[1.02] Confused by how "binding" is supposed to work

you get them when you upgrade the crystals to shrines - one when you first build it then every so often, another one of the same strength. Then, when you upgrade the shrine to temple, etc. you get stronger versions of it. Each type has its own elemental it produces, from grave elementals to cyndrum demons. However not all of them produce one on the "Shrines", some of them only produce on the temple upwards.

You can make a slave-based bandit lord or beast lord faction and use binding + cult of 1000 eyes (and quendar blood) and bound flesh tome. Then you can add those shrine elementals to your sac stack.  Also, you can use them to back up your sovereign. These are not the best units, and perform better in automation than manual combat.  However, they save you from building actual real armies and let you research the other tech lines.  The spiders will pair with them nicely as tanks.

I can't remember too well, but try selecting a shard and see if it has a "_____ Elemental, X Turns Remaining" type thing down in the selection window. Similar to building on a camp.

I'm not sure if this information is displayed, but it works the same as a troll/mercenary camp. After a number of turns (around 15 or so, but I did not count),  the shard spams an elemental.

There are 3 kinds of elementals for each shard (like "young, normal and ancient"), with increasing power (more attack and HP). They appear as you upgrade to temple/altar in the city.

It is a cool trait for the early game, as provides free units periodically, that will give you Faction Power (the AIs will stay easy on you) and they will help your champs.

The problems are that you need shards and that they are weak units. In mid/late game, they are almost useless: they will die in 1 hit, or you will pile them in cities just for defense. But for that moment, you are supposed to train powerfull units.

This seems as good a place as any to ask my questions about binding. First, can you only have ONE unit of an elemental at a time? I ask because after a single Ancient Mirror Elemental was created from a water temple, the information on the Water Temple says "Max number reached." If you can only have a single Ancient Mirror Elemental despite having 6 water temples, that seems pretty miserly. Is that working as designed, or a consequence of using the Anthys map?

Additionally, I made a custom Kingdom faction, and gave it the binding trait. Life shards don't seem to produce elementals. From reading other posts, I understand I can mod in the death shard elemental relatively easily.But, did the Devs intend life shards to not produce elementals with Binding? I can see lore based arguments for it either way (ie, binding a life shard twists it and produces a death elemental type/OR binding is a dark art that has no effect life shards). I searched but didn't see any Dev comments on this. If it is intended that life shards never produce elementals, perhaps adding that to the trait description would be possible? It would prevent player confusion by making explicit that binding is best suited to an Empire faction.

quender blooded slavers can use these elementals to nab up the sacrifices.

And no there is no such limit.  In my current game i have 6 temples built, and every 5-8 turns i get more and more units, i am running out of space to put them!

I will probably redo my custom faction to move this over to a quendar.

Really! Interesting. I haven't modded anything except the quest xml (got tired of the icicle man quest being repeatable), and despite having 3 water shards with temples for 20+ seasons... just 1 mirror elemental of each type.

Your experience is more in line with what I was expecting. Does anyone know where the XML code for spawning "bound" elementals is? Would it be possible to tweak it after a game has been started, to see if the Anthys map is overriding the spawn code somehow?

Thanks!

They are not necessarily useless in late game, however one of the key mechanics that would make them useful (blood sigil) is broken in 1.02 (it causes a game hang in battle, and sometimes does not protect them in autoplay).

The basic game at normal speed will replace a shard demon 10 turns after it is lost, if you still have more shards of that type improved to the right level than you have shard demons of that type.

Each shard can be improved by an altar, then a shrine and finally a temple.  Young shard demons (some are called elementals) are given by altars, ordinary demons come from shrines and temples give the ancient version.

How many of each type you can have and whether they will be replaced if killed depends on the order in which you improved your shards and upgrded them to shrines and temples.  If you manage it carefully it is possible to have the demons at all 3 levels from lots of shards.

Let's consider a simple example where you clear a large area of monsters and gain 3 earth shards which you control through a city or outposts.  Assume these are the first earth shards in your game so far (so you have no grave elementals yet) and that you have researched the Immortal Codex and can therefore build temples.  How should you improve these shards and does it matter? Yes it matters a lot if you want to maximise the number of free demons.

The best way is to improve all 3 earth shards to altars before building any shrines.  That will give 3 young grave elementals.  Then improve the 3 earth shards to shrines and that will give 3 grave elementals.  Finally improve the shards to temples and gain 3 ancient grave elementals.  Giving a total of 9 demons from 3 shards.  If you were hasty and developed a shrine before the 3rd altar was built you lose one of the young grave elementals, since when the 3rd altar is completed you will have 2 young grave elementals and 2 earth altars and so a 3rd is not generated.  Similarly if you build a temple before the last shrine an ordinary grave elemental will not be generated.

If you go to battle and lose one of the young grave elementals or a grave elemental they will not be replaced (so look after them more carefully  ) because you have more of them thm in existance then you have the right level of shard.  But losing an ancient grave elemental will start a 10 turn process at one of the earth temples and it will be replaced.

JJ

Thank you for that very detailed explanation. Elementals have started showing up according to the rules you outlined. Since I hadn't lost any of my original elementals, the only additional elementals I was ever going to get were new Ancient Class ones- guess I was just too impatient, or the game had to restart, or something.

Anyway, I now have the expected 3 ancient mirror elemental and 3 water temples, so thanks everyone for explaining!

The death shard demon will split if it has a killing blow (bandits and mites are good targets). When split to 5 units its quite an early game menace.

Hiya The_Apprentice   I guess you're the same player who is on the Warlock forum with that name, in which case I'm UncleJJ there and we both have a good taste in games

I like the free troops gained from the shards and Resoln is a much stronger faction than most people give it credit for if you play on a map with plentiful shards.  They tend to concentrate too much on the weaker trained units and the -1HP per level clux Wraiths get.  Resoln can get away with building very few trained units (maybe archers and mages for ranged firepower) and using the shard demons as meatshields for ranged troops and magic.  That gives a very magical game which I enjoy most of all in the fantasy genre (and if you remember that has been my most severe criticism of Warlock, its magical system is too restrictive)

Yes the Cyndrum demons from death shards are one of my favourite types of shard demon from "binding".  If you are careful about the first battle or two they soon become some of the most effective troops.  The most risky thing is getting the first kill which literally doubles their HP and damage dealing by giving a second figure in the unit.   By using other units and champions to damage a suitable target and block their attacks it is possible to get in the killing blow. I find that using the spells curse or wither can make the task much easier.  After that it is a lot easier to make more kills until you get the 5 figures in the unit.

Five figure units that move 3 tiles and do 45 (young cyndrum) or 55 damage are useful in the early / middle game even if they do have zero defence.  Each time they level up they gain a further 10 HP and that soon makes them hard to kill and great damage absorbers.  If you're up against a tough enemy that does a lot of damage or has tough defence, then use wither and curse spells or blindness to even up the odds.  I find Cyndrum demons work really well with Ogres, they move at the same speed and ogres add missile fire and blunt damage to the cutting damage Cyndrums have.

JJ

I find the Elementals, with the exception of crow demons, to range from useless to utterly useless.

Death demons are lackluster, even at 5, and beyond early game are outclassed by any random troop you can build.

Sure they have some hp but 2 hits later and they're almost dead. And they hit like wet noodels. 

I find it somewhat amusing that in the scenario everyone is so afraid of the Enchantress and her wraiths. If I were

there I would tell them: "Relax Relias, the enchantress is actually a lame duck and her armies are weaksauce." 

The Elementals/Demons have to be pretty weak, otherwise the ability would be too powerful. It's one of the few traits (besides +10% race traits and such) that doesn't come with any requirements: you don't have to research anything, build anything or buy anything.

The Water and Fire units are completely worthless, but the Grave (earth) and Cyndrum (death) ones can hold their own fairly well. The Crows (air) are excellent scouts and can sometimes win fights with hit and run tactics. All of them can be be a great help for your Sov in the (very) early game.

Since you are not complaining about the blood sigil bug, i must say that I do not think you have thought enough about this issue.

(@JJ- yep, that's me ;))

I ended up using an Ancient Crow Elemental as a sidekick for my sovereign last game- basically a free titan's gust every battle. The Crow reached level 18 or so, but even then it felt underwhelming. And for Movement Point reasons, I couldn't see attaching any other elementals to my main force.. they are just too slow.

So, after a full game of using bound elementals, I agree that even the ancient ones don't feel very useful in the late-game. I would think, ideally, a way to make them more useful throughout would be desirable. What if a later tech in the magic tree (like the one granting Curgen's Volcano) allowed the player to designate a single elemental as a "Focus/Avatar" for all of the shards of its type? And the bonus would scale with the number of shards in your control? Thus, a Crow Focus with 4 air shards powering it would have greater hp/abilities than a Crow Focus with 3 shards powering it.

There could be all sorts of ways to balance them, like a certain number of turns to reap the benefits of additional shards so losing a Focus would matter.

(As a relatively new player/forumite, is there a specific sub-forum for these suggestions?)

The bound elementals cost no upkeep. That alone is enough to keep them in my ranks in the end game. If nothing else, then garrison duty. And besides, even if they get killed, you get them back for free.

I'm surprised some think the water based ones to be useless. Their ability to reflect damage is pretty cool in my opinion. It seems they reflect even missile fire back. Any unit that has less hit points than the elemental is dead when facing it. There's no way around it. Either the elemental hits and kills (unlikely with the small damage it does) or the other guy hits the elemental and they both die. Nice against Juggernauts, heroes, high defense units, archers. Weak against nothing except damage from spells.

I can't agree with this view , all the demons have some uses even if only to boost your faction power. 

I have won a game on Expert level, large map, plentiful shards and not built any trained units except 2 or 3 scouts.  I was the most powerful player at the end by a long way (400 FP versus 250) and only had 4 champions, lots of shard demons and some ogres (about 10) until right at the end I gained a few more level 9 champions I didn't really need.

Cyndrum demons benefit a lot from levelling up.  My best unit of young Cyndrums were level 12 and had over 200 HPs at the end including 30% bonus from my towns.  They stayed with my Sovereign most of the game and cleared lairs out of lots of areas, cleared a couple of wildlands and accompanied all my heroes on their quests.  My sovereign taking the trainer promotion early and only having one hero for most battles helped them and other units grow quickly.  An important bonus from levelling units that are used to clear lairs and wilderness areas is the increased healing rate.  At level 6 (for instance) my demons had 90 HP and healed at 7 per turn, whereas a level 1 unit would have 40 HP but only heal at 2 per turn.  That might be why you are thinking they are weak, slow, useless or whatever you've decided.  The answer is more levels and looking after them properly, just like it is with most types of troops.

I'm not quite sure what sort of "random troop you can build" you had in mind but I can assure you that in the early game a three man unit of wraith troops spearmen (say) with leather armour is nothing like as strong (less damage, slower and far less HP) and they cost production and maintenance, that's why I didn't build any early trained units.  A lot later in the game a Squad (5 figures) of mailed lancers (chainmail cavalry) with amulets for extra fire and cold damage would indeed do more damage and move faster than the Cyndrum demons I was using, but they would only have about 60 HP and heal slowly.

But let's look at the mailed lancers a little more closely.  Firstly they rely on a lot of expensive research in the Warfare area that Resoln doesn't need to do, Cyndrum demons need no research except Immortal Codex for the ancient version and that is in the Magic technology area that is very useful anyway.  Then there is the cost in resources: 5 chainmail lancers will cost about 300 production and use maybe 80 iron and 60 crystal and 5 horses.  Well I trade most of my iron away for 6 gold and the same for crystal and horses, since I don't really need trained troops.  I use the gold to buy research I do need and to rush-buy production in my cities.  So the total cost of the mailed lancers is 300 + 80 x 6 + 60 x 6 + 5 x 6 = 1170 gold/ production.  Although I'll admit they are better than the cyndrum demons I can have late game, the demons cost nothing to build and have zero maintenance so we're not comparing like with like.

My demons do not "hit like wet noodles"    Just ask the two juggernauts that were chopped into little bits without landing even one blow on my hoard of massed demon destroyers.  Against troops with significant armour, like mailed lancers, just use the curse or mass curse spell (Death master needed) and we have a level (and blood splattered) playing field

It seems you are seriously underestimating the effects of levelling and a little support from spells.  Resoln is after all a magical nation.

JJ

Thanks UncleJJ44. You say the basic game at normal speed will replace a shard demon 10 turns after it is lost. In my current game on 1.1 my Young Mirror Elemental killed in battle was replaced 8 turns after it was killed. (Btw, it's really easy to lose Mirror Elementals in battle since they start with 8 hit points only and are regularly targeted first both by ranged and melee blows). Maybe the replacement time was tweaked by the Devs  between 1.02 and 1.1 or maybe it depends on the level or the type (or both) of the elemental.

I'll get back with more observations as I progress in my current Resoln game.

farkas

I know this is a bit old, but in case anyone does a search for the topic, there is indeed a limit (at least in 1.1+) to the number of demons spawned. It appears to be 2 per city (possibly per shard type or total, I'm not sure). Having 5 death shards attached to one city will only give you 2 cyn demons though, of the appropriate tier/s of course. If you move some of those shards to another city then more will spawn at either of those two cities depending on which shards already have active demons.