Potential tactic or...?
 

First: Since I only have the demo Version, I really don't know if this works, but say your opinion no matter what.. and sorry for my crappy english.

Pretender: Great Sage 35p (new paths 10 + res bonus)

-fire 1
-air 3
-water 1
-earth 2
-astral 1
-death 4
-nature 1
-blood 3

So now we have the potentia to call vampire lords, but they don't match Vampire Queen... yet.

Research:
-Blood 7
-Construction 4
-Alteration 3

When you have researched blood 7 and con 4, plus have been working hard, you should have lots of gems and enough blood slaves to call.. lets say 2 Vampire Lords. Since they can't cast potential spells, like mistform, you have to strengthen them with equipment:

(Great Sage can construct each of these, if you have enough gems)

-Sword of Switfness: Good and cheap (Not necessary though)
-Charcoal Shield: Fire shield
-Elemental Armor: Decent prot and element protect
-Wing Helmet: +1 air (Mirror Image)
-Earth Boots: +1 earth (Stone Skin)
-Bag of Winds: +1 air (now also Mistform) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif
-Blood Stone +1 earth (now Iron Skin)

Overall:
+Vampire havoc!
-balance between research, magic site finding and blood hunt

Like I said if you find anything that's not quite right, reply please. And sorry that I brought another vampire-topic..

[ May 07, 2004, 05:43: Message edited by: Azhur ]

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

Path boosting Items (Like Winged Helmet, and Bag of Winds, Earth Stone, and Earth Boots) only work if you have at least 1 intial path in the magic it is boosting.

So unless your Vampire Lord starts out with 1E, 1A he won't gain any benefit from the Helmet, Stone, Boots, or Bag.

Hope that helps.

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well at least I know that know..

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

-Sword of Switfness: Good and cheap (Not necessary though)
-Charcoal Shield: Fire shield
-Elemental Armor: Decent prot and element protect
-Wing Helmet: +1 air (Mirror Image)
-Earth Boots: +1 earth (Stone Skin)
There are boots, of Stone I think, that give the wearer Stoneskin.

-Bag of Winds: +1 air (now also Mistform)
-Blood Stone +1 earth (now Iron Skin)
Mistform is nice, but so is Pendant of Luck, and if you really want protection there are few options... But you could be using many different items too. That is quite a bit of research, though... If you can make up a strategy to survive up to that point, then it's a different thing!

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

Note: This is tested with full Version 2.02

Now I know! Tried this at my friend and it works like hell upon earth:

Great Sage (35p)

- fire 1
- air 5 (call air elemental queen)
- water 1
- earth 2 (elemental armor)
- astral 1
- death 1
- nature 1
- blood 1

Research:
-Conjuration 7 (air elemental queen)
-Construction 4 (necessary equipment)
-Evocation 3 (mistform/mirror image/Charge body)

Tactic:
Once you've done researching (about turn 25 if standard research), you should have found enough magic sites with your sage to produce one air elemental queen in 3 turns. With proper equipment they can even match VQ! Since it also takes about 3 turns to equip one A.E
Queen, you can put them in an assembly line.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Air Elemental Queen (cost: 50 air gems and 5 air)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Abilities: Almost all the same compared with VQ (no immortal or regen) and hefty 50hp! But the best thing is that she's able to use air magic, so with mistform and mirror image she's almost as tough as VQ. She has no head or boot slot, but once in battle, you see that it's quite insignificant...

Equipment:

- Sword of Swiftness (fast and fairly cheap)
- Charcoal shield (prot and fire shield)
- Elemental Armor (prot and elemental resist)
- Pendant of luck (luck+)
- Amulet of Antimagic (magic-resistance+)

In practice (Desert Eye without wraparound):

- It's turn 35 and I have now cast three Air Elemental Queens, which are fully armed and more than capable to beat any kind of army I encounter.

- Turn 55, I have 10 Queens and it's game over for other nations (total of 6). This is just too easy for me. Maybe I should stick with VQ, so I could get some real challenge (kidding..) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Overall:
+ If you manage well to turn 35... even Ermor will have serious problems, trying to retreat from your flying apocalypse
+ Sage can manage both researching and magic site finding fluently

- A bit researching and some magic site finding, but that's as hard as it gets..
- Too much winning can cause depression

Comments please...

[ May 07, 2004, 19:23: Message edited by: Azhur ]

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

You could free some points by counting in any booster items you might be building, mainly Winged Helmet and Bag of Air. I don't recall if they are Constr. 4 or not... If they are higher, it might not be worth it. Also, with Earth Boots on your sage you get to Earth-3 and Dwarven hammer. Use it!

How many Queens exist? I think all Elemental Royals are limited in number. I thought they all were limited to two or three.

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">2 Fire, 2 Earth, 3 Air, 3 Water, 1 Banefire, 1 Illearth

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">2 Fire, 2 Earth, 3 Air, 3 Water, 1 Banefire, 1 Illearth </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">So the question then being...how did he get 10 queens? A bug? Maybe you start getting duplicates after the first 2/3?

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

The trouble is he was using Version 2.02

In the older Version, you can get multiple royalty summons (kinda funny to have duplicate ones, I tried this out before and got 4 Queens with 1 duplicate). But there are supposedly only 3 Air Elemental Queens, they are:

Aella, able to summon Air Elemental
Nephele, able to summon Sylph
Thuella, most melee-combat queen, 4 attacks.

Similarly, only 3 Queens of Elemental Water, 3 Kings of Elemental Earth (one being a blood summon, Illearth), and 3 Kings of Elemental Fire (one being a death summon, Banefire) exist.

Outside of elemental royalties, other unique summons include 5 Arch Devils, 4 Heliophagus, 3 Demon Lords, 6 Ice Devils, and 3 Treelord.

-Gateway103

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

But still even with three queens, it's worth the effort. In the game I had one queen of thunder, one queen of storm and 8 queens of cloud (all 8 cloud queens had the same name, Nephele).

BTW: What was the spell name of Djinn summoning?

[ May 08, 2004, 09:24: Message edited by: Azhur ]

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

The Air Queen is by far the best Elemental Queen/King, isn't she?

Re: Potential tactic or...?
 

Anthrax is good too. Fire resistance doesn't help against his Banefire shield.