As I've been playing, I've found that I greatly dislike the Myrran boss mechanic, and would rather try to neuter them than conquer all of Arcanus like some maniacal warlord. To achieve this, I would need to open some towers early. And this is where I get stumped, because they often have dangerous encounters like multiple Efreets or various Archangels. I can't seem to reliably beat them until I get to rare tier, at which point the Myrran wizard has already ballooned too far. Any tips?
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How to open planar towers early?
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I do the same thing, but you need to plan your build for it.
In general, if you expect to break a tower before Rare (that is, before you have any Rare spells), you're looking at pre-1409 at the latest on Lunatic, +1 year per difficulty level downwards. With some luck, the earliest possible time to break the tower is around 1404, using some cheesy tactics for combat and specialized strategies, involving Confusion or Ranged attack and Retreating Exhausted and +Movement, Flight items or -Spell Save on heroes or with Nomad Horsemen. Such strats would target the towers with Many Gorgons. It's also feasible to hit Great Wyrms if you have flight. A hero with good -spell save and confusion who can stay out of range for 25 turns can take out a lot of high level things over several turns. You can do it with Black Sleep and Ranged attack on the hero too, but it's a bit harder. It's more reasonable to aim to break towers around 1406-1407 if you're actively rushing for it. You can take out towers with Sky Drakes, Great Drakes, Behemoth, Hydras using powerful offensive units you can get early, like Slingers, Magicians, buffed Berserkers/Gladiators, Gnoll Halberdiers (you will lose a lot of units with the melee ones though). Chaos and Life are best suited for this with their access to offensive buffs at Common, and possibly Nature if you can transmute Adamantium. Even better if you combine them. Web and Earth to Mud are also very useful for slowing down some of these units so you can destroy them with strong ranged attacks. Attacking Archangels or Efreets are a bad idea. Archangels have very high defense and Movement making them very difficult to kill, while any kind of Ranged unit is generally hard to attack into and should be avoided. Still, on higher difficulties, it might not be a great idea to break towers that early anyways. Realistically, you won't be able to fight well against the Myrran because they'll usually have a research lead and better units. It will be very difficult to make gains at their expense. But if you ally with all the other Arcanus wizards, then they'll be stretched thin and will definitely slow down. I usually don't break towers until one of: -There are no lairs left except the Towers or things too hard to deal with (this is the most important reason). -There are no good places left to colonize on Arcanus -I have a Very Rare show up in the research spellbook. This typically happens turn 130 at the latest, which is still 30 turns before the AI is allowed to research Plane Shift on their own. Unfortunately, the AI on Lunatic also hits Very Rare around this time, so it's still a rather tough war unless I get lucky and get one of the best spells first. I do it this way because rather than gunning for the Myrran AI itself, my main goal is generally to get to the lairs with retorts/books before they do. If you wait until after turn 140, there may not be anything for you to attack in time on the other side except the Towers themselves. And of course, if you wait until turn 160, you may lose the Towers as treasures, because Plane Shift can be researched in a few turns by the AI, and that breaks the Planar Seal so they don't actually need to wait until turn 200 when they're actually "allowed". (October 22nd, 2020, 10:23)Anskiy Wrote: Interesting, so you think it's actually better to leave other Arcanus wizards around and take all the lairs, nodes etc that you can before the Myrran shows up? There's no one best strategy, it depends on what your build does best. There is no point in allying all the other Arcanus wizards if you're playing a rush conquest build, and you need their cities, and it rarely makes sense on Small or Tiny maps. An alliance strategy is only viable when you feel confident in keeping up in the race to Very Rare without any wars to take more cities, and you have at least 1 natural ally. That means you need to develop at least 10 cities without conquering them in war. If everybody hates your guts to begin with, trying to ally them before they all declare war on you is hopeless without Charismatic. You can also leave them alone without allying, but there's more uncertainty there. I definitely don't bother to attack anybody who I can't steamroll, it's a waste of resources. They may not help you against the Myrran wizard though, or might even ally with them, if you aren't their ally and call them to war. But still, it's more likely that they will just start fighting by themselves, so it is useful. The fact is that the AI's on high difficulties generate more resources and cast faster due to their bonuses, so you and 3 AIs vs Myrran wizard is a lot stronger than you owning all of Arcanus, and you all develop much faster if nobody wasted resources on war.
Yeah, I definitely experienced that with an Arcanus wizard stabbing me in the back when I was fighting the Myrran. I made some decent progress against her too, but in retrospect I should have realized he wouldn't be on my side the moment I saw the Myrran was Kali - he was a Nature/Sorcery wizard.
December 28th, 2020, 03:20
(This post was last modified: December 28th, 2020, 03:22 by teelaurila.)
Magicians is usually my go-to method for reliably beating most. You do need some help from your build: web+mud, prayer, focus magic, black prayer come to mind. Barbarians with holy weapon+flame blade is another way.
Then there are special cases. Sprite-cheese (with web/wraith form), invis-cheese (night stalker) would be ones that show up a bit more often. With various heroes and items there are a staggering number of different openings. The earliest I got was undead chaos spawn + black prayer against wraiths. This was while still researching commons, since I got the black prayer from treasure. The bottom line is, if your strategy is to hit Myrror early, you should plan your build for that. I also like to be able to do that, but it is just one option depending on how the game goes. It comes anyway with having a strong treasure-busting strategy. The difference to treasure hunting in general is of course that you only need to find one tower that you got good stuff for. And naturally you should only go for Myrror if you have a point to be there: Either a strong decapitation stack or prepared treasure hunting.
Makes sense. Personally I prefer to be the one breaking the towers since I don't like waiting for the Myrran to show up. It lets me study their build and prepare appropriate counters or adjust my strategy. There's few things worse than running into a Death wizard when you have low resistance armies running around. And that's just one example.
Sprite cheese is taking a stack of sprites into any lair / node / tower with inhabitants that can't attack flying. Sprites are extremely weak, usually only able to kill one or two rare / very rare creatures per combat, so the cheese part is repeatedly taking them into the tower.
I prefer night stalkers, as it's a quick spell to research and you can clear out towers with a much wider array of stuff, like storm giants, efreets and doom bats, although usually only by spending a lot of mana on spellcasting in the process. Hydras are one of the easiest creatures for any wizard, just take in stacks of magicians and cast fireball on them. Since they're secretly a multi-figure unit -- meaning the fireball hits each figure -- and have low defense, they'll die pretty fast. They're also quite slow. I've always felt hydras are a pretty lackluster creature for the very rare tier, although the regen is nice if you're the owner. Towers full of angels / archangels are basically impossible in early game. In groups, those particular creatures are vastly more difficult than equivalent creatures, and I feel they're underrated by the combat weighting algorithms. Demon lords and death knights are also tough but, for whatever reason, much rarer in towers. |
