I figured that the best build for a ton of nations would be an imprisoned rainbow pretender with minor blesses from all paths, with nice scales. +Def/att/str/hp/reinvig, elemental resists, etc. that suit the nations sacreds. Especially now that elemental resists work as a reduction, you counter any evos pretty hard against your sacreds... Which just seems boring if it's done all the time.
Again, how many nations can spam (effective) sacreds to counter all possible magical openings? Not a majority. Cost effective sacreds are even lesser in number. "Optimal" blesses pretty much follow partially your prediction, the best scale blesses are imprisoned rainbows at large. I've seen a significant number of early expanders though, mostly to gain from the "major blesses need an awakened Pretender to function", but it's always a bet. SC gods are a rarity nowadays, at least in my experience, as the value of SC has gone seriously down since the Dom3 days.
It's not that you can win the game just by spamming minor-blessed sacreds, at least with most nations. But that if you have decent sacreds at all, you'll probably want to take an imprisoned rainbow to supplement them. When you get everything in one cheap package (scales, bless, magic diversity) why choose a narrower approach? Boring.
Value of SCs going down is not actually true even if people keep saying it, not in Dom3->Dom4 transition anyway. What actually happened was that it became much more difficult to get a good chassis and items, as the recruitables became StR, Titan pretenders got nerfed (only in a Dom4 patch - when the game came out Titans were the gold standard), and gem frequence went down. And Dom3 CBM was SC central ofc. Weak thugs got more fragile though in a handful of respects, but bigass SCs not so much.
Maybe the elemental resist changes make them a llittle less useful now in 5, dunno, but still a small effect. But not much reason to take an SC god when it's ridiculously expensive.
But still it's hard to get to play a game that feels like an inferior version.
Inferior in what? More nations variety and fixes in some clearly badly-planned nations (Yomi). SOME new nations are outright weird and badly planned tho (NAKED SPARTAN GIANTS). Quality of Life improvements in interface and commands. The Real Time change isn't as ....
impactful as it seems, we're still playing on a pseudo-turn based system. Details changed, mostly, in spell balance and the like. I
guess the loss of relevance of SC kept trucking on. The Bless system gives you
far more variety than the standard N9E4 build of Dom4 times.
Real-time change most of all seemed impactful to me in how you no longer had the defender have the starting turn advantage. Which is fine.
Never was a big fan of N9E4, not to the level it was hyped as standard...Even if you took it, you could still choose whether you wanted your guy awake, dormant or locked up. Now there's much less room to choose when imprison got an extra 100 points, and picking a different flavor of rainbow pretender paths/blesses is extremely samey just as well.
Like sure, even if magic is relegated to a smaller role you still need it, but playing a game like that... Or a game where fast troops might waltz past each other on the strategic map... Is annoying to me.
"Smaller role"? How? When? Because Evos are somewhat less likely to hit now the entirety of the Magic system has a "smaller role"? Troops waltz past each other? When? The maluses for movement through enemy territory makes that
impossible bar for flyers, and flyers waltzed in as they liked even in past Dominions. I don't understand what your annoyances are about.
[/quote]Magic in smaller role was just in response to Malakal's post, I can't comment on it further. Troops moving past each other can definitely happen unless they changed something since first release.
If there's provinces A-B-C-D, connected to each other like that... I control A / B, you control C / D. I have a troop in A that's commanded to go to C, and you have a troop in D going to B. They will definitely move past each other to their intended targets, though they are basically moving along the same route. IIRC it could happen on a road even B->D and C->A, if the units are really superfast and there's a road, but not 100% sure anymore, might need a bless or a lone commander with item to achieve that - which would make it kinda ok as a fringe strat. How do all these weird border-skipping maneuvers interact with eachother? I do know a million fringe tidbits about these games but trying to learn these broke this camel's back.
But even if the cases described here are rare or near nonexistent, the new movement system is still really pointless addition - you just get more micro out of it to reach the best possible logistics, no real added strategy is gained from this shit. And map-movement winter is something I feel doesn't really add anything of value to the game but makes map-making take more time.
But maybe these are just minor annoyances and I should get over it. The prevalence of imprisoneds is kind of a bummer though, since you can't even mod the cost of awake/dormant/imprisoned.