Current Impossible Strategy

[Nelphine]

Ha, life force and enlightenment. I'm confident of my ability to stay ahead of the myrran wizard now. (29 cities, 3 myrran nodes, 15 arcanus nodes; power production: 1271 (822 afyer maintenance) mana, 1049 research, 648 skill production = total of 2968; gold income after maintenance is 337, and one day I'll get to put prosperities on my cities - I learned the spell in 1403 but could never spare skill to cast it on more than my capital).

Its January 1410.

A map of what's been happening:

   

The blue circle is my capital.  I had 2 of the cities in the black circle when the first war started.  The red circle in the red area was that capital; similarly the yellow circle in the top yellow area was the yellow capital.

When the war started, I kept one doomstack (my second one) in the black area.  I lose all the cities in that area at least once, some multiple times during the course of the war, but my defensive stack never fights anything that can threaten it.  My first doom stack went straight up after red's fortress; once that was conquered, it took the rest of red's continent.  By the time that was done, I finally had proper control of the black circle.  My main offensive doomstack then went and repeated my strategy on the yellow continent; take the fortress, then slowly take the rest of the island.  At that time, yellow colonized the bottom right area.  By the time I had the yellow island under control I had 3 offensive stacks, and there were no significant enemy armies left, anywhere on Arcanus.  Green then sued for peace, so while I could have rolled him, I instead focused on clearing the remaining nodes and lairs; by the time that was complete I was up to 4 offensive stacks.  Purple broke one tower in the very bottom left of the map, but purple has planar travel and astral gates everywhere, so I don't really care. I have just finished popping the other 5 towers, and I'm just starting to explore Myrror.

Edit: Oh blimkey. I wasn't paying attention and I waltzed in and got my top stack killed (Demi God hero, 7 bezerkers, warship). WHOOPS. Singlehandedly dropped my army strength down under purple. Luckily, it was only the Healer, which is one of my worst heroes. Sure I could resurrect, but.. this way I can get a better champion!

[Nelphine]

Its July 1411. I have holy arms, crusade, and charm of life and archangels to move my bexerkers. My unbuffed bezerkers are now better than great drakes (+4 to hit, 8 thrown, 12 melee, 6 HP, 8 armour) aside from resistance (7). (With standard doomstack buffs, endurance, flame blade, holy armor, bless, Lionheart) they're.. Ridiculous. (18 melee, 13 thrown, 10 armor, 7 HP, and only sorcery reliably breaks their 10/15 resistance - and with high prayer even sorcery doesn't do much). However, purple has started to cast spell binding. Now things get interesting.

Since I have no sorcery books, I can't get spell blast. So the only thing I can do with spell binding is disjunction and recast whatever spell he takes. However that costs twice as much as spell binding - and the AI has overland casting bonuses. If I want to keep my advantage of army strength, I have no choice.

I have to declare war on purple, and banish him. Unfortunately he's got an alliance with green. So I have to declare war on green too. (Red and yellow will declare war on me too, and cover me in corruption but oh well.)

I have 6 doomstacks. At speed 5 each (except Jaers stack which is speed 8), I should be able to raze 4-6 cities per turn.

That should mean I can raze every enemy city in ~12 months. I don't think any AI can do significant damage in 6 months, even with the new doomstacks, but 12 months might see me lose a decent chunk. So, bother with defense or just go with a 'burn it all to the ground' setup? Even in 12 months, no AI is going to destroy 29 cities.

[Catwalk]

Raze at first and save a few good cities with doable garrisons for last?

[Nelphine]

Going to respond to Catwalks question from Seravy's test game thread: it effectively boiled down to 'how lair reliant are you?'

The answer is: you need to get ~500-2000 gold from your cavalry. Recall, I take alchemy, so items or mana also count as 'gold'. And yes this is the sprite strategy - this is when I realized nerfing sprites was missing the main problem, which was not sprites, its any early conquering at all.

Since you can get hundreds of gold from even the easiest lairs (something like few guardian spirits qualifies) this generally means you need 1 node (sprites, war bears, a single earth elemental or great lizard; or few nagas, phantom warriors, or phantom beasts in small numbers; hell hounds, fire elementals, a gargoyle or a chimera) or 1-3 lairs (as above, plus guardian spirits, skeletons, zombies, few ghouls, a werewolf, a shadow demon, a unicorn; without a node bonus you can also take a cockatrice or a few other things). Given the speed of cavalry, and the fact you don't need to defend lairs after taking them, you can afford to go 30 squares from your capital of needed.

I don't use earth lore, I just poke my nose at things until I find something that I'm sure of. Occassionaly I overestimate - 2 ghouls with 7 zombies etc. But especially in lairs, if there is only a single monster, its usually a weak lair and even if there's a second monster you usually don't have more than 4 or 5 enemy units total, which let's the high speed of cavalry trade the damage around as needed. And depending on exact distance traveled, usually I have enough to cast heroism on one of them to do killing blows without taking damage.

Also recall, as long as I get that gold, I can afford to lose all the cavalry. So, the third lair can be on the strong end of the list, kill 8 cavalry, and I still win. (Worst thing is getting too many prisoners or spells too early, or an item that's REALLY good and you don't want to melt it.)

Its very rare there are no weak lairs available. (If playing small or tiny, just build a trireme, 6 or 7 heroism swordsmen, and fortress strike, ignoring cavalry and lairs. But that's a different build.)

[Nelphine]

Not sure how this is going to go.

In the opening turn of the war, both myself and the myrran wizard burned over 15000 mana (EACH). But I think I only lost one out of the.. 15 or 20 battles. And no one else declared war in the first turn.

Edit: Probably ended up spending.. 50k mana? maybe 65k? On this war. But, putting everything into mana production, and setting a ton of cities to trade goods, I was able to scrape up about 4.5k mana income per turn (after maintenance). So I was able to do it. Still lost about a dozen cities (mostly ones that I had conquered and thought were defendable - only actually lost one of my original 29 cities).

[MrBiscuits]

Whenever I do a game as barbarians every other wizard seems to have sorcery with confusion. So they just cast that on my best barbarian each turn and I lose the battle.

They're great for nodes and lairs etc. but I struggle with them against other wizards. Any tips?

[Nelphine]

Don't go to war with that wizard until you have lionheart/resist magic. I know I know, not great advice, but the idea is to just build masses of bezerkers so they sue for peace because they're weak. If you do it fast enough, they never declare war in the first place (unless they're chaotic of course.)

If you can get all the nodes in the universe, and your army strength is ahead of theirs, peace is in your favor. You'll get stronger faster than they will, and then you can just build lots and lots of bezerkers.

Once you actually have to fight, then you just end up using dispel magic - which costs more than confusion, but since you have the best casting skill anyway, because you have the strongest power production, it doesn't really matter that you have to spend more per cast than they do to negate the confusion.

At that point, the only real danger is when they have multiple high level heroes, because they can do multiple confusions per turn. And by that point, you have multiple stacks of bezerkers - each stack will do serious damage, so, it's ok to lose a few stacks.

[Nelphine]

My game ended with utter domination. Interestingly it was a bit of a throwback on treasure too - ended with 8 picks worth of retorts (alchemy, warlord, spellweaver, astrologer, tactician sagemaster) and 11 spellbooks (6 life, 3 chaos, 2 death) Highest I've seen in a long time. (And the myrran AI picked up a spellbook from a node too. I could have had a nature book!). If I played it out, I could research SoM by 1417, maybe 1416. So I could have skipped going to war, and just won that way.

[MrBiscuits]

Some wizard always seems to declare war on me right at the start of the game before I can build up my army strength and they always seem to have confusion as well. Maybe it is just bad luck or maybe I need to increase my army strength earlier than I currently do.

Can't they just cast confusion on all your barbarian stacks?

I guess you need to design your wizard around getting lionheart and resist magic, neither of which I have in my current game.

[Nelphine]

Can you post a game summary of January 1402? And another of 1403?

I never use resist magic - sorcery wizards are weak and rarely declare war early.