Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territory!
 

This is likely to happen when huge armies try to melee in a castle gate, but there's no way at all for you to know that. (your god blasted, but couldn't kill everyone).

An easy built-in save game feature would have really helped here. (though I still dont think it's important overall).

The game mechanic that caused this is that after 50 turns the game figures that this battle is a stalemate and will never end, so attacker (Man) automatically retreats. Then if battle is still going on a bit later, the defender (you) auto-routs too. Perhaps some of Man's units were caught in battle, or paralyzed, or over 100 fatigue from your undeads' chill aura, so they couldn't run.

Guess your mages were force to run, then right afterwards the last of Man was gone, and you still had some units in battle, so you won the fight. (or maybe Man's armies were automatically killed off at turn 70, at some point that happens)

The game's not likely to change... what you have to do if you try this again, is to finish the battle faster. Kill the enemy faster. Archers, or more mages casting damage spells would work. Have some death4 mages stand forward scripted to cast cloud of death perhaps.


If your whole army is poison resistant, and most of the enemy's isn't, then casting Foul Vapours could work (probably from your pretender). Enchantment5, needs a nature gem, nature3 water1. *everyone* has a 10% chance to be poisoned each battleturn... should kill off most humans in a long fight.

Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territ
 

Seems to me the real problem is figuring out why your guys routed. You said you were holding the gate, which means the enemy was trying to storm the castle and you were the defender, so the 50-turn limit was on the enemy, not you. Once 75% of the army is destroyed, the non-mindless and non-berserk units auto-route, so it's possible that you'd raised enough skeletons to outnumber your whole army by a factor of 4 or so and then when they all died, everybody routed.

I see two solutions:

1.) Make sure you always have a back door of some kind to retreat to. If you want, you can do this with remote summoning spells and/or a flying SC on the turn you're expecting attack on your castle. E.g. send your emperor and a handful of Wights on a flying carpet to the next-door province to take it over.

2.) Alternatively, try to stop the rout from occurring in the first place. Either you were unlucky, or you're using amazing amounts of chaff that die, or something. Win the battle quicker. This should be pretty easy if you use, oh, Wind of Death or Rigor Mortis or Darkness or Army of Gold + Flame Storm or Plague or that battlefield-wide Fear spell (Wind of something? D4A1). You've got all this research done, so you might as well use it. Another thing to try would be to use less chaff and stick to e.g. 100 Wight footsoldiers plus mages, which should easily beat 1200 AI chaff troops once you've got your battlefield enchantments up. (And if you're defending a fortress, gem logistics are a piece of cake because you're right on top of a lab, so you have no excuse for not using battlefield enchantments.)

It just seems to me that the current way you're playing, letting yourself get down to a single province and hoping your units won't route, is a lot riskier than it needs to be.

-Max

Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territ
 

Really? I thought the attacker just died at the 75-turn limit. I didn't think the defender auto-routed.

-Max

Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territ
 

After I 'won' the battle, I actually had very few casualties. Only about 100 or so chaff and a couple dozen (roughly) wraiths. So it must have been the turn limit that routed my pretender and casters.

I guess I will have to stick with the back door option, or win faster. Mostly I used this strategy for flavor, I really enjoy playing MA Ermor (undead*); and raising vast hordes of the undead from my capital fortress to suddenly overrun the world is just fun :-). Is the turn-route feature moddable?

Thanks for all the replies.

Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territ
 

But you also said you were summoning tons of undead during the battle, presumably with Raise Skeleton and Raise Dead. I'm 80% sure killed skellies and zombies still count toward the 75% limit, so theoretically if you had 1000 units, then you summoned another 3000 skeletons during the course of the battle, and LA Man killed all those skeletons, your army would auto-rout because 75% casualties had been taken. I don't know how plausible it is that your guys would have summoned 3000 skeletons, though.

The turn route feature is not moddable. Modding is focused on altering unit/nation/spell stats, not changing the basic rules of the game.

You can still go with the vast hordes of undead if you like; just cast Rigor Mortis at the start of the battle and it should all work just fine. Your undead hordes are immune to it, but Man's troops should quickly fatigue into unconsciousness so your troops can slaughter them, and once they hit 200 fatigue they start taking physical damage instead of fatigue (although of course since they're unconscious they also recover 5 fatigue per round too). They should all be dead well before the auto-route limit.

-Max

Re: -InsertName- died retreating into enemy territ
 

Thanks for your help Max, I had never given Rigor Mortis a second glance.