Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

The manual states that it is impossible to execute a "defensive battle" - i.e. not move or wait for your opponent to come to you.

But there's guard commander.

With this in mind, is there anything that stops someone with high range evocation spells (read: thunderstrike) neutering their opponent's evocations by hiding at the back of their placement box?

Let's say it's EA Aby vs Caelum.

Aby puts his infantry at front on attack and mages at center on phoenix power, falling fires (range 25)

Caelum puts everything all the way back, troops guarding mages, and mages on thunderstrike.

Battle starts, Caelum defending. Caelums mages thunderstrike fine, but Aby will cast flare(!) because thats got the 35 range needed to hit enemy troops.

Aby could try to respond in future battles by placing everyone at the front, but then all their mages get hammered when caelum in the next battle uses normal placement.

Aby can mitigate to some extent, but is still at an annoying disadvantage because it can't script to control mage range, and it's opponent has no such hindrance.

Am I missing something?

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

that's the advantage caelum has by using longer range evocations... abysia struggles for accruacy and range with tehir fire evocs, but on the other hand all of their troops are fire immune, so if battle is joined the combination is awesome, especially when you get up to heat from hell and Firestorm. Air is much better for picking off targets

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Eventually Abysia will research Evocation 8 and have access to range 100 Pillar of Fire, so that they can use the same trick against anyone who isn't fire-immune yet.

If Caelum has Storm up (negating fliers, which Abysia shouldn't have too much trouble getting), having fast-moving troops, probably some kind of cavalry, would help.

The rules for retreating could also cause trouble for Caelum. In either Dom2 or Dom3, all-bodyguard forces run away much sooner than normal armies, but I don't remember the details.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Except pillar of fire virtually misses everytime or seems to when I cast it! Good spell on paper, rubbish in actual use.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Is it just with Abysia, or with everyone?
Thunder Strike and the mages who cast it both have a good precision, so Pillar of Fire won't come near that, but I don't see why Pillar of Fire would be that bad. I really should play few MP games, so that I'd actually find out these things.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

With everyone really, its a fairly high level spell so could do with its prec being raised from the current 0 to perhaps 5 - 10 or so. Its very frustrating when you have 10 mages cast it and every single one misses its target by miles, so even the AOE it has does not effect the enemy. The prec increase would just about make it useful from useless as it is now.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Spells that attack the entire battlefield would also work, for example firestorm which abysia's units are immune to.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

It's not all about the spell. Most Fire 2-3 mages have precision 10 or worse. Compared to Thunderstrike, which requires Air 3 (+3 precision) and has +2 precision, it will of course miss a lot.

It sounds like Conceptual Balance at least could make it a bit more precise, but when I tried EA Ermor Augur Elders (the only F2 mages with high innate precision I could think of), they had little trouble hitting the enemy forces, and the first star of experience increased their precision a lot. You're right about Abysian mages having trouble hitting with it, although I only tried it in few battles.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

this is a big advantage of nations with both Air and flying. They can pretty much completely neutralize any enemy mages, there's simply no place to hide. If you attempt to hide from the flying, then you can't hit them but they can hit you, if you attempt to get close enough to hit, then your mages get hammered with both the magic and the flying units...

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Could you set Aby's mages to phoenix power, attack, attack, falling fires or something like that to bring them in range?

Also I've used pillar of fire effectively as Marignon in the past. Since its a high research spell, you can expect to use it when there are large armies running around so the low precision isn't as terrible.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

I don't follow the logic there. Once you're in the later game there are far less armies running around, rather you have specialised raiders, thugs and SCs.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Indeed, Pillar of Fire is not a very accurate spell, which combined with the AOE=1 means that it's just not ever going to be as effective against smaller numbers, as Thunder Strike. On the other hand, it's F2 and 20Fat, whereas Thunder Strike is A3 and 50Fat. So it's significantly more spammable.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Caelum (or whoever) responds by returning to normal battlefield placement, with troops in front, and mages in middle.

What now?

The shorter range Abysia can guess about enemy placement, but he always eats the downside of the mismatch.

Anyhow, thanks for the comments. I guess it's just another reason why I can't see how EA Abysia has any chance in vanilla MP (don't know about CBM).

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

EA Abysia "has a chance" because they won't always fight against the enemy who is the strongest against them.
With nothing else luck alone can win a mp game, if you have enough of it.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

EA Abysia's pretty strong isn't it? If a nation is weak against another particular nation, that doesn't mean it's weak.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Yeah EA Abysia can be a nightmare for some nations because though it's a little single minded at first it is extremely good at what it does. If it can rush research to something like firestorm it can do a lot before you can counter it. It can also mount a strong bless rush and has access to two of the strongest lategame paths in blood and astral. The amount of remote death they can drop of people is pretty crazy too with horrors, devil/imp farsummons, teleports and remote fire spam.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

I have played against EA Abysia in numerous 1 on 1 scenarios. While it is true that Caelum can just tear EA Abysia apart, I would say that *isn't* true for *most* (not a few, most) EA nations.

The combination of very strong sacreds (a challenge to giants a vans) and powerful Fire mages that can spam all the most powerful evocation spams without fear of even scratching those beautiful sacreds is very strong.

Add to that that fire magic is more common (and powerful) at early evocation levels than any other, and Abysia *never* has to worry about it.

While Caelum can use their flight to deprive the enemy of evocations, Abysia already does the same thing for many nations without even needing to modify their setup.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Burning ones go down pretty fast to anything that tramples, destroys armor, causes a lot of fatigue, or is AN.

Later on fire fend and fire ward are pretty bad news, and firestorm isn't all that effective against high protection troops (it's only 6 AP).

Wolven winter is also a huge pain in the ***.

I guess I wasn't trying to imply that they were weak versus everyone, simply that there are enough nations that play strongly to their weaknesses that it would require a lot of luck to come out on top.

And warlocks, can teleport, but only with a cap and coin, neither of which they can forge without help (coin is pretty much pretender only barring a very lucky warlock with the 1/40 chance for earth or empowering or indies). They don't make good thugs anyway and are cap only.

The only thing I really do like about EA Abysia is rushing to Thau 5 for raging hearts. Early site searching means lots of fire gems, and the spell creates 60(!) unrest for 10 gems, and you just happen to have a preponderance of F4 casters...

Not a great strategy, but pretty rough to the first person you run into. At least in the one game I used it in.

Anyhow I'll yield to the opinions of those with far more experience than me who say they're decent, but I've had too much trouble with them.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Yeah abysia struggles against strong air users and tramplers, but against all others is very strong in the early stages. In the late game the lack of diversity can be punishing, you have to build yourself to handle that somewhow. In MA and LA you have good blood and astral access. In EA you are stronger upfront but less able to diversify into blood and astral. The upside is your Anointeds all have earth, which adds a lot to abysia. A bloodstone economy isn't too hard to get into, and suddenly everyanointed is E2, can summon earthpower.. apart from the useful reinvig a host of spells become available, including the useful magma ones for fire immune opponents.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

I think you are missing the point here. It's not a case of Abyssia being strong or weak. It's the fact that you CAN in fact "hold your ground" in battle, and whether this is balanced or not

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

Well, that's kind of silly then.

There are significant drawbacks to just placing all of your units on Guard Commander.

Not the least of those drawbacks being that any foe with sufficient ranged power will be targeting your mages, since they will be at the center of your massed troops.

In the late game there are ways to help with that, somewhat, but if someone is using those tools to great effect - either their opponent has researched their own tools to deal with that - or they have been outplayed.

Different nations have different capabilities at various stages of the game. Caelum is relatively fragile in the early game, and they must push hard to develop tools to gain the upper hand. Using Abysia as the counter example isn't exactly fair, as Caelum does tend to eat Abysia - but also because Abysia starts out VERY strong - especially in the EA when all of their infantry have Heat auras.

Believe me, I have had a good rush ruined by Thunder Strikes. After the first horribly failed assault, I never quite reached the critical mass that I needed, to finish off my foe, since he managed to almost never lose a single mage. Some matchups are just bad, and will usually not turn out well for the same nation - that's not cheesy, it's just Dominions-realism.

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

To detail the rock-paper-scissors thing, EA Abysia's weaknesses are definitely air magic and tramplers, the latter mostly early on. However against any infantry based army they are incredibly strong, archers aren't a big threat and niefel giants look pretty tasty.

I'm actually experimenting in SP with an E9A9 bless, dormant titan, to see if the cost is worth paying to shore up that massive weakness. When you look at it IF you can reach the late game with enough gems (mist covered, pretender site search, trading) to conjure some Air Queens there is a lot that air magic has to offer abysia - shock res, arrow fend, mass flight, fog warriors, wind guide. I can't think of a school that does more for them, even earth. It requires a lot of research to get both the casters (Conj 8), and the high Alt and Enchantment magic to get all those, so you have to get by without through the early and mid game. Hopefully the bless on the burning ones is enough!

Re: Battlefield Tactics cheese
 

If you are going to go a9, I doubt you will need more than e4 on the pretender, and possibly just e3 for dwarven hammers.