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Bummer_Duck said:
What is the counters to Ghost riders?
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I'm aware of 4 uses of GR and the counter will depend on what your enemy is doing.
#1. Ghost Riders as raiders. Likely used together with scouts to take provinces. Against this probably the best counter is to move small el-cheapo groups (or even lone indy commanders) of nationals back and forth so that you won't be losing provinces. You'll lose some of those groups to ghost riders, but at 30-50 gold or 5 death gems it's a cheap price to pay. Meanwhile, you can use your gems to fuel offensive.
Another alternative is to use small groups of vampires. With those you won't suffer losses. This will better work for nations with cheap death mages, but with some careful scripting you can ensure that you rarely use the leading mage either.
Sub-use of #1 is carpet bombing (20-30 provinces in one turn). There is no real counter to it, but the opponent can't cast it very often due to gem cost and only few nations have sufficiently easy access to required death mages.
#2. Anti-SC squad. Used to eliminate careless SC. There's no counter except stealth and teleport-like spells. Generally, careless SC is bound to die, if not to GR then to something else.
#3. To inflict casualties to the armies. Set of several GR is cast on the enemy army. This one is the easiest to counter. Fire spells, priests, fire-shielded-SCs, variety of astral spells and many mass-damage spells - everything works. Generally, it that army is supposed to fight somebody it should be able to deal with undead, thus it should have little problem with GR. It's useful to summon a lot of weaklings in the beginning of the battle to absorb horsemen's lances.
#4. Gem drain. That's the most powerful use of GR. Just when your massive army is about to storm enemy's castle, he casts 5-6 dozen of GR and your mages can't resists and waste their gems to eliminate those GR. Of course, that means that they're likely to get slaughtered in the following real battle. There isn't any good counter to it AFAIK. Creative scripting helps a bit allowing to, at least, be able to cast cruicial spells in the main battle, but still it's a serious disadvantage for the attacker. Besides, you need to have a good variety of mages to implement such scripts. The problem is even more complicated, because your army is likely to be hit not only by GR, but also by FftS, MW and Wrathful-Skying squad. Other spells can be used instead of GR, but GR are the cheapest per unit (in most cases).
Overall, if you discount the #4 (which is rather a problem of game mechanics encouraging long and slow late games), GR don't look that impressive. However, considering how many good uses they have, I think they are underpriced. IMO 6-7 gems per casting, or maybe 6 gems and death 5 requirement would be appropriate.