Except you're doing the test knowing how to take advantage of golems - not only humans will understand this, so balancing for this at less than master is a mistake. And I don't think any race needs to be hit or miss for the AI - if it is, it should be taught to not use it on miss occasions.
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Test games played
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Blue seems to be nomads, green is high man. Blue cities don't have any significant buff on them, green has Gaea's Blessing. I really wonder how can blue be the stronger one. I saw green cast Stone Giant while blue haven't cast a rare spell yet...oh blue has 4 nodes on the starting continent and one more elsewhere plus whatever I don't see yet. For Green I saw only one node.
...eww blue attacked my stack in the tower I opened. They know Banish, that much is certain. They are still summoning Water Elementals though. Seeing some focus magic cockatrices, wait from 1 green book? Ok that answers the question. Although you'd expect the opposite from the books, it's blue who has the Cockatrice+Focus Magic combo. Meanwhile at green - adamantium pikemen and air elemental, golems ain't gonna work for this one. Or maybe they will. Hah, take that, my golems killed all the magicians and now they can avoid the pikemen because they are slower! Next I can send in the cannons to kill the sluggish pikemen from range. Also, I realized I have one more way to bring down flying units : summoning centaurs or catapults. Those are ranged so they have to attack me.
I managed to conquer the neared green city - high men with adamantium - but a blue doomstack immediately attacked it and took it from me. Gryphons counter Golems. So now I'm at war with blue. I probably shouldn't attack green cities anymore as it's only helping blue who is already the strongest.
I might need to rely on the Troll or Draconian cities I obtained from the other Myrran wizards. Adamant hammerhands didn't seem to be effective enough (they are good but take too much damage) and cannons die to a single shot from focused cockatrices. Maybe I should try buffing the hammerhands? No one seems to have AEther Binding but idk about Dispelling Wave so probably a bad idea. I just realized all 4 wizards this game have at least 4 Sorcery books. Some good news, I have Inspirations. The not so good news is if I spend all my power on research I'm still only making 437 and this game will probably go long enough for that to be relevant. At the moment I have the forces to hold what I have, and that's about it. It might also be a better idea to first clear out Myrran nodes and lairs before trying to conquer Arcanus. 
Lost the tower to the same doomstack. I should have expected that to happen...
Wait, why am I even playing this game still? I'm a Life wizard and everyone has Sorcery. Life is weak against that. If I was ahead, sure, but I'm quite a bit behind due to a bad start (two hostile wizards on my plane). Not only that but the main race of the strongest wizard hard counters mine. Griffons kill cannons and golems easily with Armor Piercing, while Hammerhands can't attack them. If I was playing anything but life, I could deal with that but mono Life is bad at it. Also I failed to pick a wizard that actually matches our definition for 100% Expert win (at least 2 picks on good retorts, I only did one although it is the bets possible) and my Nature books turned out to be duds - no Web, no Transmute, not even Earth to Mud (which is amazing with cannons) so I was pretty much 3 picks away from the definition. I can most likely still win the game...through regenerating troll magician hordes. But that doesn't really amount to much Dwarf testing...Or I can rush my research and hope for archangels and other top Life spells...but my research is awful with this race. Heck, half my cities only has a single golem to guard it. A griffon and I lose it. And things keep coming through that tower and astral gates. 2 cities are already down. This is why I hate playing offense and neglecting defenses. Green has Seismic Mastery and blue has Storm Giant. Great. I don't have any useful summon. Looked into my book and I won't get Archangel either. I'll get Crusade, Life Force, Enlightenment, Charm of Life, Survival Instinct. I don't feel like playing another 5 hour to find out if the others get Spell Binding or not... and I'm not getting High Prayer and Supreme Light??? No, this game is lost, my spell rolls are as bad as it can get. What other very rare? Consecration - no one has Chaos or Death... and that's all 5. Well, I guess there is a chance for more spells or books in treasure but eww... with only two dwarf cities having adamantium and enemies already on the plane, that's my lowest priority right now. tho knowing a research war would bring me nothing at least means I don't need to bother with it... nah, starting a new game is a more productive way to spend time, but that's for tomorrow.
That's more like what I expected when you said you were relying on golems. You just didn't have any chimera hordes or buffed draconian halberdiers to also eat your golems.
However, I think its important to note, myrran is a 2 pick retort. It should help a fair amount. (Heck I'm trying my impossible life strategy with myrran barbarians just to see if its worth the picks, as per that save file with the scouted cities bug.) If you're doing specifically dwarf testing, then I think what you've shown is 'omg they're super strong ... Wait.. No.. No they aren't..' Which is almost exactly how I feel about them. They do SEEM awesome, but when push comes to shove, they just aren't. Yes you can kill some things - but we have done massive amounts of balancing work alrwady - I'd be very surprised if anyone could find a strategy that looks good on paper, and isn't at least decent in a fair number of situations. But no magical power really hurts dwarves, and they don't have bezerkers to make up for it. (Adamant hammerhands should be able to pull the sane strategic shenanigans though, if you can get 4-5 with holy weapon and holy armor in every city/tower, the AI should simply stop attacking you. They don't have the resistance weakness of bezerkers, but they can't attack fliers naturally.) Quote:if you can get 4-5 with holy weapon and holy armor And that's exactly what fails if you play against all Sorcery enemies. Tho they might not have dispelling wave, I' rather not risk it. If it was only one or two, fine, but all 4? (Purple does have it, that I know. Or was is yellow? Anyway, there is someone who can trade it to the others.) At this point I'm uncertain if Dwarves are underpowered or Expert is too difficulty, or I simply screwed up but I'm leaning on the latter. I mean, getting attacked by two wizards early (both with naga stacks), plus not picking web, plus going mono life against all sorcery, plus not taking advantage of land settings (I picked neither dry nor rich), and overextending on top of all that and even getting all the bad spells from common up to very rare is just too much. One or two more games and we'll know. (Griphons coming through wouldn't be a problem if I wasn't already way behind or if I had ANYTHING to plug the tower properly, or if I wasn't so foolish to open it when I only had like, half a stack worth of free units. I was impatient and played very poorly today.) (btw focus magic cockatrices have huge strategic power. Hammerhands might not be enough to stop them from attacking, tho in actual combat the hammerhands win.)
October 22nd, 2017, 16:40
(This post was last modified: October 22nd, 2017, 16:50 by Nelphine.)
No, focus magic cockatrices don't compare to elite 6 figure adamantium hammerhands - also, holy weapon and holy armor is just so you don't need 6, so its fine to just build the extra hammerhand. Dispellable buffs are pure icing when you have adamantium hammerhands/bezerkers, not remotely required.
(The hammerhand has an army strength of 278)
Cockatrices are 246 without, roughly double with Focus Magic. So 278 of the hammerhand is barely adequate to match the unbuffed one. I'm assuming this is with levels or adamantium or buffs already as base hammerhand is only 113. Assuming you want to block 9 with a stack of 5, you'd need a unit strength of ~1000 for each hammerhand which sounds megabuff level. I'd be fine with 9 blocking them though but they don't. (also, once the AI has rares in their doomstack those also are in the 500/unit region so it's not cockatrice exclusive)
October 22nd, 2017, 17:08
(This post was last modified: October 22nd, 2017, 17:11 by Nelphine.)
Er, then we're not calculating the same.
Cockatrices are 1011 melee attack + 905 ranged attack + 4*4*7*(5+4) = 1008 defense. Assuming all you do is add ranged and melee together (and I don't think you do, I think its lower) multiply by defense and divide by 8192, then focus magic cockatrices are 248, 30 lower than one hammerhand. And yes, as per my post, which is based on what you said you had available, this is elite adamantium hamnerhands with no buffs. Toss a few holy weapons on, which by itself shouldn't trigger much dispelling wave, and you'd be able to stop 9 FM cockactrices with those hammerhands.
I didn't calculate anything, just looked at the output of the unit rating tool. Assuming it's bug-free, that means you need to divide by 4096 I guess.
Isn't Elite Adamantium a bit too optimistic? Altar of Battle is a rare spell. I guess it works with Warlord, I should have picked that plus Alchemy but...7 picks on retorts and secondary books and only 5 in main? I don't like the sound of that, while I won't miss the guaranteed Incarnation that much, not being able to pick Stream of Life and Prayer both is bad. 3 very rares instead of 5 is outright horrible, considering in the current game I managed to get 5 very rares that made me want to stop playing... Speaking of which, if having the best 4 global Life enchantment in the game wants to stop playing before even knowing the enemy has it or not shows Spell Binding is still a problem. Not that we have a solution for it. Life dwarves might just be too risky to be a reliable strategy for testing. It's weak against 2 realms - Sorcery (beats Life) and Chaos (destroys ores) although it's strong against Death and Life and ok against Nature. It also needs going low books or miss out on either retorts or web. This is the kind of thing I'd expect to have a (small) chance to beat Lunatic but also have a chance to lose Expert at the same time. I think I'll do the Nature version next. I wonder if I should try better land settings to see the race at their best, or keep it around average. |