SP probably the best way would be casting the global 'Gift of Health' (Enchantment5, Nature 5 to cast, costs 50N gems) This global increases the hit points of all units in friendly dominion by 10%/dominion candle - absolutely amazing for regenerating giants in it's own right - and also has a good chance of healing afflictions.

Second option would be to forge the artifact 'The Chalice'. This unique item becomes available at Contstrution 8 and requires N4S3 to forge. When equiped it checks to heal the affliciont of all the units in it's province.

These two option are the most powerful, and will quickly get rid of all afflictions in your dominion/in that particular province, so for single player they're your go-to options. Additionally, these are the only ways you can heal affliction on undead units. (Which will become very significant when you get to the stage you want to explore Tartarian factories.)

In multi-player though, these become less reliable, since you'll be competing with everybody else to get these. (Unique item and a global of which only can be up at one time.) And everybody really wants these, for the aforementioned Tartarians. (Some of the players might decide they don't want to dedicate the resources to compete for them, but everyone would love to have them nonetheless.)

Third option is to get a unit that's a healer, and give them the order to heal afflicions. (There's a specific icon for healers, so they're easy to recognize.) There's a few nations that have a recruitable healer. Most notably Arco's priestess, (all ages) but also Hinnoms Acha and Gaths Abba. Can't think of any others off the top of my head. For nations without recruitable healers there's the Fairy Queen. (Summonable at Conjuration 8, requires N5, costs 40N gems. She's not a very good healer*, but unless I'm mistaken it's the only (non-national) summonable healer? In most circumstances I wouldn't recommend summoning one 'just' for healing, but they're very capable mages, (A3N3, so they offer a way into air magic if you don't have it already) and quite a popular summon anyway, so if you have one and she's not otherwise occupied you can have her healing away.

* The way healing works is that first the game checks if your healing ability kicks in, depending on your 'healer' value. Arco's priestess has 100, while the fairy queen has... around 25 if I'm not mistaken. If this check succeeds then it checks each individual affliction to see if it's actually healed, some afflictions being harder to get rid of than others.

Edit: EA Ermor has healers too.

[Cosian]

Sweet! Thanks! New stuff to explore this weekend ..