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[sprinkled chariot]

Are shadow vestals worth of a bless?

[ThtblovesDF]

How do Swamp Terrain, Quagmire and Amphibious units interact?

[Mithras]

Shadow vestals are pretty good. Using a D9 bless in a 8 player (indy strength 6) my expansion was so supercharged I had more provinces than the next 2 or 3 biggest nations put together by the time our borders started hitting each other. Fortunately that was a team game so it didn't paint a huge target on me, unfortunately the game ended soon after first contact. The main problem was that I was so busy building expansion parties that my research was well behind.

Sceleria has several good candidates for blesses, if I had to do it again I'd probably go for an S9 bless to resist MR negates undead killers in the midgame while pumping up survivability in expansion with twist fate. I'd say Shadow vestals are good enough for a single bless to make them very effective (whether that be water, death or astral. I'm not so sure about nature) however they are best mixed with normal troops and capital only so I wouldn't go for a double bless because good scales means Sceleria can leverage all it's advantages, silly vestals, tough troops, a sea of indy priest summoned undead, big death/holy/astral communions. All that tends to eat up a lot of gold.

That said I've only played two multiplayer games with Sceleria, one was with a blood nine bless (not sure what I was thinking) and had only three players, my expansion was so insane I won the game before player conflict broke out. The other one was the abortive team game. So I guess the takeaway from that is, vestals are good for expansion (probably even without a bless) if you watch your scripting you can get an expansion party out every turn from turn 1 if you really want to. The question is, how much of a target do you want to paint on yourself? Once you paint that target I don't really have the experience to help you.

[Karlito]

Sceleria has several good candidates for blesses, if I had to do it again I'd probably go for an S9 bless to resist MR negates undead killers in the midgame while pumping up survivability in expansion with twist fate.

Which MR-negates undead killers would those be? Vestals already have 15MR to protect against banishment spam, and if someone's invested enough into Thaum to cast Control the Dead, they'll be able to throw around Wither Bones soon enough.

I think a blood bless on Vestals isn't as ridiculous as you think. It makes conventional evocations against them problematic, which would otherwise be one of the best ways to counter them.

[chaoticag]

I think Blood vengence vestals would work wonders on dust to dust casters. But yeah, I have not played with shadow vestals, but I ran into some blessed with nature in a game once. They can outlast ulm's infantry in my experience, the bread and butter infantry. The guardians make minced meat out of them though. Their main drawbacks would likely be their cap onlyness. So yeah, a major bless is good. You might be able to squeeze a minor in as well, but eeeeeeeeeh. Blessed vestals are a good compliment to Scaleria from what I understand it, but they do not a backbone make.

[EnigmaticHat]

Sceleria has several good candidates for blesses, if I had to do it again I'd probably go for an S9 bless to resist MR negates undead killers in the midgame while pumping up survivability in expansion with twist fate.

Which MR-negates undead killers would those be? Vestals already have 15MR to protect against banishment spam, and if someone's invested enough into Thaum to cast Control the Dead, they'll be able to throw around Wither Bones soon enough.

I think a blood bless on Vestals isn't as ridiculous as you think. It makes conventional evocations against them problematic, which would otherwise be one of the best ways to counter them.

The most important thing for a blood bless is gold to health ratio and that's terrible on Shadow Vestals. To put it in perspective, a lot of evocations are at least AoE 1 which means if they hit a shadow vestal square they could potentially do 105 gold of damage to you; there are evocation mages that are cheaper than that.  It would also be a worthless bless during expansion.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Vestals are pretty good melee fighters so I'd accentuate that with W9 if I were blessing them. But if I were really blessing them I'd probably go for some otherwise useful minors or S9 for twist fate since that works well with both vestals and mages. They don't have enough health to justify N9 and I'd rather get cheap evocation magnets than go all the way up to B9. Although N9 is quite tempting for communion shenanigans...

Of course the real treat with Vestals is that they're stealthy. Those girls bust PD for breakfast. So I don't know, maybe W9 is back on the menu.

[E. Albright]

Well, sure, but a blessing isn't going to matter with stealth unless you've got a stealthy prophet or Shademail shenanigans for a rando priest.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I forgot that minor obstacle.

Could be worth it to forge a few shademails just for variety, but those raiding parties get expensive awfully fast. Probably smarter to not get a bless with PD smashing in mind then. Oh well, there's always Pan...

[Frumple]

Shademail's pretty fun with heavy astral nations anyway, particularly against other astral heavy ones. There's few things quite as amusing as a stealth S4 tooling around with an army (or flock of BVC carriers ) that otherwise doesn't have mind hunt protection and watching as the enemy dumps most of their astral artillery on the army thinking there's nothing stopping them. Has the double-plus benefit of shortly thereafter making your opponent incredibly wary about trying it again, heehee.

You have to remember: If you have one stealthy teleporting S4 in a bush, you have stealthy teleporting S4s in all the bushes. Schroedinger's feeblemind :V

[Shadowlord]

Like all ethereal units with 0 protection, Vestals are extremely vulnerable to units with elemental damage. For example, in the case of Agartha, magma children, which can be easily summoned in large amounts rapidly using fire gems. Caelum also has sacreds with elemental weapons IIRC*. Marignon could also employ flaming arrows to great effect. A nature bless (with regen and bonus HP) should help resist BV as well - I think this is more effective on units that already have more HP, so they regenerate faster and are less likely to die from a single BV hit.

* I was going to check the inspector to be sure, but I'm getting a down for maintenance error from it.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Last I checked, all of Caelum's ice weapons counted as magic weapons. So they should ignore ethereal, invulnerability and anything else I'm missing. Given that MA Caelum is big on the ice crafting it means that Shadow Vestals won't be very good against them. Everyone except for the Mammoths has an ice weapon with ethereal ignoring properties, though admittedly the archers will only use theirs due to the whole 'archer' thing going on. Even their PD will be able to ignore ethereal and threaten a couple of kills that way.

[Frumple]

Vestals should actually be pretty good vs. Caelum, by dint of generally fairly average attack, I'd think. At best 12 (and that on cap-only critters with shorter weapons) vs base 16 (significantly more if you go water bless, which is damn sexy on vestals) + shield is... not the best odds. Not the worst, but still. Add to that that the vestals are undead and that makes darkness a go-to for turning the fight from advantageous for sceleria to a complete stomp, well...

Honestly, MA Caelum's best bet vs. vestals may be the blizzard warriors. The high precision may actually do better than the melee fighters. Try to bury them in light infantry, perhaps...

I wouldn't even remotely want to try to take caelum into a straight up fight with sceleria, though, unless it was very early. Lightning evo could do a lot vs. undead hoards, but storm+darkness is kinda' painless for sceleria and kicks caelum right in the teeth. Though getting storm for 'em without pretender intervention would be a little rough. Not exactly impossible -- they've got the potential for A2 and astral rings -- but relatively improbable. Still, it'd probably be a pretty nasty match up for caelum, imo, especially if they didn't manage to get an early handle on sceleria's reanimator production. I'd probably be considering investment into seeking arrow spam...

[sprinkled chariot]

Entire community with sweet mods is completely nuked?

Any places to search for remnants?

[Shadowlord]

http://dom4archive.kermodebear.org/www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum.html ?

Although, oddly, desura is loading for me again. It's just taking forever to do so.