Re: Guide to Marverni
 

It got changed recently in CBM (maybe 1.5). Used to be S/E mages would pick off enemy mages because of their lack of armor and the 100 precision....most frustrating to have a sniper spell with essentially a "target low armor & hitpoint units" because of the way the AI evaluates targets.

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

Lol.
So that's why my strength of gianted bearclaw talismaned girdle of mighted 1 shot 1 kill bear (transformation) farstrikers were doomed to snipe archers...

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

So expanding on this I guess Gifts from Heaven and similar spells target units with high armor?

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

I've never tried Farstrike for sniping, I'm surprised it would target mages. I'd have thought it would still favour a higher HP target.

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

From what I understand the AI does several theoretical test castings of a spell and sees how many hitpoints damage are caused for a given spell against a given target. Farstrike is largely mitigated by armor, so if you have several mages behind heavy infantry blockers the mages will exclusively be targeted. For gifts from heaven you have to consider the accuracy as well as the number of units affected. If you've got a clump of 10 hitpoint humans which over several theoretical tries the AI usually manages to mostly hit vs a moderate hitpoint leader that the gifts tend to miss then the AI will target the infantry. If you've got a 150 hitpoint tartarian though....

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

That's quite interesting, thank you. With 16+Str (say 24-26) damage, I'd assumed the AI would look at a 9HP 0protec mage and a 10HP 10protec grunt and think it would readily deal 10HP damage to the grunt.

However, I presume you could arrange alternative chaff: a unit like a shambler with weak protec and plenty of HP would probably be a more attractive target?

Re: Guide to Marverni
 

For farstrike (earlier version) I think the way the AI thinks is "Out of my tests I kill the 10 protection infantry 80% of the time, but I kill the 0 protection mage 100% of the time, on average dealing more hitpoints of damage if I target the mage". Shamblers are some of my favorite mage decoys for this reasons, because of their hitpoints, protection & MR they'll often be targeted by mages. Of course it's prohibitively expensive to use them as, say blade wind decoys. ;)