See my comment about your own prayer. Your lack of uncommons isn't the issue. Its the super power of blur + endurance + prater.
|
Test games played
|
|
There are no spells in the game left that can remove combat global enchantments. Dispelling Wave used to be able to but as part of sorcery balancing it was removed. I don't have sorcery books anyway.
Quote:Its the super power of blur + endurance + prater. Pretty much every realm has answers to that, if you pick a decent amount of books. Life can do the same to be even. Sorcery can dispel the unit buffs well or ignore the armor altogether through illusion units. Nature can use Crack's Call or Petrify Chaos can use Lightning Bolt to hurt the unit - expensive but 2-3 shots should probably kill it. They also have Flame Blade+Blazing March+Mystic Surge to overcome the armor if needed, or can create a doom staff or bow for their ranged heroes. At rare, they can easily deal with it through doom bolt, doom bat, etc. Death can possess any of the halberdiers not blessed and use those to kill it. They can also use Blood Lust to double their damage output and that way the Hammerhands can easily kill the unit. Every realm has at least 2 ways to deal with it, so playing dual realms, your chance to have no way to deal with it is minimal, unless you play insufficient amounts of books.
How would life deal with it? I've just explained that even with prayer you wouldn't expect to kill the halberdier.
Nature could, but cracks call and petrify would not be on my guaranteed list any day. So its totally reasonable for them to not have an answer. Chaos can. Sorcery.. Can't. They van dispelling wave, but against one unit that's no bette r than disoel magic, which you could, but justifiably won't. They're illusion damage won't do enough to beat it due to blur, without costing as much as your dispel magic cost. Death can possess - oh bless. No. They can bloodlust, if they don't mind building 3or 4 hamnerhands for every halberdier due to no healing. Again, justifiably won't. Quote:How would life deal with it? I've just explained that even with prayer you wouldn't expect to kill the halberdier. Maybe not in a single turn but they'll do enough damage that Healing can't save them from going down in 2 turns, and the added +To Def on my hammerhand will make sure they survive to do it. It makes enough difference that I can at least use tactics that wouldn't help at all otherwise, such as destroying the wall to reduce their bonus by 2. Quote:would not be on my guaranteed list any day. Neither mine but with 5+5 or more books, the chance of getting one of 4 different spells (2 per realm) is very very high. At least high enough to consider that strategy reliable. (also, while the nature spells aren't, some of the others are and we are discussing dual realms so you can have Prayer with N+L or Phantom Beast/Dispelling Wave/AEther Binding with N+S etc.) Quote:Sorcery.. Can't. They van dispelling wave, but against one I might not lose the battle if it was one unit actually, but it's two, which ensures my front row hammernhands die so quickly I can't concentrate more than 3 of them hitting once a turn each. If some survived, I could use those to hit twice next turn which matters. Not that it matters, Phantom Beast and even Warrior says that halberdier is dead cuz they have 0 armor  Yes, blur does reduce it by 25% so what, instead of 3, I need 4 warriors? That's still only 60 Mp while removing spell lock costs ~150 and then there is endurance afterward. I can also have AEther Binding so my dispelling becomes twice as effective. Quote:They can bloodlust, if they don't mind building 3or 4 hamnerhands for every halberdier due to no healing. Considering my current position, I could afford that, but I don't think I would need more than 2. But let's see, instead of 9.75 I'd do 19.5 swords against 15 shields. That's 4.5 extra swords at +2 to hit, 13.5 damage per attack, so two attacks kills the halberdier. I wouldn't even spend three whole hammerhands to beat the 2 halberdiers. And I only specifically need this against heavy buffs. Quote:Death can possess - oh bless. No You pick the one(s) that do not have bless and use them to hit the ones that do. Sure, if the entire stack has every buff then you can't but that's quite unlikely. This tactic might be a bit less reliable now that the AI has a fairly high priority to use bless but I'd expect at least a few units without it to show up. Also, not every unit has a high base resistance - you can possess through a bless against some races and units, especially though a black prayer. The halberdiers in question had 10 resistance - with BP, that's a 30% chance to possess through bless and a success kills two units by making them fight each other (if they aren't evenly buffed, and you can hit the best one, you might even kill 3-4), although if they have both Resist Magic and bless you are out of luck. (actually if they have RM, Petrify also won't work.) So I admit, Death and Nature are not as good as the other 3, but they at least have something.
October 30th, 2017, 17:48
(This post was last modified: October 30th, 2017, 17:50 by Nelphine.)
I disagree that life works.
And even if youre comoletely right about what works, considering all of this requires very specific spells - when I don't think anywhere we've EVER stated certain spells are absolutely required. If I wanted astral gate and stream of life, nope prayer is required. I want warp nope and famine - nope. 2 commons and a single uncommon should not require this much work. I firmly believe this is a blur problem, and to a lesser extent, the longstanding +2 to defend life problem.
I'll think about playing this game further or not tomorrow morning. Not a fan of abandoning a game where I'm not even far behind others to be honest but having such a poor selection of spells is just sad. Maybe I'll try some nodes and see where the leads, either the AI outgrows me or I find something that wins...if I had a powerful artifact for that Monk hero, I could use it to obliterate the halberdiers...
Until then, the conclusions for the time being -Draconians are overpowered. Their easy access to intercontinental settlers, paired with easy doomstack generation which leads to treasure advantage, then power from population and extra defense on units is too much in one package, especially on a race that can also do sprite tactics with their bowmen AND have powerful late game economy and units (Doom Drakes are a monster - they are fast, hit hard and have fear!) . How to nerf them is something we need to think about. We might actually need to do more than just removing power or armor. They are like lizardmen were pre-nerf - too much of the good stuff on one race. -Hammerhands seem to be about right with the current 4 health and reduced cost of 140/4 but an additional health should still be considered. I've only used adamant, elite versions of them afterall, and it should be good even if not having all that. -Golems are fine as they are. They spectacularly failed to be game changers in almost every battle where I used them, even against the 7 magicians 2 shadow demon city controlled by the death/chaos wizard. They had no way to kill the shadow demons and actually took serious losses from mystic surged shadow demons in melee due to the partial armor piercing effect. -Myrran should cost 1 pick in one way or another. Not that I'm happy with this conclusion but I have to face reality, a system designed for 12 picks can't work with only 10. -Sorcery is still very powerful, and frustrating to play against. This is the second game I'm abandoning because I don't expect to be able to beat a Sorcery+Life wizard even before actually losing the game. -Which is ironic as that used to be the easiest wizard to beat. The AI got really good at playing these realms, nice to see that. -Expert difficulty might be too high considering I'm actually surrendering games on it where I seriously tried to win. However both games were affected by a lot of external factors which were against me so this is far from conclusive. (October 31st, 2017, 04:20)Arnuz Wrote: 1 golem to destroy the wall and retreat and some steam tanks should beat those. Why are you going in melee against immovable super buffed tanks? The AI knows to come out and attack if I use ranged armies. Maybe if I only used a single cannon or two, but I don't think that many can kill the unit. Nonetheless, a cannon only has ~15 attack strength, not much better than the 13 of hammerhands but only a single figure. I don't think it can actually kill it but worth a try. One more thing to add to conclusions : -Due to the AI improvements, I didn't get the chance to clear any easy/medium lairs. Getting 2-3 spells from those in the early game used to be normal, but now AI Nagas clear them out before I can have my first army built. At best I can hope to grab 1-2 lairs on my starting continent. This massive drop in spells, combined with smarter AI trading and the new spellbook system that offers fewer spells in early books results in 4 book wizards being massively weaker than before - you actually have significantly fewer common and uncommon spells to work with. (October 31st, 2017, 04:30)Seravy Wrote:(October 31st, 2017, 04:20)Arnuz Wrote: 1 golem to destroy the wall and retreat and some steam tanks should beat those. Why are you going in melee against immovable super buffed tanks? It's almost as if there's an overabundance of roaming stacks by t40 for AI cheating bonus - who knew! 
|
