Continuing the game.
Halflings have proven themselves to be absolutely bottom tier. After from all the troubles I went though to have some slingers (with buffs or otherwise), Fire Storm said "no". Even with Bless they'd take severe damage and without they outright die - but any other Halfling unit suffers the same fate.
So now I'm using Catapults for self defense.
Fortunately, the Jackal Riders keep my army strength fairly high, so despite the 3 way AI alliance, I can get peace treaties with the weaker two every once in a while.
That said, I'm obviously not doing well. 1413, the AI already have their first rares. I'll have Altar of Battle soon so same here, but I have a research advantage in my race and have a fairly good empire. So compared to that, it's not a good result. I've conquered 3 cities from the Chaos/Death wizard who is the strongest, and plan to continue doing so, as Jackal Riders and buffs allow.
Speaking of buffs. I had to check for Runemaster twice in the game code because all my stuff keeps getting dispelled, but I couldn't find any bugs. Bad luck? But this much?
A 50 cost spell with Runemaster should resist at 125, which should be 50/175=28% chance to dispel at max strength. Yeah on each dispel I lose one, often even two spells.
Did anyone had problems with resisting dispels?
(the enemy does not have AEther Binding nor Runemaster)
I honestly haven't seen a lot of dispelling lately. I avoid mass buffs now because it's annoying, and use buffs against neutrals or only on super important battles.
Buffed swordsmen should barely be hurt by firestorm. But getting that many buffs out would be mostly impossible for garrisons. Ive never used many buffs for defense. Offense offense.
btw I realized meanwhile I did not get Holy Armor this game. Only Endurance.
Yes, I'm only using buffs for offense. But I do need SOMETHING to defend my cities from the hordes of lizardmen, gnolls and flying whatever coming my way. And that something constantly dies to Fire Storms.
Offense is very sluggish - buffs are expensive and even my buffed units die plus I need to garrison the conquered cities. Yes, a buffed Jackal Rider is a godlike unit...until it runs into 8 chimeras backed by a wizard who has Blazing March and Lighting Bolt. (ok, I'm not sure those are all the same wizard, maybe the Blazing March was the other wizard)
I've conquered 3 cities so far from yellow, and lost one on my home continent to blue (yellow firestormed it like 5 times this game as it was my first slinger production center).
My home continent (including the small island part) has 11 cities - that needs significant forces for defense.
Oh btw I think I'm the only wizard in the game with Life books.
Satori is Nature/Sorcery as always, Patchouli is Chaos/Nature as always, and Suika is Death/Chaos which is unusual and gives me the impression that the Myrran wizard will be Flandre with Death/Chaos, and having seen no globlas yet from there confirms it.
Playing a 3 way war with Halflings is ultra-frustrating, even though I'm not actually losing the game (yet).
yeah, halflings aren't designed for long term military. and getting both heroism and holy armor is very important, to maximize lucky. i find they're VERY strong as the basis for a conjuror wizard (that was the death game i went straight to death knights. however, research change etc, means that may not be possible anymore)
Started a 8death/3sorc + omniscient with Gnolls. 'good' power, fair land size, 3 wizards
Goals:
*Resist magic chosen for my death summons and mid to upper tier gnolls
*Focus Magic ghouls for early victories, then focus magic shadow demons and wraiths.
*High production for sage guilds and amplifying towers, because I'm not too confident in my gold.
Started in a good tile but very mediocre locations for my 2 settlers in a fairly small island and borderline 0% terrain prod bonus, bad for omniscient!. There was a klackon town with halberdiers I defeated in 2 turns (not good for raising undead) with ghouls and swordsmen and the right spells. The spot was used for a settler of mine .. but I almost lost it to a floating island w/settler from a wizard that randomly declared war on me. A trireme took care of this.
Got a couple of lairs associated with phantoms, gargoyles, and war bears and got some gold/mana bonuses and a decent wand. This was essential because I was economically hurting so bad I sometimes couldn't cast spells.
Got another trireme and found a good island for 2 settlers. A 2nd AI unfortunately beat me to a spot, so I traded a good spell I now regret (why did I give resist magic! whyyyy?) and just declared war and took the spot for myself. With an undead gargoyle and 2 undead war bears, I can hold my own on that island, while the main island is starting to crank out 0xp wolf raiders and recently researched lycanthropy (no mithril tho).
Despite having aggressive tendencies, cracking 4 easy lairs, and having 6 towns in 1404, i'm scored lowest 'expert' and being at war against 2 does not fare well (nagas going my way). I still think I picked the right wizard, not so sure about race but resist-magic wolves are gonna be a life saver against those nagas.
Goal for next couple of years: get a handful of resist-magic wolf raiders and halberdiers to hold down. Get a couple of sage guilds and slowing research 'shadow demons'. Once done, a couple of resist-magic focus-magic shadow demons would be hard to stop.
Now here's a possible major bug:
*I chose 3 wizards, all 3 are in arcanus.
*Arcanus is surprisingly small-looking
*I did a quick 'rvl' cheat without trying to memorize anything. Arcanus does look really small with just a bunch of islands, myrran looks bigger with continents.
*I was expecting a myrran enemy. It seems like the ratio of land applies backwards?
Aug 1414.
716 combat casting skill
9165 skill power production per turn (~6 skill points per turn)
997 research per turn (I'm not finished building sage's guilds yet)
0 mana per turn (alchemy, even the crappy non-retort kind!)
3455 gold per turn (I'm not finished building merchant's guilds yet)
I don't have any cities on Arcanus (13 dwarf cities, 3 trolls, 2 draconian, 24 beastmen - all with heavenly light and inspirations and uranus' blessing. about 8 have stream of life. Also found/cast aether binding, and researched/cast life force.), but I do have 10 arcanus nodes (as well as all 13 myrror nodes).
My test of casting skill is concluded.
Pushing casting skill into the stratosphere is still alive and kicking.
Note, I wouldn't expect anyone to get anywhere CLOSE to this high normally - rich wet dwarves (abusing adamantium steam cannons for all early combat), max power, all retorts designed for maximum skill/power production (4 sorcery/1 chaos/2 life, omniscient, cult leader, myrran, astrologer, archmage. Found: 3 nature, 1 death, 2 life, 2 chaos.). My sole point was to see what could be done. And, to top it all off, my capital city started with 3 gold mines, orihilacron, wild game, a gem, and mithril. My first settler had 2 adamantium, 2 gold, and a wild game. The starting was absolutely insane, even for rich starts.
Note: With the change to very rare treasure, omniscient is (very marginally) a better pick. I don't think we need to do anything about it, as its random what you'll get, but just thought I'd mention it.
Second game (started with; 2 sorcery/2 death/2 life, channeler, spellweaver, conjuror, myrran (dwarf); found: 2 sorcery, 3 death, 3 life, tactician, specialist (sorcery)).
Jan 1413:
7123 Power Production (+2492 research + 192 skill) not finished wizards guilds/religious buildings
778 combat casting skill (1271 overland casting skill) not finished amplifying towers
2528 gold production not finished banks/merchant's guilds/colosseums
This game I had a dark elf opponent, so my secondary cities are all dark elves (5 dwarf cities, 2 draconian cities, 1 troll city, 2 high men cities, 44 dark elf cities); I have 28 of the nodes (I'm missing 2 arcanus ones that guardian spirits are floating towards). I have heavenly light/altar of peace (i'm at war with all remaining wizards though)/uranus' blessing (not on dwarves)/stream of life/inspirations/dark rituals in all my cities, and flying fortress to prevent earthquakes in all my arcanus cities). I've cast aether binding/enlightenment/life force.
My PEACEFUL opponent is casting 4 dispelling waves per turn. Very annoying. So I'm keeping his aether binding disjunctioned, and keeping spell lock (+8 other buffs) on my main stack - Beastmaster + Undead Angel + Airship + 6 Ghouls. I can reliably raise dead every non hero unit my opponents field, including gorgons. Watching Ghouls go toe to toe with Gorgons and win is amusing, but 9 buffs make that ghoul worth over 1000 mana... except there are 3 divine orders in play, so it's 'only' about 600 mana per ghoul.)
A bit more time with it and Runemaster definitely is working against Dispel - I just had bad luck in the first few battles.
Zitro, your save isn't attached.
Changelog says we decided to make it at least zero Myrran wizards for 3 opponents and human on Arcanus.
I checked and I see no bug in the code - it does say "exactly 1" wizard for one of the planes to shrink that plane and grow the other (which must have 3 or more wizards).
Are you sure the total land size is different? Whether the land is scattered as islands or few larger continents doesn't matter, as long as the total land tiles are the same.
Note that lake prevention does add extra tiles - if a large circle shaped continent is generated with a lot of sea in the middle, which gets filled up, that can result in more land for that map. However at Fair land size I don't think this would result in more than a few or maybe 10-20 extra tiles.
Meanwhile I continued my game as well - conquered yellow's entire continent. Buffed Jackal Riders work well, so buffing isn't bad - as long as I stay away from buffing halfling units, it works. Flandre showed up halfway during this and attacking her from behind, so she got one city from the continent, I got the rest. Suika likely has some island somewhere because she managed to return. Flandre only has one Chaos book but 7 Death which is unexpected.
Graphs show Flandre is like 3.5 times as powerful as me, I mostly saw Mammoths and dwarf units, which explains the army strength, but not the magic power. I strongly suspect this difficulty should NOT use the myrran rapid expansion tactic. She cast Eternal Night which actually helped my Jackals - but not so much my power income. At this stage of the game, having an income of ~300 is horrible, but half my empire is Gnolls so what can I do...well, I found Armageddon which should fix that. I also found Charismatic and Archmage, furthermore my doomstack banished the strongest Arcanus wizard, and I allied with the Myrran. So she'll likely let me get away with the Armageddon covering her plane with volcanoes, leading me to victory by the time - if ever - the Alliance breaks. With Charismatic, maintaining Armageddon without other bad globals should be easy.
Now researching Hydra - a stack of those should help cleaning out any remaining lairs albeit not much is left for me by now. Not sure what I'll do about that strong Arcanus wizard though - aside from the doomstack which will need to garrison the capital I don't have much for offense, and the map is full of their units so I expect tomorrow to start with a very long defensive turn of many battles.
At this point I'd say Halflings are bottom tier - but only in military which they are meant to be. How much having a stable high research income and good overall economy (and racial modifiers) help is harder to measure but it certainly is the main feature of the race. Overall, I feel it's still the intended "conquer and make units elsewhere, or make peace and farm research from your halflings" gameplay, but I have to say this makes the race the hardest one to play as it's often really hard to judge which of the two you need to go for, plus deciding on where to build units is anything but trivial (and halfling units feel like newbie bait to me - the buffed halfling strategy isn't any worse than before if you just look at the buffed unit itself, the problem is the AI is a lot better at countering it. Aside from the obvious dispelling which does not apply in my game, all sorts of missile denial, resist or die that bypasses death, fire storm, are all hard counters and unlike the vanilla game, the AI can and does use them now. Also there is no Lucky bug since insecticide. I guess it would still beat other Life wizards, pure Nature and Death but Chaos or Sorcery kill it.)
I'd consider Halflings Arcanus top tier. For military purposes they get the best Magicians on Arcanus and Catapults. I don't usually use any other military units, even on other races.
