Test games played

[Seravy]

   

Found my 7th staff this game and I have the best 4 nonchampion melee heroes.
Last game I had nothing but wizards...

So the AI moves engineers according to the following logic :

1. Find nearest town
2. More than 1 tiles away? Move closer.
3. 1 or fewer tiles away? Find nearest, not connected, city on the continent.
4. If city found, build road there, otherwise do nothing.

Now, connecting specifically one city of another race, doesn't really do anything special. Being another race does mean that city contributes double, so it's as good as connecting two cities - but that's all. So if we care, we either connect them all, or none at all, there isn't really much reason for doing exactly one.

Connecting cities can have one of 3 outcomes :

1.The AI has a lot of cities on the continent, and already maxed road bonus. Only the player benefits from the road.
2.The AI has several cities on the continent but haven't yet maxed the road bonus. The AI benefits, but the player also benefits.
3.The AI has very few cities on the continent but the player has lots. The AI benefits a little (major bonus but on a few cities only), but the player benefits a lot (many cities gain a bonus) or none at all (player already maxed trade bonus using his own roads).

1 is bad for the AI, clearly. 3 is bad for the AI, or isn't relevant (player already built roads so we are not really doing anything they wouldn't already do on their own), 2 is neutral.
This is the economic effect.
On the military side of the things, during war the human will have a quite hard time building their own roads, so the AI building them is definitely a bad move that defeats the purpose of the AI killing the player's engineers. On the other side, the roads can be abused by the AI's stacks to reach player cities faster, or in cases, threaten several cities with a single stack at the same time. This is also double-edged as the human might end up using the roads to strengthen their defenses and in my experience, roads usually help me more than the enemy, as they enemy already uses fly/water walking/pathfinding/whatever stacks, or if not, their stacks are slow enough to not have a relevant advantage on a road. So overall, I think roads are bad for the AI in this case as well.

Which means the AI should probably only build roads from their own cities towards another of their own cities, or, if we care for that much detail, include allied players as well.

[Seravy]

So this time I used the "raze all" tactic, and built elven and halfling cities everywhere. About a year until towers break and my best newly made city is pop 11 with only cheap buildings (parthenon, university, basic stuff, but no WG, AT, etc). Pretty much only the few cities I built on the first enemy wizard's territory are big enough.
I don't really see how this is a good tactic, considering I was razing extremely early and my cities are still not as good as what I would have if I simply kept the lizardmen cities that were already built up. At best I'll break even but I couldn't use the resources meanwhile so overall it's more of a loss. It will be better on the long term but the long term only matters if the Myrran wizard doesn't attack.
(I also bought the sawmill, granary, marketplace and farmer's market everywhere, to have good growth rates, so it's not that.)

Oh and I'm only earning 400 gold a turn and I was supposed to use that to fuel my spellcasting. And that's without building Amplifying Towers. So I likely need to cut skill and research to stock up on MP in case a war does happen.

Note the advantage of not having to garrison so exterminating other wizards goes faster is certainly there, I'm talking about the economy side of it only. Even 2-3 years of delay would have made this tactic a complete suicide.

First tower opened. Myrran wizard seems to be dwarves. Has a total of 17 picks!! 9 Life, 2 Sorcery, 1 Chaos, Nature, Death, Specialist, and Famous. Lawful but our starting relation is low enough to guaranteed war (9 Life vs 10 Death).
...dwarves huh. All high resistance units. Further buffed by Life magic. I think my spells will be entirely useless this game.
   
Spell power and power income is almost the same as mine, only about 25-30% higher each. I also own an entire plane so population shouldn't be all that different (ok it is, my cities are still pop 7). Anyway most of that is army strength.

This might actually be the time to offer tributes for a temporal relation boost. They are lawful so as long as REL is above -40, there won't be an attack. I need more time to Dark Ritual all my cities and Clouds of Shadows would be nice too...in fact I don't think I can win without them. Fortunately I can give her common Death spells like Skeletons...
So current plan : cast Dark Rituals, Nature's Eye and Cloud of Shadow on all cities, while offering common spells as needed. Reimu and her obsession with donations lol.
This should give me enough time to fill up all those cities with 9 horsebowmen or whatever else I can build, and turn them productive enough that I can afford the war. Plan is to use horsebowmen, rangers and pegasai, produced by all the maxed out cities simultaneously - hammerhands should be weak against ranged attacks. (She does have mana leak so rather not magicians, maybe I shouldn't have traded it but hey, I got a Disjunction, that's worth like 6000 RP! I don't actually have a single magician right now, and Shadow Demons are unusable against Holy Word anyway.)

There is a 30% chance she won't get Consecration in which case I can use my Pestilence.
Btw what does Death do against a stack of 7 angels and 2 archangels? I saw one of those getting plane shifted. I don't think anything less than 5+ Demon Lords can even think of fighting that. Oh yeah, same thing as hammerhands, kill one and chain animate...

btw Death Knights. I was thinking because they showed up in research before Demon Lords.
So Death Knights are bad against...
Life, high resistance mean no life stealing
Chaos, Flame strike spam
Sorcery, Banish, Creature Binding
Death, Annihilate

So they are strong against Nature...and dual realms that miss the listed spells. Kinda limited considering most other very rares are strong vs 90% of the possible enemies and only weak against 10%. (raising their resistance by 1 would not really help with that.) On top of that they are an upgraded version of Wraiths, so when they do work, you already used Wraiths to win. Not that I have any idea what to do, of if there is a need to do anything, just stating my observations.

[Seravy]

Still doing the preparations for the war, want to summon at least 4 stacks of 4 demons lords, ideally each led by one of the heroes. Also need to research the two globals at the very least, but the combat spells would be nice to have too. Already spent 3 years on preparing but I still need more. Economy definitely suffers from all the razing strategy, I'm still only starting to have amplifying towers built. She has Spell Blast so I'm going to need to raise my skill to instant demon lord levels before starting to fight.
Meanwhile the AI seems to start flatlining - Stream of Life already maxed out all their cities, and with the max 2k units cap they can't increase their armies. Of course while the graphs don't change much, more and more Archangels do get summoned, so wasting time is still not a good plan, especially as this is the scenario when the AI is willing to push up research for SoM, but overall, I can afford the 15 more turns I need to get my globals and demon lords.

[Nelphine]

I dunno, I can't see demon lords beating archangels one on one. And an undead archangel is weaker than the original archangel (unlike most animated units).

[Seravy]

Yeah but it's 3 v 1. 1 Archangel against my demon lord, undead archangel and undead demon lord. Plus my demon lord gets a doom bolt and is ranged. But we'll soon find out.

(also, animated Archangels can't regenerate from Supreme Light so even if losing the battle, I eliminate the stack.)

[Seravy]

Ok so 9 Archangels vs 9 Demon Lords, I'm attacking.

Turn 1, each demon lord takes a step back, uses doom bolt and shoots at an archangel. 3 Archangels dead (of which two had lionheart, and all had Charm of Life).
Turn 2, the Archangels are still not in range (since we took a step back and killed the front row.), but no room to summon, so each demon lord moves 3 back (or whichever many they can) and shoots. This doesn't go so well, as High Prayer is now up and there is no doom bolt left. 1 archangel down to half health, 1 webbed. (it's over ocean so it's disabled for good.)
I lose 1 demon lord as some archangels manage to attack. I anime 1 dead archangel, which probably isn't as good as using web but we are trying to test Death magic so I should. It attacking, plus me moving and shooting, 1 more archangel dead. Now the board is my 9 units vs their 3+1 webbed (instead of webbing I could have cast terror but there was no room to animate).
Next turn another demon lord lost. However now I have Holy Bonus+2. I kill 1 archangel and stay out of range of the remaining ones. I don't expect to take damage from this point onward (aside from star fires) so I start reanimating lost demon lords.
I lose a third demon lord to star fires but reanimate all 3. Overall, I had no losses and 3 demon lords are ungraded to animated status. 9 Archangels died despite high prayer+supreme light+charm of life. I have one demon lord at red health, all others are still at max or green.

If this isn't enough proof Demon Lords are overpowered, nothing is... and it's specifically due to the doom bolts, otherwise it would have been a fair fight, slightly in my favor (due to animate dead and web) but this way it was a 9 vs 6 battle which would have been 9 vs 4 instead without charm and lionheart bonus.

By the way, at strength 20 but being magical ranged, so no ranged penalties, Demon Lord is about as powerful at range as a Colossus, but has double ammo, flies, is immune to a bunch of things, might gain health from attacks, has fear, summons 3 demons, which cast a lot of spells and cause instant death, on top of providing suppression in melee if needed, and having melee equal to the colossus itself, let's not forget 1 higher movement. It also generates power instead of having maintenance. All those extras for 30% more cost is already really OP and makes Colossus look like a toy, and THEN we also have an extra doom bolt on top of it. It's reasonable to expect first turn damage around 200 against a typical stack using 9 Demon Lords. That annihilates even most fortress garrisons in a turn.

[Sapher]

Started a new walkthrough on a lunatic without loads this time. part 1
December 1402, 1 wizard defeated, 75 skill (thanks to a skill training farm)

[Seravy]

Great, will watch it immediately! (In fact that'll most likely be a lot more entertaining than slaughtering a helpless Life mage using OP demon lords in my game. I might even drop this game if something major doesn't happen in the next 2-3 turns, as demon lords are outright unstoppable.)

[Seravy]

So, first turn of war over. Battles were one of these categories :

Anything vs Demon Lord : I win
Archangel+army vs anything : I lose
Army vs army : I win

It's also really weird that almost all my spells do absolutely nothing in battles where there is an Archangel and High Prayer - an additional +5 resistance is too much to do anything, and nonresistance spells can be easily healed, while wave and animate are not available unless something was killed first.
Annihilate wouldn't help with this if I had it, as it causes irrecoverable damage, so while it does kill a unit (or not, Exaltation still heals it and all the units are multifigure), it can't be animated, and it won't kill enough units to allow using wave unless the army was already fewer than 7-8 units.

Also, this is the second game in a row where I have no use for Drought, Wrack and Evil Presence. While the curses make sense (first game had runemaster and sorcery opponent, second game I first had no one left to curse on my plane, then couldn't afford the diplomatic penalty, and finally during war it's way too late for these), wrack is quite disappointing but we already know we can't do much about it. When it does work, it's amazing, but it requires low resistance enemy armies...plus an enemy that can't nuke the units I have while waiting for the effect. That's a bit too narrow now that the AI is actually smart at using combat spells.

Overall, for now I'm losing cities faster, but the AI will run out of MP in another turn and then no high prayer in most battles, so I'm going to win.

[Nelphine]

Yes life beats death is a thing. Things like that resistance boost is part of why I would never play death - if the AI gets that combo death is screwed.

That's something that contributes to me saying life hard counters death.