Test games played

[Nelphine]

Agreed. (Mind you I think rangers, paladins, and griffons are all basically useless, so I'm obviously biased). The building cost reduction is way too strong on high men, so if you're not playing them, you need to be doing something that works very fast (for nomads, that's horsebowmen).

Not to say you can't win otherwise, but you're handicapping yourself by not choosing high men otherwise.

[Seravy]

Nomads produce extra gold, high men produce...extra rebels. I'm playing an alchemy werewolves strategy. Nomads have good interracial unrest that's perfect for early conquest, high men have one of the worst. Also high men can't produce cheap, but combat efficient units in the early game that work for removing unrest and also defend cities or fight enemies if needed.

Sure, this strategy might be playable as High Men, but I don't see why it would be strictly better. You trade early versatility, possible strong early units, good resistance, less unrest and extra early gold for a chance of a stronger late game. "Chance" being the keyword - roll enemy races that hate high men and your early conquests will be fruitless.
Yes, the map having no enemy on my continent makes it look like it was an economy strategy, it is not. But you have to adapt to what you rolled. If you roll a continent with no enemies and fairly good spots to build, you do that.

I could have rushed horsebowmen but what for? There was nothing to attack for them so settlers were a better investment.

I obviously couldn't have known I won't need the early horsebowmen in advance, that depends on the map.

In particular, I don't think I'd want to play High Men when I picked Alchemy. They have bad gold production ability and no unit that benefits from the free magic weapons. They don't have any synergy with Death magic either. So what for?

[Nelphine]

Death doesn't need gold. Death has free undead units. Alchemy lets you convert more mana into skill, allowing you to get to the point you can use amp towers sooner; with high men, you get amp towers even sooner. Alternatively, alchemist allows you to turn mana into gold, allowing you to overcome the high men weakness, thus allowing you to get amp towers faster.

Get amp towers fast enough, and your skill skyrockets past any opponent, and you win. 

Being death, you don't need early units - you have death for free undead. So you ignore high men normal weakness. 

The only things nomads do that high men don't are gold, which is already covered above, and horsebowmen. And if the game goes long enough, no race is as good as high men. (Except maybe dark elves.) So you've given up the only advantage nomads have over high men (horsebownen).

[Seravy]

Eh no, Alchemy lets me convert gold to mana. Which allows me to max my SP (or RP if needed) production, so it's effectively converting gold to skill and research. At a far better rate than Amplifying Towers which are better at...what was it, might as well calculate here...
let's see 1 tower costs 1800 gold. That's 1800 SP with alchemy. That's about 128 skill to break even but that's before considering the maintenance (which SP has none), if I include maintenance it's like double this amount. Even if I include the High Men bonus, it's still such a high value I won't be seeing it before 1412-1416.

Basically if I'm with Alchemy it's pretty much never worth building an Amplifying Tower, unless I'm already making more gold than my entire overall mana spendings (and even then only if I already have every more cost effective building everywhere). That's something that never happens - we are playing a warmonger so we're spending tons of mana crystals in combat, on top of the overland and maintenance spendings.

I'm playing werewolves which make no undead - so I can only expect a few of them at the beginning when I most need units to remove unrest and max taxes.

You also haven't really explained why it's a good deal to have extra unrest in most of the cities I conquer when I'm trying to expand early. Assuming the unrest table is up to date in the races thread, High Men get more unrest from Orcs, Nomad, Lizardmen, Gnoll, and even Elves as far as the Arcanus races are concerned, and this list pretty much includes most of the races the AI spreads at a priority. On the other hand, as nomads I have extra unrest in High Men cities and...that's it. (I'm ignoring Myrror where High Men are even worse.)

I feel like you're completely ignoring my Alchemy retort and the fact I'm using a (somewhat) early game strategy.

Being death, you don't need early units - you have death for free undead. So you ignore high men normal weakness.

So, pairing low resistance on my normal units, with low resistance on my summons, and having no source to buff resistance should be a great plan. Oh wait. (Yes, there aren't that many spells that target both normal and fantastic unit resistance, but it's a thing, as are multi-realm wizards who simply have both.)
If I had no Alchemy and instead had 2 Sorcery books for Resist Magic, then I could maybe see High Men working, but not really.

I also don't get what advantage you are even talking about - we calculated and tested High Men and set the building discount to be balanced - the benefit from it equals the loss through higher unrest. Unless you are packing some sort of an unrest removal in your strategy (Life books or Cult Leader), you aren't gaining anything. Maybe, just maybe, if you are playing a peaceful game where you only ever buy buildings and never a unit, but this isn't really that case and no, undead alone won't be enough to deal with everything. (also this isn't a Lunatic difficulty game to be willing to take the extra time to wait for the enemy to spend all mana, then summon a zombie, put all enemies to sleep and kill them with the zombie in battles I can win far faster and easier using my wolves or later shadow demons or wraiths or whatever. Not to mention doing that takes a lot of casting skill which by the time you do have, is too late to use those units to remove your unrest. If you haven't done it the past 150 turns, you've lost crazy amounts of economy potential.)

I understand even less why you're suggesting a late game strategy and pure late game benefits for my early werewolf run. What does being High Men contribute to summoning werewolves and fighting wars early?  Because Nomads contribute the casting skill and mana crystals, as well as a possible early unit that can kill fliers if I need it. (This game I did not so far, but that's luck. In a previous game I was facing stacks of 9 sprites everywhere.)

If I were to play Death High Men which is certainly viable, then I would have picked Ghouls, Cult Leader, probably 2 Sorcery books, and most definitely no Alchemy nor Lycanthropy.

[Nelphine]

Eh, I guess I'm too used to ghouls just being hands down better than werewolves. And don't get me wrong werewolves are great. They just don't compare to a ghoul strategy. And it's an even earlier game strategy than werewolves.  (And death immunities more than makes up for still having average or worse resistance.)

But conquering cities and getting 8 undead units from them completely negates high men unrest. I guess the problem is that playing death, and not playing ghouls is kind of like playing chaos and not allowing yourself to cast any combat spells. Or playing life and only using summons. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?


As for alchemy.. no. Alchemy is useable in many ways. And if you can conquer enough lairs *cough ghouls* you can get loads of treasure, and never produce a single point of mana for the first 10 years. That means you get much further ahead on skill than expected. 

High men also get magic marts noticeably faster in the very early game (when even one turn matters). Which makes a big difference to power production.

I've never agreed high men were balanced. I couldn't satisfy you that they were clearly better, so I settled with keeping an eye on them. But 20% less gold costs during the period of the game where flat gains in gold from conquest and lair treasure are worth far more than gold from taxes, mean that in the first, oh, 12 years, you can snowball far better with high men than anyone else, if you play a realm that has strong early units. And snowballing enough means you win. (You can easily, with alchemy and high men, be building amp towers by 1408-1411, because you're already at that high skill; and that's so early you're still living on treasure/conquest income, so maintenance means nothing, because you're still not spending anything on mana production.)

[Seravy]

Yeah but it doesn't matter if better or not, If I decided to play werewolves then I'm playing them. (and this is even true if it's not for testing purposes, I decide what strategy to play then pick an appropriate difficulty for it. )
It's not about handicapping or picking the best strategy, it's about playing what I want to, to the best of my ability.

Sure, you can do it, but why would you?

Because I think ghouls are vastly overrated and wolves are far better. Almost the same cost but they regenerate, are immune to weapons and have twice the attack power and hit points.
If I want undead I summon a zombie or use Life Drain. (which I completely forgot to use in the second part, but now I started using it so I got some nice undead orcs. However it wasn't my starting spell so I had to find it first. And with the starting skill I could have only converted less than by a zombie anyway.)
Of course I'm getting really tired of playing werewolves all the time so eventually ghouls, skeletons, night stalkers etc will get their turn. (and then I'll be able to compare them better)

And if you can conquer enough lairs *cough ghouls*

That never really worked for me, it's on the todo list to try again later. Until then I consider it a myth.

But 20% less gold costs during the period of the game where flat gains in gold from conquest and lair treasure are worth far more than gold from taxes,

It's 15% less though. Also doesn't apply to settlers or military in general. Extra rebels also aren't just loss of gold, they are loss of food an production as well. An even greater problem, they are loss of population. Housing does not work with rebels, even in the new formula, but now you are expected to do more housing to get the best start. So maybe it's just 1 extra rebel, but you're also 1-2 units of population behind, unless you got lucky enough to already find something you can turn to undead to be able to push 4-6 units into your fresh outpost. (very unlikely. Also undead summons cost a lot to maintain. They are not that great to get early, especially without alchemy.)
Either way, snowballing the economy for the late game is NOT the point of playing a rush strategy where conquered cities will be 75-90% of my economy. It's very well possible I won't have a single city of my home race after the first 3 if I don't start on a continent void of enemies. (In fact, if those neutrals were actually touching the resources instead of blocking them, I might have had no use for settlers whatsoever. The continent had 4 neutral cities, taking up over half the free area, and pretty much all the nondesert regions.)

So yeah, High Men would have been okay on this particular map due to no enemy presence, but...actually not, they wouldn't have been okay. I've taken over an entire continent of Orc cities. Those have +3 unrest to high men. I also only built 1 additional settler so have 4 cities of my home race. Including the neutral, I would have had a total of 5 high men cities.

More importantly, part 3 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTI50-SZ-Ws

(fixed the bug at end of the video but I need to sleep now, so part 4 tomorrow)

[Bahgtru]

Lol that banishment. Rage worthy! I wouldn't add vampiric, at this point you're going to find fewer and fewer low resistance units.

On nomads. until part 2 you've only done the usual 3 (markets, magic markets and libraries) and only now started with fighter's guilds. With this little city size the nomad bonus is probably not even enough to counterbalance the production lost to the absence of granaries, the only remaining trait is resistance but I don't recall it being useful. So the point of my question: in what do you consider this a test of nomads? Highmen was maybe the wrong example, any other race that has a low rebel rate would achieve the same...

So... I just asked if you expect mounted archers to be meaningful now. II guess you can nab that chaos spawn site? But some suicide archers can do the same earlier and without the need for a fighter's guild. And there's so many ways to do that... Well they help with AIs secondary targets, but again - just about anything can deal with secondary targets... Where I'm getting at is that I have a feeling watching this that werewolves make horsebowmen redundant despite the very different type of unit. You use them as garrisons but especially with nomads I prefer catapults - no food upkeep!! That's huge.

Actually I like what you do with the wolves, I could see that fit together with a ghoul arcanus strategy to deal with undead garrisons and early fortresses - ghouls are expensive and weak per se until the investment has a return in terms of undead. Wolves are clearly faster.

[Nelphine]

And that I totally agree with. Werewolves absolutely have their place, and sometimes are infinitely better than ghouls - but ghouls are always good, particularly for garrisoning secondary cities (I really do typically get 6+ garrison units from every secondary target I conquer when playing death, which is huge), so even if they aren't your main doomstack, they still have a very good support role that allows for very fast expansion.

And the particular comments about nomads that Baghtru asks are very relevant. Ignore high men, why not halfling, or high elf, or orc, or even klackon? They all have different strengths, but they don't have the lack of food, and you aren't using horsebowmen which is the primary early game reason to choose nomad.

[Sapher]

More importantly, part 3 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTI50-SZ-Ws

Hero is very good but better make a pack of werewolves and conquer some lairs/nodes. A pack of wolves can easily take that node with earth elementals. Almost no lairs was conquered that game so they still have a lot of work to do. That way you will have both a pack of wolves and a sword(as a rewad from a node)

[Seravy]

Well, I specifically need a sword with Life Drainx4 in it (as Heroic Heart by itself won't be enough to keep the hero alive against uncommon spell spam) but for the armor and accessory, finding something good is a better plan than making them, yes.

I think I have enough wolves, I just need to gather them into one/two stacks by replacing those I left behind by horsebowmen and undead. At the moment there are a lot of freshly conquered cities that need some guards. Let's see...halfway through recording part 4 atm, I have 19 wolves. So I can make 2 full stacks.