My 2 cents , I was planning to go for an adept army that uses kamikaze skeletons. Picking death and maybe tower of necromancy. Then a Mage army supported still by the adepts.
Hm, Skeletons are only str 3 right? 4 with ToN. I am not sure that is strong enough, considering the point at which you get it. And the Adept are 90 hammers alone, while an Axe is 45. Every Skeleton + Adept, both at str 3 has to win against 2 Axes at str 4 (or 5 with bronze). Tbh I don't see that working IF your opponent isn't hit offguard. And if he is, than an army of Pyre Zombies would work as well. You'd get 3 for every 2 adepts. Though probably better to go for Doviello in that case.
But ok, thats my problem with Sheaim in a nutshell: They can't do anything that another civ can't do as well, but better. Except for Pyre Zombies. And that means you are pretty much forced into rushing someone early, hoping to secure enough land and cities that you can sail that advantage to a win. What isn't going to happen because someone WILL wreck you as soon as your pyre zombies lose steam.
Probably would need to make Planar Gate CONSIDERABLY cheaper (like 100-150 hammers) so that every city can build it with some planning early on and than also make the spawning mechanics more transparent and also to work on more buildings. Or make it in general more predictable which units are brought in (or heck, maybe simply can be built in the city, maybe with a national limit). Anyhow, I think that civ really needs a big overhaul if it shall actually be interesting and worth picking over others at all.
Skeletons get Empower promotions, get experience, can get Enchanged blade and other spell effects, can be resummoned each turn so it is not an adept and a skeleton vs 2 axes, it is an adept and infinit skeletons vs 2 axes.
Empower V is +50% and needs C5 on your Adept. That could take some time. And when you finally have it your skeleton is str 3 + 50% = 4.5. Axe with Bronze is str 5. And if it won a few battles against your skeletons will have promotions. The spell effects can be cast on the Axes as well. That skeletons gain XP is something I didn't know though. But I doubt that all that many would live long enough to enjoy those. So I'm not sure how much that should be taken into account. I'd assume right now that you still look at average at a str 3.6 against two str 5+ units. As city defenders more realistically seems str 6 or even 7 though. Because you won't attack with the Adepts if you can't first whittle the defenders down enough. So in reality it is not an Adept and a skeleton but just weakly skeletons against strong city defenders. Even worse they will gain XP with every skeleton that is killed and probably quickly reach C1 or even C2 to make them pretty much invulnerable to your skeleton-army.
Of course you are right that you can resummon them. But lets consider same hammer-invest into army. You have 20 Adepts with 20 skeletons. I have 40 Axes. Who wins? After your 20 skeletons have been defeated by my city defenders, I still have at at least 20 Axes to attack you. If you had presummoned your Skeletons I need to kill them first maybe, but considering the defending strenght we can safely assume that after my 20 completely unharmed axes have killed your skeletons there will be enough left to kill some of your adepts. Don't even have to be that many, just 5 or so will suffice that in the next turn you'll even have worse odds. And they'll go down from there, especially with the defender having much shorter-supply lines. And that does not even take into account to give up a frontline-city and move back to have 5 more turns to reinforce while you either have to move on or sit around and wait for reinforcements. And some point there, even if you finally would win the war, you'd already have invested more than you'd win.
Imo you really "win" with your skeleton summon-army only if you have considerably more adepts than there are defenders. But in that case you'd win with other troops as well. Though I agree that having a disposable unit to throw away which you don't care about is helpful in those cases. I'd probably still prefer catapults instead.
And of course, that still leaves the question: Why Sheaim? Balseraphs do the whole "summoning"-business much better.
Thing is, Death mana early is always cool :P, The tactic is primarily shooting your skeleton army on a stack THEN resummoning them and attacking next turn, repeat. I have yet to lose with this strategy and Q can speak about its power. Also, you can never run out of skeletons xD getting attacked by 5 skeletons per turn or more + the pyre zombies is quite powerfull dont you think? Espically when those skeletons come back.
(March 11th, 2013, 14:16)flugauto Wrote: Skeletons get Empower promotions, get experience, can get Enchanged blade and other spell effects, can be resummoned each turn so it is not an adept and a skeleton vs 2 axes, it is an adept and infinit skeletons vs 2 axes.
The last part here is wrong. Each adept can only have one skeleton at a time (at least in EitB-in FFH, Keeylen's adepts can have more). Edit: I may have misinterpreted you.
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1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
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40 axes cost 40 upkeep so they have to attack to be effective against 20 adepts.
Why Sheaim? Sheaim start with death mana, so they can get free death1 with only 1 death node. And adepts and summoning isn't for all the Sheaim leaders, it is for Tebrin. Arcane adepts get alot of bonuses over normal adepts, so Balseraph have to get luck with Perpy being Arcane or wait with Kyleen gaining experience.
Edit.
(March 11th, 2013, 15:24)Merovech Wrote:
(March 11th, 2013, 14:16)flugauto Wrote: Skeletons get Empower promotions, get experience, can get Enchanged blade and other spell effects, can be resummoned each turn so it is not an adept and a skeleton vs 2 axes, it is an adept and infinit skeletons vs 2 axes.
The last part here is wrong. Each adept can only have one skeleton at a time (at least in EitB-in FFH, Keeylen's adepts can have more). Edit: I may have misinterpreted you.
1 skeleton per adept, but resummonable, so infinite.
Well, tbh, no 5 Skeletons don't scare me at all. If you had said 50 I would think differently, but 5? But apart from that, I had actually forgotten that you need to get Necromancy as well first for Death1. God, that takes ages. And if you get BW for Pyre Zombies as well even longer.
Sorry I don't want to be mean, but I still don't see how you win with that approach. CoE does need less tech to get to the point where they can produce 4 Axes for every one Adept you produce. Four! Yes, they need a Warren, but that thing already pays back with the next settler + worker produced which in turn helps to get another city for more production so in the end you have the same costs just to keep up in expansion and therefore production with them. Or Hippus. They will have long before HM with an incredible movement-range. Your opponent won't be able to defend properly if you have enough of those, simply because they can hit on too many points at the same time. Amurites will have LBs with Fireballs, killing your Skeletons and Adepts before you reach them. Balseraph just outsummon you.
(March 11th, 2013, 14:54)Serdoa Wrote: Imo you really "win" with your skeleton summon-army only if you have considerably more adepts than there are defenders. But in that case you'd win with other troops as well. Though I agree that having a disposable unit to throw away which you don't care about is helpful in those cases. I'd probably still prefer catapults instead.
Generally agreed. The main exception is if a war can be stretched out, to be not 20 skeletons vs 40 axes, but 40 axes vs 20 skeletons every turn for 5-10 turns. XP and healing would eventually get swamped by the numbers and bad RNG rolls. I think skeletons are better on the defense therefore, where your culture and roads let you have that attrition.
Or, maybe, in a committed rush, 5 adepts might be able to conquer an unprepared empire where 10 axes couldn't, because they don't have to worry about attrition to garrisons. Although I wouldn't want to actually try that, now that I describe it, it's a very risky strategy if your opponent has anything at all.
But really I agree with you Serdoa, I wouldn't expect skeletons to win me a game, I'd expect them to be a useful stopgap while my adepts collect the XP they need and to win the game with Mage spells. And even there, summoners need to control the pace of the war to win. In a strict stack vs stack fight between prepared opponents, you'd better not only be using skeletons. And even if you do control the pace of the war, skeletons might not be the best way to exploit that.
Quote:And of course, that still leaves the question: Why Sheaim? Balseraphs do the whole "summoning"-business much better.
Yeah . And so do Amurites, and Illians, and you could make a case for Clan, and...
Well, Sheaim have better mana than most, so maybe if you're rushing with skeletons they'd be better since you'd only need KotE, not also Necromancy. Or on a very custom map, like Mist makes, where it's difficult to get the mana types you want until late game.
@flugauto:
20 adepts + 20 skeletons also cost 40 upkeep . And infinite skeletons is only possible if you control the battle. But you can't really do that with just skeletons, against a smart prepared enemy. I'm sure it works against the AI, because the AI is passive.
![[Image: CmQTvVS.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/CmQTvVS.jpg)
. And so do Amurites, and Illians, and you could make a case for Clan, and...