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Runemaster is the best retort

If I'm playing Death with a werewolves strategy, a Sorcery player can absolutely destroy my armies with Confusion. Or Death and Shadow Demons, a Nature player can completely counter me with Petrify.

Those are good cases of "adapt your strategy". Maybe you hide your armies, avoid conflict; charge into battle and accept the losses; switch to other units; or disband all those useless units. You have choices.

When an omniscient AI starts targeting your armies, no matter where they are, with an uncounterable effect -- there's really nothing you can do. Your list of strategies hasn't expanded, it's shrunk; and if you're loss averse, there's nothing you can do to avert the loss.

I think what it really boils down to is that some players don't care if they lack a strategy to respond to some particular AI action. Others do. So the ones who don't care say "just forget about it..." For people who want to be able to make plans and choices, instead of scrapping entire strategies, that's not a palatable solution.
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You have three options :

1. Pick Runemaster and use Spell Lock and brute force your way through dispelling anyway
2. Use diplomacy to pacify Sorcery players and fight others while using buffed stacks until you gain enough advantage to win the game regardless of buffing
3. Adapt your strategy and don't use buffed stacks if there are too many Sorcery players, or eliminate them early if there are only a few.
4. Be selective about buffs and only use fewer per unit/stack and/or use the ones that add lower dispel priority to the AI. AI dispel priority is proportional to the amount of spells you have on, and your loss is also proportional to the amount of spells on, so having X spells means your expected damage from dispelling is X^2. Stopping with the buffs at a lower amount drastically reduces the damage.

If you plan to use "2." it's recommended to use the "Order Please" option.
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(September 4th, 2021, 17:34)jhsidi Wrote: If I'm playing Death with a werewolves strategy, a Sorcery player can absolutely destroy my armies with Confusion. Or Death and Shadow Demons, a Nature player can completely counter me with Petrify.

Those are good cases of "adapt your strategy". Maybe you hide your armies, avoid conflict; charge into battle and accept the losses; switch to other units; or disband all those useless units. You have choices.

When an omniscient AI starts targeting your armies, no matter where they are, with an uncounterable effect -- there's really nothing you can do. Your list of strategies hasn't expanded, it's shrunk; and if you're loss averse, there's nothing you can do to avert the loss.

I think what it really boils down to is that some players don't care if they lack a strategy to respond to some particular AI action. Others do. So the ones who don't care say "just forget about it..." For people who want to be able to make plans and choices, instead of scrapping entire strategies, that's not a palatable solution.

But everything you just listed about Werewolves and Shadow Demons applies to buffed units too.

Hide your buffed stacks by splitting them up so there aren't that many buffs on one square. Give them Invisibility so they can't be targeted. Don't fight the Sorcery Wizards. Ignore it and keep fighting anyways. Switch to summon units or heroes with items. Or just disband the useless buffed units.
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Invisibility doesn't work but splitting the stack, or forming a treaty with Sorcery wizards does.
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(September 5th, 2021, 00:31)Seravy Wrote: Invisibility doesn't work but splitting the stack, or forming a treaty with Sorcery wizards does.

I think it's unfair to force you to form a treaty to be able to use a strategy. What if you want to fight that wizard? Goodbye unit buffs, goodbye thousands of mana spent on these buffs.

I think it's interesting to consider the option where dispelled buffs in battle return once the battle is finished and you are victorious.
Also, Dispelling Wave should be combat only.

Perhaps this could simply become one of the options at the beginning of the game? So that people can try it out and then we can see if it's really a good option or not?
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Splitting the stack at the end of every single turn is a "solution" in the same way that covering every inch of my land in spearmen or skeletons to protect my nodes is. Technically possible. Realistically, I'm better off just turning off the computer and eating paint chips.

Incidentally -- Runemaster doesn't totally protect you from dispel spam. Actually, the priorities don't seem to take the chance of the dispel being successful into consideration (the way it would for, say, a resistance based spell). In this game with Specialist x Runemaster x Spell Lock, every single battle I had against magicians, all the AI magicians would spend the first 2 turns of combat spam casting 10 mana dispels. It's ridiculous. Most of the time I slaughter them because they're wasting their time. But there's a slim chance that incredibly weak dispel can work, too, and it does sometimes. I lost a lot of Spell Locks even with all those retorts. The AI could be actually doing some damage or killing some units, but it seems to prefer attempting to annoying me to death instead. Anyway, I won the game and it was partially for that pointless dispel spam, but I probably won't play this strategy again.

Since we haven't heard any kind of reasoning for it yet -- why is it necessary and useful that the AI should have map omniscience for dispelling wave? It seems like one of those cases where the AI works in the logical manner (can't target volcanoes, cities, etc it hasn't found) until it doesn't feel like it anymore (hey, you've got an enchantment active in a plane I've never visited, dispelling it is my new life quest!).
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That’s a good last point or question, why cant dispelling wave be cast only near wizard’s own town or troops? I know it is not fully optimized, but it would make more logical sense and be less frustrating.

On the other hand, why is wizard randomly casting firestorm instead of a city near wizard’s armies?

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I was under the impression that Invisible units were only visible for pathfinding purposes, which is understandable. They really shouldn't be visible for spell targeting. And I agree with the others that targets under Fog of War shouldn't be targettable either.
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Whoops pressed edit instead of reply, sorry about that. I'm getting tired, should go to sleep.

...fixed, I guess.

Anyway.

It would completely defeat the purpose of Dispelling Wave countering buffs if the best buff in the game countered Dispelling Wave.
More importantly even the human player can target invisible or otherwise unseen units on the overland map with spells. (Although you will need to guess what they are likely from the fact you encountered the stack before and know it's in the generic area.)

(You can even use this as a way to detect invisible armies - cast a minimal power dispelling wave and if the cursor changes to valid target, there is an invisible enemy there. Same way you can find them in combat by looking at which tiles turn your movement cursor to "invalid tile".)

The logic behind this is these spells target map tiles, like Crack's Call in combat, not the unit(s) on the tile. You don't actually need to see the units there to cast it.
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(September 5th, 2021, 11:41)Seravy Wrote: Whoops pressed edit instead of reply, sorry about that. I'm getting tired, should go to sleep.

...fixed, I guess.

Anyway.

It would completely defeat the purpose of Dispelling Wave countering buffs if the best buff in the game countered Dispelling Wave.
More importantly even the human player can target invisible or otherwise unseen units on the overland map with spells. (Although you will need to guess what they are likely from the fact you encountered the stack before and know it's in the generic area.)

(You can even use this as a way to detect invisible armies - cast a minimal power dispelling wave and if the cursor changes to valid target, there is an invisible enemy there. Same way you can find them in combat by looking at which tiles turn your movement cursor to "invalid tile".)

The logic behind this is these spells target map tiles, like Crack's Call in combat, not the unit(s) on the tile. You don't actually need to see the units there to cast it.

I would generally agree, but any game with high difficulty and high number of AI players means that it's nearly impossible to play e.g. a Life strategy, because you're going to be dispelled sooner or later. The AI spams dispelling wave.

At least there should be something (e.g. Heavenly light) which prevents dispelling wave cast on garrison units. At least that.
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