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.