Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Vanilla Dominions

Paralyze is a level 4 Thaum spell, AoE 1 person, does 60+ points of AN damage and paralyzation.

Stellar cascades is a level 5 Evo, AoE5, 25AP stun damage.

Both require S2 to cast.

Questions:

1) Is there an effective difference between stun and paralyze?

2) Assuming enough research had been done where both would be reached at the same time, which would you pick? What situations is one better than the other?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

In fact, it does PARALYSING damage. And is negated by MR. So, if you hit someone with paralyse - you don`t kill him, you just paralyse him for a LONG time.
Stellar cascades, OTOH, deals damage to fatigue and can`t be negated by MR, so it`s much better against something resistant to magic (like fully kitted-out Iron Angel, for example)

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Stellar cascade needs spamming (must reach 100 damage to effectively hold the target) and is AP, not AN. So paralyzis is better against armored targets with low MR, and stellar cascade against unarmored with high MR. You also have a huge difference in terms of precision and AoE. Stellar cascades basically requires spamming and can affect many units. Paralysis with some penetration can get rid of a single nasty thug or SC.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

isn't paralize prec 100?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

So's Stellar Cascades, so there's actually no difference there at all. The really big difference is paralyze is range 100 but Stellar Cascades is only range 30, so the latter can be dodged with good scripting. On the other hand, any random set of S2 mages or S1s in reverse communion can spam Stellar Cascades and it's not really plausible for any SC to survive it, since it'll require ridiculous 40+ protection and sky high reinvigoration, while it's quite plausible to make SCs near invulnerable to paralyze spam without penetration gear.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Yeah, stellar cascades is a great spell if massed :D.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

How does the priest spell Word of Power compare to these?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

It`s like paralyse with AoE 1 and needs holy4 priest. It probably means, that nobody in your empire can cast it without some serious boosting (communions, PotS, Sword of (In)Justice).

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

But were I able to use it, would it be worth scripting before I reached stellar cascade and paralyze in my research?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Against high HP SC's (with some regen) then yea, against anything else smite should be better.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Please poke holes in this if I'm totally off base or just talkin crazy, but it could work as a poor man's paralyze or stellar cascade if you had enough priests that also had a point in astral, and then you could set enough of them to communion slave to boost the holy levels of the masters to H4, and script WoP for them.

Thats assuming you hadn't yet researched far enough, but for some reason had the critical mass of astral mages/priests located together.

Seeing as how WoP is zero fatigue, would that ever be worth doing instead of stellar cascade of paralyze? The communion masters could essentially keep that up all battle without causing any fatigue to anybody.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Priest masters would still cause the basic encumbrance fatigue to each slave per casting. The big issue is that WoP is H4 while paralyze is S2, so with the same communion boost/base power, Paralyze will have +1 penetration. Also paralyze takes something out of the battle completely with a successful hit, WoP has a much shorter duration so you better be able to kill whatever you paralyze before it wakes up.

That said, if you have powerful priests with astral, yeah WoP spamming can be quite useful even after you get paralyze in CBM due to the aoe 1 that got added.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Add minor earth bless/Summon earthpower - and you can spam WoP until timelimit hits.
And Word of Power needs only 4 slaves for unlimited number of h2 masters. :)

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I decided to do some tests on the effectiveness of truly massed WoP. Some observations:

1) Mictlan priests are good for something other than research with the removal of SDRs after all. As the cheapest way of testing, I massed a ton of Mictlan priests, had 8 cast sabbath slave and the rest sabbath master, and spam WoP. A dozen priests spamming WoP paralyzed most of the AI army in 3 rounds. Sure a dozen real communioned mages spamming evocations would have destroyed the entire army in 3 rounds, but no way they wouldn't kill 8 b1 slaves in the process.

2) WoP was actually killing their targets. After paralyzing them once, further successful paralysis hits were doing hp damage. Only a few points at a time, but I had so many priests and so few regular troops that around 1/3 the AI troops ended up dying to endlessly spammed WoP before my troops could go and kill them. I didn't know paralysis damage did hp damage. Anyone know how exactly that works? I had a D9 bless on those priests, but I didn't think blesses worked on spells except for increased affliction chance.

3) For a supposed 100 precision spell, strange that it ended up paralyzing my jaguars a few times. How does that work?

Here's a question that I really don't want to replay a dozen turns to find out the answer to myself. My test was in magic 3 dominion (which probably helps explain why WoP was so effective), so the priests were at ~75 fatigue after casting sabbath. The enemy didn't last long enough for them to go unconcious. But had they been in neutral magic, sabbath should cost 99 fatigue, and the master priests would go unconcious with the first WoP they cast. Now, I know unconcious mages should recover 5 fatigue per turn they are unconcious, but is that recovery before or after they cast spells? Ie, since priest spells are guaranteed to generate less than 5 fatigue, will the priests cast every turn even if it was driven unconcious by the previous turn's casting, or will they spend every few turns unconcious not casting?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

What kind of units were you using WoP against? Just some of the standard neutrals? Or anything with decent MR?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

100 prec spells are not special, 100 prec can still miss.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Yeah, enemies with 10 MR. And they were actually at MR 9 because of magic scales. According to the probability table, WoP would only have half the chance of connecting against MR 12 enemies, but those are pretty rare anyway. Against thugs and SCs, the whole idea is really massed spamming, and you'd have more Mictlan priests than pretty much anyone else'd have casters capable of spamming paralyze.

The idea is not likely to have a great deal of application for the most part. You need priest mages with either blood or astral, and almost all of those worth recruiting have better spells to cast. The basic Mictlan priest is rather unique in being able to cast almost nothing, but still likely to be around in massive numbers.

@Soyweiser, really? I though 100 precision was special, not being affected by negative precision spells and all. And even if it works as regular precision does, it should mean no deviation until range is > 95, which isn't even possible.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

You have seen the spells miss right?

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Umm, yes, as I said in the first post on the matter. The question is how 100 precision spells missing works. Cause under the precision formulas, there shouldn't be any deviation at possible ranges. So either the formula is wrong or it functions under different rules.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I know you guys are always right and I'm always wrong, but my precision formulae don't even seem to say that? The best I can see is that a 100 Precision spell deviates after 48 squares? Sigh....

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I have personally seen 100 prec spells miss in a storm so there is that.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

May I ask where you guys get your precision formulae from? Where does it say that 100 Precision spell is anything like 100% accurate??

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Guesstimates? You never see them miss. Except in storms and presumably under cover of darkness were its actually more like prec 50 due to the halving.

Edit: Except were there are more than one unit in a square. Precision only narrows things down to a square. I once had a supercombatant that attacked a fort that contained a few weak astral mages. The astral mages were scripted to cast Horror Mark x5. But most of them missed because my SC was only size four and shared the square with and indy commander. Every spell hit that square but they all struck the poor indy commander instead of the SC. The SC did not get a single mark before he was finished with his long buff cycle.:D

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

The manual describes precision as the number of squares a unit can aim away before possibly hitting the wrong square. The presented formula is essentially (precision)+((precision - 10) ≥ 0). With 100 precision, that is 190 squares away - longer than the entire field.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

As anyone with thugs that have ever failed to bless themselves despite the distance being zero, knows. The formula in the manual is wrong.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Umm, I'm sure I'm being dumb, but my manual p.77 states (Precision / 2) - 2 as range beyond which deviation will occur. Which I make 48 for a 100 Precision. I admit I'm looking under "missile combat", but I thought it was same for spell-casting mages.... :confused:

and P.S. p.86 tells me mage casting is as per p.77 !

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Elsewhere it describes it as precision, with precision past 10 counting twice, which simplifies to the formula I gave.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

That's not a matter of Precision, but of how the AI picks targets and how the AoE spread works.
In short, instead of picking the sacred thug to target, it tries targeting several random units and picks the first one where the AoE spread in its test casting includes the thug. The AoE spread in the actual casting does not necessarily hit the same squares. This is not necessarily a bad idea when you have multiple sacred units to bless, since it picks a target that has a chance of getting more units with one casting: think a non-blessable target surrounded by blessable ones.

The simple evidence for this is that bless will never miss a single thug alone on his side of the field. If he brings an ally or if the enemy reaches him before he casts (fliers!), it can miss.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I understands your reasoning, but I was talking about lone thugs. Or in this case, lone Dai Onis. Granted, Dai Onis auto summons wolves at the start of the battle but these are not sacred and should not be targeted. I rather think it has something to do with the fact that Dai Onis have less than 10 points of precision. Witch would mean that prec 10 is really prec = 0 for most purposes.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I now understand your formula, thanks.
Given that we are talking about deviation likelihood, since the manual there states that the distance is "half the Precision, minus 2", a 100 precision spell has a range of 93 (plus a bit maybe from the mage). Not the 190 someone said.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Nope. I did extensive testing on this at one point. You can see it clearly in the debug log if you really want to get into it.

In a little more detail: When the AI casts a spell, any spell, it tries it on a bunch of targets and sees what gets the best result. It will try targeting enemy units with buffs, friendly units with artillery, whatever. It figures out which of those gets the best results, then goes ahead and actually casts it, rerolling all the random parts.
So the Dai Onis wolves are valid targets for the bless casting, even though they're not sacred, as even any enemies within range would be. Since there's only one actual blessable target around, the test casts are either successful or not. If a test cast on one of the wolves catches the Dai Oni in the spread, then that case may get used and it may not catch the Dai Oni in the AoE in the real cast.

If you look closely, pause at the right moment, when the Dai Oni doesn't get blessed, you will always see a wolf getting hit by the bless effect.
Try sending a higher precision self-blesser out with a couple companions, you'll see he misses himself too.
I first noticed it with Jotun thugs, who don't come with chaff, but I was raiding Pan, who has flying PD. They'd fly up round 1, I'd miss the bless and get killed.
Nothing to do with Precision. Mod in an AoE 1 version of bless and the problem goes away.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

Wow. That's fascinating.

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I thought the targetting system was well known, but guess it's a case of very little is ever really new, as it's often just knowledge that has been forgotten. thejeff has it right though, which you can see from reading the log file (btw it's impossible to fully understand how some of the mechanics work without being able to read the log file correctly. As trying without that ability often just leads to the spread of mis-information, or classic cases of "well what I saw was", and then basing a load of misconceptions from that faulty observation).

But one thing, Bless can miss if there's only one target (such as a lone thug). It's very rare, and I mean insanely rare. But it can happen, and one of the old-guard Russian guys, can't remember who (someone like ano, WingedDog, Psycho, Dimaz, Kuritza. Or perhaps vfb) posted a save file of it a few years ago (sure I have it bookmarked on another machine). I don't think the spell targetting has been patched since, so it could in theory still happen in v3.27. But then I'm certain some things have been patched (either intentionally or unintentionally) without a corresponding patch note, so maybe it doesn't happen anymore. Either way though (for the benefit of newer players) Bless missing a lone thug is not something you should ever plan to script for. ie. never script Blessx2 with a lone thug on the basis of the first one might miss, as that will just give him a free pass to cast something himself, and likely ruin your day as a result.

Although this Bless missing scenario is why there was a call at one point a few years back for CBM to make a self-bless spell to avoid it happening to lone thugs. Think it wasn't considered worth doing though as it would have taken up a spell slot to do so, and at a time when spare spell slots were at a premium (since it was before Illwinter patched in a load of extra spell slots).

Re: Paralyze vs Stellar Cascades
 

I'm not saying that's not possible, but I don't recall it and I've never seen it.
For a long time it wasn't understood exactly why self-blessing sometimes didn't work.
I remember the suggestions for a self-bless spell, but those were in response to this problem since it can't always be avoided: Dai Onis and other summoning creatures, flying enemies, etc.

It wouldn't be a bad idea, now that there are spell slots to spare.