Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
1. Whenever a Inca or a Coya die, the closest Coya or Inca will die as well to complete a Mummy bundle. I have seen it fail once or twice, but im not certain why. I suspect that bit was a bug.
1B. Yes its a complete waste to turn a Inca into a prophet IMO. You get nothing out of having a single H4 priest. But if you instead turn a Apu commander into the prophet, then the resulting mummy will be able to summon your sacred national ghosts.
2. You dont really need a H4 priest for anything.
3. Depends on your build.
4. The biggest thing her is the population growth. Its exponential. Try and take a pocket calculater, then see how much a province with 10.000 people will actually grow over 30 turns at max growth.
5. I would not take drain myself, since it makes spellcasting harder. It might be part of an advanced strategy.
6. This means the opponents have 2 turns before your in their back rows.. though yeah dont know much about flier vs flier
7. The main deal is i guess, that you can then cast storm power to buff your air mages.
8. Thunder ward dont to much to a direct thunderstrike hit. But your troops are dirt cheap. So if 10-20 procent of hits are friendly fire, oh well.
9. Nazca is a rather complex nation. Their troops are generally garbage, but their mages rock. And they can mass sacreds rather well late and mid game.
10. You can actually make a few boosters because you have a really high number of cross paths on your mummy bundles. It is really hard to cast the massive armies busting spells. You need communions for that. But your Hurin priests can still cast a lot of extremely useful buffs from Earth.
Anyway. Here is a link to a handy guide.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1262004761
I was thinking of taking Charged Bodies with Fire and Shock Resistance (the Earth bless) -- will 10 SR be enough to negate the CB? On the other hand, I've never seen anyone take that bless before so I guess it's considered crap, just wondering since I could have so many sacreds.....
I can't tell from the bless description however if the bless is exactly like the spell -- does it discharge only once (meh) or as often as you are hit (sounds like a great deal to me)?
2. No, it's not. +1 morale is usually low-impact, on skelespam nation (Hurins) it is worthless and with your communions it's absolutely redundant. Better use some tougher chassis for a prophet instead. Nations with bad D/E access might benefit from making a stealthy prophet, but you have Hurins. Another good idea is an A2/S3 prophet who can teleport across half the map, but you have Incas.
3. As long as you're not pushing to get a better bless (which is a good idea for Nazca), Production is indeed okay. If you're using sacred summons, picking Luck for more gems may be worth it but you'll likely lack points.
4. Seasonal temperature shifts over year may range from +3 to -3. As a result, supposedly -5% penalty per scale is actually less of an issue; also, not taking Growth 3 for any living nation simply doesn't happen unless it's small and/or fast game and if you can't spare any other points, you will add temperature. For Nazca who already likes cold, getting more cold is way less of a penalty too since cold is capped at -3 and you get almost full income in summer.
5. Can't comment on this, but Nazca supposedly has some really good sacreds. Dumping everything in favor of a dormant or awake bless is a thing, and you have access to most possible research booster (Quills, Skull Mentors, Lanterns) except Imp Familiars. But it costs a lot of gems.
6. You must expect your flyers to die, unless protected by Fog Warriors. That is true for both Zotz and Caelians; neither are fit for anything more than discrupting backline; any dedicated melee troops mow them down. Even their sacred troops are incredibly fragile unless buffed. With Hurin Priests casting Horde of Skeletons and Raise Dead you don't need flyers to hold the line though; only draw fire for those two turns.
7. Storm gives Storm Power and makes your A1 mages actually combat-capable. Hurins are skelespammers and don't care for accuracy past first few turns with Shadowblast, or maybe Gifts of the Heaven communion. Nazcan sacreds are also stormimmune and still can fly. And actually using non-crossbow archers to do more than harrass naked targets?! Preposterous, especially since your own sacreds qualify and you kind of want them alive. Once you have a flyer screen to draw fire from mage raiders, dump all extra gold into more mages who can die and go crazy summoning undead. Fire magic will suffer, true, but there simply isn't any way Nazca can be a fire magic powerhouse (not that it means you can't surprise someone, but Mari and Aby do it way way better).
8. Friendly fire isn't much of an issue when you expect your troops to get killed. Skeletons are temporary and them dying is wholly acceptable. And finally, shockres bless for Supayas partly solves the Thunderstrike problem, and most other sacreds are also shockres so may tank direct hits. Other Air nations like Caelum often use Corpse Constructs, because they have high hp/gem ratio, but Condors feed from same gem income and it might be an issue if you mass-produce these.
9. Recruitable Nazcan troops are all flying chaff; humans are strictly emergency troops (skeletons and zombies perform better in almost all ways which matter). For Nazca, non-sacred troops primary purpose is to disrupt backline (which normally works because AI is stupid or someone forgot to make proper rearguard) and absorb attacks meant to kill mages or sacreds. As for scales, you either go for big Supaya/Condor bless, or you get a smaller caster/rainbow bless and get better scales. Going for no bless with nation of sacred mages is counterproductive.
10. Path climbing is its own strategy, so I'll comment on combat magic:
a) If you have Astral or Blood or you're MA Man, you use communions. Nazca has astral with FAED masters, though you'll likely kill your expensive slaves with FA magic once offscript. Also watch out for Magic Duel because losing Coyas and Mallqui might disrupt everything; to be safe, you may stick Matrix on AED hurin to keep enchantments going.
b) If you don't have Astral or can't afford 1 turn of communion startup, you summon big expensive summons, give them big expensive boosters and gear them with big expensive armor.
Though its much better to focus on Incas then. Hurin Priests got the same paths as Coya.
And Inca mummies can summon sacred ghosts.
If you want a few Coya around, then Twiceborn them and then go suicide into a Wight Mage.
A great way to die is to fly into a hostile province and the retreat.
But why should I twice born first if I'm going to die and become a mummy anyhow? 😁
The major reason is Condors.
Nazca is a Bless Nation (generally speaking, a nation that either has good recruit anywhere or summonable sacreds). While there are potentially other strategies (and they might get nerfed soon if we're lucky), you don't need much more than Cap Only sacreds for initial expansion, an Awake Pretender with high Air paths (higher the better) to summon Condors (low level Conjuration sacreds with a ton of attacks each), and Royal Mals to summon Supaya (with headdresses for 3x per turn). While there are counters later in the game, not many are accessible early on (avoid enemies with Fire Shield or take Fire Resistance as part of your bless), and by later on you'll have a broad magic base yourself (even if your research is low, you'll have so many paths to choose from) and a large swath of conquered territory (unless you provoked a dogpile by scaring everyone / attacking indiscriminately).
Tank all of your scales (-3 everything except for Fortune) and maximize an offensive bless and you'll steamroll your neighbors for the first 40 turns (a Luck bless is all the defense you'll need, though you could theoretically take Air Shield and +Def / Blood Surge blesses if you don't want Thunder Weapons since other players will expect you to have it). Since your armies will be almost entirely free summons, and because your expansion and rush ability is silly (powerful bless + fliers hitting commanders in the back), gold will be less of a problem than you'd think. After the first year, it's generally cost-effective to recruit Royal Mals from your cap. directly at ~800 gold per turn since Supaya summoning scales (more expensive to recruit them directly, but it doubles your Supaya scaling). Why go for 18 / 36 / 54 when you could go 36 / 72 / 108 (that is 108 free super-blessed Supaya per turn after 3 years of recruiting straight Royal Mals, on top of Condor scaling with your Air Site searching success). The real cost of the Royal Mals is in Upkeep, and you're paying that whether you have the fancy ones or the crappy ones.
Storms improve Thunder Strike directly and allow for Summon Storm Power for +1 air path. Look for Storm Immunity on your units, or pair this with Undead chaff summoned by non-cap mummies.
H4 gets you Fanaticism. Can be useful in large engagements since morale matters, but most of Nazca's early fights end very quickly one way or another. It's also easier to boost to H5 with magic items, though that's generally not useful for Nazca unless you're fighting MA Ermor or somesuch. H4 is notably more effective versus Undead.
Couple of follow up questions:
- what do you mean by the difference in Mals "crappy" vs good ones? I'm obviously missing something
- I was also thinking luck because I find my cap sacreds fragile but I read somewhere that luck doesn't work on undead - is that mistaken?
- how bad is the "heretic" function? I sort of want some of those paqos at least to help mitigate events and also a wee bit of nature but don't want to bork my dominion
- why can't I find any info (even on the mod inspector) regarding thunder strike and storm? Any other interactions I need to be aware of?
Thanks tons
Because Thunderstrike and Storm have no direct connection. Storm gives +1 air magic to any mage that has cast Stormpower. That allows mere A2 mages to cast Thunderstrike and weak A1 mages to cast Lightning Bolt. So it allows for a +1 Air magic across all your mages if all of them cast Stormpower.
It also tends to prevent enemies from flying thus closing the distance to your army quickly. THat combined makes it a powerful spell that increases your damage output dramatically. So that;s why the combo is strong. But there is no direct interaction between either spell.
I did mean luck bless as mount nomad indicated, but am still unsure that bless does not affect undead units.
Still not clear what a crappy royal mal is, sorry, and don't entirely understand the calculation with 108 after 3 years (I mean opposed to what?).
If anyone knows about how harmful heretics are, that would be very nice thanks!
What I want to know though is why the designers thought this nation and its mechanics were a good idea out of the box.
There are other nations in the game you can say the same of.
But I really don't buy the "diplomacy" argument on balancing, i.e. if your nation is just innately better than others, the chumps will band together out of common sense, stop everything they are doing, including conflict with other chump nations, all to steamroll Nazca before they can get their unstoppable gimmick going. But watching various LP's, it seems that not everyone has fully digested this meta. Not just for Nazca, but for other problematic nations.
You ain't got no time for playing little games with Vanheim. The first thing that needs to happen in any game is to get rid of Sceleria/Ermor/Nazca/Power Blood Nation/Etc, then the real game can start.
That bless thing is really nice. But while it is not as good, you can really play Nazca in other ways, even if it is not as good. You can play a scales game, win with mages. Go to being an undead nation. Leverage the whole mummy mechanic (come on, this is "twiceborn" without you having to research or spend gems on a spell).
Great mages and crappy troops isn't a totally unwinnable position (if you are playing against non-overpowered nations), particularly when you get to the point where it is mostly about mages, summons, and sacred troops anyway.
But when you can recruit flyers as your crappy troops, well by definition they aren't really so crappy actually. Too many tactical and strategic shenanigans you can pull with that mobility and siege power.
That's about how they have been designing nations since Dom1. Completely broken/unbalanced nations like Ermor (domkill and spawn) or R'lyeh (madness) have been created because they had a cool idea. They thought mummies were great, then added condors because they make sense for incas, and so on.
If you're the strongest player in a game, try playing a weak nation. Play a Bad Nations game. Or go full-on cutthroat like Disciples of Youtube and everyone meme as hard as you can. Many nations *demand* a particular play style to be effective at a particular scale, and if you're not using that play style, ur doin' it wrong.
Onomastikon, when you create a Royal Mal via mummification but don't have both mage types to sacrifice, what you get is a Royal Mal that only has the paths of the one mummified mage. For Supaya summoning purposes, this's just fine, but you're paying the same upkeep you would for a Royal Mal with full magic paths. In the first 8 months, you'll probably want 3 H3 fliers anyway, and if any die they're on permanent Supaya duty for the rest of the game.
When I say things like 36 / 72 / 108 I'm referring to scaling of Supaya summoning. Each Royal Mal can summon 3 Supaya per turn (with a headdress - only one adds benefit, even though they have two heads). An expensive Royal Mal can be recruited at your capitol in 1 turn, but the birdies that can die and become Royal Mals take 2 turns to recruit. If I have the gold, I'd rather pay a premium to get Royal Mals faster, as super-bless Supaya are a core army component (help flesh out the numbers, and provide ethereal meat shields to soak hits for the condors).
You are correct in that a Luck bless does not work on Undead, but H3 banishment does, Mace to
Face does, and flying to the back lines and killing their leaders really does. Your summonable blessed troops get a stupid number of attacks, particularly with a Quickness bless component - you'll probably kill low Combat Speed undead as fast as they reach you, even assuming you don't manage to snipe their commanders (thus leaving the Undead leaderless, causing the dumb ones to fall apart).
Heretic can be rough, but in the case of trash scales it's incredibly desirable. Remember, beyond the basic need of having enough Dominion to not be eliminated from the game, you don't *want* your Dominion spreading to your lands, killing of your people, lowering your income and messing up your research (you won't get positive research boosts even if you're in Magical Dominion if you have drain scales standard, but you won't suffer from the research malus).
Asymmetric doesn't necessarily mean unbalanced, and it definitely doesn't need to be hugely unbalanced. There's plenty of minor changes that can be done to bring factions more in line with each other while still keeping them distinct, such as changing costs, changing the number of units summoned at a time or similar.