merlinme

[quote who="Fallenchar" reply="27" id="3380404"]Seriously, I do not see how any faction besides Pariden can amass it.[/quote] Um, no. Anyone with a Death archmage has as much mana as they'll need for most purposes by casting Sacrifice. Magnar can get lots of mana early on by casting Consume, and almost unlimited amounts of mana by casting Cull the Weak on Skeleton Horde (although I consider the latter an exploit and think Cull the Weak should banned for summoned units (or only for

They're ok if you're short of mounted troops. Hopefully the wages will be sorted out so they're not so expensive.

All good points from joeball123. I usually only have a couple of main heroes, my sovereign mage and one extra hero. The extra hero is quite often a melee type who I give all the best melee magic gear to. That way I feel like I am actually getting some use out of all the plate mail and superweapons I find. If you do it like that (create one super warrior) the chances of having a hero who can actually survive and do some damage in combat are much higher. The higher l

[quote who="coyote303" reply="10" id="3380345"]I do not believe the target's spell mastery has any effect. You are comparing caster's spell mastery and subtracting defender's spell resist.[/quote] Yes that's correct, I think we were all reading what we expected to see rather than what had actually been written. Spell mastery is compared to the target's spell resistance, not to the target's spell mastery. To be fair, that may have been what Borg999 meant to

If we can be arguing about it this long and there's no clear winner, then I'd suggest the balance is fine. I'll continue to use spears and clubs, spears for the higher initiative and impale ability, clubs for the damage, probably building twice as many spears as clubs before I can get metal shields, and after that I'll probably build about half of each. I tend to stick to clubs and spears because I upgrade my early units which I've got to higher levels. I will

I'm not really expecting the AI to be able to challenge a decent human player without lots of handicapping, given the complexity of the game. But if the AI can continue to be improved to eliminate what seem like obvious mistakes to a human, and improved to the extent that Ridiculous and Insane are challenging for a good player to beat, that would be great.

Well, yes, most of my strategy revolves around building a Stack of Doom. I know some similar games (Civilization) have tried to make the superstack a less obvious strategy, but when the entire game revolves around heroes, dragons and super spells, I don't think that would be either easy (or particularly desirable, for that matter). Off the top of my head, the AI would have to be able to beat: 1) Summoned Skeleton Horde 2) Summoned Lightbringer 3) Fireb

There are so many strategies the player can use in the late game I'm not sure it's going to be feasible to come up with good AI responses to all of them. What I think could be improved is that the AI makes better use of what it's got. So yes, it should be building dragons etc., it should be focusing more on mounted troops with better initiative and the maximum amount of buffs possible, and it should be making much better use of tactical spells. But to be honest I don't think i

[quote who="jonasadolphson" reply="13" id="3380188"]Wouldn't this just be positive and a desired behavior? Once you start defeating the first few AI armies you have pretty much won anyway. This would just make the mopping up faster and more fun.[/quote] I'm not convinced. This is clearly a matter of taste, but personally I think the balance is fine (although possibly there could be more of a bonus for killing enemy heroes). Currently in my games there's at least some mix b

[quote who="jonasadolphson" reply="13" id="3380134"]The AI stack opportunistically hits first my sov, then the city. Killing him on the first archer shot as he has only 1 hp left after the first fight.[/quote] That sounds great, that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping was fixed. It will need some more playtesting, but I'm hoping this will fix the situations I've seen where a large AI army has marched straight past an undefended city. In one game I used the garrison t

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="50" id="3379983"] But I am going to drop the liklihood a little bit so they are a little less common.[/quote] That sounds sensible, I got two new cuirasses within 100 turns of starting a new game, which seems a bit OTT. I assume this is just the random number generator having fun, but even so, Common is probably a bit much.

Getting more XP when killing enemy heroes seems reasonable. Anything more than that would make AI bashing too much the obvious thing to do. As it is currently, even with the low XP it's still usually the better strategy to kill the AI rather than go questing, but at least I think briefly about whether I want to do a quest detour to get a level and a good item before attacking the AI.

[quote who="Skystone" reply="19" id="3379980"]Clubs are flat out vastly superior[/quote] Such confidence! [quote who="Skystone" reply="19" id="3379980"] The fact that units become less effective/threatening once damaged means the front-loaded damage (alpha) is far better than attacking more frequently for less damage,[/quote] Well, yes. Which is why spears (which will generally strike first) are better than they initially appear. As I noted in my previous post, it

Not amazingly high priority as A. it's a pretty obscure corner case, B. doesn't kill the game and C. has an easy workaround (don't do that), however... casting Cull the Weak on a unit which has Death Ward gives "interesting" results! I tactically summoned a Grave Elemental, which effectively gives Death Ward to all units within one tile. Just for the hell of it, I then tried Cull the Weak on one of the Death Ward units. My reasoning was that the

Casting Wither on Darklings can reduce them to zero attack, at which point it becomes a walk in the park, regardless of how many units they have.

[quote who="Star Adder" reply="7" id="3379931"]Not even a sign of AI trying to flank me and attack cities farther away from the front lines...[/quote] One step at a time! I'll take any attacks as progress. I've seen the AI ignore undefended cities on several occasions, and it's been reported by others as well. In any case I believe "send an army to attack the enemy capital" is one of the programmed strategies. It's happened to me once where it ignored

Actually after I typed that Shrink wasn't resistible I wondered if I was correct. To be precise, when I gave one of my heroes the weapon which shrinks opponents, it did not appear to be resistible. However skills, items and spells do not necessarily follow the same rules. The Darkling hero has Shrink as his special skill, I'm not sure if that is resistible or not. But if joeball has checked and says the spell is resistible then I assume that is correct, for the spell at least.

I don't care so much about goodie huts, which rarely produce anything very game changing. I'll be disappointed though if the AI still won't attack undefended outposts and cities.

Especially if you've got Tame, you can build as strong an army as you'll ever need with tamed beasts, heroes and summoned units. I do train units but I favour quality over quantity and normally only have one proper stack, so I probably don't train more than twenty units in a game on a medium map.

One other thing, the main point of the Death spell Shadowbolt (especially since they nerfed the damage) is to to reduce spell resistance. So, for example, with a tough opponent with high spell resistance, it's a viable strategy with a Death mage to hit them with a couple of Shadowbolts before casting Curse, Blindness, Kill etc.

What Heavenfall said. There are various mage traits and some magic items which increase the level for summoned creaturesl; they're all clearly labelled as such. The one thing which I would add is that spell mastery has no direct effect on damage either. It is compared to spell resistance to determines whether a spell is resisted or not. Generally spells which can be resisted like this (like Curse or Blindness) have no effect if they are resisted. The ultimate example is

I'm not aware of any way to set rally points. It might be nice but to be honest I've never really trained enough units that it's been an issue. The number of cities and number which are training troops in an average Legendary Heroes just isn't on the scale it can be in a large tank war in Civilization, for example. With heroes, magic, summoned units, etc., it's not hard to complete a game having trained fewer than ten units. Zero units except Pioneers is perfe

As a matter of curiosity, have you started a new game since you updated to 1.2? I've certainly seen all the behaviour you describe in previous versions, however I was hoping this was improved in 1.2. I don't believe you get the new behaviour unless you start a new game, though. I only started a new game last night so I can't comment on whether the AI seems any better yet.

You definitely cannot resist shrink, which can make it quite powerful against big scary monsters with high attack and high magic resistance. I assume this is intentional, as otherwise it would be a pretty marginal use of an action when you have other bigger and better spells and abilities to use.

Butchermen can be surprisingly tough at the start of the game. A couple of times I've been cleaning out all the weak lairs around my capital, moved onto medium lairs, until there's just been a medium butcherman lair. And I look at it and think, "how hard can it be? Low hitpoints, no armour, small unit sizes... I'll burn a bit of mana and it will be fine." And then they kill my entire army. The problem is that if they kill one of your units they gain a unit member, which ca