le petit caporal wrote:
How do you like the Marv? I find them difficult to survive, for the early game ...
I should have pointed out this was a CBM game. This instituted many changes, particularly to Boar Warriors. They become Recruit everywhere, have more HP, reinvigoration and a massive Berserk Bonus.
Marverni also gains a national spell called Stampede...Which is a battlefield-wide Haste effect. In addition to allowing your Infantry to close faster, tramplers and cavalry become a lot more effective.
The game I am playing, I went with a Dom 8, Master Lich/Demi Lich. Multiple Minor Blesses and a Major Death bless. The priority was a Death 9 caster over the bless effect, but even so, my Boar Warriors benefited from the Death Weapons effect and my sacred spellcasters enjoy a significant chance of inflicting afflictions.
My opening strategy relied on mass Boar Warriors, followed by their Sacred Boar summons, for a mass of hasted tramplers. Following that, my strategy became all about research to summon more powerful armies. Dragon Master is cheaper in CBM, so Cave Drakes, Ice Drakes and Wyvverns became fairly easy, if expensive to mass. My pretender was also capable of summoning a few undead commanders, such as Lamia Queens, Spectres and I have also picked up a Lich. I relied heavily on a pair of Revenants early in the game for remote site searching, and got lucky with my Death income.
My first serious opponent in the game was T'ien Ch'i, who prompty decimated my army with fast research (Wind Guide, Flaming Arrows). I got lucky in a couple of battles, relying on hasted tramplers to inflict a lot of damage. A pivotal battle saw 2 Druids take out their offensive army, with only a small screen of chaff units for defence and a lot of summoned Earth Elementals dealing the damage. That forced me to deplete their commanders Gem supply through multiple hit and run battles (so they could not buff their archers), prior to my lucky victory.
As for your set up, it seems like it would short circuit your slaves rather quickly.
All of those slaves benefited from power of the spheres, so had +1 to all magic paths. Those with Air, Nature or Earth recieved an additional +1 to those paths. They all benefited from the reinvigoration from Earthpower and the regeneration from Strength of Gaia.
Their was a few other units in the battle. A couple of Boar Warrior commanders casting bless, as well as a number of units.
My priority was to hit the enemy hard with a number of fatique lowing spells (sleep cloud, all the lightning effects) and morale lowing effects. That way I could force a fast victory with minimal casualties. It did not matter that the majority of the communion slaves would be unconscious in 4 or 5 turns, because I wanted the battle decided by then, one way or another. A drawn out battle would not have been in my favour, in this particular instance.
If I was on the defensive and wanted to have those communion slaves last a lot longer, I would probably would have made a Lamia Queen a Sabbath Master, in order to periodically cast Reinvigoration. However, that only guarantees that your Communion Slaves are active until turn 6 of the battle. After that, all bets are off.
I did not see any retreat orders. Is it viable to cast returning on your slaves ... leave them near dead on the battlefield (Fatigue 100+) and wait until someone hits them and watch them disappear?
One of my Druids was scripted to cast returning as his last scripted spell, the other was scripted to flee after he had cast 5 spells. Ritual of Returning is an ok spell for tough raiders that do not get hit very often. I have Ritual of Returning on a couple of Druids and I had put it on a Golem Raider...Which I later lost to a Disintergrate spell.
The spells Returning and Vortex of Returning are of situational use. They come in handy for certain tricks and tactics, but I have really only been using them to send a couple of my powerful, geared up commanders home after they fly or teleport into a battle. That way, I have them on call for deployment to battle, research or crafting every turn.
