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Jack Simth said:
There are a few mitigating things:
One you briefly mentioned: Dominion.
If I'm defending from your attack, it is on turf I hold; with good use of preaching, that pretty much means that unless I just recently conqured the province, it is likely in my dominion. While you are attacking me, chances are it is in my dominion, and any casulties I inflict on your forces are rather permanent.
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each blood sacrifice is an additional temple check iirc .
so if i station my god on your border , my prophet and blood sacrifice i think you have to preach really heavy to hold off my dominion .
if you haven't castled everything i mow down your preachers simply by ghost riders unless you guard your preachers really well .
if you have castled i decimate them by some flames from the sky or similiar spells .
so i should normally win the dominionwar if i am just patient enough .
Quote:
Jack Simth said:
Another thing to consider is that vampires are undead. If I happen to have the spell "Undead Mastery" at the disposal of my highly equipped SC (or a lot of mages with the spell Control The Dead (or whatever it's called)), I can harvest a fair number of those vampires from you, very effectively eliminating them from your grasp regardless of whose dominion we are fighting in. With MR penetration items, I may even be able to arrange to steal more than half of your army out from under you in any given encounter. Wouldn't you just love to face that undead horde you took so much time to build, with pretty much only troops that are vulnerable to the same attack the current leader of said horde can harvest to add to his army?
I'm not saying any of these are foolproof counters, or even that I could properly beat such a strategy for certain, just that it isn't as invulnerable a strategy as you might think.
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undead mastery is a really good idea .
fortunately this spell has some drawbacks though :
7D required to cast .
7 gems required to cast .
700- FATIGUE
AND mr easily negates .
according to the manual this means that it is only a base penetration of 7.
vampires have fortunately a quite high mr of 15 .
if someone wants to think it through in detail i am grateful
but in a brief estimation i think you need at least about 10 base death skill and use all your gems for fatigue reduction to go to less than 200 fatigue to be able to cast the spell and survive it .
the highest base death you get from summonable creatures is 4 death for a demilich or one of the heliophagi .
ring of sorcery + ring of wizardy are both + 1 penetration and +1 deathskill so this is gooood
with your weapon you can take the unique sceptre of dark regency for +3 death .
with skullface helmet you get +1 death again .
and you can take rune smasher as 2nd weapon .
so with this equipment a heliophagus / demilich / pretender should be almost able to get the needed skill + 4 extra penetration .
the final result is probably about 12-13 penetration vs 15 mr .
so this special leader probably can convert about 20-30% of the undead vampires .
but with 7 gem cost + further need of gems to decrease fatigue you can cast it only once / battle .
and the +3 death sceptre is unique .
so if you want a second undead mastery caster you need probably to empower him in deathskill which is horrible expensive .
even very lategame you probably don't have the resources to build more than 2 of these special undead mastery casters i would suppose .
so all in all perhaps this one single strat beats my vampire horde strat .
fortunately for me though the spell is pretty lategame .
by this time i will be able to wish myself probably .
and i have developed a counter strat against this too :
i summon storm demons + a few pazuzu / air queen scs .
these i use first against anti vampire wither bone mage squads and second against your undead mastery strat
i think this dual combo where i invest about 70% of my resources in vampires and 30% in my anti-antivampire special elite army with airqueens / storm demons is almost unbeatable .
you need probably at least 3-4 times higher resources than me to beat me then when it comes to lategame .
unfortunately i have developed this strat only in the Last week .
so once i get abysia in a new mp game and until i can test it about at least 4 months will be over
