New Faction?!?!?!

[Muddy33]

Anybody else see this, Mekone, the Brazen Giants?!?! Are there others?

[Burden of Brine]

No other new faction from what I saw. Some random screenshots of what they bring to the table:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276736174
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276735464
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276730391
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276732613
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276734241
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276737428

[berandro]

It's not exactly a surprise, but yeah, I partake in your excitement. :)

[franktrollman]

How big of a deal is the +1 Dominion Fight bonus? I got a throne that gave me a Dominion Fight bonus, and I can't honestly say I much noticed one way or the other. Without blood sacrifice and having really expensive priests means I don't expect this nation to be that good at dominion kills.

[Igigi]

More giant nations is always welcome. Looks like a combo of Mycenae+Sparta and other ancient greek features- Awesome

[Szronar_PL]

Originally posted by franktrollman:

How big of a deal is the +1 Dominion Fight bonus? I got a throne that gave me a Dominion Fight bonus, and I can't honestly say I much noticed one way or the other. Without blood sacrifice and having really expensive priests means I don't expect this nation to be that good at dominion kills.

they can buff it to +3 with 8lvl thaumaturgy spell. they also gain one dominion
this means that late game when starting with dominion 5 you are competing with dominion 9, without counting bonuses from number of temples
they are simbly ebin
i can see them as going for max construction (cyclopes and researching for jugernauts) or max thaumaturgy (gigantomachia)

[kzickas]

They seem interesting, but I'm not sure how strong they are. They have insane resource costs and I'm not sure the elder cyclops can make up for it.

[Szronar_PL]

Originally posted by kzickas:

They seem interesting, but I'm not sure how strong they are. They have insane resource costs and I'm not sure the elder cyclops can make up for it.

they dont get any blessed troops so you should go scales
this is probably the only nation in ea you can go scales on
bigger problem is the fact that each giant is capped on 4 PER TURN. i guess you could get a few fighting heroes instead since with that cost for mages and units its hard to reliably recruit one per turn
also promotion is very nice mechanic

[Kingetos]

New cyclops sprite is very nice :)

[Red_Rob]

I could see a thug bless for their F2E2 giant commanders, they aren't StR so being Cap Only isn't too much of a hindrance.

The reclimit on the giant troops is only 1 in non-cap forts, which seems harsh. When combined with unrest in every fort every turn and the yearly "kill your population for fun and profit" events they seem like they might end up being a little hamstrung.

[Nrak555]

Played a quick scales game and easily got 700 resources in the cap.

[kzickas]

Originally posted by Szronar_PL:

they dont get any blessed troops so you should go scales

Yeah I was definitely going to go with a scales build, but even at prod 3 I felt short on resources.

Originally posted by Szronar_PL:

bigger problem is the fact that each giant is capped on 4 PER TURN.

Not a problem in practice. They cost so much resources you are almost certainly going to be running out of resources before you run into the recruitment limit. 4 gigante hoplites and 4 gigante ekdromos are 488 resources. That also means that the nations theme of lots of humans and a few giants ruling over them never materializes. Since the limitation on recruiting giants is resources and the limitation on recruiting humans is also resources the result is that you never have a reason to mix the two.

[Swirler]

Curiously their mages are formation fighters. I don't know what application this has but there you go.
Also curious is the slave infantry can be promoted.

Man their elite infantry are strong. Well armoured and with magic weapons.

[Igigi]

The giant hoplite has to be the most sqaure-efficient (non-sacred) unit in the early era so looks like the Thau 8 spell has to be a priority to lift the recruitment limit. Also interesting is their magic armor (resistance to Iron bane and whatnot) and high map movement of even helots.

[Twogun]

they look cool to me. only problem is going to be, everyone is gonna want to play em!

[Kingetos]

Any idea on how they will evolve in MA and LA ?