Caster of Magic playthroughs

[Anskiy]

I figured it would be best to have a thread for posting your current Caster of Magic playthroughs. Let me start with a High Men wizard I've been running.

Wizard: 

I ran with:
Nature: Sprites, Earth Lore
Chaos: Fire Bolt, Hell Hounds, Flame Blade, Wall of Fire, Chaos Channels

The idea here being, I would shore up the early game weakness of High Men by hunting and supporting with Sprites, while focusing on a Chaos Channels based build for later. Flame Blade would be a great offensive buff, Hell Hounds would be a decent filler summon, and Fire Bolt and Wall of Fire are both good at what they do without being spectacular.

Started by casting Earth Lore on my initial location, found some decent lairs so summoned two Sprites to hunt them down. I later upgraded this to four Sprites and casted Earth Lore further to the south, as that was where my landmass stretched further and had the most lairs. Noticed some decently grown Halfling hamlets from Raven, so I decided to try my hand at capturing them. My first attack succeeded, but I lost the city thanks to Sprites fighting the counter attacking Swordsmen in melee the next turn. The auto attacking option makes weird decisions sometimes..

The second attack on the city failed since Raven learnt Guardian Wind by then, however they did significant damage to his garrison. I was close to finishing up my Fighter's Guild and building Pikemen, so I decided to have the surviving Sprites hang around the city. They were grouped up enough to dissuade any counter attacks from Raven. I was amused to see him frantically rush War Bears into the city. An Earth Lore there revealed that Raven had started on the south of my landmass! Well, this was a lucky find.

Assembled some Pikemen and Sprites and mounted a third attack. Raven tried desperately to hold, but Flame Blade Pikemen simply cut down War Bears to ribbons. Sprites were pretty good ranged support, sniping off targets before the Pikemen engaged. With his city captured, I diverted Pikemen to his western city while sending Sprites to support again. His western city fell easily, and he didn't seem to have much remaining to fight me. Raven did perform a sneak attack on my eastern High Men city and took it since it was poorly garrisoned and I casted Wall of Fire in combat, not realizing it didn't work well against War Bears. Some Pikemen promptly recaptured it though. My Sprites captured his northern city, and that sealed the deal. He begged for peace, and I accepted.

From there, I started building Flame Bladed Pikemen to capture nodes and lairs. A lair with many Great Lizards fell to them, yielding a Nature book. Chaos Channels showed up in my book afterwards, letting my Pikemen attack nodes with Air Elementals and Sky Drakes. It's shocking how fast these enemies melted away once my Pikemen could fly or breathe into them. The node yielded Valana, and more importantly Doom Mastery!

Raven, having realized my might, started asking for a Wizard's Pact. I hesitated at first, but after realizing he was unlikely to spread further on the map, signed it. I started casting Doom Mastery while adding Magicians and Slingers into my armies. I ran into the other two wizards soon enough, Merlin seemed mildly upset with me but never actually attacked. Tlaloc had grown big, but was also willing to leave me alone. Lairs yielded some decent stuff, including a Sage Master retort, a Life book, and some decent artifacts. 







I soon got Land Link and that basically sealed the deal. Nature buffs play really well with Doom Mastery, and Land Link is no exception. In particular it made my Slingers and Pikemen utter monsters.

I also made some decent trades with other wizards. Cracks' Call for Cockatrices and Blizzard for Nature's Cures, both from Raven iirc, who remains too small to be a threat. I've researched upto Efreet and started learning Doom Bolt, so I will have decent options for doomstacking soon. Current state of the game:





Currently still lair hunting. I regret not being a bit more aggressive with Sprites as Tlaloc and Merlin captured some relatively easy lairs, but I still have the upper hand. Once Arcanus is cleared of lairs, I'll start killing off wizards. Tlaloc might be good to start with, though it depends on how good his cities are.

[Anskiy]

I gave up on that game.

I tried attacking Tlaloc, but his combination of Black Prayer and Prayer was extremely effective at shutting down my troops. On top of that, he annoyingly knew Guardian Wind, so my Slingers became very ineffective. I lost two whole stacks to him. At that point, I realized the game was lost, but decided to continue playing anyway to see how the AI would behave.

I observed that they were infact very incompetent at forming offensive stacks to capture cities. Throughout the war they only captured two cities, one of them being my capital, despite both having crappy garrisons; Valana was the only exception. Infact they gave me enough time to build an Efreet stack and burn down two of Tlaloc's cities. I also think Reaper Slash is a bit too strong on units that don't resist Poison? That two of them could be used to kill an Efreet was definitely not very encouraging haha. Further, I feel arrow counters are way too prevalent, though I know Seravy disagrees.

Soon after I fought Tlaloc, Merlin declared war and decided to harass me with halberdier stacks. I wasn't surprised; Klackons don't really have any great units. However they did do fairly decent damage to units I thought were well armored, like Chaos Channeled Land Linked Paladins who had rolled the +3 defense buff. Later, Raven decided to join in and declared war too. After a long time, the AIs decided to send their stacks towards my capital. Valana boldly killed two of the stacks singlehandedly; one of them was a Griffin stack sent by Tlaloc and the other a Focus Magicked Cockatrice stack sent by Raven. My capital's troops were less than useless, doing fairly little effective damage before being cut down. Merlin's halberdiers followed afterwards, and despite my best attempts to keep Valana alive they managed to deal the killing blow.

[Anskiy]

I started a new playthrough to see how Lizardmen fared with Nature + Chaos. My wizard:



Nature picks: Sprites, Web, Earth Lore
Chaos picks: In the image above.

The plan was to use Sprites for lair hunting again, and then upgrade them to something better. Javelineers with Chaos Channels would also be great as invading troops for the early and mid game. 

Sprites definitely paid off well. I got some pretty cool spells:





Not shown here is various pieces of junk I melted down.

Oberic decided to declare war on me since he was Chaotic, so I skirmished a little on his continent. Sprites completely tear apart Hell Hounds, especially with the aid of a Nature node. Anyhow, I teched upto Javelineers and used them to gradually destroy his cities, replacing them with Lizardmen cities. That basically killed his chances at reappearing in the game, with the other two wizards breathing down his neck, and he sued for peace.

I upgraded my summon stacks to use Chimeras and found some cool treasure from nodes:





Mystic Surge helped quite a bit in capturing them. Mystic Surge in general is very fun and silly to play with:





I concluded the game session after getting the doom bow, current state of the game:





Tauron is the only one who could threaten me, and is Chaotic, so let's hope he doesn't pull some nonsense. Thankfully he's allied with me right now.

[Anskiy]

I kept hunting lairs. Tauron unsurprisingly declared war a few turns later. I decided to brave the water with some troops.. and found that they were quite lacking. Tauron was a Warlord with Gnolls, with Chaos Channels buffing their defense on some of them, so they actually ended up being quite scary, which is rare. I had to spam Cockatrices and set my mana generation to max to finance them. It was rather intense, but with some backing by Javelineers and a whole load of Lightning Bolts, I pushed him back and started seizing his continent with Lizardmen settlers. Eventually he was reduced to just his capital, at which point he begged for peace.



If there's one thing Lizardmen are good at, it's spamming tons of durable and reliable units to simply intimidate the AI. I almost ran out of food supplying the Lizardmen horde, but it was well worth it.

After that, it was just a matter of claiming more land and clearing more lair. I got Deth Stryke, Sir Harold AND Mortu all to apply for me. WOW! I also found some amazing stuff, including Doom Mastery from a lair and this amazing gem:



Current state of the game:





I am currently the undisputed ruler of Arcanus. Myrror may be a challenge, but with Doom Bolt, Doom Bats, Chimeras, and Great Wyrm being researched, I highly doubt it. I already have some idea of who it is, since Raven's portrait popped up when he casted Detect Magic. Wish me luck!

[Anskiy]

Continued that game. Started hunting towers for treasure as Arcanus had run out. Raven wanted to get my spells, but offered crap trades. I was preparing a doomstack to hit his capital when Oberic allied with him, declared war with me due to his Chaotic personality, and got Raven to turn against me. What followed was a huge slog. I banished Raven but he knew Magic Immunity, and Chaos has no good answers to that outside of praying for the guaranteed Confusion hit from Apocalypse. So it was a struggle every time his hero stack showed up. He returned to a random village on Arcanus and began to spell blast my casts of Great Wyrm. Thankfully at this point I had built up enough skill to instant cast Stone Giants, so I started stacking them up for the offensive. What impressed me is that they were not only able to take Raven's cities, they were able to hold them too.

Had a few tricky fights at his capitals, since he was using Sky Drakes and knew Counter Magic to block my web. However multiple stacks were able to rough him up, and he was banished a second time. Now, I started going on the offensive. I captured as many of his Myrran cities as I could, stealing some nodes on the way too. When Raven lost a noticeable amount of ground, he realized that the tables had turned and sued for peace.

What followed next was me disjuncting his damned Detect Magic, setting up my own Armageddon and Meteor Storm, and then swarming him with many Stone Giants. He was able to kill one or two but Apocalypse did too much damage to his garrisons. Gradually, his main continent fell to my horde, and then his island to the right. Armageddon definitely served me well; the extra power was a huge boost to casting skill and by the end I had 660(!) casting skill.

There were a few attempts at comebacks. Oberic had started seizing a few of my Lizardmen cities, and his Chaos Rifts were hurting a lot. Raven was also able to decimate some cities with Earthquake, though personally what hurt me most was losing Mortu to one of them. However, the game was already decided; the only thing that remained was to fight many battles, which I did.

At long last Raven was down to only two cities, completely devoid of any real power. He did an admirable job of stalling me with Sky Drakes and Djinn, however multiple stacks drew out enough blood to make him fall dead, especially when his casting skill could hardly compare to mine. Once he fell, it was but one turn before the remaining wizards acknowledged my supremacy and handed me the crown of the two worlds.

[tehemperorer]

Awesome, I'm enjoying these... can you post the settings and the final score screen too, and also if you used save games or not?

[Anskiy]

Thanks! Sorry, I forgot to get a screenshot of the score screen, though it wasn't that good since the game dragged a bit too much. My settings are below, I do use save games but I tend to avoid reloading and only use them to bookmark a playthrough.

[Anskiy]

Started a new playthrough, wizard:



Nature picks: Sprites, Web, Earth Lore
Chaos picks: Fire Bolt, Flame Blade, Wall of Fire
Race: Barbarians

Started the game by earth loring on my capital, then building a four Sprite stack asap. I spent a ton of money getting my barbarian capital upto speed, and noticed that Horus was trying to settle on my continent, and was running Barbarians too. Good news for me! I promptly snatched his settlements and started developing them too.

I Earth Lored the entire plane, and noticed the lairs were kind of crappy for Sprites. No matter, I could still claim some Sorcery nodes and risk a few lairs. Horus calmed down eventually and sued for peace, while my capital grew to a decent size, enough to make Gladiators pretty consistently.

I got some Maritime Guilds built to get Flying Warships going with Chaos Channels. Node treasure was sadly underwhelming, outside of Land Linking. Horus caught me by surprise and captured my westernmost city with a Barbarian stack. The battles I had there showed one thing: Barbarians on the defensive with Life buffs are really overpowered, being able to tear even Gladiators to ribbons. The wall definitely didn't help matters. However, they were still weak to resistance spells, and highly vulnerable to ranged attacks, so once my Sprite stack was done hunting treasure I would build a 9 Sprite stack to follow my Gladiators in. 

At long last, my Sprites cleared all the lairs and nodes they could, failing to find anything interesting. I sent them back to my main continent. Horus tried to reinforce his garrison by ships, and was harassing my Gladiator stack. He even picked off a few stray Sprites. However my navy technology was much superior to his, and a few Warships there cut off his navy for good. Once I had 9 Gladiators and 9 Sprites ready, I first attacked with the Gladiators, baiting the defenders into coming onto the gate time one by one and fire bolting them down. Then I sent the Sprites in. They gladly massacred the rermaining barbarians, the node boost from a nearby Nature node definitely helping them out quite a bit here. 

Horus got Raven to declare war on me after that, but Raven was too far to really help. I don't think he could bring anything dangerous anyway, closest thing to a threat he could make were Focus Magic Cockatrices, and my gargoyle research was underway.

I then pounced on Tauron after that, taking away his Orc and High Elf towns. Tauron tried some fairly feeble counter attacks, but my Great Lizards had come into play, and they crushed those easily. Tauron managed to defend against one of my offensive stacks, but that was the extent of his accomplishments. He sued for peace eventually too.



With the war on Tauron over, I swung my Great Lizard stack to claim a Nature node with many Giant Spiders, supported by some Gladiators and Berserkers. They won, but the low resistance was painfully obvious as a weak point against the Giant Spiders. Infact this was becoming too obvious with the nodes: Barbarians are great for their raw power and ability to hit flying creatures easily, but resistance based effects tend to shut them down, and there were many lairs I couldn't quite take thanks to Cockatrices or Chaos Spawns. Anyhow, this lair was a great find, because it had Shalla and Transmute. Transmute was not so powerful for my Barbarians, but it would be good on my captured races.

I got a Gargoyle and several Gladiators to clear a Cockatrices and Sprites lair, which yielded the Change Terrain spell. I also got Chaos Channels, which would finally let me enchant my Warships with flying potentially. Change Terrain was a very welcome sight, since it would let me improve the location of my High Elf and Orc towns.

Horus attempted to steal two of my nodes, but I promptly swatted him out of those. In return, I took a node on his continent, and held it with five gladiators. He harassed me with some counter attacks, but it became plainly obvious that he was quite a way behind me as far as casting skill and the quality of spells were concerned. With that done, I began to cast Chaos Channels on my Warships, and Flame Blade on a Berserker stack sent towards a Great Lizard node.

The present situation:





As of now, Raven remains the only wizard who can threaten me. I have Cockatrices so Horus is dead whenever I want him to be. I plan to look around for lairs I can conquer with my armies, then begin mopping up wizards.

[Anskiy]

I continued that game yesterday. My Berserkers claimed a Great Lizard node, and retrieved this:



Stone Giants weren't part of the plan, however they would be a good fallback option. They would especially be helpful if Raven decided to throw Focus Magicked Cockatrices at me. 

My Flying Warship stack was ready, so they started hunting for nodes my Berserkers, Gladiators and other regular units couldn't deal with. Their first node yielded a rather unremarkable bow, their second node yielded a War Bears spell and yet another uninteresting bow, the only thing going for it being the Inner Fire trait.

Around this point I was alerted to the Myrran descending to the plane with him banishing Tauron. I quickly swung my Warships towards Tauron's continent to make contact. It was Merlin, with Nature and Life books. It seemed like he was using Dwarves, and indeed Tauron's former capital had been occupied by 7 Hammerhands and 2 Magicians. I was hesitant to attack it; while I was sure my Warships were mighty, I also knew Merlin would likely have Web and having a Warship lose even one turn on the ground could be troublesome, to say nothing about exposing them to Hammerhands. 

It was barely two turns after I met him that Merlin declared war on all of Arcanus. I decided to punish him for his insolence and start attacking his node stacks. Raven had already reached Tauron's continent and seized some towers, so I followed behind him and dispacted a node garrison, which was largely weak. However, this battle showed me that Merlin knew Call Lightning already, which was a little worrisome. Thankfully, at this point Nature's Cures popped in my book, which would effectively cancel that spell completely. I immediately rushed research for it while my Warships captured a small, weakly defended town of Merlin. However, I noticed that Merlin had another huge node nearby, as well as a major city, so I just used the town to make two Magic Spirites while the Warships moved on, leaving the town empty.

The huge node was guarded by a small army of Hammerhands, and was Nature on top of that. I decided to risk the battle anyway, and while Merlin got to web one Warship, it broke free quickly and he wasted his time summoning irrelevant things like Catapults and Boars. My Warships did admirably against the Hammerhands, even with a Call Lightning slowly chipping at them. This gave me a lot of confidence against Merlin's defenses, and I decided to send them to take his huge city the next turn.

Merlin again tried his usual Web, Catapult summoning, Call Lightning strategy in his city, but I outsmarted him by Webbing his Hammerhands, throwing some Earth to Mud, and chipping away at all his Hammerhands while exploiting their poor movement speed, especially on mud. My Warships were hardly singed, with only one ship dying, while Merlin lost all of his precious Hammerhands. What's more, the city was largely intact when it passed into my hands.



A near fully developed high population Dwarven city next to an Adamantium mine that could build every Dwarven unit ever except the Warship. Could you say "gift horse" again?

When all this was happening, Raven warmed up enough with me to become buddies. And this showed up in the book:



There was no question; this had to be researched and casted asap. My Warships would of course hold this city, it was just too good a find. I was preparing an army of Gladiators, Berserkers and even Spellserkers to send to Myrror to aid in the invasion, while the city would keep making Hammerhands to throw and distract Merlin.

Eventually, Merlin grew tired and realized he had started a pointless war. He sued for peace with most wizards, and was beginning to cool off with me. Unfortunately, Raven defeated Tauron by this time:



This was pretty unfortunate; I would have preferred keeping him alive to potentially stack Chaos Surge and trade for good Chaos spells later. Oh well, it couldn't be helped; besides, atleast Raven and Merlin being Nature wizards meant that I could potentially trade with them later, though of course trading with Merlin would not necessarily be a great idea!

When I was preparing my stacks, Horus decided to steal my damn nodes again. This time I had enough of him; I promptly reclaimed those nodes with force and then decided it was time to conquer Horus, leaving only his capital up so that Divine Order would remain in play. Doom Mastery was researched and was being cast, and I had my stacks directed towards the northeastern most island to capture his cities there first. 

State of the game:







Horus will have a great fall soon. I hope Raven won't mind me capturing a few of his cities to teach him a lesson. But I'm decently prepared for any eventuality at this point, so I doubt it will be an issue.

[Anskiy]

This game is insane.

I conquered Horus' northeastern cities, but it was costly. Life buffed Berserkers are no joke, and with Spellserkers throwing spells behind the walls, it was near impossible to beat them. I managed to kill them with a Cockatrice army but it took a lot of mana to summon, and the Cockatrices took heavy casualties. At around this point, Merlin decided he really wanted Arcanus land, and started warring with all Arcanus wizards again, including me. He took three nodes, and was beating Raven soundly. One look at his troops was enough to confirm he had a significant advantage over me; many of the Hammerhands came from adamantium and mithril cities, they would usually be backed by Prayer and sometimes have Lionheart casted on them, and his Torin had 22 defense and 22 resistance!

What was going to be a campaign punishing Horus would have to be turned into one defending against Merlin, almost immediately. I signed a peace treaty with Horus and tried to get Land Linking on all my troops. I played after the save provided a bit, and found that Flame Bladed Berserkers and Gladiators with Land Linking could hold their own against a Hammerhand, but I clearly needed something more to get a decisive advantage over Merlin. I pushed Merlin out of a Klackon city he took from Raven, took back two nodes, and dealt heavy damage to his tower stack, but it was all quite costly in terms of both troops and mana.

You should definitely try this game if you like a challenge. Save attached below.