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[Frumple]

Can you do something useful with nature trolls?

Basically no, tbh. The nature summon one is 1D1N 100% EDN with nothing going for it except being a troll, whereas the kings are both 3 in their respective paths and gem generators. Their coterie also significantly better than the forest troll one, too -- the forest trolls are basically the worst trolls. There's a reason the forest troll tribe is 37N compared to the courts' 55X, heh.

You could do a little bit with it, maybe -- about as much as you could do with any 2D or 2N caster, if you get lucky and get those instead of ending up with a more or less junk (barring trinket casting and site searching, anyway) 1E1D1N -- but you can't squeeze them for nearly as much as you can the kings.

E: Well, thinking on that a little, a nature nation could use them to break into death, if they've absolutely got no better access. And a bucketload of conjuration research; the easiest 3D summon that could top a 2D one seems to be mound fiends at conj 7, heh. Maybe a lamia queen, which a 2N shaman in a nature nation might be able to boost up to...

Course, if you've got enough death gems laying around that burning that much N to be able to start spending them is a good idea, you've probably already got death access. So... yeah. Forest troll tribe isn't the best of unit summoning spells, heh.

[Kagus]

I've found it amusing: For instance, casting it on a castle I have no intention of attacking any time soon - eventually a horror shows up, kills the PD, and puts the fort under siege. Another time I cast it on a big army that looked poised to fight another big army. They fought, one side was losing, and then the horror popped out and went to town on both sides.

That's gotta be great for them to watch afterwards. "Player 3 has entered the game!"

[EuchreJack]

I'd look at whether you need to replace your losses, and how difficult it would be to do so. Getting 50 more wolves would take a while, for instance, unless you have a lot of werewolves or burned a lot of gems summoning more. On the other hand, you could replace them with a non-shit unit that would be less likely to die in droves  . Of course if your army was strong enough and they were just chaff you could replace them with any other chaff unit or use in-battle summon spam.

Getting another demon knight, otoh, is easy if EuchreJack has even a tiny blood hunting operation going, although you have to ask yourself whether it's worth the mage-turn to summon a single demon cavalry unit (unless he has blood 9 and can summon 10+ per mage-turn with boosted/empowered mages). If he wanted to replace the lost conventional troops, I'd guess that his main constraint would be the time needed to produce them and ship them to the front. How fast he could do so would depend on obvious factors that you've probably already considered: where he wants to make them, the amount of resources available there, and the resource cost on the units, and how long it would take to ship them forward.

If he's using them as standard troops it's entirely possible that he could be producing and streaming them to the front constantly, so replacement time would be effectively zero, so there is that, too.

To be fair, and to reveal something about the Random Hoburg mess we're playing, most standard troops are map move 1, with the rare few having...map move 2.  So nobody's going to ship conventional forces to the front lines quickly, although AlStar is doing his best to shorten the distance between my forts and my front lines...

[AlStar]

Well, thinking on that a little, a nature nation could use them to break into death, if they've absolutely got no better access.

I'd say this is probably the best use of them. If I didn't happen to have a hero that had a single point in death magic, I would've   needed to use them for this. As it is, I'll agree - the earth troll king is much more all-around useful, both for rituals and on the battlefield; and water trolls are great for moving into underwater provinces (but otherwise fairly mediocre, from what I've seen.)

Still, sometimes you just need some heavy hitters (+regen, - tendency to burn to death), and you don't have a surplus of earth gems to conjure up ogres.

[chaoticag]

So something of a general question here. Does anyone know if the value of rainbow pretenders had gone up? I thought I had heard that a few months back they redid some point costs in that regard. Also, what about rainbow disciples? Any reason you'd want one over a dragon?

[Shadowlord]

The three pretender design archetypes* (awake expander, bless, rainbow) all serve different needs. You don't need an awake expander if your troops are OP. You don't want a bless if your sacreds suck or you have a different strategy in mind. (Scales would be a sub-type, like you have to tank almost all of them to get a triple bless, if you even can)

Rainbows are good if you have specific plans to use specific spells or items and you need someone with paths your national mages don't have, or if you just want to keep your options open as far as making boosters for some of the paths. You can also site search with them, but that can be risky since they tend to be weak. Also site searching is more useful as a disciple since as a pretender you would probably take imprisoned unless you expect the game to be short or you need their help early.

* This is how I see it anyways.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Rainbow in a disciple game can really help with site searching and can help you get specific items. Works good if you can keep the team alive up to that point. A bit too risky early on for my taste. Maybe if you had +4 players per team then I'd be comfortable taking one rainbow.

Rather than a rainbow I'd take a strong caster, preferably an immortal. You don't get variety of a rainbow but you can afford a few high paths to get some key items. They also wreck the battlefield once you have some good battle spells researched. Still not as good early on as a pure combat god but I seem to recall seeing liches and vampires doing alright in disciple games.

[Shadowlord]

In 404 I took a rainbow disciple as Agartha and used him for site searching prior to contact, then mainly crafting and researching iirc. That was the MA disciple game which E. Albright, Frumple, and myself won (as C'Tis, Rlyeh, and Agartha).

He wasn't immortal, but our opponents never targeted us with assassination spells. Several of them had combat pretenders, which made them killable with VoTD spam by Frumple.

(E Albright's pretender was a standard N9Ex bless chassis, which was far more important than my disciple build, for the record)

[sprinkled chariot]

What is votd?

How do I into blood megic, like every combat spell requires slaves, which I need for sweet rituals.

[AlStar]

How do I into blood megic, like every combat spell requires slaves, which I need for sweet rituals.

You've just learned the secret of blood magic - you don't use it on the battlefield. It's all about summoning up demons to kill all the things. (Minor exceptions exist - I think it's worthwhile to occasionally cast the "+4 strength to all demons" spell for big fights, for example.)

[Delta Foxtrot]

Vengeance of the Dead most likely. It's an assassination spell where everyone the target has ever killed fight him as ghosts or something. It's pretty cool.

I'm not really experienced with blood, but maybe just don't fight. Spend all the slaves on various rituals and use something else for your combat magic. Everything requires slaves and they're pretty fragile as far as "gems" go. If I get to kill several dozen slaves per battle I'm pretty happy with myself.

[chaoticag]

Speaking of VotD, is there any way to find those unit stats on mod inspector? Wasn't linked anywhere there and it's been a while since I had seen it in action.

[ThtblovesDF]

Casting transformation creates a up-keep free unit, right?

[AlStar]

Casting transformation creates a up-keep free unit, right?

Correct, and also, hopefully, one that can still cast spells.

[Frumple]

Speaking of VotD, is there any way to find those unit stats on mod inspector? Wasn't linked anywhere there and it's been a while since I had seen it in action.

It's these guys. Dead ones. Not much to 'em, really, you generally don't expect vengeance to actually directly kill anything particularly powerful (though it can wreck flimsier damaging battlefield casters pretty easily and does alright if the target doesn't have magic weapons), you expect it to outnumber them so badly the turn limit shows up and everyone dies. Or fatigue 'em out by sheer weight of bodies, if by some odd coincidence something worthing of targeting with VotD isn't fatigue neutral.

And yeah, as per AlStar re: transformation. Just remember most of the time it's going to give you a notably worse spellcaster if the one casting the ritual relies on boosters to any extent. There are some full or almost full slot transformation results, but not very many. Still, if that's not an issue, it's usually pretty good stuff. Animals tend to be beefier than humanform casters (so better battlecasters), and that's not getting into the sexy forms that are available if you get really lucky.