Early Age Civs

[Darkstone]

Is there something wrong with ThunderStrikes and Shadowblasts?

[JimMorrison]

A large part of it is probably their heat aura, tiring your troops and making them easier to crit. Depending on your pretender choice, you may have multiple options, but I'd guess if you are very far into the game, and they are very big, you won't have a lot of time to develop something new.

So summons who are immune to fire, magic items for melee commanders that give FR (hard for you to make, mostly), and heavy evocation barrages (if you have a pile of Sorceresses and/or Kings at your capital). Sometimes in SP if the comp gets unruly in what is still basically the "mid-game", your most viable option is a researcher rush to squash their main armies. It's unbelievable (when you first see it) what 20 battle mages spamming thunderbolt can do to 400 heavy infantry.

[Zeldor]

JimMorrison:

Yeah, I think experienced players pretty much know what nations are good. 1-10 is too much, 1-5 would be enough. But I surely wouldn't say LA Ermor is extremely easy to play. Or that EA/LA Mictlan is the hardest.

[JimMorrison]

Well that's part of the point, that not everyone will agree. That's why rather than have opinions tossed around here and there, I thought why not collate and average out the different perspectives, to give these newcomers a more complete and accurate base to draw from?

And just to note, I am basing this more on SP, because that is where newer players will cut their teeth. As far as LA Ermor goes, they were my first win against all Mighty AI, and I just walked through the game with almost no complications whatever. EA/LA Mictlan have been very hard for me to pick up. Between no dominion spread from temples, and the thusly heavily enforced blood magic reliance, these nations require more thought and management for a newer player, than most other nations. Again, as I said, these are just my own perspectives on it, but having a central repository for these opinions could possibly help sharpen the learning curve for new players, keeping them interested in the game, and getting them ready to dive into MP more quickly.

[thejeff]

On the other hand, even for beginners, if you remember to blood hunt a little and sacrifice, with a good double bless Mictlan will roll over almost any AI opposition.
If you really didn't want to mess with blood, you could probably get by with just one priest sacrificing the capital blood slave income.

It's a good nation to learn how impressive sacreds can be.

If you're playing more competitively, both blood nations and LA Ermor become micromanagement hell in a decent sized game, so few experienced players would call either easy to play.
Both are quite powerful.

I like the poll idea though. Strength will be pretty easy, especially broken down into early/middle/late game.
Easy playability would be harder to grasp: Make it clear that you mean ease to learn or something similar. It may not be ratable. Is it easier to figure out how to equip thugs to fight different foes or to set up a blood economy or to manage communions?
It may be easier to list for each nation the things you'd have to master to do well with it.

[Amhazair]

The 'chart' idea sounds potentially intresting. Speaking for myself however, (and I'm assuming here that people consider me a veteran, with a couple of MP wins under my belt, even though I still think of myself as relatively new. Must have something to do with how vast this game is. ) I would only feel comfortable rating nations I played myself (not including those I played in SP when I was still very new.) And perhaps a couple I waged long wars against and thought about playing in MP. Which would amount to maybe a dozen nations.

At that rate compiling a comprehensive chart might be somewhat slow going.

[JimMorrison]

Well, I would probably expand the chart to 5 ratings:

Early Game Strength
Mid Game Strength
Late Game Strength
Ease of Learning (SP)
Overall Ease of Use (MP)

I think the spread of these 5 attributes would give players a good road map for developing their gameplay as much as is possible before entering into MP. I'd also be tempted to list any path that the nation has national mages with higher than 3, and listing what their highest blood mage is.

Anyone else have any thoughts on a 1-10 scale vs a 1-5 scale? I suppose I can see the merits of either, so I will look for a little more input on the matter.

[thejeff]

Highest blood mage is less important than cost of cheapest blood mage. If you've got enough hunters, blood's easy to boost. If all you've got is 500gp B3's, you'll never have enough slaves to matter.

[MaxWilson]

In my experience 1-5 scales tend to illicit better information than 1-10.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Well I mostly just thought that highest trainable Blood would serve sort of as a benchmark for the relative perceived Blood power of that nation. Obviously a skilled player can start a blood economy out of nothing, but this chart is more intended to serve as a development aid for new players, not a quick reference for the more seasoned (though I am sure some will be curious as to the results).