[initialize near-midnight babbling mode]*scratches head* It's not really the 'zerk that does it, though, is it? When I was doing some testing on giant performance, iirc I was using one of the non-zerk variants (the water elemental ones, I think) and they were
still more or less soloing indies with the obvious N9E4. Seems to more or less just be the HP base (plus N9), and cost wise you're more or less in line with vanilla formorian giants. All that really happened in this case is that, well. Giant nations ended up being ~half the players, instead of, y'know, at most two, with the obvious effects (No one with a major bless
didn't have N9, right?). The giant nations are usually held more in check with more meta balance (being alone, having high cost other commanders, etc.) and/or dominion restrictions (needing cold to really work well).
... not that tacking some more cost on to the things would be entirely amiss, mind. If the nation's not going to be particularly balanced in other ways around the critters, y'might as well try to put the balancing aspect on the critter itself. It's not like doubling or tripling the cost of those things would slow the giant nations down much, if any.
Basically, m'not really sure the giants are particularly out of line, on their own. They're fairly close to vanilla, as is. Except the commanders, anyway. The commander versions are
hella cheap for what they are (sacred mid-to-high tier SC chassis for <200g yes thankyou I'll be spamming this like Sceleria spams consuls now), especially Caesar's -- that recruit anywhere on those guys is just
obscene for 155g. I'd at least think about putting StR on the buggers.
M'just not really sure what you'd
do, basically. The whole thing about sacred giant nations is that they take a N9<whatever> bless and then send out their troops to
solo indies. Even if you literally restricted recruitment to 1/turn they'd still largely be able to do what they're doing here (or, well, could have been doing, anyway). Price has to get ludicrous if you're actually going to use that alone to bring in line something that is an expansion army in and of itself.
... still. Yeah, for little things -- StR those giant commanders, unilaterally. You guys don't seem to be using them very much, but I can go ahead and tell you lot if I had 'em you would
all have kitted giant commanders ransacking your
everything right now, and it would have started a long time ago. The lack of paths
really isn't enough to justify that cost for that chassis. Maybe bump cost on the troop varieties somewhat... they're all fairly notably better somehow or another with barely any increase in cost compared to vanilla giants. Possibly consider letting negative traits of some sort (eats population, unrest, heretic, etc.) offset the gold cost, and make it likely for them to show up -- maybe for just straight up anything sacred and with HP >30 (or 10
). Problem really isn't exactly the giants on their own, though, it's the giants with N9(E4) being a thing that is. Ends up meaning they can be fielded with basically no risk for quite a long time, which
drastically skews their gold efficiency.