Blood of the First Born
 

Gath national/ Blood Spell / Wish option.

There are few (no) late game counters for high hit point units, at least none that dont' work equally well against low hit point units.


For example, armageddon, leprosy, earthquake, Earth Attack, whirlwind, winged monkeys, all work much better against low hitpoint units. So do things like.. the kindly ones .. etc.

Part of the reason that Hinnom and Niefle are perceived to be so difficult is a lack of these kinds of spells - cocytus and inferno are good examples.

Or I'd like to posit another - Blood of the first born. The computer picks a random number. Units ending with that number - die.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

How would giving that spell to LA Gath help counter EA Niefel or EA Hinnom?

How would giving a different wish option help counter niefel or hinnom in the early or mid game, where they probably have the largest advantage?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Very high damage, high fatigue single target spells would be a good anti SC option that would have very little effect on lots of low hp troops.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I always thought that's natural that nations with recruitables with high HPs have an early game advantage. Giving the others an early Soul Slay or similar to counter this seems strange, unthematic.

The most important thing is IMHO that the early powerhouses should have less options for a very strong mid-late game if they don't make best use of their early advantage. This doesn't apply only to Niefel but even Lanka, Helheim etc. Specialization against versatility.
Unfortunately, Hinnom and in minor part Lanka don't fully respect this trade off IMHO. Looks like the next patch should put some nerf to Hinnom, and Lanka seems somewhat balanced anyway.

I am very interested in similar or different opinions, expecially by guruz :)

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

um how about soul slay? or paralyse? curse + death bless?

curse + death bless can be utilized right from early game to ruin neifelheim bless rushes and any sort of awake SC pretender.

especially deadly on LA atlatis' arssatuts, their bone glaives sap strength so add that with unimagineably high chance to cause affliction and bingo SC is ruined if not dead.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Curses are for the most part irrelevent. Even afflictions are for the many races or paths available to fix them.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Making it a blood spell would make it available to all blood nations; making effective against large units would make it more useful against these nations - as there are sufficient things that kill low hp units.

Making it a LA Gath spell would help in Single Age games (niche, I agree - however I was suggesting three options for such a spell, not specifying one).

My interest is not in countering Hinnom or Niefle so much, as redressing the balance between low hp mages / humans and large hp units such as SC's, summoned creatures etc.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

If you want something that'll kill high HP units but not low HP, why not just something that does a lot of damage, but has very low accuracy, and is fairly expensive to cast or hard to research?

Blood Nations are the ones that probably need the *least* boosting. They've already got numerous summons, specialty spells, even their own line of forging. Added to that, most of the Blood Nations are already powerful, diverse, and interesting. If anything needs a spell that can take out high HP units, it's probably Abyssia/Fire.

Fire's likely the weakest magic path, anyway.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

i concur, i can't think of a blood nation which can't battle it out with the big guys. Lanka's an absolute powerhouse, mictlan is like the king of bless and can simply swarm SC's with blessed eagle warriors from there various fortifications scattered around (eagle warriors aren't cap only in MA, guessing it's the same for other ages), Gath i'm afraid ARE the big guys...anything i've missed?

fire being perhaps the weakest path (with the exception of the pheonix pyre spell) which most of it's stuff has a cold equivalent (as well as water magic having a load of buffs and stuff making it better than fire), mind you they already have the inferno.

to be fair i think every path has atleast one spell more than capable of taking down SCs or atleast a spell to give you an SC to face off the other in 1 on 1 mortal combat or 2 on 1 if you can gather the gems.

lets make a list

astral - soul slay
water - claws of kokytos
fire - the inferno (what's the real name of the spell again?)
nature - just send some mages behind a few tarrasques to buff them
death - tartarians
earth - same as nature but iron dragons instead of tarrasques
air - actually a little more lacking but has some nice buffs to combine with other paths to take down SC's
Blood - send horrors at the SC, horrors happen to horror mark with their attacks so the strength of the horrormark will get stronger and stronger untill a doom horror wipes him out.

any other ideas, particularly for air?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

The only problem with the above list is that the W and F spells are mostly blood. Personally I would say that for W its frozen heart, and for F its incinerate. Air would probably be Orb lightning. The only problem with these is that resistance is easy to attain for all three, whereas with Soul Slay the SC needs to have very high MR if you have a decent number of S3 mages, or communion.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I think that for thematic reasons MA and LA Hinnom (or however they are called) should get the "Release Lord of Civilization" spell

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I don't see a need for a new spell, the save or die spells (bone melter, soul slay) are effective against high HP creatures, moreso than against small as they will be more likely to be targeted. There are also very high damage spells like Life for a Life and banefire. Blind effectively nerfs them... there are plenty of options

its only the synergy witha good bless that makes these units particularly scary in the first place, which is at a big cost to the player, especially as N9 isn't particularly flash on a pretender for anything other than global spells - certainly not good for a SC.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Well, that's going to be true generally. Direct damage will always be equally effective (or more effective) against low-hp units, and save-or-die doesn't care about hits in the first place.

There's a variety of battle magic that causes large amounts of non-resistible damage already, and it will preferentially target high-hp units thanks to the way the AI works. Save or die spells on the battlefield tend to aim at high-hp units as well.

If you mean there are few strategic spells that will be more effective against giants than humans, I have to agree. I don't see how killing random units in an army is more effective against giants than humans, though. It seems to me that human-size armies, because of their greater numbers, would lose more units than giant armies would.

If an assassin spell preferentially targetted units with higher hits, and the assassin used that handy sword that deals extra damage against units larger than the wielder, that might be interesting.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Sure, petrify works equally well against a blessed Jaguar Warrior or a Tartarian. It's more likely there are 100 warriors than 100 tarts though. So in that sense petrify (etc.) does not work as well against low HP units, since there will probably be more of them.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

"If you mean there are few strategic spells that will be more effective against giants than humans, I have to agree. I don't see how killing random units in an army is more effective against giants than humans, though. It seems to me that human-size armies, because of their greater numbers, would lose more units than giant armies would."

Yes. Being able to kill the same proportions is more effective because the spells I enumerated don't kill ANY. For example armageddon won't kill *any* giants.

So having a spell that will kill some giants.. is a step up.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

big units already have their work cut out via cost and being able to be simultaeniously attacked by 54 burgmeister guards (9 squares sorounding big guy, 6 armed hoburgs per square)

now just put on a few buffs on the hoburgs with you're mages in the same way you would for the giant. iron bane to take down armor, strength of giants to bump up the damage, quickness turning 54 attacks per turn into 108...etc

also each consecutive attack per turn reduces the enemies defence stat, so with 54 unquickened hoburgs attacking at once half of them are likely to be striking a big old SC with no defence or parry skill - free hits anyone.

and that's without quickness, with quickness thats 3/4 of you're hoburg horde having not one but 2 free hits.

offcourse many can die with aoe weapons SCs may use and fire sheild but you'll still get a fair amount of free hits and you can cast some buffs to protect you're tiddlers, there are spells to protect against fire and anything else the SC may throw at you.

in short SMALL IS POWERFUL!!!

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Sorry,
You're nuts = ).

Almost any AoE spell will kill your hoburgs. AoE spells in fact kill relatively more small units than large ones, as the large ones are limited to 1 per square, and hence spread out more.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

It’s a balanced trade off

Yes, AOE spells will hurt small units a lot more. But hey will also gain a lot more out of AOE buffs. And are a lot more resilient to single unit kill spells because, well, who cares if you lose one hoburg? There is also a lot less luck involved - an unlucky affliction is inconsequential on a cheap unit, but get unlucky and one of your giants goes blind?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

The damage that these spells cause, should simply be upped. I mean, I could have sworn that "Armageddon" describes huge cracks being torn in the earth, and people falling into them. Last I checked, that should kill a giant easily enough.

If the spell describes a small damage, like "Fires From Afar", then it should do that small damage, but things like "Flames from the Sky" describe themselves as "enormous force", and causing "great damage", that should either (have the chance to) kill, or horribly afflict giant sized targets.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Astral: Paralyze
Fire: Incinerate
Nature: Charm
Death: Drain Life
Earth: Petrify

-Max

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Paralyze is not particularly effective. High prot, hi regen SC's with/without FireShields can ignore being paralyzed.

Now, if combat ended when all units were paralyzed... another story.

Drain life doesn't do sufficient damage - now it is useful as a buff - but as a tactic to kill a big unit - not so much.

I don't remember incinerate. Sooo since Ihaven't seen it used I'm inclined to say it isn't effective = ).

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Incinerate is something like 10 or 15 points of AN Fire damage. There's an item (Phoenix Rod, 25 Fire gems) that lets you cast it. Fire mages frequently choose it to eliminate single units (that lone knight that broke the blockade) because it's Prec 100. I don't know why you haven't seen it used--perhaps the SCs in question were fire resistant?

Just like Frozen Heart, Incinerate and Drain Life obviously require you to deal damage faster than the target heals. This probably means you need 2-3 casters doing 30+ HP per turn (AN). Since they're all Prec 100, they scale well w/ number of casters.

Paralyze against an SC is probably most useful in conjunction with other spells that actually finish off the SC, like the afore-mentioned direct-damage spells, or Mind Burn. As you say, SCs will frequently be able to stand off troops w/ Awe, Fear, high Prot, etc. even while paralyzed.

-Max

P.S. In theory, Paralyze out to do a massive amount of damage to SCs because paralyzation damage turns to real damage if you get re-paralyzed, according to the manual. In practice I haven't observed this w/ Paralyze, although I haven't really been looking for it.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I'd like to mention that, thematically, it's an intriguing idea, I just don't think it's a necessary addition, mechanically, the way it's presented.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

On the face of it, what you say sounds plausible. However, examining it detail:

If you're looking at it in detail - the average giant will have a mr in the 14-18 range. The average sc in the 20-28 range.
So considering Niefle giants, for example

Even if you spam incinerate - you're spamming your F4 mage (cost > 150gp) against a unit with an MR of 18 usually after the bless, and a regen of 10. Won't work.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Incinerate doesn't have an MR check. 18+AN damage. 100 precision. F3, which really only needs an F2 mage with Phoenix Power, if you're spamming it.
Neifel Giants are vulnerable to fire, so it should drop them even faster. It's Alt 5, though, so hardly an early game counter. And SCs will usually have FR, or will once you kill a few this way.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Here's my list of combat no-MR spells, may as well share it with the world :):

Damage-dealing, no MR spells, ignoring range <= 5, AN unless noted, not underwater only
(SD)=shield defends
(NAN)=not armor negating/piercing
(AP)=armor piercing
(MB)=magic being target only
(U)=undead being target only
(L)=living being target only
(F)=Fatigue damage only
(P)=Poison damage only
(!)=Precision 100
(#)=large area/BF/BE
(*)=Not resistable like you might think

A: Lightning Bolt, Orb Lightning, Thunder Strike, Shimmering Fields (#)

S: Star Fires, Magic Duel (!,opponent must have S), Arcane Bolt (MB), Solar Rays (!,U,AP),
Stellar Cascades (!,F,AP)

B: Blood Burst, Leech (!,L), Hellfire (AP), Life for a Life (!),
Infernal Prison/Claws of Kocytus (!,can return)

D: Ghost Grip (NAN,F), Dust to Dust (U), Wither Bones (U,#), Drain Life (!,L),
Rigor Mortis (not undead,#,F), Bone Grinding (#)

E: Flying Shards (NAN,SD), Magma Bolts (*,NAN,SD), Farstrike (NAN,SD?), Shatter (AN,lifeless only),
Blade Wind (NAN,SD,#), Rain of Stones (NAN,#), Magma Eruption (*,NAN,#),
Gifts from Heaven (NAN), Earthquake (AP,#,defense roll), Petrify (!,paralyze)

F: Fire Flies (AP,SD), Fire Darts (AP,SD), Flame Bolt (AP,SD), Fireball (AP), Flare (AP),
Falling Fires (#,AP), Pillar of Fire (AP), Sulpher Haze (#), Incinerate (!),
Flame Storm (#,AP)

N: Maggots (U,!,AN), Vine Arrow (NAN,SD), Breath of the Dragon (P), Storm of Thorns (SD),
Poison Cloud (#,P), Foul Vapors (#,P)

W: Frozen Heart (!), Geyser (AP), Cold Bolt (NAN,SD), Ice Strike (*,NAN), Acid Bolt (*,AP),
Falling Frost (#,NAN), Freezing Mist (#), Acid Rain (*,#,AP), Grip of Winter (#,F),
Acid Storm (*,#,AP), Niefel Flames (#,AP), Numbness (!,F)

Marignon: Holy Pyre (AP)

TC: Celestial Chastisement (MB,!,AN)

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

You don't need to explicitly spam it, the battle AI is fine at picking it out itself after the script runs out. MR is irrelevant. Regen of 10 takes care of one mage, so the other two will take him down in short order as long as the chaff holds up. Incinerate is not an F4 spell. I think it's F3, because F2 mages can cast it without boosters. (Thus, it's an SC-/thug-killer that costs only gold, no gems.) Fatigue is low too--20ish IIRC.

Probably the main reason it doesn't get used in MP is because *do* pay attention to resists, since otherwise they'd get Frozen Hearted and Incinerated to death.

-Max

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I think my point was using a (capitol only?) mage that costs > 150 gp, to take out (capitol only) niefle giants that cost 150 gp is a losing equation. You're fighting economics, plus the 1 commander / turn restriction.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

But you don't need to kill all of them, just enough to defeat them. Also, you can have your mage and decent scales, while he has destroyed his scales for his bless. Not to mention that its unlikely that your mage will only be able to kill one giant if he's spamming incinerate, more likely he will take down at least 2-3.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Plus the entire point being - giant dies, mage lives. That's the sort of equation that almost always bodes well for you. ;)

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Yah, survival for the win :)

Blesses really cost the world. If you can negate blessed units with anything close to gold equivalent you are worlds ahead

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

True triple bless guys must have painfull moments once level 5-6 spells come out. Which can be really quick against someone with strong scales. Now I only use uber blesses on commanders worthy of it, so as to be sure not to get countered too easily. In SP, I've seen whole armies of sacreds (with no mages) get murdered by a strong pretender sitting behind his gates !
Think about it, who can afford a mage (several !) with each army with a double or triple bless (in MP) ?

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Mictlan often can, which is why they tend to be so dangerous.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

The shapechanging or flying sacreds of Mictlan are maybe an exception, mostly the shapechanging ones due to their limited invulnerability, if I remember well, they can't be killed in one hit.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

lets set it up and look at it. I think its far from clear.
say Niefle, 1500 gp, vs... who would we like as a standard fire commander. I don't think a fire nation is an apples to apples comparison to determine the general effectiveness of the tactic.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

I can only think of Ermor and Abysia having good enougth fire mages in EA. So it leaves some possibilities open for Niefel.

Re: Blood of the First Born
 

Despite their other weakness.. Yomi has excellent mages EA. But we don't have to restrict to EA.