Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

If I have a Black Sorcerer, some Spider Hunters, Hoplites, a Tomb King with some undead, some mechanical men, and some mid lvl magic items (about 100 troops all told), can it take out a lone Sphinx Pretender?

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Depemnds, for one thing, does the sphinx have any extra magic?
Normal troops can take out a spinx (for instance a lot of crossbows might do it), but likely not the army you descibed. It might be possible with your black sorceror casting shatter though.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Well, your hunter spiders, hoplites, mechanical men and undead would be completely and utterly useless, and only marginally useful if enhanced by Weapons of Sharpness. A pretender's MR can be pretty damn difficult to penetrate, so Disintegrate is out of the question. And you haven't got any astral mages to Magic Duel the target.

Mid-level magic items, eh? If that means Smashers, Duskdaggers, Hammers of the Mountains(or whichever hammer is armor-negating) and maybe, maybe Ethereal Crossbows, you might actually stand a chance, provided you've got survivable, high-MR commanders who can bear said arms, and the Sphinx isn't in high friendly dominion. I don't suppose you've got a high-strength astral mage around who can wield two Swords of Swiftness, or a Smasher in each hand? Nothing quite like 2-4 uber-high damage armor-negating attacks per round to bring an immobile colossus down.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Given that the Sphinx is an Astral mage, is an autokill scenario anything more than a longshot? The idea is that the Sphinx paralyzes some attackers but cannot kill them, all attackers except the paralyzed retreat, the turn limit passes, and everyone remaining, including the Sphinx, is autokilled.

I guess the simple answer to the original question is no, don't even think about it with the army you described.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Yes i see it the same way, with that army you won�t stand a chance. Only if your battle buffs are as good as described above(strenght of giants, weapons of charpness.

mid lvl magic items???? Thats a very very wide expresion, can mean everything!:)

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

If it is an AI Sphinx, and it doesn't have access to any really good attack spells, you might be able to use the "autokill" tactic sushiboat wrote about.

Also, if it has low Astral skill and you have lots of astral mages you would throw away for possibility of win, you might try to Magic Duel him.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Thanks for all the input. I've played SP a few times now, but this is my first game where I am at or near the top in all the Score Graph categories (except dominion, where I'm just in the middle of the pack). I'm playing Machaka. I've used massed armies, black sorcerers, summoned undead leaders, troll court, Call of the wild, and magic and combat boosting items as my main strategy. I have Fire, Death, Nature and Earth mages of mixed skills.

I've avoided SCs as I have read that the AI doesn't know how to deal with them. I feel if I did concentrate on a SC strategy I would either lose before I made a good one or Win automatically if I got it going. Both these scenarios are not what I desire from the game.

But in this one instance of the Sphinx trapped behind his fortress walls, I must either create some SCs or dwindle its dominion to nothing.

So that leads me to my next question. With Temples and 3 lvl preist all over the place why is my dominion weak? Is there some other dominion boosting method that I am missing?

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Don't think you can get him this way. With more Machakan mages you can try to script them to Blindness x 4, Retreat and give them Rune Smashers if possible. Eventually the Sphinx will fail a MR roll...
Paralyze could alos work but you won't have many Astral mages with Machaka.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

The dominion value you start with affects the speed your dominions spreads with. Every 5 temples give you one more point, but IIRC it only helps to stop enemy dominion from invading, not to spread your dominion, or has some other similar limitation. If you took low dominion, your dominion won't go above your borders, but with lots of temples you can have your whole empire under positive dominion.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Hand of Death can be good for your mages, as it deals a lot of damage bypassing armour... but you will need to get your mages at point blank range first, and Death mages will probably cast other spells than that one when under AI control. I don't know for sure how Decay works, but it could be a solution: you have access to Bane Blades, the Decay spell and Banefire, and those deal a lot of damage at the end of a battle (hitting the Sphinx will not be a problem).

The main factor for Dominion spread is the Dominion level you picked when creating your Pretender: the higher it is, the more easily your Dominion will spread. You should aim at having 6 or so for a good spread, and the AI seems to pick Dominion levels around that value too. You can raise Dominion in one province by bringing in your Prophet and your Pretender (who automatically spread Dominion), by building temples in the immediate vicinity, and by setting your priests to preach (they only raise Dominion when preaching). If it still does not work, a few units have the ability to lower enemy Dominion (Sceptics and one Demon Lord, in particular), and the Stone Idol has the same ability, so it might work out... if you can get any of these things, as they aren't particularly easy to reach for Machaka.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

If memory serves, these points will not help Dominion spread at all, but they will raise your maximum Dominion value by Dominion spread. So, if you picked 5 at Pretender creation, and built 25 temples, all your provinces can reach Dominion 10 automatically; only that will make it harder to push your Dominion, since +10 is harder to override than +4.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

From my memory of Illwinter's description on this forum, your nation will get a certain number of dominion-increasing "plops." A plop has a probability of increasing your dominion in a province or decreasing enemy dominion. If it does not succeed in its own dominion, it moves on to another province. Only failure in enemy dominion kills a plop. Therefore, having your own dominion 10 in provinces doesn't hurt. The plop just moves on to somewhere it has a chance of doing good.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Sometimes, I really hate English. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif When I wrote "to push your Dominion", I was speaking from the enemy's perspective, not your own perspective. I use "push" when attacking an enemy Dominion, and "spread" when putting your own Dominion somewhere, but it's not as if there was any authoritative Dominions dictionary.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Preaching the sphinx out seems like a good strategy.

If you want to fight, maybe consider fatigue inducing spells/attacks. That will help you get around the high protection, especially since the sphinx has to use fatigue to attack.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

I tried earlier to storm the Sphinx castle and "forgadabowdit". Eomer, Man and Ulm are the other powerful empires out there and are keeping my armies too occupied to bother with this "insignificant fool" (insert evil laughter).

He's bottled up in his fort. I think I will keep him there. I'm going to move my Pretender and Prophet (when I can have another since he died, lol) to the area and hope to drive down his dominion. I'd love to see him just fade away.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Alneyan, my point is still different from what you are saying, I think. If a plop is in friendly dominion +4, it might settle there to increase dominion to +5, as opposed to moving on, possibly to attack enemy dominion. If a plop is in friendly dominion +10, it will definitely move on, since it can do no more good there. Thus, having high friendly dominion and attacking enemy dominion are related. When friendly dominion is maxed out, then enemy dominion is more likely to be attacked.

Then again, I could be wrong. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Having Dominion level 10 or Dominion level 5 does not really affect that, however: your core provinces will reach maximum Dominion (equal to your base Dominion + temples) without any problem, and once it is done, they will no longer be targets for Dominion spread, at least until you get 5 more temples... but getting +1 will be easy enough when left unopposed.

Dominion spread on a spiritual border will result in heavy "fight", with nobody likely to have a maxed Dominion for long here.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Not that I have ever tried to fight a sphinx, but what about a couple of ThunderStrikes? Its not their armor piercing, but their fatigue that might be useful here...

For if I undertstand correctly, then protection is likely to be penetrated/ignored for unconscious units. Or does this only apply to protection from armor and is the sphinx's protection value a natural/basic protection value?

---

Oh, and why is Shatter not a sensible thing as someone else proposed here earlier?

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

An important thing to remember about plops and max dominion is that since a plop will spread to another province only if the province its in is "full", higher dominion will actually slow the rate at which your dominion spread to other provinces.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

I think that unconsciousness would affect defense but not protection. However, even with no protection, you still need to deal out a ton of damage -- perhaps 1000 to 2000 hit points. A regular army can't do it.

However, you probably can count on the Sphinx having Astral Shield up. Maybe the double-unconscious autokill scenario could happen more than once in a blue moon.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

This fellow is more a annoyance than a threat, so I will take the road of just sealing him up in his own tomb until he just fades away.

I learned a lot by asking this question. Necessity is the mother of invention. This game gives you challenges that are difficult to solve, but also many ways you might use to deal with them.

Great game, I've had it only a month now and haven't scratch the surface of all there is in it.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

The problem with Shatter in this situation is that you need to spend at least one turn to get in melee (with Flying Boots), so you can cast the spell only four times at most, and Earth mages will definitively not default to Shatter. The 50% chance of losing a spell in melee may also affect the script of your mages, but I'm not sure.

Shatter also has harder prerequisites than Hand of Death (especially research), and only works on specific creatures, but deals the same amount of damage as Hand of Death, so you should use Hand of Death in these situations, if possible. There is, incidentally, no attack roll needed to hit with this sort of spell, so the Sphinx being immobile does not really help here.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Well, 'loosing' 5 gems per turn probably more than a mere annoyance on smaller/medium sized maps...

There definitely some passage inside the manual talking about a penetration chance of x% if fatigue is over y, where I believe y to be 80. However, since I am currently moving I wont have my manual available until 3 more weeks, so I cant check myself.

I think that there is always a chance for plops to travel, but the further away from max-dominion the current province is, the less likely is the plop to travel...so you are right that low starting dominion and high max dominion due to temples is a hinderance for dominon spread...

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

I don't follow you. Why do you think I'm loosing 5 gems a turn just because this Sphinx is holed up in his castle under siege?

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

From manual: if (2d6oe - fatique/15) < 2, Protection is halved.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Im guessing he means the 5 gems you will probably get from the magical site in the province, since the Sphinx can only be in the capital, and most capitals have a daily income of 5 gems (from the national sites).

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

^ Oh, doh, my bad.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Here is a passage from page 15:
There is no special treatment mentioned for unconscious units. So, you're right that Protection can be reduced by fatigue, but it doesn't drop to zero.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Easiest way to take down a sphinx in combat: dusk daggers and gate cleavers. Both cause armor negating damage, and tossing a squad of mid to high level thugs armed with these weapons will chop the sphinx up in no time. Especially the gate cleaver, 29 armor negating damage is quite a wallop. Machaka should have no problem producing either one of these, as gate cleavers are earth only and dusk daggers are earth/astral, so you just need a random astral pick for black sorcerer.

Edi

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Right, Gate Cleavers, not Hammers of the Mountains. My mistake, I got the two mixed up.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Speaking of armour negation, does Astral Weapon make your weapon AN or only AP? Does it affect ALL weapons?

CC

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

AN. I thought it affected all weapons but I've never tried a ranged weapon with it.