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[Jilladilla]

Also I feel like you're really overstating how great Earthquake is, seeing as it's only 8 armour piercing damage, is defence negates and has 200% casting time. Calling them Earthquake bombs is probably quite literal, as you probably need a couple Svartlf to make a sizable dent in the enemy army and give them enough support to prevent them from being focused down by enemy mages spamming Mind Burn or what have you. So if they can take out an army, they'll probably take themselves out too and you're out a sizable investment in earth gems and gold.[/sub]

You know. You say this, but I've had an Ermorian (EA) army obliterated by a pair of Earthquakes in the past. Now, granted, now I'd be able to take actual measures against it, thankfully.
But a fair number of competent battlefield counters also have the very long cast time applied.. (And Ermor would still need to set up the Communion)

[USEC_OFFICER]

The key word here is 'pair'. A single casting of Earthquake isn't going to do much, so you need to cast it multiple times. Which is a problem for Helheim when the only mage who can do so is capital only and takes 4 Commander Points to recruit. And that mage is E3 only 25% of the time, so you need to forge them Boots of the Earth or cast Summon Earthpower and waste a turn. Or both if they're E2. Either way you're pretty much crossing your fingers and hoping they don't die before they can get Earthquake off. And if they do get the Earthquakes off then they're likely to kill themselves in the process.

My point is that Earthquake is not something that Helheim can do often or consistently now that turns are simultaneous. It is very much a last resort kind of move.

[Jilladilla]

You have air magic, do you not? Rings of Floating grant Earthquake immunity. Yes, a few more gems of investment, but if you can shatter their army; well you really only lost the gems for earthquake, as their army is busy routing and not stabbing your army. (Remember that the Quake goes off at 100% cast time, the remaining 100% is recovery. I don't think many things can blitz the backline fast enough to interrupt this, except fliers maybe; depending on how exactly the timing works out (it'd be a close thing), but why are you using earthquake against fliers?)

[Endymion]

So here is a fun question: Does quake do its damage to specific body location? Because if it did favor legs then 8 AP damage to the legs would give most people an army that can't move without major attrition.

Anyways, it isn't like the tactic only exists for earthquake. There are dozens of spells that turn a mage, 5 bodyguards and 5 points of pd into a slayer of 1000s of gold worth of resources.

[E. Albright]

High starting dominion does no longer bring awe to the pretender?

Presumably it's a tradeoff since the pretenders now get their blessing.

[Gigalith]

So here is a fun question: Does quake do its damage to specific body location? Because if it did favor legs then 8 AP damage to the legs would give most people an army that can't move without major attrition.

Anyways, it isn't like the tactic only exists for earthquake. There are dozens of spells that turn a mage, 5 bodyguards and 5 points of pd into a slayer of 1000s of gold worth of resources.

Bone Grinding is basically the death version of Earthquake, and works this way. Fail an MR check? Instantly crippled. Probably a bit more insane in Dom5.

[Jilladilla]

So here is a fun question: Does quake do its damage to specific body location? Because if it did favor legs then 8 AP damage to the legs would give most people an army that can't move without major attrition.

Anyways, it isn't like the tactic only exists for earthquake. There are dozens of spells that turn a mage, 5 bodyguards and 5 points of pd into a slayer of 1000s of gold worth of resources.

Bone Grinding is basically the death version of Earthquake, and works this way. Fail an MR check? Instantly crippled. Probably a bit more insane in Dom5.

No no, it's like this:
ALL OF YOU LOT TAKE 3 AN DAMAGE! Good. Now, Half of you are now Limp! IS THAT A COMPLAINT I HEAR?! MR CHECK OR BE CRIPPLED!
With how crippled is now... A few castings can immobilize an army... Ethereality is the only defense against it. It's a good thing it's not exactly an easy spell to cast..

[MCreeper]

What nations have access to trinity gods? I managed to forgot about this awesomeness, and got reminded by this patch.

[E. Albright]

I wanna say they're just Celtic.

[USEC_OFFICER]

In case anyone didn't notice, today(ish)'s patch granted MA Man a new spell called Chorus Master/Slave. It works exactly the same as Communion Master/Slave except for two notable differences. The first is that it requires N1 to cast instead of S1, which is important since Man's mages would be unable to use it otherwise. The second difference is that slaves are automatically booted out of the communion when they're knocked unconscious. On the one hand it means that you can't accidentally kill your communion slaves, but on the other they can handle less fatigue overall. Admittedly Man's witches also have spellsinger to reduce fatigue but I think that only counts if the Master has it so it's not relevant if a Logrian Wise Man or anyone else acts as Chorus Master.

85 gold sacred communion slaves are pretty damn enticing so I get the feeling that this will make MA Man better than it is right now. I'm not 100% certain if it'll make them great or overpowered, but it's still a good improvement over being simply lackluster.

_{The patch also borked supply so that living creatures don't eat but undead do. I foresee that being fixed quickly but it is still extremely silly, especially since it was caused by a fix for Half-Dead.}

[E. Albright]

I can't see that one going more than a day without a hotfix, yeah.

[Frumple]

Rather than a hotfix, they should make it a toggle :V

I'm not entirely sure what the exact sillinesses of inverted supply requirements would be, but I can only imagine they'd be interesting. Just don't ask how gluttony is producing supplies. Also maybe swap the N supply bonus over to D, I'unno. Part of me ponders the thought of negative supply starvation bomb squads roaming the countryside.

[Gigalith]

I'm curious how to choose one of these new-fangled trinity gods, because I don't see them anywhere on any pretender design screen. Is there a button I'm missing? Or are they only available for a tiny handful of nations?--I've checked the Celtic ones I can think of.

[USEC_OFFICER]

The Morrigna and Hooded Spirits were the only two Trinity Gods I could find. TNN, Foromia, Mavereni, Eiru and MA/LA Man get access to both, while EA/MA/LA Ulm, MA/LA Marignon and MA Ys get access to only the Hooded Spirits.

They're definitely interesting though kinda unwieldy and full of exceptions and odd interactions. The Morrigna get -1 to their 'main' path and -2 to everything else. So a A4S4D4 on the design screen turns into a A3S2D2, A2S3D2, and A2S2D3. Extra paths are granted to all bodies of the Morrigna, though adding in anything less than 2 points in a magic path is completely pointless (except perhaps for path boosting) due to the innate -2 penalty. The Hooded Spirits are different. One body gets full Water and nothing else, one gets full Earth and nothing else, and the third gets full Nature and any additional paths. This means that Water/Earth, Nature/Earth, and (Earth or Water)/Anything crosspaths are not possible. So you could splash some Astral on to forge Moonvine bracelets but not Crystal Coins, since the Earth body won't get Astral.

Separating the Trinity gives them -2 to all paths which is almost crippling to the Morrigna, since they start out with some large penalties to begin with. At least the bless remains intact, so with some gear they could make good raiders in your domain. Keeping them together and casting some nasty Air, Astral or Death spells is probably a better use of them however, especially backed up by a communion. I'm not 100% certain how useful the Hooded Spirits are as combat casters, but at least they can react quickly to threats with their unify ability. Assuming you decide it's better to spread them out in peacetime instead of keeping them together for the extra research/dominion spread/whatever, of course.

[ThtblovesDF]

Trinity is fun cause you get the first 4 commanders (1 prophet + 3x auto-bless-everyone) for free, so if you go into a heavy bless that is just broken as fuck, you can get another sacred unit out and have 4 Expansion partys taking provinces by turn 5. It worked well enough in singleplayer, since even if you lose one (not that likly, they are fairly good), they are easy to recall and you won't lose the bless.

Plus I'd personally prefer 3x Casters then one, since they can lob 3 times the spells.

It would be fun if they'd add another member to the trinity for each magic path. Like it starts with 0 paths, a new one is 50 and adds a aspect of the [many]-ity