Originally Posted by
nooblet
It's more like 4x, discounting the times you'd need to cast Vortex to strip away buffs like Reflect Magic and Magic Shield to make your ops more valuable.
On Meteors - That op should be left to dedicated t/ms anyway, since you only need about 2 t/ms to cover Meteors on all enemy provinces. If you have attackers trying to cast Meteors, what happens when said attacker gets chained, and has a harder time getting the necessary runes or targetting an enemy's largest provinces? The same goes with other ops an a/m would want to run - when you get chained, your towers are trashed, and rune costs increase for smaller provinces, and finally size difference makes ops harder and less effective on the provinces you'd want to op. That is why an attacking mystic has to be played very carefully, because chaining such a province produces great rewards and such a province at the bottom is less effective than a strict warring personality.
Since my kingdom warred yours (Jotun/Lebanon)'s last age, I think I can say a few things...
- We had Undead/Mystics last age as I alluded to in another thread, and putting up meteors was difficult with a lot of mage pumping. Most of the a/ms gave up on Meteors and stuck with FB+Chastity to make life easier.
- Since Cleric chaining came up (I don't know why); when a province runs very high offense, low defense, high draftrates with homes and low BE, any personality is easy to chain. Even then we didn't want to chain the Clerics, but we had to take down some of the high-honor and high-offense ones because those were the best chain targets, and if we did not put enough attacks into them we were shooting ourselves in the foot. This goes back to Mystic (and Rogue) as well - chaining Hybrids is a good way to make such provinces incapable of doing much of anything, forcing them to release their thieves and wizzies if they want to stay afloat.
- Elf/Mystic is difficult to play right, but chances are your a/m wants to have a substantial defense and doesn't need a huge offense. a/m running high offense is guaranteed to get chained... at 6/6, Elf armies are about even with Dwarves, if they are adopting a more balanced offense/defense strategy. Elf Lords are better at turtling as well, and odds are an Elf can keep some of their elites at home to keep their defense higher. Your big elf's problem wasn't its army or build choice, but because it was played by a nub who wasn't using its size and army in the best possible way... had it been in the hands of a decent player we would have had a much harder war. Fortunately for us it didn't happen.