Quote: I have the impression from games that only 1 poison attack is rolled no matter how many attacking figures there are, is this correct?Wrong, it's one for every figure.
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LIFE Realm
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Life requires taking advantage of stacking buffs, particularly undispellsnle ones.
However, life has the least summons, and those summons all further provide stacking buffs, so life is very good at teaching people about what it needs. Life is also very brute force. You tend to be able to just throw things at the enemy, which are cheap to build, and they can't possibly match it, even if they have ways to deal with individual units. (For instance, when flame stroke is only killing 1-2 figures out of each unit, and mass heal replaces 1 figure, that's the brute force of life just saying no, I don't care what you do.) And raise dead means killing individual units usually doesn't matter. Once you learn life, it has the fewest counters by a large margin. So it's the most reliable win. If you go crazy with it, it becomes reliable (80%+) on lunatic. I believe only ghouls come close to that level of reliability. (For me ghouls aren't as good, but others are better than I am with them.) (October 26th, 2018, 06:13)Seravy Wrote:Quote: I have the impression from games that only 1 poison attack is rolled no matter how many attacking figures there are, is this correct?Wrong, it's one for every figure. The results are funny low often enough to lead me to believe that there's a bug somewhere. This can be seen in particular with life buffed stuff, because then you can see that say - naga or ghouls do little to nothing to - say - swordsmen.
October 26th, 2018, 08:17
(This post was last modified: October 26th, 2018, 08:19 by Nelphine.)
Least that would be an easy test. Take a warlord tactician barracks town, pump out swordsmen and attack neutral ghouls. If you have enough skill toss holy armor on too. But without holy armor that should still be 9 armor (block ~2.5) against ghouls 4 attack +1 to hit (deal ~1.5 damage). So most ( > 80%) of all damage should be poison. With holy armor you'd be even more sure.
Keep in mind Ghouls have poison 1 so they only do 4 poison rolls. Meanwhile Nagas have 4 so they do 12, Giant Spiders do 16. So Ghouls are only really relevant if it's many of them against 1-2 buffed units - which comes up more often than you would think as buffing up one unit costs as much as 3 ghouls. What makes Ghouls a threat is being ranged and that the enemy gets the buffed unit and keeps the buffs on them if you lose to them.
Sorry to revive a conversation from last week, but I've kept playing games where I run into multiple Life wizards and I'm just wondering how you guys view them. Someone (Seravy?) mentioned that Life is supposed to be strong early game, medium / normal in late game.
I see Life as probably the most powerful school in the game; Sorcery would compete, having the Magic Immune + Invisible + Spell Lock combo. Here are my points: - Single best combat buff in the game: Prayer, a low-cost buff that scales UP later in the game rather than down due to stat scaling on later units. I can't think of any other spell that scales like this. Black Prayer is almost pointless in late game unless you need the -2 resistance. Blazing March, a tier higher, is situationally OK but not great comparison to Prayer; the +1 to hit is almost always better than +3 attack, and then you also get +1 to defend AND resistance! - Supreme Light. Really, does Life need another giant in-combat buff? It makes sense except... - Extremely good summons! Angels and Archangels got crazy buffs in CoM. I'd rather have an Angel than a Chaos Spawn, Stone Giant, Doom Bat, Wraiths, etc. Granted those other Rare summons are situationally good but that's my point: an Angel is a very good summon in any stack. Similarly, I'd rather have an Archangel than a Great Wyrm or Great Drake; it could fight those creatures head up after casting its spells, and that's besides massively buffing all the other units in the fight. -- On top of all this, Life gets the strongest Hero in the game too ... along with the best tools (beside Sorcery) for making Heroes powerful.. oh, and it can't lose heroes, just resurrect and truck on. - Even the combat summons are better than schools that are supposedly better at summoning. Call to Arms is better than Earth Elemental-- considering that you'll only summon it when you have Prayer active. Maybe part of this is that Earth Elementals are quite weak for a Rare, with very low defense. (I've been using them in my current game and it's usually a waste of mana.) - The city buffs are nothing to scoff at; applied to multiple cities, they'll easily carry the game. My point isn't that Life late-game is too strong. Rather, I'm thinking that it feels like a very powerful school throughout the game -- early, mid and late. I certainly got bored with how easy it was to steamroll while playing Life.
The problem might be that Life inherently has very little counters in the game.
It's hard to counter the theme of not losing units - more effective damage and kill spells are overpowered, and preventing only healing is too situational and unfun, and while it's possible to counter buffing, it can't be an efficient counter because almost half the spells in the whole game across all realms are some sort of an enchantment. The realm's weakness is not being able to summon as well as other realms, but that doesn't really apply once you have Archangel (although you only have a 1 chance for getting it while all other realms have at least two kinds of very rare creatures.) - but the realm doesn't need to summon, since buffs are a game mechanic that is mostly equivalent. So it's pretty much the only realm in the game where the defined weakness is something you aren't supposed to be doing when playing it anyway, as it directly competes with its strength, making it as if it never existed.
"Life inherently has very little counters in the game" >> yeah, that feels about right. I'm playing Chaos / Nature vs 3 mixed realm Life wizards and it just feels like I'm playing an inferior version of their game. I cast Blazing March, they cast Prayer. I cast fire/lightning/whatever damage... and it's instantly decreased because of bless, then cancelled by heal. I'm still able to win but it's just brute force (war trolls), my spells are otherwise inferior.
One thing I was considering is whether I would have been better off with Life than Nature for my strategy of mixed summons + chaos channeled units. I think the answer is yes. Life gives me Endurance + Prayer: +1 to hit, +2 to defend, +2 to resist, which scales much better in late game, plus I get bless to block some annoyances like Black Sleep and get +1 attack/shield/resist in my cities. Nature gives me Land Linking and Survival Instinct -- the latter only because of a lucky roll -- for +2 attack, +3 shields, +2 resistance. Alternately I could have gotten Iron Skin for 5 defense but lost the resistance, so I'm again vulnerable to base tier junk like black sleep. Around mid to late game, the Life strategy is just clearly superior due to the scaling of hit and defend rolls. And this is for summoned units! Nature is just something I picked for flavor and because Endurance starts to feel like cheating after a while. I guess it comes back to my personal issue of feeling that to-hit / to-defend are broken mechanics. But overall, Life just feels too strong -- while it's a very cohesive realm with a satisfying set of spells, it also gets crazy scaling that doesn't feel like it makes sense as the game goes on.
Yeah, I could pick Endurance for 2 books like any other Common. That's why I mentioned that it feels like a cheat -- because Endurance is very effective in early game and extremely effective in late game, especially on the units that are already most overpowered. Its value grows, which feels broken for a Common.
... sorry, forgot one comment about Endurance (editing to add). Isn't to-defend also effective versus spells? That's one of the oddest things about Endurance and other to-defend spells for me: it feels so wrong that they're equally effective for blocking a Colossus smacking me in the face with a boulder, or a lightning bolt from a wizard. IIRC that's one of the most common misconceptions for newer MoM players -- that resistance has nothing to do with spell damage. Then to-defend comes in and completely cancels out most of the damage spells. It feels like a 2-for-1 deal. Granted you'd get the same from Iron Skin, but that's a Rare and, in cases of high defense, is actually less effective than casting a Common that gives you +1 to defend. |