skelliespam
 

I've fought against C'tis in all eras in several games now, and more often than not I'm unable to deal with skelliespam. C'tis will set up 10 or 15 of its mages to cast raise skeletons or undead horde, occasionally supported by swarm, foul vapors, or shadow blasts. Their mages are backed up by significant PD and chaff, to the tune of 100+ units. This is enough to defeat my forces despite equal levels of magic utilization and sometimes far superior research. I've lost battles despite having fully kitted thugs, flaming arrows with massed archers, battle mages casting falling fires, superior troops in superior numbers... I just don't know how to deal with it.

So how do you deal with skelliespam? Especially if you have a nation with weak national priests? (and I've never been a fan of recruiting priests anyway, because that usually means I'm not recruiting mages).

It's been a very frustrating experience.

Re: skelliespam
 

Mod the game so there is no skelespam spell....

;)

Re: skelliespam
 

try battlefield wide spells like earthquake and rain of stones. or remote assasination spells like manefestaion or E attack.

Re: skelliespam
 

And ofc spamming out H1 indy priests can work well.

Re: skelliespam
 

Enc 0 frontline is a good start. Statues, mech men, wights, etc. Buffed with weapons of sharpness and backed by a decent number of priests. Sometimes earth blessed sacreds can do the job. The important part is to have some kind of unit in front that normal undead can't harm easily and that can fight forever.

Archers and flaming arrows are ok but you need to win before ammo runs out and they run forward and gets killed. I think archers are better against pre-raised hordes of undead than against skelespam.

Tough and large enc 0 thugs with charcoal shields are good to soak up undead. If you're using EDM the mechanichal giant is good for this role.

Earth and fire elementals are good against undead too.

Spells like soul slay and paralyze don't target the mindless undead, so if your opponent is using only mages skelespamming that is a way to target the mages directly.

If you can increase the fatigue of the skelespamming mages the wave of undead ends earlier. You might have troops that synergize with Heat from hell, grip of winter, soul drain or even rigor mortis.

Another way is to deal loads of damage very quick before the skelespam reaches critical mass, hoping to kill the mages. Mass flighted lance cavalry or flying troops on attack rear that connects on turn 1 of the battle. Or a swarm of flying thugs with brand weapons.

Re: skelliespam
 

Undead nations frequently use Cold scales so Ice elementals can work too.

Re: skelliespam
 

he said it was ctis. no cold for them. although that being said, casting wolven winter on the province the fight is in will greatly raise their encumberance making them much less useful

Re: skelliespam
 

er oops good point :)

skellie spam is kinda messed up anyway, considering that 5 longdead costs 1 gem from the ritual... but in battle your skeletons just scale infinitely with your number of death mages. raise dead is much more balanced cuz it needs corpses.

Re: skelliespam
 

target the mages rather than the skellies
for me that means fatigue them out. Rigor Mortis, Heat from Hell, Grip of Winter, Curse of Stones. And on your side relief and mass regen. Also it's good if you can nail the mages with round 1 battlefield spells; rain of stones or earthquake. Flames from the Sky x2+ is also a good mage killer.

Re: skelliespam
 

If you are fighting only skellies and mage (+ troops on guard commander) you can put your archers in fire large monster mode. They will target the mage since a longdead only have 5 HP.

Re: skelliespam
 

Skellie spam is powerful, but I don't think it's "messed up". It can be beaten.

A couple of castings of Wolven Winter would definitely be good against C'tis if you can cast it. Their mages will fall asleep *very* quickly in a cold-3 province.

Re: skelliespam
 

As Fantomen says, a sneaky way to mess with a skellispammer who's only using a bunch of mages and little to no supporting army is to script spells that won't affect mindless or undead units. Cold spells would work too, since undead are immune to them and the mage casting them would be forced to target the spammers, although they probably won't have the range or precision required for the job. But things like Mind Hunt, the Northern Star/Magic Duel combo, Harm, Sailor's Death, Stream of Life... could all become your Sauromancer sniper rifles. Heck, even lowly Sleep could shut them down quick.

I've had great success with Air elementals, too - they fly, so they get to the spammers very fast even in a siege. Usually they'll target the undead first (more's the pity) but occasionally you'll get lucky and they'll roll over a sauromancer or two.

Re: skelliespam
 

it greatly depends at the stage of the game you're encountering the skelli spam. early on he won't have the mage numbers for massive skelli spam without destroying his research, so a few thugs with fire brands instead of frost brands should do the trick, the lower enc the better, so undead thugs like Banes are the best. later on when he can afford the numbers you should have adequate research to deal with it. Solar Brilliance is 1 battlefield enchantment you should try to have against undead happy nations, and it also overrides darkness which combines perfectly with skelli spamming tactics. reverse communioned stellar cascades and other anti undead astral spells can work wonders as well. just use the first few turns for soul slays or something than start with the stellar cascades(when the skelli spammers got a mass of undeads spawned already). and of course killing the mages themselves, as others have already said.

Re: skelliespam
 

I don't think you mean Stellar Cascades, but I can't remember what the spell you do mean is called. Star Fires?

Re: skelliespam
 

yeah, I actually meant Solar Rays. Star Fires is the lesser version of Solar Rays, though AN instead of AP, but skelli spam doesn't produce high prot undeads so Solar Rays is better.

Re: skelliespam
 

You've got them twisted : Solar Rays is the small one, Astral Fires is the big one. However Astral Fires is S3/F1 rather than just S2, so it's quite harder to mass for a communion if you're not Marignon or EA Ermor.

Re: skelliespam
 

Star Fires is actually a seperate, far ****tier spell than Astral Fires.

Re: skelliespam
 

star fires not astral fires, there's a difference. and no, I wasn't referring to astral fires for the exact reason you mentioned.

Re: skelliespam
 

Are you sure you're not making this problem more difficult than it needs to be? In my (admittedly limited) experience, skelespamming is a high fatigue process. After raising a horde of undead, the death mages should stop for a rest. What you need is to have enough damage-dealing ability to mop up his horde and kill his mages before they start up again.

Thugging is exactly the wrong way to go. You want a horde of cheap expendable troops, that, or effective anti-undead spells. Troops with multiple attacks are ideal.

Also, like someone else pointed out, a pile of 40 gold indy preachers are highly effective. Plop temples and recruit them, you don't need to worry about losing mages to make them.

Re: skelliespam
 

krpeters - assume you have 10 d2 mages spamming skeletons. That's 50 skeletons for the first three turns, a short break, and then another 50. So assume you have a minimum of 200 skeletons to kill. Probably more, due to the sheer amount of time it takes to hack through that many undead. Fielding cheap troops to kill that isn't really ideal, because you'll suffer a lot of attrition. Anti undead spells help a lot, of course.

But you really need to come up with a method of killing the casters, or you'll be throwing troops into a meat grinder that doesn't really cost the spammer anything they didn't already have.

Re: skelliespam
 

In my experience of fighting C'tis; the best way to beat skellie spam is with overwhelming force. You want to be able to kill his skeletons faster than he can raise them. Or at least have enough killing power that you do not get overwhelmed. I have found that waves of cavalry is a great idea as cavalry have two attacks and get less fatigue per attack than norm tropes. Skeletons have too poor attack skill to hit cavalry unless they can swarm them. And the huge number of attacks from the cavalry will prevent that.

Cutting of their retreat rout with flying/teleporting guys, is also a good idea.

Re: skelliespam
 

In EA, with Reborn at only 100 gold apiece, that's a real problem. But in MA he's using 220 gold Marshmasters. That's 2200 gold... if you go head-to-head, you're coming at him with 220 light infantry. I admit I'm not experienced enough to know if this will work, but I think it has a fighting chance. Does anyone have a simulator to test this? Javelins alone should really chew 'em up.

Re: skelliespam
 

The problem is that even if you win you'll lose half your units while his skeleton spammers walk away with their XP.

Re: skelliespam
 

That depends on how badly fatigued his casters are. If you can get to them before they wake up and run, you get to chew up his 2200 gold force.

If they're likely to wake up first... then yeah, having some flyers to head to the rear and cut off his retreat will be a big help. Cavalry might be able to pull it off too if they run to the back before the undead horde gets too large.

Re: skelliespam
 

If you have enough territory, you can play attrition: accept to loose the battles where he gathers like 10 mages, but take as many marshmasters with you every time with cheap tactics (archers, assassination, flyers, magic duel, etc.) or battlefield globals such as Earthquake (A Troll King can cast it), Grip of Winter (a Water Troll King can cast it) etc. My experience is that en Earthquake alone will kill maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of the mages, it is not much, but if your troll survives to cast it one more time, the attrition of his relatively expensive mages will cause Ctis troubles.

A couple or archers well positioned (as close as possible to the front) can be very effective. I've seen like 30 archers kill 6-7 marshmasters before my PD chaff "lost" the battle to the skeletons.

Re: skelliespam
 

For thugs fire shield is very good against skeletons. Their low hp means that they pretty much just kill them selfs when trying to attack. For an example try bane lord with charcoal shield and regen ring. Archers are guite good against skelly spam too :)

Re: skelliespam
 

Earthquake is so-so against C'tis. If there are astral mages around (shamans for instance), it's likely most of the skellyspammers will be body ethereal-ed and that 1 earthquake will have almost no effect in terms of killing mages unless you are the defender and cast it without summon earthpower or any other boost.
My experience with earthquake against C'tis has been rather poor. Lots of troops, preferably tramplers backes by archers, is better.

Re: skelliespam
 

Thank you for the excellent suggestions. I was finally able to defeat his mages after multiple battles that whittled down his chaff (serpents, sirrushes, lizard infantry). This allowed my mages to target his mages early, and I killed several of them in the first few rounds with well-placed thunderstrikes. He still managed to summon a lot of skellies, but between my priests and several hastily-forged herald lances, I was able to kill most of them.