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Originally Posted by bbz
I think people suggested Earthquake because half of the skeletons have 4 hp so or up to 8hp. Also the way to use it is with a single caster defending a province that an enemy is about to attack. Use some pd to distract the enemy then all you need is 1 or 2 E4 casters with 5 earth gems each, cast summon earthpower to get them to E5 then set them to: cast earthquake, retreat.(giving them the two extra gem would make them cast earthquake like an E6 mage and reduce the 300 fatigue from the spell enough so that they can retreat(and not be unconcious because of it) ,also you need high defence to avoid being hit by earthquake that is if your mages dont have enough hit points to survive it)
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Yeah, there's basically two ways to use Earthquakes. The first is as described above, casting and retreating. (If you do it with human-hp mages don't use two in the same province though. The first caster will rack up massive fatigue from the casting, meaning he's very likely to suffer a critical hit and die from the second Earthquake. The Ideal caster would be a Troll King, they have 4E with boots, and enough hp to shrug of a couple of Earthquakes.)
The second way, if you really want to stick it to a big enemy army is to first cast army-buffs to make sure your own guys can weather the quakes. (Assuming you have the research of course.) The single best protection would be Fog Warriors. (Alt7) Since Earthquake counts as nonmagical damage, it will only do one point of damage to those affected, while being extremely unlikely to dispel the mistform. Another option would be Army of Gold/Lead or Mass Protection if you have medium armour accross the board already, both of which will mean only critical hits or very lucky rolls will do any damage at all.
Of course, if you're at the point where you can reliably cast Fog Warriors or Army of Gold/Lead in battle your problems with the AI should be pretty much over.
You can get a similar effect by bringing along a (probably smaller) army of tougher stuff. (Usually summonded. The trolls you get along with the Troll King in Troll King's court would qualify for example.)
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Originally Posted by bbz
Answer to the second question, they do it randomly in an area around them also they tend to target less armoured targets I think(that is for legions of steel buff, not sure about the others but it has some tricks i think)
What I usually do is set the thug at the bottom and the rear of the map(or top) and place the mage behind the thug so that thier squares form a rectangle. Also I dont place anything near them so that the mage doesnt make a mistake. Another way to ensure that your thug has quickness is have the mage cast it 2-3 times before battle(at least improves the chances of affecting the thug)
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Yeah, there's no way to be completely certain besides making sure the thug is the only unit in range. This is easy for spells with range 1 or touch, but various other spells have greater ranges.
Other than that there's some tricks that can help nudge the spell AI along: Single target spells are more likely to be cast on the single unit with the highest hit points. (Which in many cases will be your thug, but keep away other high hp units like elephants, vine ogres, fall bears, the various golems, etc...) AoE spells on the other hands tend to target big troop squads, so you might want to park your thug in the middle of the biggest group of regular dudes around) Spells without perfect accuracy will also tend to target units that are close to others. And a last important consideration is the stat to be boosted: spells that boost protection tend to go to units that have low protection to begin with. I'm less sure if the same reasoning goes for other stats though. (Does quikness prioritise units with low action points? Iron Will to those with low MR? I wouldn't be surprised based on the "logic" of the spellcasting system, but never actually noticed such a corelation myself.)
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Originally Posted by Zywack
I had a Sleeper already on hand so I geared him up with a cross between rdonj and Amhazair suggestions (plus reinvigoration boots)[...]
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Yeah, good call on the boots.
The biggest diference between the two chassis is that, not being undead, the sleeper doesn't have 0 encumberance. If you want to send him out against big AI hordes solo he
has to be fatigue neutral, or he'll die. (He also has significantly less hp, meaning he also regains less from regen. The better att/def/prec/move of the sleeper mean very, very little in a chaff-killing role unfortunately, so for this purpose he's strictly inferior. Which doesn't mean it can't work.)