Runemaster is the best retort

[jhsidi]

How did I forget?

With Runemaster, no more watching as Dispelling Wave knocks off 24 enchantments in a single casting. Let the AI spam Dispel Magic 15 times in a single battle. It's a great way for them to waste mana! ... with absolutely no result.

Even better, now that Aether Binding exists, you, the player, can troll just as hard as the AI does.


With Runemaster and Aether Binding, a 50 mana Disillusionize on some annoying Life city can knock off 5 city enchantments in one go. A 25 mana Dispelling Wave can wipe out 500 mana worth of buffs. Got a Death AI cursing you? Be rid of it for a base cost, 50 mana Disenchant Area. In the late game, for 375 mana, Disjunction can remove the most game-breaking effects.

... I realize this post may seem a bit pointless, but I just want to spread the gospel for everyone else that, like me, absolutely loathes AI dispel spam, especially now that Aether Binding exists. I spent a long time not picking this retort because of the cost. But, you know what? I think I'm fine just having 10 picks for every subsequent playthrough.

[Anskiy]

Kind of wish we could redo how dispelling in general works, because yeah I do hate how binary it seems. Sure there needs to be a counter to buff stacking, but a 25 MP spell throwing out 1000s of MPs worth of buffs, to say nothing of the overland casting skill involved, is quite unreasonable, and basically forces picking Spell Lock for buff strategies.

[jhsidi]

Except Spell Lock has turned into a liability in the age of Aether Binding:

The original design made Spell Lock 100 mp, a really high cost for a buff, specifically to make it difficult to dispel. But Aether Binding, a spell that was not in the original design, now doubles the dispel power of (in most of my games) 5-6 wizards, plus gives them new priorities for overland dispels. So for almost half of all potential opponents, Spell Lock IS easy to dispel, and prioritized to boot.

So let's say you have an 8 stack, which you've laboriously insured with Spell Lock on everyone. Sorcery AI #4 goes aggro and tosses off a 100 mp Dispelling Wave. You get a mildly unlucky RNG roll and the spell clears 4 of your Spell Locks. That's 400 mana gone, which depending on the year, is probably 3-4 turns casting time.

But wait! You had other buffs, and the priority for dispelling stacks with lots of buffs is REALLY HIGH. So while you're trying to recast your Spell Locks, you're getting hit with Dispelling Wave on repeat. Pretty soon, you've lost thousands of mana worth of buffs. Also, AIs have map omniscience specifically for dispelling. They can't cast Corruption on your city they haven't found, but they can cast Dispelling Wave on your stack they can't see.

This isn't an issue that only happens with heavily buffed stacks. If the AI doesn't have a great spells for your specific units in combat, for instance, Dispel Magic and Dispelling Wave receive a really high priority. They'll be spam cast at a low cost, over and over. You may only have Focus Magic and Spell Lock, but there's a good chance that both of those will be cleared by the end of the battle; your Spell Lock insurance was useless.

I wrote a thread on Aether Binding, Seravy's reply is that it's perfect the way it is. I highly disagree; the reality is that, at high difficulty levels, buffing has been removed from the game as a strategy. At least in a game with 13 wizards. There are simply too many AIs, with too much mana to sling around.

So, anyway. Runemaster it is.

[Suppanut]

Runemaster seem to shine best in sorcery but Runemaster is also key retort in case your combo rely on global enchantment too. Especially if you play synergy of 2 or 3 realms but your key global enchantment are at rare or very rare level. It is best way to guerentee it appearance. It used to be very likely in CoM but now there are more global enchantment in CoM2, so odd become a bit less but still better than rely on RNG.

Example of build which rely on runemaster to work due to global enchantment
- Chaos+Nature powerhouse warlord style (rely on doom mastery+survival instinct+chaos surge to dominate late game with blazing eye and herb mastery as supplement)
- Chaos+Sorcery summoner style (rely on inner power and reinforce magic to make summons of both realm to fight with great advantage)

[JustOneMoreTurn]

Somewhere else I suggested that Dispelling Wave become a combat-only spell that suppresses enchantments during that combat. Units that survive the combat have the enchantments restored. It would replace a drain on mana and the annoying tedium of recasting buffs with a strategic challenge to fight a dispel-happy opponent without relying on buffs.

Would it be better if city enchantments were suppressed for x turns rather than being dispelled? Maybe with a cooldown period (the residue from the suppression disrupts new castings for a while) or some other mechanism so that your enchantments wouldn't be constantly suppressed. Human players would be able to exploit this by timing attacks properly, but that probably wouldn't be game-breaking. That might work for Corruption too: make Purifying protect a tile for x turns.

[zitro1987]

Unit enchantment losses are kind of like unit losses, you need reinforcements (units or buffs) to keep going. Permanent loss of unit buffs is just another form of loss. I can acknowledge The micromanagement of bringing back the buffs gets tedious (looking up what buffs were lost)

The idea of nullifying buffs for 1 combat is very cool, as a different spell

[massone]

But wait! You had other buffs, and the priority for dispelling stacks with lots of buffs is REALLY HIGH. So while you're trying to recast your Spell Locks, you're getting hit with Dispelling Wave on repeat. Pretty soon, you've lost thousands of mana worth of buffs. Also, AIs have map omniscience specifically for dispelling. They can't cast Corruption on your city they haven't found, but they can cast Dispelling Wave on your stack they can't see.

...

the reality is that, at high difficulty levels, buffing has been removed from the game as a strategy. At least in a game with 13 wizards. There are simply too many AIs, with too much mana to sling around.

I've never had this experience in my games, even with no boost to dispel resistance.  It has literally never used the overland version on any of my stacks, or any AI stack that I've seen, and the combat version, although it does get used, it's not nearly powerful enough to to be "correct" move in combat if the opponent has Spell Lock. By spending a turn on dispelling a few Spell Locks, the battle is already lost in most cases. In your example of 8 unit stack and 4 losing Spell Lock, the fact that all 8 of them still have full buffs means the player can probably destroy at least half of their units on the player's turn, so the battle is already done. The only chance the AI has to cast Dispelling Wave is during a defensive battle so they go first, but that means the player gets a "free" turn, bought with a few overland casts of Spell Lock, and it only happens during critical battles such as city assaults (because the player has no reason to ever engage in field battles with a heavily buffed doom stack). Spending a few turns to re-cast Spell Lock in exchange for a conquered city is an easy trade.

Somewhere else I suggested that Dispelling Wave become a combat-only spell that suppresses enchantments during that combat.  Units that survive the combat have the enchantments restored.  It would replace a drain on mana and the annoying tedium of recasting buffs with a strategic challenge to fight a dispel-happy opponent without relying on buffs.

Would it be better if city enchantments were suppressed for x turns rather than being dispelled?  Maybe with a cooldown period (the residue from the suppression disrupts new castings for a while) or some other mechanism so that your enchantments wouldn't be constantly suppressed.  Human players would be able to exploit this by timing attacks properly, but that probably wouldn't be game-breaking.  That might work for Corruption too: make Purifying protect a tile for x turns.

I suggested the first one in a different thread I think. The reason for that is because combat casted Dispelling Wave can be spammed as it doesn't itself require overland casting skill. To be fair, the only way to dispel overland enchantments IMO should be to use overland casts of Dispel Magic and Dispelling Wave.

I think it'd need to work a little differently on city enchantments though. It's already been split into Disillusionise, which is a Rare spell. I don't think it'd be appropriate to nerf that even more, seeing as it's a fairly situational Rare spell and generally far from my top picks. I would, however, support merging it back into Dispelling Wave so that more AI can access the spell, but change it so that it has a high chance of suppressing enchantments for a number of turns, and a very low chance of permanently removing the enchantment.

[jhsidi]

But wait! You had other buffs, and the priority for dispelling stacks with lots of buffs is REALLY HIGH. So while you're trying to recast your Spell Locks, you're getting hit with Dispelling Wave on repeat. Pretty soon, you've lost thousands of mana worth of buffs. Also, AIs have map omniscience specifically for dispelling. They can't cast Corruption on your city they haven't found, but they can cast Dispelling Wave on your stack they can't see.

...

the reality is that, at high difficulty levels, buffing has been removed from the game as a strategy. At least in a game with 13 wizards. There are simply too many AIs, with too much mana to sling around.

I've never had this experience in my games, even with no boost to dispel resistance.  It has literally never used the overland version on any of my stacks, or any AI stack that I've seen, and the combat version, although it does get used, it's not nearly powerful enough to to be "correct" move in combat if the opponent has Spell Lock. By spending a turn on dispelling a few Spell Locks, the battle is already lost in most cases. In your example of 8 unit stack and 4 losing Spell Lock, the fact that all 8 of them still have full buffs means the player can probably destroy at least half of their units on the player's turn, so the battle is already done. The only chance the AI has to cast Dispelling Wave is during a defensive battle so they go first, but that means the player gets a "free" turn, bought with a few overland casts of Spell Lock, and it only happens during critical battles such as city assaults (because the player has no reason to ever engage in field battles with a heavily buffed doom stack). Spending a few turns to re-cast Spell Lock in exchange for a conquered city is an easy trade.

I don't think any of the annoying experiences of MoM / CoM will happen every game or necessarily even in a lot of games.

The volcano / corruption thread, for instance -- some games go by with hardly any of this curse activity. In my current game I think I've gotten volcano'ed 5 times or so by 1510? No problem. But two games before, I'd been hit maybe 80+ times and saw a few AIs getting the same treatment too. It's just a role of the dice whether you get those maniacal / ruthless wizards who decide their entire skill pool needs to go to 1 spell (which in my opinion isn't a good use of all their resources, and is not particularly fun).

As for Dispelling Wave, I see it cast in almost any game. I haven't been hit with it in my current game... because I'm playing Sorcery and have good relations with my peers. But there are 3 other pure Sorcery AIs and they're slinging it at enemies quite frequently. I don't think I've ever seen a game where you wouldn't see it cast on someone over the endturn. Not sure how you'd miss it, really.

This is likely also related to playstyle. I like to explore and treasure hunt. That requires buffed stacks. One of the major things that annoys the heck out of me with Dispelling Wave is the map omniscience. If I've got a stack on Myrror, and some wizard on Arcanus who has never been on the other plane is aggro to me, it should absolutely not be possible for it to hit me with Dispelling Wave. Instead, it gets some massive priority because there's a stack out there -- somewhere it can't see -- with buffs, and the spam begins.

[zuzzu]

I agree that when the AI starts spamming Dispelling Wave against you, it's terrible, and there's no way back.
They have omniscent view, huge mana pools and skill pool to cast, and essentially this issue single-handedly nullifies a number of interesting strategies.

I think that Dispelling Wave should be combat only, and that effects should be restored when the combat ends. Also restored for units that are killed in battle but raised from dead during battle.

[zitro1987]

Or adapt your strategy. Use your casting skill for altar of battle and angels/archangels (or other summons if dual realm)