2981

In addition to the vine ogres, archers, mech men he also has a number of hama dryads which are annoying, and a bundle of undead troops.

Also there were 2 arch devils which liked to spew forth flame storm every so often.

However as Huz said it was the mass of assorted troops, buffed to the gills with battlefield magic, that were able to basically hold my attacking troops in place while the mages lit them up with all kinds of area effect nastiness. Plus the AQ I was relying on to wreak havoc in the rear ranks of his army turned out to be pretty useless against mistformed, elemental resistant troops…

2982

I just popped open the replay to check something. As I thought the AQ was melee’d to death by an eternal knight. That’s a nasty little unit!

2983

That’s what they said to Dave Perkins the other day in the quad as he ran around nekkid. Go figure. :shock:

2984

It was this battle that modified my guesstimate of a C’tis victory from 98% to 99.99%. The Kings of the Deep are utterly hopeless against Ghost Riders. All they cast against them is Ice Strike, which does pretty much nothing more than kill one guy at a time. In fact, the Coral Queens with banishment are far better against GRs, though the Queens are useless againt C’tis troops (but they can eliminite nearly unlimited mass armies of Ermor undead). Plus, I can only build a very limited set of either Kings or Queens each turn.

The frigging Frost Fiends are bugged terribly, which is why I suppose people never build them. They use their ranged frost attack on the immune ghost riders, which is really pathetic indeed. I guess I have no choice but to switch to Fiends of the Darkness with my hoard of Blood Slaves.

I was going to use 999 blood slaves to overwrite the C’tis global, but it dawned on me that this was a total waste of resources since I am 90% sure C’tis has a blood bonus site and I don’t.

However, a force of about 10 sauromancers and maybe 40 random infantry like vine ogres can easily dispose of 10 castings of GRs without even being scripted! If fact, I was really wishing that I could take a C’tis castle and build Sauromancers from them. But alas, I can only build independent commanders/priests or Heavy Infantry or Archers. Nothing of any consequence.

Atlantis can really do very well in the water, but it is quite weak on land. I am now trying to come up with a secret weapon which would allow me to take another C’tis province at some future point, but I have not yet discovered it as yet. I also really need to do some battle scripting, but that just takes so much time.

Congratulation to Hazzur/Soapy on the splendid win! Once Man goes under, a resignation is obviously in order.

2985

Not that I’m trying to convince you to keep going (indeed, I hope this game ends someday so there will be folks interested in a smaller, tamer game using a similar mod). But - I do not think that casting a global from a bonus site gives you any actual bonus against a dispell. OTOH, the way this game goes there may be a totally different equation for overwrites vs dispells. Anyway, there was a thread about this on the shrapnel forums (maybe in Dec or Jan).

2986

they cast against them is Ice Strike, which does pretty much nothing more than kill one guy at a time.

Actually this is the very spell that makes them great! It actually kills 6 longdead per casting plus due to quickness they can cast 2 / turn! That’s 12 longdead gone to their final rest per round per king of the deep. This is best case, actually they have to hit, but considering how insanely large the GR packs have been hitting does not seem to be a problem. Putting Boots of Quickness on some of your Holy-4 preists would also put a real damper on the ghost riders.

I’m quite sure that if you could somehow have some chaff that was able to delay the ghost riders for a turn or two your kings could mow down ghost riders like there was no tomorrow. This is what I was worried about to be honest. The requirements for chaff to survive against ghost riders is either ( a ) high prot or ( b ) etherial, best case: both :)

Mechanical men for example do quite well against GR. As we have seen Army of gold anything does pretty well. And army of gold vampires does exceedingly well.

As for Ice demons I ( personally ) find them next to useless. FoD I find to be servicable but they have their limitations ( mostly against high prot ). Devils are excellent but in our current environment have limitations. Buffs of various sorts like army of gold/lead, weapons of sharpness, quickness, mass regeneration, mistform convert these decent troops into killing machines.

2987

I must be missing something… Let’s see:

Ice Strike:
Area = 2+ (6 max targets for W3)
Damage = 18
Fatigue = 20-
The 9 armor of GRs reduces the damage to 9, which should be enough to kill them except for the small problem of the MR check.

Wither Bones:
Area = 6+ (14 max targets for D3)
Damage = 16+
Fatigue = 50-
Armor negating, plus NO MR check.

Death from wither bones is automatic in a 6+ area, unlike Ice Strike where you are lucky if you can kill 3 GRs per cast. Heck, even the Wraith Lords are guaranteed dead if hit twice from Wither Bones! Ice Strike will never kill the Wraith Lords, no matter how many times they hit them. The quickness helps, of course, except for the fatigue doubling.

Ice Strike fails miserably against a large number of Ghost Riders. And there is nothing better than that if using water magic.

I was also so dissapointed with Neifel Flames that I quit using it. It is quite weak for a level 9 spell that costs 100 fatigue plus a gem.

I have to agree about the Ice Devils. They don’t seem very good so far to me. Also, they really need to fix the Frost Fiend problem. They are supposed to be better than the Fiends of Darkness, but they are certainly not, even in cold 3 (because the Frost Breath attack is stupidly used on water immune troops).

Anyway, it takes death mages to stop Ghost Riders. Nothing else works very well. I am still wondering why they were not heavily nerfed in the mods, since late game is nearly always dominated by Ghost Riders. Soapy? Any reason for not nerfing them?

By the way, I now have 148,830 population with a gold income of 1108 in my capitol. That is totally amazing to me!

One thing I really messed up was not setting an earth mage up to cast Army of Gold on my shamblers. I had no idea that spell was so darn good! I had looked for a nice battlefield water spell to make my army into a killing machine, but there is none, unfortunately. I didn’t really think about earth spells, as I was using my earth mages mostly just to make mech men.

There is so much complexity to this game that I will never figure it all out…

2988

There’s no MR check on ice strike.

I have to agree about the Ice Devils. They don’t seem very good so far to me.

Ice devils are the best of the devil commanders until you reach alteration 7, then they are about even with archdevils. They are both always better than the heliophagi, and the demon lords tend to be missing vital equipment slots.

2989

I don’t think you are giving Ice Stike a fair shake. It’s really a good spell.

Consider how it works with your W3 mages ( the bulk of your mage force ). For 13 fatigue ( 20 / 2 + you nice base enc of 3 ) you have an area effect of 3 with a precision of 1 which auto kills long dead.

Whither Bones OTOH is 55 fatigue ( enc 5 ), for 6 area which auto kills long dead with a precision of -1.

Note that negative precisions are kind of weird in that it seems that they wildly miss their targets ( Gifts of Heaven at -3 are almost comical! ).

The ice strike comes out pretty well. Note: It seems that there is no MR check with ice strike it’s just pure physical damage. I could be wrong though.

Now death does give access to cheap and easy chaff which water does not have ( water elementals are avilaible but they just don’t have the same “chaff” feeling that skelletons do ). So you really need army of gold/lead.

All this to say that I’m moderatly impressed with the atlantian army for this stage of the game. I’m not sure that they are super for the early part of the game but now when money is cheap they seem pretty good to me.

As for Ghost Riders it’s my fault. I figured that good sized armies would be able to defeat them and that they would be hard on SC’s, which is basically true so I thought of them as a pro-army kind of thing. However I did not count on people actually being able to cast flames from the sky and murdering winter in the quanaties that I am seeing! It’s the crazy remote fire and cold spells that are breaking up the armies which allows ghost riders to be so effective. Also they are kind of crazy effective against PD which makes mad castling a must which I didn’t really want.

2990

Actually it’s not Ice Devils we are talking about it’s Frost Fiends. Sorry for the nomenclature problem.

2991

Holy crap. I play Dom2 like this: research and recruit almost at random. Check out the cool spells and equipment that show up. “Cool! I can make something called EMBER. I definitely want to try one of those.”

etc.

2992

Yeah, the number-crunching sort of drives away the fun for me. Though it’s apparently effective, so there’s always the temptation to the dark side.

2993

Ah well this is not quite true, the sauromancers do need to be scripted or they wont cast enough wither bones to do the trick, and their “meat shield” needs to be tough enough to delay the GRs until the withbones/drain life/bane fire/nether darts can do its work.

I mean… you HAVE overrun sauromancer armies with GRs in the past, it just takes the right circumstances. However I will say that murdering winter is waaay more effective, generally I will lose 3 out 4 sauromancers in an army that catches murdering winter 3 or 4 times.

Lastly the thing that REALLY stops ghost riders is Army of Gold or Army of Lead in conjunction with death caster like sauromancers. beyond the initial AP charge ghost riders basically cant do significant damage to armoured troops. That particular battle you commented on was precisely that situation: 5 sauromancers defended by just enough Army-of Gold boosted troops to hold the ghost riders in place.

Also I want to say that I have had only mediocre success in general using Ghost Riders against Atlantis troops for a variety of reasons, and my only serious successes have come againt very much weakened armies. Heck, ghost riders couldn’t even take out the PD you put into Ryleh’s underwater provinces!!

2994

I play dom2 fairly seat-of-the-pants too. All my behaviour is basically “learned” from actually seeing what works and what doesnt. I sure don’t test the way huzurdaddi does! :shock:

2995

That is why you are sane :)

2996

I guess I am the same way about playing by the seat of the pants. I have been trying to rationalize why my Ice Strikes are so ineffective, and I can’t for the life of me tell why. They seem to kill on average, less than 2 riders per strike, and even fewer of the Elite Warriors. If you do the math, it makes no sense. I had assumed there was a MR check, but that could be wrong. There must be something in the damage equation I don’t really understand.

I also noted just how easily the Wither Bones utterly destroyed the Riders as compared to the Ice Strikes. It is obviously a far more effective spell on undead troops.

My only real tactic so far has been to kill the sauromancers with Murdering Winters and Flames from the Sky. I think I must have killed 600-700 of them so far. And still they come. Endlessly and without remorse…

One thing I like about playing under these mods is that territory makes a big difference. The more territory you have, the stronger you are. The inability to easily hoard clams could be one of the reasons for this. The overdone growth scale might be an even stronger reason.

I am also curious on how many territories C’tis currently has. My guess is about 230.

Oh, and about the PD thing. It took 80 PD to stop 5 Ghost Riders. This is over 3000 gold vs 20 death gems. And Atlantis PD is one of the best. In other words, yet another a serious imbalance in the game. PD really needs to be fixed somehow

2997

And with good reason, since thats all its good for… killing undead!

2998

Faeruntest (Man) - Despite watching hundreds more C’tisian fiends die in the past two turns, mostly to Atlantian ghost rider attacks, I fear the end is nigh. A Doom Horror besieges Myth Drannor, and with the Arcane Nexus Soapyfrog doubtless has the ability to summon at least one a turn.

Oh, and Soapyfrog: I’m not getting any reports on what is besieging my fort at the glacier of the white worm (346 I think). Could you tell me roughly what your force is?

2999

Anyone still playing in the Feeding Frenzy game? Who won?

3000

Doom Horrors are the great morale breaker ;) Of course I wont tell you how I managed, in another game, to lose 14 out of 18 Doom Horrors in one battle!

Oh, and Soapyfrog: I’m not getting any reports on what is besieging my fort at the glacier of the white worm (346 I think). Could you tell me roughly what your force is?

I think if you dont have scouting there you wont see whats beseiging you. That has certainly happened to me before!