(December 2nd, 2018, 07:35)Bahgtru Wrote: Test game: werewolves
TL,DR: lol OP, mainly because of death immunity
Setup: lunatic, all fair, halflings, omniscient/sage/specialist S rest D for +40% research and -15% research cost. Lycanthropy more or less assured to be in the spellbook from the beginning, takes 7-8 turns to research and then 5-6 to cast.
I've used it to do the initial easy lairs, in the meanwhile explored with halfling spearmen. I've found among several undoable lairs some phantom stuff ones, and the WWs can deal with them one at a time, then I've grown up to earth elementals.
I think part of the problem is armor: the defence roll per figure adds up, and even earth elementals can't kill a unit in 2 attacks.
I've been lucky enough to meet a death wizard - Sharee, in my case. Sharee came with her own WWs and settled my continent with humans. Well, thanks to death immunity she didn't stand a chance. Obviously the human can focus forces better then an AI, and thanks to death immunity I've been able to just enter all of her cities and not lose anything, even managed to zombie an undead or two here and there. Had I had to deal with black sleep it'd have been very different. In this match I've been a bit slow because annoyingly I was alone despite being on a big continent, so there haven't been so many cities to conquer and I've had to settle myself.
Thanks to the research setup I've had plenty of spells to give away and get in wizards pacts. Only now the other two have started threatening for the city numbers. But I'm pretty sure that given the very favourable position I will recover the advantage that Kali has pretty soon. I've started mass producing triremes, and black sleep will clear the seas of all her ships in no time.
Had I not had death immunity from the start, I'd have had to bloodlust them - in lunatic the number of black sleeps that the AI can cast makes it impossible to manage without it. Early on they're unbeatable, make them cost 50% more (bloodlust) and they become quite a bit more scarce in the first 2-3 years. As it is you're basically guaranteed to out-number everything you meet.
Continuation...
Sharee was quickly dispatched. However, Kali proved to be much more of a problem than I expected: with 2 life she had nothing less than exorcism. The werewolves would be over! Or would they? I found resist magic in a node, thanks to werewolves being so uber in treasure hunting. With resist magic on, they can survive 1 casting of exorcism, and usually the AI seems to prefer to cast it on another unit rather than on an already damaged werewolf, so to avoid losses all I had to do was to retreat the first exorcism target and fight with the rest. The AI managed to conquer 1 major, 1 medium and 2 minor cities on my continent, but once I found the spell and put together a "buffed" (lol) stack I didn't care anymore. Thanks to death immunity I was immune to ghouls' and syphon life un-recoverable damage.
I eventually re-conquered my cities and started to work on hers. The other AI sent me 6-8 expansion warnings but never actually dropped the wizards' pact, also thanks to avoiding its cities.
Before moving onto Kali's continent I decided to treasure hunt, and I started a ghoul stack. I got as usual a chaos spawn, then a hydra, found a very lucky beastmaster/windwalker combo and with them managed to snatch 2 angels (sacrificing some werewolves to get rid of the unicorns) and then other 2 in the same way, opening a tower. This granted me another sorcery book too. On the other side there's a blue/white runemaster, I guess I better deal with that before the local Sssra'...
The power graph is over the myrran's, the local Sssra (militarist) is going to be made irrelevant by warping its 3 nodes, and I'm pretty confident I can deal quickly with Kali despite some wraiths that I've seen, I think I'm doing quite well.
Now werewolves aren't relevant anymore but given that:
- the AI setup situation was the best to counter them
- I pawned lunatic anyway by finding death wizards and exploiting the werewolf' death immunity
It is pretty safe to say that giving them death immunity is a big mistake, as it plugs their only weakness with a rather common AI foe. Sure this applies only when one can find death wizards, but why leave that possibility open when there's simple solutions to prevent raising them? (And that's the only reason for death immunity based on the discussion).
You still haven't told me why you think black sleep would be more effective than weakness, and how weakness worked out against your wolves, nor why you think beating Death is better than beating sorcery - they are an equal chance to appear.
I haven't said better, I've said that it's easier, thanks to death immunity. I'm not at all suggesting to go back to sorcery immunity if that's what you think, I'm suggesting to remove all the immunities like I consistently have for quite a while, as any of them plugs the only weakness of a very strong unit vs some AI.
Bring back your undeath immunity idea but modified as to account for the feedback of those who didn't like it the first time: controlled werewolves revert to their original form on death, which is super flavourful and gives at least some undead for the effort of death players (but not broken WW undead as you and Nelphine correctly fear), while neutral ones can be turned (flavour: they were born werewolves and that's their original form) for a minor amount of fun in very limited numbers.
Black sleep vs weakness... One cancels a unit the other only halves its strength, that doesn't quite matter as much. But there's also regeneration prevention to keep in mind, right now I lol at ghouls and zombies.
That implies either the AI isn't using weakness on you (which is a decision problem, and is my guess), or the ai did use weakness, and it had no impact on the stacks effectiveness (which means seravys idea that weakness will help death vs death combat is simply not actually true).
More clarification on that would be helpful.
On my own testing, I can't make werewolves work as well as you baghtru. I can't do nearly enough treasure hunting with them to snowball the way you describe. On expert in 1406 I haven't defeated any ai and only control ~1/4 of arcanus. (All 3 arcanus ai are dual realm with death as one realm; 2 have chaos and 1 has life).
I've been subject to weakness, it doesn't seem to matter so much in my experience.
I'm surprised of yours results. What's your race and setup? I find that in this approach speed is all that matters, so super research halflings is perfect. I'd have to fiddle around with the new retorts now, but same principle.
On treasure hunting: they're quite good because you can whittle down a lot of different kinds of nodes, with regeneration over some turns, in that they're like archers/sprites, but also brute force a lot of them. Maybe I got lucky with an early phantom beasts, but I don't think that turns the game, and similar results can be achieved with many types of guardians.
Anyway removing death immunity is not an incredible nerf... I find they might still be OP, but I'd need to test them to be able to say.
Halflings specialist sage master spellweaver 8 death. Huge land size for more opportunities.
'my' 3 nodes were gorgons, gorgons, and cockatrices. No neutrals until the other side of the strongest AI (in 1407, 2 neutrals are still there!).
Half a dozen lairs, but mostly sprites and chaos spawn. One with colossus. Just nothing to get the ball rolling.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still winning, but I ended up relying on shadow demons (found a retort of conjuror of all things) far more than werewolves. I find the Regen 0 really hurts (especially compared to my shadow demons, where I can trash entire garrisons by taking the full 25 turns to do so.)
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