Orion wrote:Is there any way to deploy blessed Guyakas in reasonable numbers?
Well, you should be bringing a lot of Gurus and/or Yogis to a battle where you intend to Communion up, and each of those can carry 25/10 Guhyakas. A Yaksha with an Astral random (the kind that can cast Gifts From Heaven) can lead 40 by himself. Throw a couple of Gurus on that, and leading 100 into battle or more isn't even hard. Also recall that a simple Starshine Skullcap increases the allowed Guhyakas by 10. Even the Earth Boots, Water Bracelets, and Water Cloaks that Yakshas and Yakshini wear to be better battle mages increase Guhyaka leadership by 5 each.
But the real issue is getting them blessed, because Kailasan priests are bullshit flavored bullshit. They are capital-only and also level 3+ Earth or Water casters, so they got shit to do in battle that doesn't involve blessing squads one at a time. The answer is the Siddha at Conjuration 4. He flies with a map move of 10 and is Holy 3, allowing you to get all your blessing out of the way right away. Also he can personally lead 50 Guhyakas if you care by that point.
Orion wrote:Siddha are like Conj 8 or something. You may be thinking of the Kinnara.
Conjuration 7. The 4 is a typo caused by me trying to write "Conjuration 7" and "astral 4" at the same time and making gobbledegook. The Kinarra is a decent mid-point, as it flies around with Holy 2.
Okay, so I get that when you don't have a province to retreat into that is adjacent, regardless of your move, your rout turns into total obliteration. And I know that there are ways to take advantage of this by taking provinces behind an invading army. But I don't quite understand how this is resolved. I know turn resolution goes magic battles - friendly movement - other movement - battles caused by movement, but how do you leverage that to take a province behind an enemy army without attacking the army in the province?
Invading Army moves into province B and loses the battle.
Same turn, province A is captured, leaving nowhere for the invading army to rout to.
Is that what you mean? Because armies moving in the same phase have a slightly random order. I have heard theories about Nation Numbers, point of origin and army size all influencing the chance that an army be intercepted or missed. I have not seen a definitive formula explaining the actual odds, assuming that the order of movement can even be influenced.
No, I get that movement order resolution is random and I'm assuming all theories about influencing it are crackpot. I suppose I'm just wondering if there's some special case I'm missing (stealthy movement?) that's an exception, because I've read about people deliberately trying to surround an invading army so when it routs it's destroyed. But I don't know how you could reliably get the province they're leaving from.
So sort of this scenario:
1) Your enemy controls province A and province B.
2) They are going to attack from province B into province A.
3) Is there any action that guarantees an attack on province B after the army has left? You could just regular attack and get a 50/50 chance of hitting it when it's empty, as I understand it.
Side question: When our routed units reassigned to provinces? Immediately after the battle? That might be a tricky/complicated question, just kind of wondering.
Side question: When our routed units reassigned to provinces? Immediately after the battle? That might be a tricky/complicated question, just kind of wondering.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think their location is determined after each phase, rather than each battle. Those that can't be assigned to a habitable adjacent province are killed.
The only definitive example I can provide is sending a Squad of Vampires on a kamekazi run, the same turn as my capital was being Stormed. I ended up with a few extra vampire units in that battle.
That example may be an edge case, though I seem to recall a few scenarios with misplaced commanders and troops in chaotic wars featuring magical attacks in addition to conventional attacks. I could be imagining things though.
DSMatticus wrote:
So sort of this scenario:
1) Your enemy controls province A and province B.
2) They are going to attack from province B into province A.
3) Is there any action that guarantees an attack on province B after the army has left? You could just regular attack and get a 50/50 chance of hitting it when it's empty, as I understand it.
This makes no sense. If they own A and B, why are they attacking B?
It goes like this:
1) Your enemy controls province A. You control province B and C.
2) The enemy is attacking from province A to province B.
3) You send an army from C to A and meet them in B with a different army.
4) If you win both fights, you own A, B, and C, and all the routing forces from the enemy's fight in B are eliminated.
Side question: When our routed units reassigned to provinces? Immediately after the battle? That might be a tricky/complicated question, just kind of wondering.
Routing forces are assigned at the end of the phase. So all the magic battles happen, then routing forces go wherever they can. Then all the movement battles happen, and routing forces from those go wherever they can.
-Username17
Last edited by Username17 on Sat Apr 21, 2012 5:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
Frank wrote:This makes no sense. If they own A and B, why are they attacking B?
Err, yes. I effed that up. You control the province they are attacking, which in my example was province A.
Frank wrote:2) The enemy is attacking from province A to province B.
3) You send an army from C to A and meet them in B with a different army.
In this scenario, though, the army you send from C to A might intercept them in province A before they arrive in province B to fight, depending on movement resolution. Which is important if you only have one real army and the other is just a raiding party sufficient to hit their PD that would get obliterated against their real army.
I'm basically asking if there's any type of movement/combat that can be guaranteed to resolve after traditional movement occurs. I'm guessing the answer is 'no,' which is cool.
If you move from A to B and I move from C to A, then you move to B and I move to A. The only time it gets weird is if you move from A to B and I move from B to A. Then (and only then), there are chances of one of us stopping the other in the province we were coming from.
The slight randomness occurs when army movement causes forces to meet head on, so to speak. There is some speculation as to which force will push the other into defending their province of origin, whether factors like terrain, army size and multiple forces from different provinces can influence which side gets the priority movement and intercepts the other force. As far as I know, that speculation is unfounded.
Last edited by Winnah on Sat Apr 21, 2012 7:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
Spoilered: feel free to read if you aren't Drago (guess what this is about? heh).
What are some general tips for sieging forts? I've never really done it in MP before. Specifically, I'm fighting C'tis, so I'm expecting skelly spam, and trying to fight it back with banishment spam.
DSMatticus wrote:Spoilered: feel free to read if you aren't Drago (guess what this is about? heh).
What are some general tips for sieging forts? I've never really done it in MP before. Specifically, I'm fighting C'tis, so I'm expecting skelly spam, and trying to fight it back with banishment spam.
From my experience with breaking in to siege LA Ermor: this has a good chance of going horribly wrong, the casters will probably start fear spamming as well as the AI loves those spells, at which point your guys will probably start running because some of them end up with like -9 morale or something stupid. You will need a lot of banishment if you go that route, and something that is actually capable of breaking through the front door. You should ideally have a way to get in and disrupt the mages. Decoys are probably a good idea. This all depends on the number of mages, less then ten and you should probably be good.
What happens to routed units during a siege, anyway? Attackers or defenders? Do defenders die, do attackers get shuffled back into the same province or adjacent ones?
How the heck do you kill a dom9 wyrm with S6? He's got a horror helmet, horned helmet, ring of fire, and amulet of resilience. 200+ hitpoints, 20 regen/turn, body ethereal, luck... I don't really see any way to get enough damage out before the fear kicks in and everyone routs.
I'm Ashdod, mind, so death and earth are my primary access.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, really anyone can read this except Drago:
How the heck do you kill a dom9 wyrm with S6? He's got a horror helmet, horned helmet, ring of fire, and amulet of resilience. 200+ hitpoints, 20 regen/turn, body ethereal, luck... I don't really see any way to get enough damage out before the fear kicks in and everyone routs.
I'm Ashdod, mind, so death and earth are my primary access.
Petrify and Disintegrate are your Death and Earth options with Petrify being crazy awesome since it kills on a failed MR check and paralyzes on a successful check.
Assuming you have any Astral at all and can Communion up or use boosters, Soul Slay works wonders as well.
If you have any Water, Numbness spam is a particularly humiliating death, but it takes a while.
Failing all that, getting a pile of casters to spam Drain Life should do the trick.
All of these options will auto-target a pile of HPs like a dragon.
Last edited by K on Sun Apr 22, 2012 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Use Death spells to give him a pile of mindless (fearless) low-grade chaff to chew through to slow him down. Also note that your second-best sacred giants are berserkers and once they hulk out they don't give a shit about fear.
There are four things which can happen when armies are moving into eachother's provinces:
They can fight in province A
They can fight in province B
I think they can occasionally phase through eachother, ending up in the opposite provinces
They can both stay in their original provinces, which intervened in a big way during one of the SA LPs when Ulm sortied while attempting to reinforce from an adjacent province and their opponent managed to block the reinforcements.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
I'm working on a mod for MA Jomon and I'm wanting to do something big and cool for one of the nation's new pretenders. However, I'm bad at this sort of thing so I'm wondering if I can get some advice and perspective from the good people of the Gaming Den. Now this mod is set for CBM 1.92 and I know that isn't a particularly well received mod by some folks around here, but even having a "it should cost roughly this much in vanilla" value will help me calibrate my own sense of pretender pricing.
So... how would you price a pretender who is a capable of filling multiple roles simultaneously? I'm working on one right now that is on par with a dragon as far as combat potential goes but has diverse magical skill and a titan form so he can wear boots and hold a thistle mace and crystal shield if that's something you need him to do. I'm using the AllFather as a baseline because he's an excellent flying, sailing, glamored Titan who starts with two good paths (A1D1) and has relatively cheap path cost (30pts), all for an initial cost of 150 points. Anyway, I'm wanting to make something that's stompier than the AllFather and has similar magical diversity.
Now, I can look at a bunch of other pretenders and mathematically regress them to give me a ballpark value of how many points something like this should cost... and I am. However, the more stuff you pile on to one commander, the less valuable much of that stuff is (barring synergies like awe and fear). A commander can't forge and research and lead armies and raid the enemy backfield all at the same time. Every turn you spend stomping on indies is a turn you aren't benefiting from a forge bonus or sage bonus, for example. How much is it worth to have a pretender who can raid, fight early indies, research, site search and ritual cast? I know the answer should be "a lot" but, how much is that?
With all that said, what is a more-or-less valid cost for something like this:
Initial Cost: to be determined
New Path Cost: 80pts or 120pts, something prohibitive
Initial Paths: W2A1E1F1N1
Initial Dominion: 3
Stats and Abilities
Pretender in Dragon Form
Hit Points: 125
Size: 6
Attack Skill: 15
Defence Skill: 12
Strength: 25
Protection: 22
Precision: 12
Magic Resistance: 18
Morale: 30
Encumbrance: 2
Map Movement: 3
Action Points: 14
Weapon: Venomous Fangs
Weapon: Claw
Weapon: Bile
Maxage: 10000
Fear 10
Fireresist: 50%
Shockresist: 50%
Poisonresist: 100%
Cold Blooded
Flying
Storm Immune
Amphibian
Magic Being
Itemslots: Two Misc
Shapechange: Titan Form
Pretender in Titan Form
Hit Points: 63
Size: 6
Attack Skill: 12
Defence Skill: 12
Strength: 20
Protection: 10
Precision: 12
Magic Resistance: 18
Morale: 30
Encumbrance: 2
Map Movement: 2
Action Points: 12
Weapon: Spray Poison
Weapon: Venomous Fangs
Weapon: Claw
Armor: Imperial Robes
Maxage: 10000
Fireresist: 50%
Shockresist: 50%
Poisonresist: 100%
Cold Blooded
Flying
Storm Immune
Amphibian
Magic Being
Shapechange: Dragon Form
Secondshape: Dragon Form -- will also change into Dragon form if mortally wounded
Itemslots: Normal Human (1 head, 2 hands, 1 body, 1 feet, 2 misc)
This pretender is supposed to be the king of the Ryujin, specifically the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. Ryujin are expensive, magically powerful and physically capable. I want the DKotES to take that same concept of "really, REALLY expensive but potent" and run it to the extreme. Think "Magical Godzilla God-King"... because if anyone should have a Godzilla pretender, it should be Jomon. However, despite wanting this guy to be expensive and awesome, I do want him to be something you'd actually pick rather than always going with an economy Titan, like the Lord of Storms, or human rainbow, like the Crone or Great Enchantress.
Last edited by Shatner on Fri Apr 27, 2012 3:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
