Quote Originally Posted by Bishop View Post
That's not true. None of my design for magic or thievery had anything to do with assisting chains.
I'd actually go further and say that most of the magic or thievery had the opposite effect -- they reduced the efficacy of chains on a gains per hit basis. Think about nightmares -- you removed a ton of NW from a target, often resulting in your chain being bottomfeed hits instead of topfeed hits, and limiting the amount of damage you could do. By adding a land factor, NM chaining is actually more effective than it used to be because you are not getting reduced gains for at least part of the gains formula.

The same holds true of NS -- removed NW reduces gains if you NS heavily.

Beyond that, the other kinds of ops do exist. If deep chaining is less effective (and I'm not sure I buy this, you just need a different strategy for deep chaining than having a core that is all the same land size -- a more spread core (which means you need less recovery time, too), is now more effective at deep chaining), then econ strategies (e.g. fireballs, kidnaps, meteor showers, incite riots, chastity, the new anti-draft op, storms, arson, starvation (e.g. drought, gluttony, rob the granaries, greater arson) are all highly effectively. And are still ops. Particularly duration ops such as riots, MS, drought/gluttony/storms/chastity/greed, are highly effective at reducing econ and helping secure long-term advantages.

If the goal is to remove target offense, things like blizzard, starvation, forcing reduced wages via econ control, etc -- are highly effective. You are also significantly underestimating the value of arson/tornadoes -- I've seen provinces get overpopped and desert from no relations arsons, let alone in war. Beyond that, everyone has the same challenges, right? So if your argument is that offense is too strong, that sounds like an argument for running attackers. And yet attackers are less popular this age, which runs contrary to that argument.