(March 13th, 2018, 21:35)Nelphine Wrote: a ton of chaos dont get firestorm. also, swordsmen don't give up and die to firestorm if they have heroism. chaos is usually fine to fight as well.
They don't need to actually die, if they are down to 1-2 figures when the enemy attacks the city, it's impossible to defend it. And they can't be used for offense either until they heal up. So either way they are out of action for the next 4-10 turns. (Albeit my stuff usually died, they weren't elites. Heroism is too expensive I mostly used Flame Blade and got levels from Armsmaster this game)
Checked the save files. I don't see a significant difference in total land tiles between the planes. Arcanus has 11 smallish continents, Myrror has 4 medium size and 4 smaller ones. Of course it's hard to tell the xact number of tiles by looking at the map but it looks obvious the +20/-20% modifier isn't applied, otherwise it'd be a much greater difference (imagine this Arcanus but with 4 fewer islands)
Meanwhile my game - I had a hard time defending myself against the wizard I banished, but the Myrran ally crushed them fairly quickly, so I won the war anyway and got most of their cities. With no one strong remaining, the last few cities of the other Arcanus wizards fell fast as well.
This left me alone with my Myrran ally. Having Hydra with Chaos Surge plus Archangel with Supreme Light, I'm 100% sure this is a win and won't even waste the 5 hours to play it out. I have Armageddon on to grow my power, Enlightement, Altar of Peace and Runemaster ensuring a quick Spell of Mastery. There is a 10% chance of Spell Blast though (1 Sorcery book) but even then I don't see how the AI can beat me if I have all the time in the universe to grow my power and summon unbeatable regenerating creature stacks.
Also I'm lazy to roll back the bug that made the AI spell bind the Aramgeddon without Spell Binding :D
Overall the Myrran wizard is still very powerful despite the changes - was at least as strong as everyone on Arcanus combined.
July 1406 with my 8 death/3sorcery/omniscient gnoll game with fairly small land.
skill 35, power base 65, roughly 3000 gold+mana total, 7 towns (none with fighter's guild yet), 2 nodes, and cracked about 5 lairs.
*My overall historian chart now bumped up to 3rd (of 4 wizards). I am last on power and research/skill, but I am first with military might (focus magic ghouls getting 5 gargoyles, plus some werewolves and wolf raiders kind of does it).
*Gnoll has military might, but the lack of magic market surely hurts.
*My 2 wizards at war were easy to get back to peace with after they had minor losses from my ghouls/werewolves and a few undead bears/nagas. After building farmer's market to most of my towns, I'm now going into sage guilds so that I can research shadow demons and get resist-magic focus magic shadow demons! (afraid that I got 2 sorcery AI - they may mess with my strategy)
*The weakest wizard seemed like it wanted to send me a doomstack (with a hero) via trireme but dumb enough to be close to my doomstack in a floating island. Attacked it! Probably the most game-turning event in my favor so far.
I would invest that gold to get jackals in the best town.
Also, if you can blunt their first attack, making peace only seems to make sense if you're at (or risking) 2-way war. Especially with a pure military-rush race like gnolls. And especially with death which allows to gain undead for further stomping on the enemy.
Finished that halfling game afterall, there were no surprises, the AI couldn't even touch the units in my fortress so easy SoM victory. It did much better than expected against my other cities though, lost 3 of them. Wasn't really expecting cities with a hydra and archangel to lose but I guess 2-3 demon lords with animate dead and other good units can do that. Or heroes, the AI had some pretty nice heroes.
I don't want to play Halflings for a while though after this one. I'll upload the recording tomorrow.
It wasn't entirely useless - I discovered some bugs including that the AI can't cast Disjunction in 5.2.
February 1408. Power 70 , Skill 46 ... but good research (102 per turn from buildings) .. 3rd of 4th place but closing in on 2nd place wizard.
My game became tricky with 2 wizards (including snowballing 1st place) declaring war together against me. They both casted 'aether binding' and 'divine order' which wrecks some of my strategies but helped on others (guardian wind against slingers, resist magic, werewolves became dirt cheap spells).
I guess I still didn't follow the advice of buying into armorer's guild as I find my gold is somewhat limited. I instead am mass-recruiting halberdiers and wolf riders. Most of my 'ghoul' victims like gargoyles are getting very damaged or dead but I'm mostly holding my own. I have lots of mid-tier normal units and werewolves.
