Sprites go first, and can often do enough damage to those ranged units that between that and the lightning, the ranged units can't finish the sprites off.
|
Caster of Magic Release thread : latest version 6.06!
|
That or anything with high resistance or stoning immunity. You only really need 2-3 of those and let them kill all the cockatrices, same works for spiders just replace with Poison Immunity. (you need other units to absorb hits from the lighting ofc)
Sprites aside from doing a lot of damage on the first turn, fly and try to avoid combat so they are really difficulty to kill before the lightnings kill your army. Of course Sprites have their own weaknesses too, Fire Storm for example, but that's at least quite expensive to research... But really the deciding factor is Spiders and Cockatrices are useful in the attacking army and will eat your capital in exchange if you aren't careful, while Sprites don't really do much on offense (assuming you had at least bothered to build a few bowmen) (August 5th, 2018, 17:34)Seravy Wrote: That or anything with high resistance or stoning immunity. You only really need 2-3 of those and let them kill all the cockatrices, same works for spiders just replace with Poison Immunity. (you need other units to absorb hits from the lighting ofc) Sprites are highly vulnerable to early rush units, such as war bears or wolf riders, provided I have a web spell, while killing cockatrices require ghouls or building a ranged unit.
Here is what I am talking about, from the Caster54Beta2:
https://anonfile.com/idVbH8f4ba/SAVE3.GAM The Dark Elf Nature Wizard has spent the whole game sending useless suicide squads of sprites to no affect. He just had his 9 sprite stack massacred. His home city has no walls when it should have had them long ago, and it is defended mostly by sprites instead of Warlocks, which he has. His mania for sprites has doomed him to early defeat. Screenshots are here: https://anonfile.com/QaWdH1f8bf/Caster54Beta2.7z
Let's see...
Warlocks definitely should be much higher garrison priority than sprites. Okay, difficulty seems to be...Expert, did I get that right? Date is 1408, that's pretty late for sprites, yes. Fortress has no ability to produce warlocks, it has no wizard's guild. The AI cannot do something as complex as sorting out units between cities ans dividing garrisons, unless all cities involved have an Earth Gate spell cast on them. Using normal movement would leave cities vulnerable for prolonged periods of time while the units reach their destination, and would likely fail entirely as a new unit becomes produced in the destination city, taking up the space. So units can only enter a city from the outside when the city is already missing units due to a previous attack (or the city being new). Basically, aside from this "refill", units can only replace others if they are produced in the city - either by the city itself, summoning there, or in the fortress, hiring heroes and mercenaries. Their capital has a fighter's guild, so they can build halberdiers, but those rank lower than sprites on garrison priority because they are weaker (even for dark elf but much more for other races). They also have stables to make cavalry which is again a worse defender than Sprites. They are Nature/Chaos. They have Spiders and Bears but I already explained those are worse defenders than sprites, not necessarily because they are actually worse defenders (they might be but I'm fine if we accept they are equal - sprites are harder to beat but when they do meet what they are weak against, they go down even faster than the other two) but because they are better attackers, so sending the sprites to attack and the spiders to defend would always be a worse choice. They don't have Great Lizards or Gargoyles yet - haven't even shown up for research in fact lizards won't be available to the wizard, so they can't summon those. These are the creatures in these two realms that can replace Sprites at uncommon. So they have no unit to realistically use other than sprites available. I believe adding a higher priority to build walls on the fortress is a good idea, I'm going to do that. Maybe even adding a special condition to always build a wizard's guild if Sprites are known could be helpful, but in this case it only works if the wizard plays a race that gets magicians or warlocks. So we need to make sure they only do it in that case. It's somewhat questionable though - magicians are only better than Sprites for a few specific races - I'd say Dark Elves and Trolls are better, the others are only equal. Higher damage output but no flight. Missile Immunity and Caster ability can be helpful though but not as often as Flight. So it wouldn't actually fix the problem for 80% of the cases. If we actually want to do something meaningful, we'd need to pick a unit for each race that does work and build up to those, but in many cases that would mean requiring the top tier building and I rather not force the AI into using those early. (Yes, pegasai replace sprites but we don't want all AI to send those to attack players in 1404, wouldn't be much fun or playable...) So overall, I still don't think anything meaningful can be done to the sprites problem - but we can force building walls, and it definitely should help. 
Difficulty was advanced, see the screenshots for the set up screen.
I still don't understand how sprites are better defenders or attackers than spiders or Dark Elf halberdiers. The ranged damage math for sprites fails to take into account that a 9 spider stack can web your whole stack and then close and eat it very quickly with venomous spider bites. If this wizard had been casting giant spiders the way he wastes mana on sprites, he would have been far more of a threat to my Draconians and almost anything else. Sprites are a marginally useful early game unit that quickly becomes obsolete, while giant spiders are dangerous as magician killers until the end of the game.
Wait, they did know Giant Spidiers so where are their spiders?
I mean it's ok they aren't in their fortress but why aren't they attacking you or something? The AI does cast 4 Spiders for each 1 Sprites so there should be tons of them... Let me check the map...nope, no spiders. Did you kill them all? If not then I have to assume he researched them recently and haven't yet summoned much. He didn't start with 8+ Nature books to get them early so that's possible too. Well, considering difficulty is only Advanced that's much more likely. I have already explained twice, the sprites aren't better defenders than spiders (neither worse, spiders are weak to high resistance units, a single 11 resistance hero kills them all - sprites are weak to firestorm or things like 3 stacks of bowmen so they are equally good/bad defenders), but the sprites are a LOT worse attackers than the spiders. So the sprites stay, the spiders move out and strike. Which do you think helps the AI win more? 9 Spiders attacking your capital and collecting treasure on the way there, or 9 spiders sitting around doing nothing? Spiders are not defending units. They are "cavalry", fast movement, high offensive power, meant to conquer things. Sprites are defending units. They are fragile, if they don't get the first turn they are useless. They are also slow and have too low calculated military power to allow the AI to think "hey mine stack is stronger so I can attack you with it". Certainly sprites attacking players can wreak havoc as well but only until the player builds their first two bowmen... meanwhile spider armies can eat even halberdier garrisons easily and they counter the most frequently used defending unit types - ranged and flying units. (if you destroyed their spiders when they were on ship, too bad for them. That's your advantage for playing Draconians and their bad luck for starting on a tiny island. The AI can't possibly be smart enough to be able to recognize that, much less counter it. If they researched them too late to use them effectively for attacking, again, too bad. The AI can't always have luck with their research order, also, difficulty wasn't that high to do lots of research early.) Maybe this explains it more : Human thinking : Spiders are better on offense and would be better defense against this particular enemy. So I'm summoning 100% Spiders wherever I need them and split them up between my offense and defense armies. AI "thinking" : Spiders are better units so I summon 1 sprite for every 4 spiders. I move my summoning circle so that it's in my fortress for 1/3 of the game turns, in my frontier city for another 1/3, and for the last 1/3 I cycle through all cities. I now have a city that has 10 units so I need to kick one of them out from the garrison - There are only spiders and sprites here. Spiders are rated more towards "use for building attacking armies" while Sprites more towards "use for building garrisons" on the overall "attack or garrison" decision result so I send a spider outside. This ensures that when I need to draft units for a new army, the spider is available, and won't be marked as "required to stay" garrison. |