Maybe rgp is trying it on high difficulties? Then the AI resource advantage counters nature's cheapness.
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NATURE Realm
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Yea, nature's thing is strong and/or numerous but weak in resistance. But you can totally make a build that counters the low resistance with sorcery.
The way pure nature would counter the low resistance is keep spamming more units. 10 nature, conjurer, specialist has summons at about 60% of base cost. 8 nature, conjurer, specialist, spellweaver can summon even more. So the pure nature has 2 bears/spiders/cockatrice for the same price the sorcery/nature has one buffed with resist magic. For some cases having 4 with resist magic could be better than having 8 without, especially if you end up fighting a lot of small battles where the resist group wins without losses but the full stack often loses 1-2 to black sleep. But don't fight small battles with your strongest stack, rather go straight to the biggest enemy city you can take, or counter their doomstack. Nature is quite strong at early treasure, so you can buy a armorer/wizard g/fantastic s (but paladins depends) before a mixed-realm wizard has researched all commons (at least on Master difficulty, never tried lunatic). You can use this to set up defenses (magicians) behind your big stack of summons. Of the situation you describe, they seem to have had a lot of ghouls to kill your "junk" at range? Otherwise, with mud, your fortress lightning should have easily chewed them? My games (the ones I win) somehow seem to go that I take over Arcanus, often leaving one ally behind, before or just as I have researched the first rare. And enter the mop-up phase (Myrran wizard broken, i.e. lost most key cities) before researching the first very rare. 
No realm can out summon Death. This is compounded by the issue with AI and strategic combat, because AI Death Wizards can take high encounters with Ghouls and walk out with armies of powerful units. Yes, you can put 2 into Sorcery to get Resist Magic, that's true (which is the best way to play Nature), I'm just saying that no other realm has this type of problem to begin with and having to put two into another school just to be viable basically means that Nature is the only realm that has no viable pure realm strategy.
Can you play pure Nature and win? Sure, of course, but only if you don't end up going up against an aggressive Death or possibly even Sorcery Wizard early on.
Summon. War bears. Win.
I've won lunatic with pure nature, and I faced both death and sorcery early. (And taking chaos is far stronger than taking sorcery. And even if you take sorcery, resist magic is the third choice of spell to take, so I wouldn't choose it unless I was taking 4 sorcery books).
May 18th, 2018, 03:14
(This post was last modified: May 18th, 2018, 03:24 by teelaurila.)
The player as death can take far better advantage of undeadifying high-level lair monsters than the AI. In my just-finished death/sorcery game, I cracked 2 towers (I think around 1406) by using ghouls to get an undead chaos spawn and that undead chaos spawn single-handedly cleared 2 towers full of wraiths.
Death is strong in combat casting against nature. Larger the battle the weaker the combat casting. So as nature against death, build full stacks to attack their cities. Defend yours with ranged attackers (magicians) and walls. Ignore their roaming smaller stacks. Call catapult should help your bears and spiders to roll into walled cities. While I'm not sure Nelphine beating it is a good measuring stick for game balane, I am intrigued by what is that chaos/nature combo specifically? (the dwarves volcano/transmute I know, but on arcanus?)
Chaos omniscient gets more power, if you have any plans to have significant city power. Dwarves are the best for this, but even just playing rich/dry on arcanus
can make this work due to starting with 2 settlers. Anything that lets you get more power super early to get your first and second stacks of 9 war bears faster. I'm trying the pure chaos version of this again, with chimeras, and I've got a maniacal chaos and a maniacal death sorcery as my first 2 opponents. Chimera take too long to get a full stack before war though, so I've had to give up 2 cities just to get going. But now I've got 7 chimera heading to my opponents fortress, and between that, constantly smoking more chimera, and dispel magic, I should have the whole plane conquered now. Nature gets going much much faster (the research cost of chimera is worth, what, almost 5 stacks of war bears? And I had chimeras researched and 2 summoned before war was allowed. Of course, bring on arcanus would mean no dwarf bonus, and less minerals, plus less chaos books. So, on arcsnus you'd only be looking at 2 stacks of war bears, not 5). Edit: chaos game got slowed down immensely. My opponent was beastman, and his capital had: gold, coal, adamtium, mithdil, orihilacron, and a blue crystal. He also had life books (Sss'ra, 9 chaos, 4 life), so his army strength was absolutely disgusting (mass common buffs everywhere), as well as him having a phenomenally fast start. And trying to beat beastmen units like that with chimera was just too costly. Still, I'm winning, but it's taking forever. The other myrran AI got killed as a side effort of our war - we both were so far ahead of that wizard that we would literally just swat him without taking damage any time we saw his cities.
Playing a 10 nature conjuror specialist high men lunatic 4 wizard game now. Playing on dry poor to give myself the worst start possible. Will post how it goes.
First enemy: Freya, 10 nature, specialist, conjuror, 2 chaos. My twin! Peaceful pragmatist, so with my innate relation and some spell trading I should be able to avoid war. Second enemy: Sharee, 4 chaos, 5 life, 5 death. Never seen that combo before. Maniacal militaristic. This will be Bad. Also has the highest power production and overall. Probably going to kill me. Poor start is super slow. But I've got 9 war bears (lost another 3 taking neutrals/lairs) in early 1402. But can't research new spells and summon, not enough power. Boo. I'm expecting to be overwhelmed by Sharee, although I should be able to fight off the first few stacks, but any city curses will destroy me.
Like I said, it's really only an issue if you go against Death or to a lesser degree Sorcery, early on.
I think to clarify, my statement was simply that Nature would benefit more from 9 resist on Cockatrices than Spiders and the reply was that putting 9 resist on Cockatrices instead of Spiders would be overpowered. I disagree with that.
ok, so if we ignore my whole argument about how to win with nature, and specifically look at cockatrices, if we give cockatrices resist 9, then how will non chaos defeat focus magic cockatrices?
Right now, ranged only beat them if they have high resist and very strong attacks; melee only beat them if they have very high resist; direct damage magic can beat them if the units are high resist, and resist or die spells can beat them if the units have high resist. With the change, then resist or die spells get removed from that list, which leaves chaos or naturally very high resist units only (high elf magicians or warlocks being the best, but chaos with dwarves or nomads could too).
I'd say strong ranged damage beats cockatrices regardless of unit resistance (they only move 3, they won't reach unless you have like a 9 stack which is a waste to use against such enemy). However, that's only really true until you put resist elements or guardian wind, or something similar on them, past that, ranged becomes ineffective.
Direct damage is quite ineffective to begin with - at this phase of the game the enemy will at best, cast 2 uncommon direct damage spells. That maybe kills one unit of cockatrices but the army can easily have several. At best it'll slow down your advances but won't stop it. So resistance spells are the only reliable way to kill cockatrices, unless you can be 100% sure the enemy does not have a way to protect them from your ranged attack - in other words you are the human player - the AI cannot plan which type of stack meets which one in combat, it only looks at total strengths. But my main problem here is not even the cockatrices themselves. Nerfing Giant Spiders would be bad as they are a much more important unit for a Nature wizard. Even if the cockatrices were 9 resistance, I'd still use Spiders but they'd be a lot weaker so overall the realm would be worse. Cockatrices are situational to begin with - if the enemy army doesn't have low figure count, strong, units, the cockatrices won't do much for you. A decent high level haberdier army tears several of them apart while being much less value. Likewise, having two 9 resistance uncommons in Nature would be even less acceptable - that would make Nature uncummons the most resistant when it's supposed to be the "weak" point of the realm. Either way, I think I'm going to ignore this until you actually bother to watch my posted and linked game where I played Nature and two of my early enemies had Death books, and at least comment on why you think I'm... not winning the game I won? idk how that's possible but that's what you were claiming, that Nature cannot win. (I also encourage you to look at my previous videos from the past 1-2 years, find the ones where I play Nature if there are any, and watch them.) I believe the core misunderstanding here is that you ignore the spiders as the solution and push for the cockatrices which would be in all ways inferior - slower to research, slower to summon, slower on the map, and ineffective against high figure count enemies (or certain types of ranged attacks). |
