[Spoilers] Perpentach of the ... where did I have my pants?

[The ShiningOne]

Good stuff! I'll be looking forward to seeing Ilios' response.

[Serdoa]

More diplo please! That's awesome.

I would but there simply is none. I have still not spoken with either Mahala or Flauros. Though it seems it is needed now to speak with Flauros at least as he has built a city nearby my cap. Unfortunately our two caps are too near to each other so either he or I had to do that. Still, it would have been nice to give me a short info but oh well, I also never introduced myself to him.

Well, some turns then I will react to it

In other news, Ilios answered:

[COLOR="Yellow"]Dearest Grepe,

We thank you for your message true
Hoping all is well with you
Bears are bad unless they're teddy
Fearsome warriors should be ready

The west is far too dark you say
Turn around you'll see His ray
Holy Varn would be so happy
If your spies could share their... stuff

Gratefully far,

Tuvan Lorespinner, Balseraph Exile, advisor extraordinary to Chancellor Ilios[/COLOR]

Well, THIS does deserve a well thought out answer so I have to prepare it which does take some time.

[Serdoa]

Sent a short answer ingame as turns moved fast and I simply had no time in the week to think about it. Simply told him that Mist did change his civis.

In other news, I had promised to give an overview about the Balseraphs but never got to do it till now. Sorry for that but my life got more hectic when I thought I would get to relax a bit. Hasn't changed, but whatever, at least I have some time today.

So, what do the Balseraph and Perpentach bring with them? I realized now that I - even when traits changed - never talked about Perpentach:



He is interesting as being the only leader with 4 traits (I think) and with Insane you do have to adapt to what the game throws at you. That can be really good - as it happened to me with Fin, Phi and Exp - or pretty bad. For example you might be in builder-mode and suddenly get traits which do ask for military build-up. Or you play 100+ turns without any change and when you finally have accepted that your traits will never change - they do. Especially in MP that can change your whole game. For example, you might get Raiders and if one of your neighbours did not anticipate that and has build roads like crazy, you might be able to really hurt them. But that also means that none of your plans should rely on your traits, as you never know how much longer you will have them.

Right now as stated above I am Fin, Phi and Exp. Fin does not that much for me, I simply have not that great terrain for it. Phi is used in conjunction with Pacifism to get a Great Person out - something I probably wouldn't have done if I would not have gotten Phi as trait. And Exp simply does let me expand faster by giving me a bonus when building settlers. Thats the reason why I am at 3 cities now, whereas all my neighbours only have 2 I guess.

That trait-change is also the reason why I feel that I still have chances at this game. Honestly after seeing my initial starting spot I did not have any idea what to do. I still feel not comfortable with this starting spot because it sucks. I could not get vision of the full starting spots of the others, but I have the feeling that they have much better starting spots then I do, especially the vampires. Anyway, I didn't want to bitch about my starting spot but tell you about the Balseraph:

[SIZE="4"]1.: Specials of the Civilization [/SIZE]

1.1: World Spell: Revelry - You can start a Golden Age as soon as you have Festivals

I don't feel like this is the greatest of World Spells. Yes a GA whenever I want it is surely not bad. I can either speed up war preparations, get to important techs quicker and so on. But it is something which is also doable within the game with GP. There are a bunch of World Spells which you cannot reproduce in any other way - this is none of them. What I do not know is if it does count against your GP-number needed for a GA. Will I need 2 GP if I start my first GA with this spell? I guess not but I haven't tested it.

1.2: Puppets

Every Arcane Spellcaster starts with the spell "Puppet". Now, what it does is create a unit for one turn (or more turns with Summoner-trait) with the same promotions as your spellcaster has them, including all the spells. Unfortunately it seems that creating the puppet does count as casting for the spellcaster so you cannot cheaply cast twice each turn. Nevertheless there are spells which profit from not casting them with your spellcaster (Domination for example which we come to in a second).

I also tried in WB to give an unit the spellstaff promotion. Idea being to cast with the puppet, break the spellstaff with the puppet and cast again. Unfortunately it seems that doesn't work. But as I could not find out how to get the Spellstaffpromotion anyway I guess I wait till PB looks in here, reads this post and tells me a) how to get spellstaffpromotion and b) if it can be cast by puppets.

[SIZE="4"]2.: Palace: [/SIZE]



So we get 1 Hammer, 8 Commerce, 2 Culture, 1 Happy. As everyone else except Grigori (who get +2 Adventurer-GPP additionally) and Mercurians (who get +2 Beakers, +2 Gold, +2 Culture additionally). More interesting are the different manas we get:

2.1: Mind Mana



+3% to research is nice. It is also needed for one of the towers. I guess thats it. Lets look at the Mind spells:

2.1.1: Mind 1

Allows Adepts to cast Inspiration



The caster has to stay in the city for this spell to work. If you are at the free unit limit this probably means to give up ~1 gold for 2 research? Anyway it at least means that if you give that to your Adepts they always have something to do.

2.1.2: Mind 2



Charmed means that the charmed units cannot attack - they can still move. Still sounds good for me. I tested in Worldbuilder and it seems to work on all tiles around the one the unit casting it is standing on. It can be resisted and works only against living targets. I have not yet thought about what this means for this game, but generally I guess this can be quite strong in an offensive war when you reach a city of your enemy and can make sure that he cannot attack out of it with his units. Unfortunately I am not sure if this "promotion" can be dispelled by the enemy or not. It does have a 20% chance to wear off each turn but other then that I don't know. Somebody with more knowledge around?

I think the enemy also can still use spells - somebody knows that for sure?

2.1.3: Mind 3



Now, that is kinda fun. You try to dominate one of the units of your opponent, meaning if you are successful he does not only lose it but you get it. Again it only works against living targets. Like Vampires.

Anyway. Normally if you attempt to use this spell and fail, you cannot use it ever again. That is bad. But we are the Balseraph. That means our arcane units can instead cast puppet and let the puppet cast this spell.

Now, will I get Mind 3? I do not know but probably not. It does sound like fun but I guess there are better spells which do hurt several targets. And if I understood the magic system correctly I can have only 4 units capable of casting this spell. As it is randomly decided which unit I get I think that this is not enough. Looking at normal endgame-stacks I would have to get extremely lucky to get one of the few extremely strong units of the enemy instead of one of the standard units. Except for if I can find a way to first kill off all of the "standard" units so that my chances of getting the strong one are much higher...

Ah no clue. I probably wait for PB or somebody else who does know better then myself to tell me if that spell makes sense or not

--------

Ok, enough for now. I am working on this posting since more than 2 hours. I will go on with the other mana my palace gives me as well as with the unique units for the Balseraph sometimes later.

[Irgy]

What I do not know is if it does count against your GP-number needed for a GA. Will I need 2 GP if I start my first GA with this spell? I guess not but I haven't tested it.

I'll confess I haven't tried it out myself, but I'd be extremely surprised if it counted as a great person golden age since it doesn't use a great person. It should just be like the Taj Mahal or an event-triggered golden age.

I also read somewhere that it lasts longer than a normal golden age.

Should be good for a big anarchy-free civic switch once you've got a few early civic-unlocking techs at least.

Now, will I get Mind 3? I do not know but probably not. It does sound like fun but I guess there are better spells which do hurt several targets. And if I understood the magic system correctly I can have only 4 units capable of casting this spell. As it is randomly decided which unit I get I think that this is not enough. Looking at normal endgame-stacks I would have to get extremely lucky to get one of the few extremely strong units of the enemy instead of one of the standard units. Except for if I can find a way to first kill off all of the "standard" units so that my chances of getting the strong one are much higher...

You don't just get a random unit, you get the strongest unit in the stack. Other than some accounting for magic resistance anyway - so it won't target the magic immune Acheron for instance but one of his Sons of the Inferno instead.

It's a very good spell I've heard, especially when you can use it with puppets.

[Serdoa]

Thank you for those informations. Though that does bring up some more questions:

What does strongest unit exactly mean? I guess "strong" in that case means strenght? Does it account for promotions as well? And if so for all (and calculating the highest possible strenght is everything is in the units favor?) or only the ones which are general, like Combat 1-5? I am asking because I think about Vampires and Archmages. Especially later ones.

[McClure]

i can confirm that Revelry does not count as a GP-initiated Golden Age, and that it gives a double-length GA (16 turns on Quick?).

I started an SP Balseraph game shortly after this game began, and found a fun gameplay strategy: Rush to Hemah (I think that's the earliest Archmage available) and promote to Chaos III (Wonder). Then cast Wonder every turn thereafter. It's not really a winning strategy, but I think it makes for fun gameplay: The Evil Archmage who has no idea what he's doing working for an insane clown who finds this amusing. I didn't really rush to Hemah, and abandoned the game in a winning position before I had casted enough to turn him into a monkey, so that could be a goal.

[The ShiningOne]

And if I understood the magic system correctly I can have only 4 units capable of casting this spell.

You can have 7-8 Tier 4 casters capable of taking level 3 spells. 8 if you get a hero like Hemah or Gibbon. The interesting thing about heroic casters for the Balseraph is if they have twincast they will summon 2 puppets. Each puppet will have twincast also, so you can summon 4 level 3 summons for each heroic caster. To get more tier 4 casters you need to get death 3 on an archmage then you can use the spell lichdom to turn them into liches.

[DaveV]

Enchant Spellstaff is the Enchantment 3 spell, so a level 3 caster can give himself a spellstaff. Amurite mages get one automatically, and you can also get one from exploring a lair.

[Ravus Sol]

The only spells that i can remember removing negative spell effects are dispell magic and the Empyerean Priest spell...

In other news, yes a Heroic Spellcaster for Baalswaths are indeed awesome. You can get 4 normal archmages which can cast dommination. But if you have death mana you can then upgrade those archmages to liches and get 4 more archmages... so i'd say you can get up to 8-9 lvl 3 casters depending on which religion you go for.

[The ShiningOne]

Yeah, I thought you could get 4 liches. I play a bunch of different mods of FFH2 so I checked in vanilla to be sure before I posted that and the civilopedia said team limit 3. I just went by that, but it probably wasn't updated. That means 8-9 it is.