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Total Members Voted: 13

[etgfrog]

The way I see it so far, everyone's nation is scary for their own reasons.
C'tis gets the disease domain(I haven't looked too much into them since they are on the other side of the world).
Arco gets a wide range of communions, healers and scrying domain.
Marignon has the most massable crossbowmen of the middle ages.
Bandar log with their nation spell that adds quickness to their sacred summons.
Oceania being a nightmare to try to fight.
Ulm with 1 gem forging of really good equipment, strong troops and rain of stones.
Agartha for the out of box earthquake casters and one of the longest holding of front lines.
And finally, Ermor for the scariest late game and ability to cripple almost anyone who attacks.

[ThtblovesDF]

Agartha feels like it has the best gems to summons ratio (besides emror).

Arco might have the best gold to Magic ratio


I wish dom5 came with a "no upper size limit besides 99" and "size scales with % of hp" or something to make your own giants.

[Il Palazzo]

Seeing how I'm not the only one having trouble doing this turn on time, can we perhaps postpone it?
There's a lot of thinking to do and I don't want to rush it if I can.

(edit: nvrmnd, I'm gonna make it)

[E. Albright]

etgfrog, I'd say Ermor has the scariest midgame, not lategame. Lategame, there are ways to deal with their unholy masses and everyone has their own obscenities in play.Midgame, some do and some don't.

Thbt, Agartha has a better gem to summon ratio than Ermor. Ermor's is middle-of-the-road when you consider how many gems it takes to set up the above-average ratio it superficially enjoys, and pound-for-pound, Agartha's summons are better than Ermor's (and spread across four gem types instead of death all day, every day).

[Jilladilla]

MA Agartha does have some issues fielding Shard Wights though, after all, my only source of Death magic is the Oracles, and they need to lead them around, and the Chill Aura is yet another aura that none of my other stuff is immune to (barring Shard Guards), and I have to be careful with! Seriously, even between just Magma Children and Living Mercuries, not killing your own forces requires a bit of effort, and pretty much relegates your chaff to mage guard duty once you start fielding enough of them, as walking through the fumes of 20 passing Mercuries is a pretty fast way to die...

[E. Albright]

Shard Wights are problematic, yes. But Umbrals? Not so much, and they're 2d per. Sure, under normal circumstances (pre-Specter/unless you get a 10% indy zotz) it takes an Oracle to summon them, which is an expensive mage turn. But they're definitely worth it: 68hp stealthy lifedraining amphibian ethereals? Yes, please. You have no one to blame but yourself if you're not plowing death gems into summoning scads of them.

Wait, no, you literally have me to blame for that. Never mind...

[Jilladilla]

Umbrals require D2E1 to summon. Oracles are E3D1 1.1(FEWD).

I'm only getting a valid caster to summon them once every 8 turns on average.
Even with Specters, they'd have to roll Earth and Death to be able to cast it without boosters.

[Il Palazzo]

I swear I'm gonna be slowly whittled away by a thousand underwhelming invasions.

[E. Albright]

Even with Specters, they'd have to roll Earth and Death to be able to cast it without boosters.

Once you have one that can summon them, you have one that can make a booster and a less capable caster can summon them instead. And you'd need the booster (or the Mason, I suppose) to summon the Spectral Mage anyway, so...

Ulm, to save you some time counting, by the numbers ~300 of those troops and ~35 of those commanders should be rotting on their feet (plus however many previously got sick in the swamps). I hope you weren't planning on using that army for anything else, and that you're enjoying your profitable little war-of-choice...

[etgfrog]

etgfrog, I'd say Ermor has the scariest midgame, not lategame. Lategame, there are ways to deal with their unholy masses and everyone has their own obscenities in play.Midgame, some do and some don't.

Thbt, Agartha has a better gem to summon ratio than Ermor. Ermor's is middle-of-the-road when you consider how many gems it takes to set up the above-average ratio it superficially enjoys, and pound-for-pound, Agartha's summons are better than Ermor's (and spread across four gem types instead of death all day, every day).

Tartarians are the best punch for gem ratio out of any summon in the game. Frequently its been stated that casting well of misery is declaring war on the world because its conj 8 and usually is the setup to start getting a ton of tatarians. While insanity might be hard to deal with, having to deal with them as an enemy is even worse, because each are essentially a sc and with the bless your carrying around, it is terrifying at the thought of you putting a shoud of the battle saint on each one.

Spoiler: This is one of them (click to show/hide)

[E. Albright]

Tartarians are not what they were in Dom3, which is essentially what your SP experience is presumably telling you they are still. They get used in MP, but they're not all that; they cost a fortune, and without Dom3's gemgen cheese, it's harder to get around that. And they still have plenty of vulnerabilities. They're nice, but they're battleships in an age of missile cruisers and aircraft carriers; it's often better to use the dumb ones as troops than doubling or tripling their cost via crafted kit.

[etgfrog]

Tartarians are not what they were in Dom3, which is essentially what your SP experience is presumably telling you they are still. They get used in MP, but they're not all that; they cost a fortune, and without Dom3's gemgen cheese, it's harder to get around that. And they still have plenty of vulnerabilities. They're nice, but they're battleships in an age of missile cruisers and aircraft carriers; it's often better to use the dumb ones as troops than doubling or tripling their cost via crafted kit.

10 gems per tartarians is NOT a fortune, you can easily cast one per turn with just your capital. For comparison your dusk elders are 20 gems. I know its in your best interest to downplay your strengths so you don't appear as big of a threat you actually are. You claim its just my SP experience? Yet I see quite a few lets play or aar mention that any pretender with D9 bless will get targeted and ermor is flat out banned in a few larger communities because its game over for anyone next to them.

Ermor also happens to have the HIGHEST win rate of ALL nations. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dlrvyEqLFYIaXRc49TheMmfdoP8jEh1m5rZJHJAzDWQ/edit#gid=874928032

[E. Albright]

Tartarians are frequently too broken to be terribly useful as more than giant super-chaff if you don't have GoH, which is the only way to heal them. They're also frequently in need of GoR/DN to make them into commanders even if they're not broken (with Feeblemind being a particular favorite break) and if you want to use them as SCs. After you've sunk an extra 25 gems into them to give them slots, you need to kit them out or they're just very robust mages that can be fairly easily targeted with "Attack Large Monsters" or by relying on their large HP pools to attract evocations. Once you've sunk another 10-30 gems into their gear to SC with them, you're looking at 50-80 gems for someone who's possibly walking injured, and has Shattered Soul 25 (which is not mere insanity), and is still just a single unit vulnerable to all the counters that (large) single units suffer from. Trust me, they're nice in a niche, but this isn't Dom3. And they're also just as much a threat from C'tis or Agartha as me (which is to say, not much of one and not for several handfuls of turns even then) - for that matter, both of those two can more easily use the Jade Mask than I can, and if you wanna churn out D7 spells, boosters matter (especially if you don't have a high-D pretender like, hmm, would that be me?).

Being next to any good player with a decent nation is game over for you unless you can overcome them. Trust me when I say you're next to a number of good players with decent nations. Ermor has some risk/reward issues which slant perceptions of people wanting to attack them, but they're not actually more devastating than a number of the nations our game is blessed with if left unmolested... and a couple of those seem to be right now, heh. This rep and "conventional wisdom" leads to the perpetuation of more conventional wisdom about how Ermor is the greatest threat in any game it's in. It might be or it might not. It's silly, albeit convenient, to believe it always is.

Finally: the venerable "win rate" polls don't tell as much as they're often made out to. They're self-reporting, and unless the methodology has changed drastically, there's no controls for overlap. They're also drawn from significantly more FFA/low diplo metas than ours. There's also no control for whether someone good played a nation or a neophyte... though between Ermor's rep for getting piled on and its micro, it's more likely to scare off inexperienced players with no overarching plan than most nations. So again, don't read too much into those numbers. They're an excellent example of statistics that look to show far more than than they can even begin to hope to...

[etgfrog]

Again, this is more you trying to downplay your strengths because its in your best interest that your not viewed as a global threat. So no, I will not simply "trust" you.
Your pretender is the mother of monsters which does let you make use of the jade mask. Thanks for bringing up that you can use it, because everyone does know you have been rushing construction to get those 11 bane venom charms you have sitting on my army.

I'll also mention, bane venom charm is a defensive item, means your trying to hold out until you can tech up and win later on.

[E. Albright]

Ha, no. BVC is a defensive item, it's a measly Cons4, and the reason I'm sitting on a pile of them is the same reason my first goal this game was stripmining my provinces for ghouls: before we even submitted pretenders, I had every reason to expect boilerplate reactions like yours, followed by a pile-on. If I hadn't gone into this game with a bunker mentality, I'd already be out of it.

The real war for who shall win the game is going on to the west of us. Our squabble are a sideshow; I'm contained to the point where I couldn't break out before one of the real powers goes critical even if everyone went all NAP with me, and you've squandered a mountain of resources by seeking to make decisive incursions into my (well-fortified and prepared-since-turn-1-for-nigh-inevitable-invasion) home turf instead of picking away at the borders like the other belligerents.

...and lastly, let's not forget that, having sunken so much blood and treasure into this war you started with a conviction that it would quickly end, it's absolutely in your best interest to play up my threat as much as possible so as to garner sympathy and/or aid, especially when so much of your army is currently 1) committed on a very narrow front, and 2) rendering itself down into mushy piles of goop.