Team Covenant Writing Contest - Why do I play Saga?

So Team Covenant is running a contest to generate content for their site. I have no issues sending this in, but as I always struggle for blog content, I figured I'd cross-post it here as well.

However to plug their contest and their entry post, here are some links:

https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6354

"Your Source For Everything Saga http://teamcovenant.com"

"Lowest Prices On All Units, Guaranteed http://store.teamcovenant.com"


Below is my Entry:



Player Nation Name: GOSLAND

Favorite Faction: Nature

Why do I play Saga?

General Answers:
Saga is by far the most relaxing RTS (real time strategy) or MMORG (Massively Multiplayer Online rollplaying game), or CCG (Collectible Card Game) that I've played in years.

Saga vs RTS:The feeling of building a city that is persistent, (doesn't go away when the game is over) is pretty unique. Unless you have alot of resources from buying gold or from transfering from another city, your city takes alot of work and efford to max out and make complete. This is both different than the normal RTS games, (whereas you can complete a build order city in several minutes), but it gives you something to plan offline.

Saga vs MMORG:In an MMORG you control a single player, and often can not stage massive battles unless you have lots of friends in a "Raid". This reliance on playing in large groups carries a level or coordination that Saga doesn't require. Saga give you an army of 100s of characters that you can general.

Saga vs CCG: In a CCG you play a game where each player has the same cards as soon as they can acquire them. So often people will post a strong set of cards on the internet, and everyone copies the "net-deck"immediantly. This results in alot of similar play, alot of mirror matches. In Saga even if you have the full set of all characters, you will have certain units that are leveled higher then others. I haven't seen the same exact army used in any of the games I have played. It adds a level of variability that you often don't see in a CCG.

Nature Specific Answers:

Nature is my favorite faction because of the following reasons:

Level of Detail for the Elven Characters: Saga Developers have definitely spent a great deal of time on designing the elven races. They have a much better look and feel then the War orcs. They seem to have been very well design. I quote Illian, "Elven Bear riders are Elfs riding on Bears". How singularly cool is that?

Treants: The first time I saw the treants I was in awe. 8 foot tall trees chucking bolders half a football field? Then after I got a few treants their strong utility in every quest I played. Such a good unit.

Elven Sabercat Riders: I loved the chicks on a cat. They make the best kiting unit for PvE I've ever seen. Human Cav Archers were my previous favorite kiter unit, but after I got some chicks on cats, my kiting was way more fun.

Walls around my main city are tighter: Compared to my Light army the Nature walls are very tight to the buildings. This is useful for pvp city battles as I can store my basistas in my town and they don't have to move very far to fire. If someone wants to nuke a city wall, they have to get closer with my city then with Light, which gives me more Stronghold archery fire, and makes them take more damage.

Four gatehouses vs two: I get four gatehouses with Nature on my city which is nice for City fights. Give me more directions to get to the battle, and makes my city looks much cooler.
Elementals: Fire, Lightning, and Earth elementals are way better looking then the light Giants. Their abilitiesare nice, anti-chain/plate, point blank area effect attack and a DPS melee ability. And they all look cool.

Quantity of Flyers, but not too many: compared to Light, (the best flyer faction), Nature still has good flyers. With the 4 unit limit, Nature can have 4 dragons, and 4 units of elven hawk riders, which is 8 units of flyerspotential. I've never seen a mission that I needed the 12 units of flyers that Light can field.

Speed of Flyers: The speed of the Elven Hawk Riders is one of the top flyers speed. This allows for very good pvp kiting. Many times my dragon has been smooshed in pvp because it has crappy range and slow speed. Having the ability to string the elven hawk riders around the map, gives me a speed advantage.

Cherbus's Special Ability plus Hawk Riders on a mass of Archers: Cherbus's can do a stacking Attack power buff on a group of archers. This stacking with Hawk Riders can give a 35% or more attack power bonus to a stack of Treants orlongbowman. Treants get a big damage bonus, so if you can buff their attack power and make every boulder count, you can basically make a high dps archer group that can spike incoming melee. In a large CP pvp game, my archer stackhas stredded a incoming melee group with this buff.

Druids: I started out assuming Druids were pretty weak like light Clerics. Fire and forget healers, no real utility after using the heal. Then for some reason I keep getting Druids in boosters, so I started playing them more. Druidsare pretty awesome. Main reason, SPEED. They can keep up with my Heavy Cav. Their heal is not single targetted, its instead a friendly AE with a large radius. I love it, makes it very useful. Also druids atack power is poor, but their ranged attack is pretty cool looking. They don't rock the damage, but they can help you take something down. Betterthen getting into melee and getting killed.


I think most armies are pretty well balanced. You definitely can play any army, but Nature has the main advantage ofsimply looking the coolest. This is why I like Saga and Nature.