Re: I hate horrors
 

Off-hand, I'm not entirely sure that you -want- to enslave Kurgi, anyway. An experiment some time ago with a preplaced, player-owned Kurgi suggested that he is not responsive to commands, and has a tendency to adversely affect the minds of those in the province where he's stubbornly parked himself.

Re: I hate horrors
 

both true

luckily kurgi doesn't hang out long.

Re: I hate horrors
 

Of course, my really twisted sense of humor suggests that if Kurgi sticks around somewhere for a while, you should at least try to horror-mark it just to see whether horrors get attacked by horrors.

Interesting that he appeared. Without Astral Corruption -- I've seen only the Eater of Gods and the Hunter of Heroes, -maybe- the Eater of Dreams but I can't recall. Never saw Kurgi or Scabiel appear in 'ordinary' play.

Re: I hate horrors
 

It would be fun to return Kurgi's gift if you take control of him.

Perhaps it will be like eating anti-pasta before your spaghetti... and wondering why you still feel hungry after dinner.

Re: I hate horrors
 

Taqwus - Actually, I'd definitely want to enslave Kurgi, just to do it. That province be damned - I've got me some Kurgi!

But then, it's these experiments that keep me entertained on the large maps once I've effectively won, which for Mictlan is usually when I have Construction 4, Blood 9. At this point, you can go bombing through the other research ranks tossing out valuable globals as you go with your commanders protected by your banishment spells, while other nation's mages are dying hand over fist just trying summon vine men.

Re: I hate horrors
 

I'm with ranger here with thinking that the people responding to this thread haven't quite grasped a part of what he's saying.

I recently ran an EA Abyssia SP game with a F9B6 Moloch, got Malphus on the second turn, and decided to start Devil spamming with soul contracts. The horror marks didn't start showing for a while so I was cheap about it and used regular infantry to guard the contract holders. A few years later, I was getting a fresh horror attack on somebody each month, and started paying attention to them. They with little variation went like this;

Turn 1 (me): Contract-holder either casts Astral Shield or Fire Shield, depending if he's an Anthamat or a Warlock. Size 10 Bodyguard squad travels forward their full movement trying to come to grips with the Horror.

Turn 1 (horror): The Horror flies up to my now uncovered contract-holder and kills him.

Variations were those intances where the horror didn't manage to fully kill the contract-holder on the first turn and killed him on the second turn before the bodyguards could turn around and get to the fight, and that one time where the mage survived long enough for his bodyguards to get back to where the fight was and eventually kill the horror.

When it got annoying I started assigning Devils as bodyguards. That didn't actually work as well as I thought it would... they fly out and attack the horror well enough, but if they don't kill it on the first turn, you're back where you started.


Bodyguards in a Special Attack fight where the oponnent flies have a glaring weakness (although you probably weren't going to even be a speedbump to that Vastness anyway...). I can't really think of a way to fix it beyond positioning your gaurds so that they're a full movement behind the commander. But that's easy to screw up.

Re: I hate horrors
 

Bodygaurds I've found work the best against horrors are ones that fly and have magic weapons. Devils may have a hard time killing the horror on the first turn, but (Mictlan) fire blessed Eagle warriors do a knock up job. I imagine spring hawks, for instance, would do equally well.

But yes, in general bodyguarding against horrors is a bit difficult.

Re: I hate horrors
 

I don't think it's a problem that a basic human (or something similar) will practically always die to a horror attack. You can avoid getting marked, and once marked the attacks are rare.

Just accept that the commander will die when the horror comes. It's not like Soul Contracts need to be made any better.

Re: I hate horrors
 

Well you could try providing the horror marked mage/pretender with blood slaves... yes they die easy but they will stay next to the commander.

Re: I hate horrors
 

Normalphil - You could have scripted the Warlock to cast Returning and made sure he had a couple astral gems on him at all times. I think you have to store him away from your capital, but besides that it's a foolproof way to keep your Devil factory going indefinitely. And the other solutions listed above work fine as well.

I think we understand just fine, though - we just disagree that it's a problem. Don't intentionally horror mark anyone you want to survive in the long term. Heck, even the astral corruption stuff I was describing on the previous page didn't cause horror marks - it just caused predictable horror attacks under certain circumstances.

Aside: Do horrors fly or teleport? If they fly you could drop a staff of storms into the picture.