Thoughts on balancing MA Oceania

[Baalz]

So, the more I play with these guys, the more they confirm my initial impression. I just don't understand how anybody could play these guys competitively without counting on extreme luck of the non-scale variety. If you do it right you can get a very impressive initial expansion. You've got *nothing* to take out elite troops though - which of course you'll be facing just as soon as the indies are gone.

quantum_mechani said:
The two strengths they really have to play to are easy searching for kelp forests, and their 2 resource super-tritons. With a bit of luck this can result in a turbo-start they can coast on for quite a while.

The kelp forests are nice, and they help you with your fast expansion against the indies. Even with an *overwhelming* economic and production advantage though you've got not a single effective thing to spend it on once you start fighting another nation. Super triton are above par as far as low resource chaff goes (not *great*) - but low resource chaff will never win all by itself unless your opponent is asleep at the wheel. Similarly, none of your other recruitable troops will take out : high protection troops, high defense troops, enemy chaff (quickly enough to get to the mages), high damage dealing troops....elite troops of any kind or enemy mages will slaughter you, and you've got absolutely nothing to counter with even if you know exactly what your enemy will be fielding.

quantum_mechani said:
As far as underwater combat, your mages can hold their own. I mean, you can do shark attacks, foul vapors, charm, living water and water strike in a pinch. I agree getting far above water takes a rather large component of luck.

Shark attack - as anyone you'll be fighting can cast the same thing, I don't see this is really any advantage outside of fighting off invasions by land races (the very least of your worries). This is, of course assuming you can even get to conj-5 before you're crushed. Additionally, this spell has been recently nerfed.

Foul vapors - with no poison immune or even resistant forces, no thugs (recruitable or summonable), and no battlefield summons (other than water elementals - a total gem sink for general purpose use) I fail to see how this can be leveraged outside of tiny niches. Underwater troops tend to have higher hps, making it pretty difficult even to use this as a hit and run.

Charm & Living water - I have to laugh a bit at the thought of living long enough to use cross school level 7/8 spells as the first effective thing your mages can do. Even at that, both are niche spells at the point in the game where people start laying down fog warriors or firestorm.

Water strike - Ummmmm, maybe CBM changes this spell, but 13 damage to a single target is called a spear, not a mage. I can't imagine any situation that this spell would have any noticeable effect on the battle even with a large number of mages.

I maintain my assertion, you've got no viable combat spells combined with no elite troops. That's *before* you try climbing out the water where your useless mages are further crippled and you can only recruit indie troops. Clam hoarding is a red herring even if you can live long enough to make it worthwhile, and you've got nothing significant to even look forward to up the research tree.

[cleveland]

What are your thoughts on a Kydnid-spam strategy?

I know Kydnids are normally ignored ("Summon Naiad Warriors," Conj5, W3N1, 30W(!) to cast) but each casting gets you fifteen Awe+3 amphibious heavy infantry with recuperation.

1) It's castable underwater, so 25% of your Capricorns can do it w/o boosters
2) It's in the Conjuration tree, which you'll definitely be researching as an underwater nation
3) They aren't unreasonably priced (2W per Kydnid) and as an underwater nation you can swing the steep 30W pricetag

Regardless, I agree that MA Oceania is weak, and would propose changing the Capricorn randoms from (100% +1 AEWN, 10% +1AEWN) to (100% +2 AEWN) as a means to rebalance them. This would allow the Capricorns to take their Earth and Air magic on shore, and access Falling Frost & Bone Melter w/o boosters, giving them a fighting chance up there.

Thoughts?

[Baalz]

Hmmm, seems like its gonna be kinda hard to spam Kydnids given the cost. The do make a decent summon and one of the few reasonable things to do with your mages, but the numbers you'll be fielding make it kinda hard to have a Kydnid 'strategy'. I guess I feel like they make a capable supplement...but the problem is that there's not much to supplement.

I like your suggestion on the Capricorns, although I don't think it goes far enough. Obviously not everything matches up between nations, but compare the Capricorn to the (arguably) two closest mages to him.

Atlantean King of the Deep. 290 gold. 3W + 2 FWSE + 10% FWSE. Full slots. This gives you teleporting thugs, 5W falling frost, acid rain, boots + summon earthpower, etc. etc. etc. I go on at length in my guide to Atlantis.

MA Pan: 350 gold. 3N 2E + 1 EDNB + 10% EDNB. Generates Maenads and summons national reanimators. Aside from the Maenads you get a solid earth mage and enough death and blood to bootstrap yourself into them. You'll get easy N5 mages to cast and early Mother Oak, and Faery Trod later on.

Capricorn: 350 gold. 3N 2W + 1 WANE + 10% WAFE. No foot slot (fairly significant on a potential E mage). Looses 1 to each path on land and stealth.

So, assuming that the mechanic which makes them lose 1 to each path on land is not going to change, their paths in Air is pretty much useless. They can't remotely site search underwater (not that there are any air sites underwater anyway), and even with your proposed change they couldn't do it on land without a very expensive A booster. In combat they can't boost the path, and again there's not much they can cast underwater anyway. So, no gems for summoning/forging and no combat potential.

Being able to get E2 would help, though as I mentioned having no foot slot hurts a lot. Landing W4 would help to, though they're still dreadfully behind the cheaper Kings of the Deep for Falling Frost. They're on par with the Kings who *don't* get a water random, and 60 gold more.

Given the lack of Maenads, lack of foot slot, and crippling out of water I think it's a mistake to try to make them 1 for 1 the same as Pans magic wise. Given the staggering cost they should be very good underwater and at least useful out of it. Perhaps 3n + 1w + 3 NWEA? This would at least make the A viable (still weak), make them able to cast mother oak/faery trod, and let them summon earthpower/falling frost out of the water without boosters. In the water this would give them a decent orb lighting and a shot at thugging out (mistform + regen + shockwave)

[Zeldor]

Baalz:

Hmm... didn't you make too many enemies in Kingmaker there? Big plans, fast start, raiding land nations etc?

But still, I cannot imagine how Oceania can survive in water with R'lyeh. Your troops and mages will be dead before they can make anything useful.

[Baalz]

Nah, Kingmaker actually went as good as I could have hoped. Top of the charts in expansion, made a couple good allies (or at least friendly NAPs willing to work with me on successful looking wars) and voluntarily launched a 2 front war against opponents significantly smaller than me who I lined up theoretical support against. Both opponents initially crumbled as I overwhelmed their PD....then crushed everything I could field in every single fight against a real army despite the fact that I had more income and castles than both of them combined. In this case I'm fighting heavily blessed EA Oceana knights and MA Argatha heavy infantry bolstered by summoned statues, a Risin Oracle, and earth mages. What, in my arsenal can even scratch any of that? This is not through sneaky tactics that outmaneuvered me or even bad luck, this is just marching their basic troops straight towards me and crushing my numerically superior armies. Before commenting that I shouldn't pick a fight with people who can field things I can't kill....my other choices were to fight EA R'yleh under the water, Helheim, Mictlan or Arco on land, later Sauromatia and Neifelheim...so who exactly fields something I can kill? I suppose I could have meekly sat around and wait for research to make me even more obsolete....things certainly don't look any better as research progresses.

This is, I think a really good illustration of the points I made above. MA Oceana just doesn't have anything to fight a real army with, even with significant research done.

[Dedas]

Kydnids are cool and very hard to kill with their heavy armor, high awe and good protection. I summoned a lot as MA Oceania in a MP game far back and didn't regret it. Just remember to watch their fatigue though...

[Ming]

Baalz,

My experience is restricted to SP only so my comments below may be completely off the mark - I hope you won't be offended if they are.

1. Bishop fish should be a good counter to both EA Oceania knights (when defended against flanking) as well as Agatha statues (with amulet of the fish). If you had allies you might have considered trading for air gems to make amulet of the fish to use your bishop fish on land. At sea EA Oceania has bishop fish too but if you had an overwhelming economy you could field far more bishop fish than he can to overcome his superior numbers of knights.

2. Your economic advantage might not be as great as you think. EA Oceania must have sacrificed his scales to get his heavy bless, so his true strength could be more than 50% greater than his raw numbers. If your Agatha opponent also follows a heavy bless strategy, you might actually be significantly weaker than their combined strength even though the raw numbers might say otherwise.

If the above were true, then your problems with Ma Oceania might have nothing to do with MA Oceania being hopelessly weak.

[cleveland]

Ming said:
Bishop fish should be a good counter to both EA Oceania knights as well as Agatha statues.

A Knight of the Deeps (KotD) has base MR of 14, so the odds of successfully connecting with a Smite are only 18%. If, of course, the EA Oceania player didn't take an Astral bless.

But let's assume he didn't and that conditions are ideal, i.e. the battle takes place in a Magic-3 province. The KotD MR drops to 12, so each Bishop Fish has a fighting 30% chance to connect. But the KotD has 16hp, so a Smite will only one-shot-kill a KotD about 86% of the time.

So - under absolutely conditions - only 30% * 86% = 25.8% of the Smites will work. Under normal conditions, 18% * 86% = 15.5% will work. And that's before factoring in the effects of any Astral or Nature (i.e. regen) bless.

Ming said:
If the above were true, then your problems with Ma Oceania might have nothing to do with MA Oceania being hopelessly weak.

I don't like this, it's argumentative & borderline insulting.

[Baalz]

I don't mean to sound confrontational, but I don't find any of these suggestions viable.

Kydnids: These *are* good, but too easy to counter in the numbers you can field. Assuming you've got no more than about 120 N gems to play with for the early part of the game you're talking about a total of 60 Kydnids - basically one smallish army. Lets just take a look at all my neighbors this time to see what the army I'd been building up over dozens of turns would face:

R'yleh - mindless tramplers backed by mind blasters. Dead Kydnids.

Oceana - The knights have the moral to ignore the awe and the first strike damage to punch through the armor. Dead Kydnids (good luck killing the 23 defense 17 protection knights - they can just let the Kydnids fatigue out if nothing else)

Helheim - very similar to Oceana using their heavy blessed sacreds, only they'll supplement it with raining down lighting.

Argatha - sacred statues backed by destruction casting mages. Dead Kydnids.

Mictlan - triple blessed jaguar warriors will destroy Kydnids. Dead Kydnids.

Sauromatia - Androphag archers and hydras supplemented by skellispam while the Kydnids die from poison and exhaustion. Dead Kydnids.

Nefelheim - Frozen dead Kydnids.

Arcoscephale - Kydnids would probably do a decent job against elephants, up until my opponent started fielding heavy infantry backed by small communions. Dead Kydnids.

In all cases my enemy can replace his army in a couple turns while that's all the Kydnids I have available.

Bishop fish - assuming I sacrificed *all* of my research I'd still not be able to recruit a bishop fish every turn (for the first few turns while I'm expanding as fast as possible and recruiting a few mages for site searching). Oceanic Knights have a (unblessed) MR of 14 and 16 hp, so each smite has an 18% chance of causing damage and will on average have to hit each knight twice to kill them. This means best case scenario 10 bishop fish will kill one knight per turn, although in practice it will be nowhere near this good as they won't all focus on one knight until he's dead, they'll end up mostly wounding two knights per turn. As the knights do so much damage that battles don't last more than 2-3 rounds I don't see how it would be possible to field enough bishop fish to make a difference against 40+ knights.

Yes, obviously my income vs a heavy bless nation is not directly indicative of actual strength, my point is that I don't think I could have played MA Oceana better nor had better luck and there is now *nothing* I can reasonably field against any of my neighbors. In a 60+ person game I had the *top* province count. After successfully raiding their PD, at the point I had no choice but to start fighting real armies I had more than twice their *combined* province count and income - both gold and gems. I had more than twice their *combined* research. I had almost twice their *combined* number of forts. This was not a slight lead, it was an overwhelming economic advantage, and I also had production-2 scales. I've thrown everything I could think of as an experience player and been totally crushed every single engagement by the sophisticated strategy of marching straight towards me.

Now to be clear, I'm not complaining about a specific game, but rather using this as a good example to illustrate my point - rather a best case scenario for MA Oceana. I'm far from an infallible player, but I maintain that even with an overwhelming economic advantage there's not really any feasible thing I can field against any of my neighbors (which are a reasonably diverse sample). This would be 10X worse later in the game with more research done....where I've still got nothing to field and everyone else's power has scaled up.


*edit*

Cleveland is correct, my math is a bit off on the smite but the sentiment is still correct.

[Zeldor]

Yeah, I can confirm. When it comes to skill Baalz is few classes higher than his opponents he is fighting there. Well, Baalz is certainly in Top10 best Dominions players now. If HE says smth sucks it must really suck