[0.981] Mage troops

Dont agree. I always have Charge on my units and will get in the mages face in the first round. In the latest changelog monsters gets more movement as well and that will give mages more problems.

From the changelog:

Increased moves for Cave Bears, Coastal Skaths, Drakes, Ebbon Wolves, Forest Drake, Great Wolf, Ice Warg, Escaped Juggernaut, Mire Skath, Naja, Ophidian, Pack Drake, Plaguestalker, Silt Skath and Umberdroths

Not really. It is very easy to get defense against elemental attacks. You can give your units items that grant a combined 75% fire or cold resistance just by researching up to Arcane Apparel. Add a Nature's Cloak to the mix and you can make your units immune to fire or cold, or even both with enough Earth Shards. The only one, that could be potentially dangerous is Pariden's Leht Staff, because items with lightning resistance are pretty rare. However, to get the staff you have to research the Warfare-tree up until Weapons of War and then the Magic-tree until Arcane Weapons. This takes a veeeery long time to do, so don't expect to see the staff anytime soon.

Don't agree.  They seem pretty balanced for their resource cost.  

No matter Ash Mage costs 15 Crystals. Ash Mage does up to 24 damage to dragons from distance. Other troops require more technologies and do almost nothing against powerful monsters in early game.

Increased moves on dragons will help. But new items allow to summon creatures to block the way to mages. Also Slag moves are not increased. Moreover Slag is vulnerable to fire.

This is the wrong forum for this - you should move it to FE Beta, as FE support is for bugs.

I agree with this though. I just killed an ashwake dragon with rank 1 cold staves. In fact, the arguments against how rediculous this is are rediculous themselves. Wear a cold cloak and cold ring? What if they are using fire staves? Not to mention you would have to best your opponent a great deal in research to obtain cloaks at the same time he has staves. And even if that was possible, that throws the value of resources bit out the window, because it costs -more- crystals to construct a unit with gear to defense against that damage.

Also how exactly do your spearmen kill them? Units that use staves are not restricted in gear. They could also be wearing armor. And then the leht staff that pariden gets... my god. Unless you stack dodge on all your units, it's game over. In short, there needs to be a way to defend against elemental damage. Resistance versus mastery would make sense.

I agree, the magestaffs are very strong for a choice for trained units. On their own, 6 fire attack might not sound like a lot. But you add +3 fire, +1 fire amulet, also maybe some cold damage. Up their accuracy from a trait, and take +2 initiative. And suddenly you have some very strong ranged troops. The real downside isn't even fast enemies because AI just sticks to anything I put in their path. The real danger is enemy archers.

I have long been thinking about this, a very sad case.

I was thinking about a defense option for magic, along with the spell resistance / Spell mastery. With the current system there is no ideal way to implement this IMO but adding 1 more stat would clog up the game.
And are you proposing that we both need to hit with accuracy, AND penetrate spell resistance? I am not against that, I am curious to your thoughts, I think there is vaguely / horribly little to do against mages, or elemental damage, when they are the problem.

Edit: Put in the important L on "Idea(L)"

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Shit, the way movement is, a mounted unit could charge the field on turn one or archers shoot them from the opposite side of the field and kill my mages before they ever get a turn.  Many things are powerful against certain troops.  If a large monster has spill damage, sweep, overpower, they can eliminate mages or anything else pretty quick.  

And aren't there spells that do elemental protection?  I've had them but never used them, so I don't know if they only work on the caster or they can be cast on other heroes and soldiers too.

Nature's Cloak is a Earth 1 spell and provides 20% (+10% per Earth Shard) to Cold, Fire and Lightning Resistance of a single unit per casting.

Protection from Cold is available from a random tech and provides 50% Cold Resistance to all allied units during combat.

Fire Resistance is also available from a random tech and provides 50% Fire Resistance to a single unit per casting.

--- > Using a magic staff does not restrict armor choices! < ---

Err to answer you kongej I didn't meant to add another stat or require a bypass. I honestly hate the way that resitance works.. but it's not just magic staves that are the problem. Building a group of lightning hammer troops or heart of fire archers all have a means of completely ignoring defense. Spell mastery and spell resist could work like attack and armor.

The formula being mastery/mastery+resist. Though I'm a bit iffy on the formula with the numbers the way they currently are. A direct percentage based on the difference might work as well.

You killed a dragon with cold staves? And that is ridiculous? Even if we assume it is (I mean is there a range of 'acceptable' weapons you would like for dragon killing?). The solution to that isnt the dragon teching up to buy itself a cold cloak, its giving the dragon some elemental resistance. Easy.

Now for the second bit, why are spearmen fighting mages? On their own? Arbitrary unit matchups can be done for anything and dont prove a thing. Cant the spearmen charge into battle? or have a cold ring? or even do some elemental damage itself with an amulet or something. The spear is a first lvl tech v mage with full armor?

Third why is it necessary to have the ring and cloak, cant get by with just a ring?. Staff damage is already less then other weapons. Now its only acceptable if its 75 percent reduced? Is this the balance for weapons. Are spears only acceptable if there damage can be reduced 75 percent by using items that must be cheaper! then the spear itself.

Now using a stave is a very costly exercise, and we have people talking about giving them full armor, abilities, amulets and rings etc to up that. In practice I found them to be a good unit but as they should be. There ultra expensive in crystal, I could only build ONE group of mages decked out like this in half the game. Cant churn out 10 or 20 of them. Not like spearmen with a cold ring.

If your opponent has built these amazing mages then you know that killing the one or two units of his and they are gone for dozens of turns of crystal mining.

Target them with champs or spells or alpha strikes of your own stack, they cant come back like your spearmen can.

Well, there is one type of dragon that is weak to cold, it seems to me that the strategy to defeat it IS COLD MAGES!!!  Seems fine to me.

Leeroy clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Building a staff has a crystal cost of 3, building a fire/cold ring unit has a crystal cost of 2. If you can afford to build spear units with cold rings, you can afford to build a group of mages. Though the reality is that if you wanted to defend against mages, belts of precognition would provide more defense.

However whether your basic spear unit can kill that basic mage unit isn't the issue. The issue is that regardless of how high your defense is elemental damage will bypass it. Crystal is gained at the same rate as metal, and constructing a full suit of chain takes 12. It takes 3 crystal to make that chainmail pointless. The tech level required is also signifcantly higher. Have platemail? Champion plate?! Wasted resources.

You are also doing the wrong comparison. We should be looking at archers. A full suit of leather provides 8, while chain provides 16. Shortbow against leather will do 4 damage on average. Longbow against chain will also do 4 (3.8) Both of these values are lower than our mages can do, at lower level tech. But what if we look at a scenario were you only have a shortbow against chain: Now your doing Less than 3 (2.6) and that empires tech advantage is meaningfull.

With cold staves, he could have all the way up to platemail and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Will that empire be capable of killing you with other things? Sure it could! But making a line of research, or an entire group of monsters, pointless with a single tech is nonsense. But it's not just staves that are at fault here. Lightning hammers, cold amulets, heart of fire. All of these things provide an advantage that your opponent can do little to stop.

And just to be clear here, when I said I killed an ashwake dragon will cold staves, I meant the ones you get from enchantment.. the 2nd tech in the magic tree..

The more I think about this, the more I simply have a distaste for the fact that armor can be ignored. It might be easier to simply include elemental damage with the attack/defense formula and modify it (before running the numbers) for different armor types. Fire against leather, cold against chain, lightning against plate.

In our ashwake dragon example we would have 6 attack with 50% bonus damage. So 9*9/(9+40?) = 1.6. Our mages would do a little better than archers, but not by much. If we really wanted to take out that dragon, we would need to equip frost rings and a frost amulet for 15*15/(15+40?) = 4, or pull out a better frost staff, or a boreal blade or something.

In any case ignoring defense should only happen with spells(that can be resisted), not regular attacks.

Mage staffs were actually at a pretty good balance at 4 base damage, IMO, though I use them enough that I don't mind them being slightly buffed.  The problem, as you've noticed, is that archers are always outclassed by comparable armor techs.  It doesn't make any sense that having a suit of chainmail will somehow protect you against a dragon's breath, or a fireball, as I don't believe there's any way to simply make mage staffs get reduced by armor without affecting every other elemental damage source.  Bows simply need to do more damage, with mage staff damaged reduced by 1 or 2 points, and the problem will be relieved.