Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

Hey

I have problems assassinating priests and astral mages. Priests - mostly due to Holy Avenger. I thought I could fix the problem by adding lightning resistance, but it doesn't help. Is there any resistance against the kind of damage Holy Avenger and Smite do ? Other than high hp and regeneration ?

Astral mages are one of reasons I don't try to asssassinate Ermor. As far as I remember, some of their astral spells don't care about MR or anything at all, and have very good precision. Any way around this ? Or just high hp and regen ? I can't seem to regenerate fast enough. I guess I could try skeleton spam with skeleton talisman, but that would be uncool.

In both cases, I think boots of Long Strides or even better - flying - could help. The point is to not give them enough time to cast anything. (1 turn is too much when it comes to Holy Avenger).

Any ideas on equipping Bane Spiders ? They seem to be very good overall, except for nasty armor with -5 defence and 5 encumbrance. I prefer to replace it with cheap Fire Plate, which offers nearly as much protection but much better defence. I think for Bane Spiders to be effective the fix must be as cheap as possible. There's a great potential in them - buffed stats, two decent magical weapons I don't wish to replace.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

Smite and Holy Avenger go against MR, so any boost to that would help.
Most Astral spells are also MR based.

Against Ermor, I'd be more worried about skelli-spam. Even Animate will stop most assassins.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

Bane Spiders are pretty damn expensive for what you get.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

MR is the key here. However assassins are generally not worth it in MP. Not only you waste a turn to produce it when you can produce something more useful, say a mage, it also a) fail its task miserably or b) fully equipped and do its task marvellously, then they start patrol aggressively and you die against the whole army, along with your expensive equipments.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

Assassins don't really work that well in Dom3. If you start giving them equipment and such, you have to be sure they will win or they won't be worth it, which means they have to be able to beat bodyguards, scripted spells etc

If you go for mass production you will find almost any basic assassin can be countered by a bodyguard or even a random spell, additionally they don't reliably take stuff like mounted commanders down, so again they usually aren't worth the cost.

If you give them the skeleton producing talisman, any assassin becomes much more likely to win, but you're right it's very boring.

Then there's the problem that if you do get assassins working, what you're really doing is forcing the opponent to micro orders and bodyguards, something which annoys them and isn't exactly 'fun' to play against.

But I do still use assassins sometimes and almost always without the 'cheap' skele-talisman, because I like them. Sometimes I thug them out with a little bit of equipment and use them to support armies as well, but mostly I just send several out and hope for them to cause a bit of disruption.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

One bottle of living water costs only 10 water and is really good. Patroling troops, high provincial defence and most of all: Good Bodyguards are still heavy problems.

The best assasin is not the assasin that sneaks into his opponent's reseach and murders untill he is dead, the best assasin is the one, that sneaks around in the opponent's terretory and randomly murders someone every 3rd round or something.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

I think an "information about commanders in province" scouting skill should be part of the assassin skillset.

If you balance the assassin so that the chances of him killing a highpowered commander with bodyguards is extremely small anyway, then the job of the assassin should be to seek out, identify and kill lesser commanders and unprotected commanders, i.e. idenityfing weaknesses in the opposing players command structure and exploiting this weakness.

What if an assassin could report back from its province what commanders where there, including his bodyguards and maybe a general description of his target viability? On top of this you could allow for the assassin to select his target directly, instead of choosing it randomly. As long as you make sure assassins cannot be constructed to be powerful enough to have more than a, say 25% chance of killing a strong commander with bodyguards.

this would make assassins more interesting imo, and less random.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

I think assassins would be fun if they could just choose which commander to go after, displaying the name and unit type, when you gave them the order. That way you could consistently go for easier targets, but still not be sure the opponent hadn't 'mined' one of his weak commanders with an anti assassin item or some bodyguards.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

From what I've seen on Assassins...

1) Jomon's Ninjas are among the best, IMO. Excellent stats and with Poisoned Shuriken.

2) Empoisoners (C'tis) come with Skele-Spam built in.

3) Any seducer is most likely worth it. I am astonished that the Serpent Cult's seducer is so very cheap.

In answer to your specific questions, like Konming said, almost all the spells you talk about can be avoided through high MR.

Re: Assassinating priests and astral mags
 

What I have fun doing with assassins is Indie provinces. Go in the province, kill off the leaders until he can't find anymore. Then attack the province the next turn. The indie army is leaderless and routes.