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[Micro102]

Speaking of taking eyes, what's the point of using things like the eye catcher? Seems like one of the most pointless weapons you could make. Only use I see is to put in on an assassin, when there are a dozen different weapons that can do so much more damage.

[Kagus]

It's AN, and guaranteed to take an eye upon dealing damage (which, since it's AN, means if you land a hit at all). Fighting a cyclops? It'll ignore his stony hide and pluck that eye out in one go, causing blindness. And anything that doesn't have blindsense will have their stats wrecked by blindness.

So, basically, it's good for large, heavily armored opponents who have a reasonable number of eyes and are not blindfighters. An anti-thug/SC weapon.

[Frumple]

Though if you're asking about eye loss in general, do remember that the only thing better than a dead enemy unit is a live one that basically can't do anything to you and is still costing your enemy resources.

[Shadowlord]

There's a reason why, when I use them, I love kitting SCs out with the eye shield + vine shield combo.

[Grek]

If you get lucky with thrones it could be possible, but if there's enough ones with mindless or 'zerking enemies to keep you from getting a throne win you're probably SOL.

Well the beauty of it is, even if your pretender dies trying this, you still grab a couple Thrones really really early and can put your early forts there instead of in conquered territory. It's not even about getting all the Thrones before anyone can do anything about it so much as grabbing a really early lead on Thrones.

[USEC_OFFICER]

In that case it sounds like you're opening yourself up to being rushed and completely defeated. Given how you're just targeting thrones, you're going to end up with a bunch of forts/provinces surrounded by independents while your score lead makes you an obvious threat. So if another player (or a group of them) came and besieged your forts, you can't do much about it if your pretender is dead. With terrible scales you aren't going to have a very large or powerful army and it'll get widdled down wading through indie provinces just to try and relieve your territories. If you were a nation whose sacreds could make use of your bless then you might have a chance but not a very good one.

An early lead on thrones isn't going to do much if you can't capitalise on it. It just makes you the obvious target with no way of fending off your enemies.

[Kagus]

Which, again, is a hell of a crapshoot considering that none of the test builds mentioned have managed to reliably take all throne types, even of just the level 1 variety. And if you're tanking all of your scales to do this, including the frankly terrifying misfortune+drain combination, then you'd damn well better have a good reason for it.

Even if you do get an early lead in thrones, you're not going to be able to hold those provinces against much of anything. You'll have -50% income and all sorts of bullshit events that will quite happily launch massive invasions of the provinces, cause you to lose whatever savings you had managed to build up in the first place, or simply erase part of the PD.

Really, what you're most likely to do in this scenario is soften up the provinces for when someone with non-tanked scales arrives to clean up.


EDIT: And then USEC commented. Yeh.

[Frumple]

Well the beauty of it is, even if your pretender dies trying this, you still grab a couple Thrones really really early and can put your early forts there instead of in conquered territory. It's not even about getting all the Thrones before anyone can do anything about it so much as grabbing a really early lead on Thrones.

I mean. You could? But you've wrecked your scales to nothing. Even if you somehow manage to fortify the areas around the thrones (easier said than done, since you're not going to have gold and building the forts is going to take a good few extra turns regardless, giving your opponents time to react) the chances of you being able to keep your (shortly-a-wasteland) capital and the surrounding area is... low. You either get a throne win within the first 15-20 turns or you lose. Early thrones are just going to mean your scales kill you slower, unless you do some serious trimming on those magic paths and bring the scales up to something non-suicidal.

Though good luck taking much advantage of any gem income the thrones give you with that drain 3 misfortune 3, ahaha.

And now I've been ninja'd but let's throw another voice in the pile :V

E: Though maybe conceptually with one of the blood sac nations if any have access to an appropriate pretender? Doing the mictlan thing and keeping your poisonous domain away from whatever provinces you're using to keep you alive. Think thrones still spread blood sac nation dominion, though, so that might not actually help much.

[Shadowlord]

An early lead on thrones isn't going to do much if you can't capitalise on it. It just makes you the obvious target with no way of fending off your enemies.

This is exactly what I was thinking as well.

Which, again, is a hell of a crapshoot considering that none of the test builds mentioned have managed to reliably take all throne types, even of just the level 1 variety. And if you're tanking all of your scales to do this, including the frankly terrifying misfortune+drain combination, then you'd damn well better have a good reason for it.

Even if you do get an early lead in thrones, you're not going to be able to hold those provinces against much of anything. You'll have -50% income and all sorts of bullshit events that will quite happily launch massive invasions of the provinces, cause you to lose whatever savings you had managed to build up in the first place, or simply erase part of the PD.

Really, what you're most likely to do in this scenario is soften up the provinces for when someone with non-tanked scales arrives to clean up.


EDIT: And then USEC commented. Yeh.

From personal experience, if you had a ridiculous bless and strong sacreds then invasions aren't that big a deal - if your territory was contiguous. However, these builds don't have ridiculous blesses, and they wouldn't have contiguous territories either if you're just skipping your pretender across the map to take thrones until he dies.

RE blood sac: In one game I dom-killed everyone as ea xibalba with blood sac. I was blood sac'ing in practically all of my non-border territories. It was a large map with a low (5) number of players, though, and easy research. Also my scales were good, not terrible, in that game, since I used vampire lords and then demons instead of sacreds, but it took longer to get the research etc for them, even with easy research. (And EA Xibalba's borders can expand without blood sac, so it's basically bonus)

[Frumple]

Yeah, the blood sac (or dying domain or whatever it's called?) in this case wouldn't be to try to domkill but to keep your dominion away from most of your provinces, while still being able to keep yourself from being domkilled. As sorta' mentioned, from what I understand it's part of how a particularly well ran tri/quad-bless mictlan manages to not get excreted upon even if their initial rush is slowed or stalled. They ruin the area around their starting provinces and keep everything else in someone else's (Preferably decent) domain.

E: In other news, I just started up a game with everything except magic -3. Late winter of the first year, one of my provinces gets hit with a barbarian invasion consisting of a chief, a lord... and 109 barbarians. Yeah, that province didn't make it :V

[Kagus]

Only nations with non-spreading dominion are EA and LA Mictlan, and yeah... Those would probably be your best bets for surviving with something like this.

Heck, the Hun Came build I was messing around with had some fun viability, thanks to picking up D9N9E4 on the pretender for various purposes, and jaguars being perfectly happy with that kind of bless.


Fun times: As Hinnom, trade for a jade knife from Mictlan. Give it to a Melqart and sacrifice 5-6 girls a month for the greater glory!

[Frumple]

... in other news, the underwater indie province one of my consuls just rolled over apparently had one of their commanders carrying... a flying carpet.

I guess it sorta' makes maybe sense considering it was being carried by a hydromancer, but...

[Kagus]

"A whole neeeew blublublublublub..."


It's always great fun whenever you run across spellcasters with either ludicrously heavy armor or some sort of berserkeritis item.

[Frumple]

The critter was also toting a black steel tower shield, yes.

Also, minor tip to all folks trying lemuria that didn't notice it already: The shadows you call underwater are marginally stronger than the ones you call on land, and still fully amphibious, even the triton ones. Can't remember if ermor or theo-whatever have similar tricks going on, though I want to say you can see something along those lines if you're in a province with native monkey population or stuff along those lines. Getting different skeletons from reanimation and whatnot, most of which are more powerful (if only by small degrees) than your baseline longdead/shadow/whatever.

But basically, if possible, you want all your spare freespawn tribunes calling shadows underwater if they don't have anything better to do at the moment. It's mostly fairly small (tritons get +8 AP, atlantians get +1 HP... and they both get floating, which can actually be a pretty major thing in certain cases), but it's a nice little boost.

[Kagus]

Therodos has its own summoning skill that specifically generates the Therodian spectral warriors, not generic units like shadows or longdead.

And yeah, several nations have pop-specific longdead/soulless variants; perhaps most notably the giant nations like Ashdod or Jotunheim. Although, I thought this was a nation-specific thing, not a provincial one.

Monkey nations are a bit hit-and-miss... You might get a big fat undead bandar ready to wreck stuff, or you get a skeletal markata... With all of 3 hitpoints, 7 MR and no armor or equipment.  Caelian nations also have special undead, but they're generally just "flying units that can't fly", so they're bigger but just as weak as anything else.

Any sort of reanimation in Jotunheim is always good fun, lots of dead giants coming back to be horrifying.