Multi realm synergies

[Anskiy]

Since Seravy recently discussed the viability of multi realm strategies in CoM 2, I figured I'd start one for CoM here.

I've only recently started delving into multi realm wizards, my current attempts being Chaos + Death. So far I've found that unless there's a specific synergy you're going for, they have less guarantees for good tools and become a bit of a roulette wheel as the game goes on. However it does feel great when you stumble on a combination that works. The potential for spell trades is also higher, and you can generally reach higher tiers faster since you have less spells from each tier to get through. My favorite moment was unlocking Great Lizard and Mystic Surge at the same time, and using that combo to plow through many liars, before being unfortunately exorcised by some Angels.

[Suppanut]

Speak of synergy, I would say that sorcery could synergy with almost every realm due to its spell is almost not overlapped with other realm and not end up limit your own other realm too (different from death-life pair which clearly excluded one another most of the time). Even realm which sorcery is an direct counter when on different side like chaos still get a lot of advantage offer by sorcery such as dispelling wave and aether binding.

Another pair of good synergy and very newbie friendly is nature-chaos. Many of their spell synergy with each others so well such as doom mastery/chaos channal with land link and survival instinct (which working so well due to they remove limit of and weak point of one another). Or raise volcano with change terrain/gaia's blessing which clearly unique combo which allow player to have fun with sandboxing. But downside of how rare and very rare spell of both realm shared many similarity, this hurt their synergy a lot as it mean that many spell of get obsolete due to existence of better spell on other realm (espeically nature which their spell which similar to chaos is clearly inferior, it would be better if nature have their own twisted or have better enchantment in rare or very rare tier) and if player play 2 realm and deal fatal hand in spell in their spellbook, the game seem to be very big disappointment by result. As late game synery of chaos-nature depend on spell which nature can but chaos could not.

Not sure about how much would chaos get advantage when pair with life though, especially for those life-global enchantment. But it is clear that Life get a lot from chaos support, especially for chaos early enchantment due to although life good at defensive enchantment, but its early game lack of offensive option. Although chaos enchantment tend to not working well with fantastic creature, but life realm wizard rely on their race follower after all.

But in the end, to say which realm have good synergy with another or not should be judge mainly on common and uncommon spell as they tend to be spell which rarely miss by wizard (even if they have few books in that realm, they still could trade those level of spell, so unlikely to miss any). If both realm only able to synergy on rare or very rare spell then it should considered as powerful combo that player may need to find those spell in dungeon raid again and again in order to get spell player want rather than real synergy.

[Suppanut]

As you start with chaos-death pair, I will try analyze it along with you.

From Chaos's perspective, what chaos would gain when working with death...
Save-or-die & direct attack spell
- Save-or-die would get advantage from death's darkness and black prayer.
- By using created undeads, it maybe an option for chaos wizard to spend less mana on summon (which your early summon clearly not better) to have more mana to spend on direct attack and save-or-die spell?

Summon & Unit enchantment
- Hell hounds has good potential to working with cloak of fear (for fear) and wraith form (for weapon immunity) in early game as option for increase survival chance when no better option available
- Wraith form may more useful for melee-based chaos creature in long term but it not make up for their weak point in resistance.
- Free undeads are thrown away units which so suitable for using with mystic surge.
- Chaos's early unit enchantment (flame blade) not working summon unit, and undead is cannon fodder which not worth pay any mana on them in long term.
- Chaos channalled normal units could get bloodlust enchantment (which also permanent) later (Count Dracula in making, but then end result would it considered as death or chaos creature or considered as both?, if it is both then it would open very big chain of combo, but fact that undead could not healed still bad for turn your elite unit into pawn for short term boost)
- Death creature could help chaos wizard see through invisible units.

City & Global Enchantment
- You would have fun cursed enemies again and again with effect more on square than just plus


From Death's perspective, what chaos would gain when working with chaos...
Save-or-die & direct attack spell
- Shatter rander weakness obsolete most of the time especially when consider that death good at reduce resistance
- Chaos channalled magician could not cast death magic in battle which lead to a lot of inconvenience for trivial gain
- Chaos and death compete for choice in direct attack and save-or-die spell, use more chaos direct attack my mean less undead raise to serve you.

Summon & Unit enchantment
- Death's summon could not use flame blade and undead units not worth mana upkeep for flame blade too.
- maybe werewolf and night stalker would get some more damage output by being arsonist (immolation) but overall chaos enchantment not give any special advantage for death (when compare to other creatures) in battle
- Your undead horde could get advantage from blazing march
- Warp reality is detriment to all non-chaos units including death units
- Not sure if bloodlust would still make chaos channaled units still counted as chaos creature or not.

City & Global Enchantment
- You would have fun cursed enemies again and again with effect more on square than just plus

Strangely. For selfish realm like death, it end up chaos would gain more from cooperated with death than death gain from coop with chaos.

@Anskiy have you ever considered chaos warlord wizard? why when you choose warlord option, you paired it with life?

Quote from Seravy's opinion from CoM 2

Chaos+Death
+Can destroy both buildings and production/population to effectively destroy enemy cities without having to conquer them
+You almost always have some spells that can be used to destroy enemy units in combat
-Too much combat spells and overland summoning cause spell redundancy
-Chaos's resistance based spells and creature are strictly inferior to Death's options at least until Disintegrate

Nothing really stands out here. Might be good in games with fewer opponents where curses and economy reducing globals can easily win you the game but overall I think this isn't a good combination. Maybe if some of the Chaos commons offered more synergy to death...

[Anskiy]

That analysis is spot on. I conclude that Chaos and Death have little positive synergy with each other. Many of Death's undead creation/resistance based moves conflict with Chaos' direct damage. Warp Creature to reduce resistance to 0 is cute, but sadly not very reliable. Chaos has little else to directly support ghouls and undead units early on, though hell hounds are a good meat shield. In the Uncommon tier, Chaos summons are largely beat by Death ones, the exception being Gargoyles vs Nature since they counter cockatrices.

Night Stalkers are actually pretty good for a combat spell based strategy, as they can remain undetected for long periods of time. I've not lucked into Lycanthropy early yet, but Shadow Demons were rather disappointing for synergy as their damage output is rather mediocre compared to Flame Blade on regular units. In theory they should be solid targets for Mystic Surge however. I was rather surprised to find that Reaper Slash and Syphon Life were both generally more effective than Lightning Bolt unless facing poison immune or high resistance units. I've not yet had a game survive to the phase where I can solidly combine Rares or Very Rares from both realms, though I did amusingly unlock Doom Bolt early several times, and Wave of Despair early once.

As for a Chaotic Warlord, I've considered it, just been playing other styles. I think Warlord goes naturally with Life since both focus heavily on making regular troops effective. That's why I pair them together.

[Suppanut]

Chaos warlord would play differently from life warlord. It is going for early game conquerer, burn your path through the battlefield as it you would full to brim with early advantage. Think about it as you are Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. Perhaps it would be nice idea to play chaos warlord as either barbarian (throw, warship) or nomad (archer) or high elves (archer) or beastman (archer, Warhammer theme coming) but basically chaos warlord working well with either cavalry faction or non-magic archery/thrown factions. Perhaps if you still not give up idea on single realm chaos, you should try warlord-alchemist chaos barbarian (which flame blade basically twice effect on melee power due to it also buffing thrown too) and try hunting for some vessel race to serve you to fix your weak point.

Strength of life realm warlord is steady through out the game (and exceptional force to reckon with late game) but early game chaos warlord fare better for some race which excel in fighting style above. For the rest of the realm, I found that it go against fantasy trope a lot. Sorcery warlord has some early game synergy but not working best as primary realm. Nature warlord has no synergy early game but bearable late game. While death warlord has nothing to great with.

But I think life-chaos (physical offensive) and life-sorcery (magic/defensive) are the best combination for warlord retort up to what kind of race you pick. For third and fourth position are arguably chaos-sorcery which is the best on early game but third best overall due to could not catch up that well with exceptional late game life global unit enchantment and chaos-nature warlord which would have a worse early game than chaos-sorcery but potentially have overall better army by brute force due to land-link and survival instinct, and herb mastery which could close gap with lack of access of late game life global enchantment. I consider 3rd and 4th position as tie due to although maximum potential for brute force of chaos-nature warlord is higher but they require specific rare and very rare spell to reach that strategy while most of need for warlord synergy of chaos-sorcery is common spells which player would unlikely to miss any even if play as 2 realms wizards and could dominate the game early due to all requires tools could get from the first turn through guarentee.

Overall warlord retort is for more-buffed/less-summon play style and this is not style for playing for death realm no matter as primary or secondary realm.

For why those two realm synergy are working so well for warlord retort, let's we discuss later when you ready to talk about those pair.

[Suppanut]

How could I forget that night stalker in the day of calamity... :D

Shadow demon is so great as as their own units but problem is that you would not find anything that could properly give them more advantage from chaos realm. But it could have considerable synergic effect from life (lionheart, invulerbility), nature (land link, survival instinct) and sorcery (focus magic, guardian wind, magic immunity, blur) realms that could truly give synergic power to shadow demon.

My conclusion about chaos-death pair is that it is only useful for role play chaotic evil dark lord who keep stacking world shattering global enchantment one over another while keep laughing maniacally only. It is fun but completely lack of positive energy.

I would argue that classic evil dark lord retort-race combination not working well in CoM at all.

Which pair you want me to analyze next?

(I decide to split previous post into 2 after I expand my reply in detail)

[Anskiy]

I still want to win or atleast reach a dominant position with Chaos + Death, but the next combo is likely Nature + Chaos.

[Suppanut]

OK. here is nature+chaos for you

From Nature's perspective, what nature would gain when working with chaos...
Save-or-die & direct attack spell
- Nature's movement restriction would be advantage which chaos need to rely on for whole game
- Chaos has overall better damage dealing spell but apart from icebolt, spell are not that much overlapped and would have chance to using some nature direct attack spell from time to time
- Chaos channeled magician could not cast nature spell which would be major inconvenience coming with doom mastery

Summon & Unit enchantment
- Chaos would able to provide flyer units which nature lack of
- Very Rare chaos creatures are generally more powerful than nature's especially in term of mobility
- Due to how nature's summon is fight by brute force, immolation would be useful spell to support nature's melee summon
- Chaos-channel and Doom Mastery allow marginally useful but very cheap unit enchantment like land link to be to use on normal unit at full effect
- Chaos-channel and Doom Mastery allow survival instinct to effect normal units too, thus enhance spell coverage a lot
- Nature summon would get detrimental effect from warp reality on this would lead to player need to rely less on nature summon by late game if player want to use warp reality as part of greater unified chaos combo

City & Global Enchantment
- chaos's raise volcano allow nature to able to turn tundra into economically useful terrain

From Chaos's perspective, what chaos would gain when working with nature...
Save-or-die & direct attack spell
- Petrify would be save-or-die spell that player would rely on until player could access to disintegrate or apocalypse on very rare level (which could not rely to have it if you play double realm)

Summon & Unit enchantment
- land link and survival instinct are useful spell for both chaos fantastic creature and chaos-channeled units, this spell allow doom mastery to be one or two step better than what it could be gain from single realm chaos especially on resistance which chaos lack
- resist element and elemental armour allow chaos summon to last longer in magic barrage and breath attack (but not most of spell resistance roll)
- nature's cure and Herb mastery increase survival rate for chaos units and solve healing problem
- hydra weakness could be mitigate by nature's unit enchantment (resist element/elemental armour/land link/iron skin)
- Nature summon generally better than chaos's summon until rare and very rare level

City & Global Enchantment
- nature support economic aspect which chaos lack
- nature allow wizard to restore natural balance of newly conquest wasteland which destroy by world-shattering spell which player casted (or other wizards) earlier

Only real synergy here is on enchantment part and it is more on nature help support chaos in term of enchantment and chaos flyer support landwalker nature as well as unique combo for terraforming the world. By late game many chaos spell would end up weaken nature summon if decide to use but there is also option to play monster summoner too depend on what spell you would have in your spellbook, plan could be change mid-game by time you know more or less on what you have inside. It has big general weakness in lack of illusion immunity to spot invisible unit, only unit this combo could get with illusion immunity is colossus which is very rare nature creature that may end up not able to fight at full power due to your own warp reality.

Nature + Chaos is clearly difference from playing Nature (which tend to rely on summon) or Chaos (rely on summon + normal unit support) alone as it clearly design to play with enchantment and warlord retort rather than mainly rely on summon (summon here end up become supporting cast as warp reality would make you unable to rely on nature's creature which player rely early anymore) but it would make normal racial units to be as strong as uncommon summon creatures most of the time. Or you could play normal 2 realms wizard until mid game when you start to build up army to prepare for late-game mass-buffed. But the biggest weakness of this pair is how weak it against normally less harm "Holy Words" which could easily wiped player's army out.

Think about it as play chaos warlord emphasis on enchantment. Pick race which either give you advantage on resistance or archery/throw and thing would go mostly smooth if you know what you are into. This combination has advantage in how cheap mana upkeep you could have and how much power you could generate (once you have Armageddon). You would have 60% of lionheart at cost less than half of what you need to pay for lionheart per turn. You also able able to take advantage from other people's Divine Order too. But I think this combination not suitable for play with retort like conjuror unless you plan to not use Warp Reality.

In case you do combine all stacking enchantment and global enchantment (stat only) together

(flame blade) (upkeep 1 mana)
+3 Melee Attack +2 missile attack, ignore weapon immunity

(chaos channels/Doom Mastery)(permanent)
+3 defense or +4 fire breath attack or gain flying

(land linking , with chaos channeled) (upkeep 1 mana)
+2 Attack +2 defense

(survival instinct, global enchantment)
+1 defense +1 to hit +2 resistance

(chaos surged, global enchantment)
+3 melee attack +2 range/breath attack +2 resistance

Total stacking bonus on all normal units under chaos channeled units (flame blade, land linking, survival instinct, doom mastery, chaos surged, not included chaos channels's bonus due to randomness, also not include iron skin, and not include herb mastery, and not include combat enchantement, not sure that land linking increase range attack or not so I assume it is not in this combination)
+8 melee attack +4 range attack +2 magic/breath attack +3 defense +4 resistance +1 to hit, ignore weapon immunity

here is combine life only unit/global enchantment for reference (holy weapon, endurance, holy armour, invulnerability, lion heart, charm of life, not include combat enchantment)
+3 attack +3 defense +3 resistance +1 movement point +25% hit point +8 hit point +1 to hit, ignore weapon immunity, illusion immunity, -2 damage receive, weapon immunity

(as you may have already noticed, life-chaos enchanter warlord would get stronger buff than nature-chaos enchanter warlord but cost would be much more expensive and more busy casting)

The weakest weakness of unified chaos+nature combo are "holy word" and "great unsummoning" it could wiped whole army out.

Quote from Seravy's opinion from CoM 2

Chaos+Nature
+Both realms offer solid, easy to use strong points : summoning and direct damage.
+Offers a powerful early (Nature) and late (Chaos) game.
+Raise Volcano is a combo with Nature's terrain modifying spells (but not a particularly good combo, it's more fun than effective)
+Survival Instinct with Doom Mastery
+Gargoyles with Land Linking are a serious force in the early game due to their low cost and being almost impossible to damage
+Nature is very good at stalling out combat, which can be used to throw lots of powerful damage spells from Chaos at the enemy
+Earth To Mud with Flame Blade bowmen is extremely good early on.
-Too much spell redundancy, both in combat spells and overland summoning spells.
-Even more spell redundancy : building destruction spells, Fire Storm/Blizzard.

Overall, it's kinda average but being the most newbie friendly and easiest to play that's probably not a bad thing.

[Incanur]

The combo of Warp Creature & Life Drain is super valuable & constitutes a major strength of Chaos + Death. I'm currently playing a game (Expert, everything Fair) where I started with 10 Life books but found 4 Chaos & 1 Death. It's 1421 or so. My heroes have be going around harvesting enemy Wizards' Behemoths. Earlier I harvested quite a few Hydras from nodes & lairs. The combo is tricky & tedious to set up, but has huge benefits. I know Sapher frequently employs this combo in games at the highest difficulty level.

It's reliable by sheer repetition. With creatures like Behemoths & Hydra, it's easy to avoid their melee attacks by moving around the map. Web facilitates reanimating even fast & dangerous creatures like Efreets. With any spellcasting units in city garrisons, you can often harvest an attacking unit or two by spamming Warp Creature until some unit becomes vulnerable & then switching to Life Drain.

However, past that I agree the Chaos + Death pair doesn't have much to recommend it. I've got another game (also Expert) where I started with 4 Death, 4 Chaos plus Myrran, Channler, & Archmage. I might be able to pull it out, but it's not going especially well at the moment.

[Suppanut]

Sound like interesting combo, but does this mean that if warping creature roll and get half attack strength or 0 defense would not lead to miss chance for get new undead pet? Does this mean that if warping get 0 defense they should be kill by chaos attack spell while half and attack for rare and very rare creature equal to mission failure and has to retreat and try again next time?

I don't know why but I never have luck with warping creature spell (in my successful chaos playthrough enemy are all picking nomad or also chaos wizard with doom mastery and chaos surged enchantment) and my roll tend to quite unlucky.

Perhaps I should accept my luck and not being so picky.