NATURE Realm

[Nelphine]

I think I may have to reverse a stance I've previously taken.

I took one archangel with endurance into a nature lair (not node). The lair had 2 colossus and 7 earth elementals.

I cast prayer via the archangel, and as a wizard, I cast invulnerability and 8 healing.

I won the battle.

I feel like that isn't overly balanced. My archangel effectively had twice as much health (which actually isn't bad; that's worse than having 2 archangels) due to the common spell, but between the inherent armor, endurance, prayer, and invulnerability, multiple colossus simply weren't a threat. The earth elementals did so little damage that despite using up all my healing fighting the 2 colossus, 7 earth elementals couldn't do 20 damage to the archangel.

I think part of it is that life defensive magic stacks too high; and part of it is that earth elementals don't have a large enough damage output (given their atrocious defenses, particularly movement.)

I'm not sure what to do about life, but we might want to consider dropping +1 to defend from prayer (even on an average 8 armor unit, that's better than giving the unit an extra 2 armor) and replacing it with +2 armor (reminiscient of survival instinct). This would also make high prayer a much bigger jump for high end units over prayer (which I've discussed elsewhere I consider a problem).

Earth elementals could use an extra +1 to hit.

[Seravy]

Earth Elementals are great, I use them plenty of times. It's a combat summon, it's not something meant to compete with buffed archangels. It's not a threat when it's not used as a combat summon, just like phantom warriors or beasts aren't.

I don't really see why you think you shouldn't win that.
As you say, you effectively had two archangels against two colossus. (let's ignore earth elementals, they can't attack a flying creature. You can fight them whenever you feel it's safe, they aren't a threat. And they definitely don't have an attack rating designed to fight defensively buffed very rares.)
But yours had a wizard and buffs, the enemy didn't. So you win.

Where is the problem?

[Nelphine]

Because despite wizard combat spells and buffs, the archangel is still far cheaper than 2 colossus + 7 earth elementals.

For instance, if that had actually been a wizard on wizard combat, its completely reasonable that 1 archangel + endurance would attack 2 colossus. Assume the nature wizard doesn't have ice bolt (only playing 6 or 7 books) or call lightning. I would personally have thought 'hey I'll summon earth elementals, they'll kill the archangel if it tries to stick around to fight'. Particularly relevant if the colossus also had regenerate (note my archangel massively overkilled each colossus; the second last attack had the colossus in each case down to around 3-5 health, so regeneration would not have changed the result of the combat; and the colossus already both used up their full ammo on the archangel). And 7 earth elementals costs WAY more than invulnerability + 8 healing (which was my entire combat casting skill).

So, under the assumption that the nature wizard is a mono nature wizard, and starts the battle with 2 colossus, and does NOT know either ice bolt or call lightning, what should the nature wizard (who has whatever skill you want to give him, up to a maximum of 7 earth elementals) do? About the only other thing I can think of is that the nature wizard could.. web the archangel, earth to mud, and.. hope that he can surround the archangel with earth elementals?

Alternatively, you could give the nature wizard ice bolt, but then I think it would be fine to limit him to my casting skill. (Due to divine order, that means a combat casting skill of ~135, although I won't apply divine order to his own ice bolt cost.) So 5 ice bolts. I think those 5 ice bolts would in fact do less damage than the 7 earth elementals.

[Nelphine]

Hmm. I suppose a mono nature wizard would probably have survival instinct as well. That might be enough by itself actually. That gives them a spell at each of uncommon, rare, and very rare, that probably would have let them win. (Although Ice Bolt would require more than 5 casts.)

[Seravy]

A nature wizard uses Crack's Call against an invulnerable, buffed very rare creature. You can get at least 3 hits = 63 damage from the price of those elementals. And that damage is irrecoverable too (albeit Life has a way to heal even that). An archangel with the listed buffs is about as good as a creature with 28 shields. Earth Elementals or Ice Bolts don't have high enough attack power to deal a relevant amount of damage to it.

I was considering to mention now that very rares aren't that expensive anymore (you can expect to summon one every second turn) and battles end quickly (usually takes two battles to get one successful crack's call hit against me because I win on turn 2-3), and even web is needed, plus it can be countered by wraithform (or dispelling webs), it might make more sense if Crack's Call was instant KO again, to all nonhero units. (heroes would still take 21 damage).
I'm unsure what made me decide not to post that.
Oh, I remember. It would be far too easy to abuse against the AI. I still remember that last game where I cleared the enemy fortress out by multiple attacks. I had to dispel iron skin and invulnerability from the wyrms, and use earth elementals to kill them. With Crack's Call being instant KO, I could have been twice as efficient at doing that (not that earth elementals weren't enough but only because I prepared 6 full stacks of units to let me spam 25 turns of spells like 10 times in a row.)

[Nelphine]

Huh. I never keep enough mana for that kind of thing. I regularly roam this part of the game with less than 3000 mana, although I save up more for the first turns of a war (15000 usually).

I didn't consider web + cracks call. yes that could work. But that's also even more expensive than the ice bolts. Given it would need at least 1, maybe 2 successful cracks calls, thats a lot of casting skill.

[Nelphine]

Whoa, overland human controlled phantom beasts! Does that mean I can get overland nature fantastic catapults too?

[Seravy]

No, those kinds of "summons" are explicitly disabled. They are turned fantastic through the combat spell itself, otherwise they'd be normal catapults...

[Nelphine]

Oh. Then why allow fairy ring to summon phantom beasts? Seems a bit strange to me. Particularly since the biggest strength of phantom beasts is that they are summoned wherever needed on the combat map; having to actually move them, well, it's awful.

[Seravy]

Phantom beast is a real unit. You can have them in lairs, nodes, or as rampaging monsters.
Nature catapult is not a real unit. It's a normal Catapult, hacked to have the type "Nature" on it for that combat. It doesn't appear in lairs, nodes or as rampaging monsters.

The cutoff is, if the overland unit type is fantastic, Fairy Ring can summon it. Otherwise it can't.