lategame balance . are my concerns true ?

[Boron]

i think immortality is a bit too powerful .

how do you beat a vampire horde lategame ?
on turn 100 i have probably 100-200 vampire lords which all summon allies . so +100-200 vampires / turn .
i summon 2-5 new additional vampire lords at least .
so by turn 100 i have probably accumulated about 1000-2000 vampires and at turn 120 about 5000 if i clamhoard + wish for blood and summon only vampire lords or if i play abysia/mictlan and bloodhunt heavy .


abysia and caelum are extremely shining for this :
abysia can dominionpush via blood sacrifice , caelum can stealthpreach cheaply .
abysia can bloodhunt really well , caelum can clamhoard really well .


so how do you beat such an immortal horde ?
i think the only variable which determines success or failure is who can push his dominion .
but caelum / abysia with either stealthpreach or blood sacrifice should be the winners in this fight .

so slowly but surely they will just overwhelm any opponent .



if you make a wither bones artillery brigade with a staff of storms the vampires are delayed but they have quite high ground movement of 14 too .

wither bones has "only" 25 range and -1 precision .
requires DDD and creates 50 fatigue .
it does 16+ an damage .
a vampire has 22hp that means normally he survives 1 wither bones hit .

so you need really quite a few wither bones casters + lots of tough guards .
but vampires are so cheap and i never lose them .
so i should have way bigger numbers than you .

i use either the vampire lords themselves to lead the vampires or wraith lords or demilichs or a combination of all 3 .

unequipped demilichs i can script to drain life x5.
unequipped wraith lords are not too bad too and i can just script them to e.g. soul vortex / attack closest .

same with the vampire lords .



the common vampires have 11 att and 13 strenght and most important SIZE 2 .
so 24 can swarm a sc .

even a 30 prot sc gets damage because with the ap lifedrain attack his protection is reduced to 15.

then it is 13+2d6 damage oe vs 15+2d6 protection oe .

so the vampires will hit + fatigue him . with a bit luck they make the sc unconscious and then he is finished .
and you have to add that my leaders with e.g. drain life script target the sc too .


so you would need a combination of scs / lots of tough heavy troops to hold of the vampires long enough and good antiundeadmages .

this is really expensive .

and remember : as long as i inflict casualities on you i have won because my whole force has 0 equipment and is revived .
so i LOSE nothing and throw it almost every turn on you .

in the first encounter e.g. i kill 20% of your force .
in the second encounter which follows soon depending how far away you are from my capitol about 1-3 turns on most maps i half your force again and on the 3rd encounter it is dead .


so did i miss something or is my estimation quite true that my described undead horde is even totally unequipped just a bit too powerful ?



if you share my concerns and agree i have 2 or 3 simple suggestions as a solution for this problem which i will say then .

[Jack Simth]

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.

Another thing to consider is the low morale of vampire thralls. If I have a fair number of tough lifeless troops gaurding several priests, with the priests scripted to spam banish (especially if I include the staff of storms thing to slow the vampire attack), many of your vampire brigades will break before reaching my priests and their bodygaurds, and so never reach them at all.

Another thing to consider is the chance that I have similar recourses at my disposal. Suppose I've done the clamhoarding as well as you have, but instead of wishing for blood slaves, I have been wishing for Dominion, or money, or whatever.

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.

[Boron]

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.

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 .

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.

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

[atul]

A couple of points...

The immortality aspect of your vamps has one downside - lose your capital and then you're left with only sub-par troops (as vampires without their immortality are hardly anything to write home about in late stages of the game).

The assumption of game being turn 100. How big a map you're thinking of? I'd think most games would be by far been resolved by that time. Also, you shouldn't dismiss Undead Mastery as a too lategame spell, currently I'm in a MP where turns are in the 50s and my research is around levels 8-9 in all circles bar blood. Granted, I do value research much... and also, by that time players have had a good time to forge crystal and slave matrixes so with communion you can get a lot of Undead Mastery squads even if you aren't Pythium.

If you push the dominion with lots of priests blood sacrificing, they can be dealt with all those nice far-slaying spells.

And remember, when you invest into blood, other players may do the same or work their way into other schools. For example, the nation to get the Chalice has an option to Tartarian Factory, producing easily 50 SCs by the turn 100 you specified. And unlike vamps, they aren't limited by dominion. And of course, elemental royalty is usually the first to be reserved.

Anyway, I'd be a bit sceptic about that turn 100, but of course it depends on your map and people you play against.

There's probably a lot more to be considered, but that's what I came up with...

[Boron]

yeah atul those tartarians are my other thing i think which is tooooo cheap .
10 deathgems for an at least top 5 sc .
when you consider their price they are probably resourcewise the best sc .


my concerns are only true for maps with at least 200 provinces .
but on karan and orania which are very liked mp maps the game normally goes until turn 100-150 .


a vampirelord is just a toooooooooooooo good investion .
55 blood slaves for a quite good leader who gives your 1 vampire / turn for FREE .


as it is i think these are the only 2 units left which are striking underprized .
1st your mentioned tartarians
2nd my mentioned vampire lords

[The_Tauren13]

well once boron starts kicking everyone's asses 3 months from now maybe you'll listen

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
vampires have fortunately a quite high mr of 15 .

This means that about 9% of the vampires will be converted. This is not insignificant, as they will be among the ranks of the other units, and become the immediate target.

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 .

6 death magic plus 7 death gems in the base cost, 1 for skill boosting, and 5 to reduce fatigue. Total cost of 13 death gems to bring fatigue down to about 116.

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 .

Your vampire horde is also a rather late game strategy, so you really should include everything else your enemies would be able to throw at you.

[Cainehill]

[quote]
Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:

6 death magic plus 7 death gems in the base cost, 1 for skill boosting, and 5 to reduce fatigue. Total cost of 13 death gems to bring fatigue down to about 116.

I don't think so, based on experience with other spells like Summon Lammashtas. A level 1 death mage can only use _1_ death gems, so can't cast SL no matter how many gems it's carrying.

The gems required for the spell itself seem to count against the gems the mage can use for skill boosting and reducing fatigue. Thus, 6 death magic wouldn't be able to cast the spell at all, 7 death magic couldn't use any gems to reduce fatigue, 8 death magic would incur ... 233 fatigue by using 1 gem max to reduce fatigue, thus winding up dead if the spell is cast.

So unless there's a bug in S.Lammashtas, it would seem that you need to reach at least death magic 7 via communion with lots of slaves to absorb the fatigue, or death magic 9 without communion.

[Graeme Dice]

Cainehill said:
I don't think so, based on experience with other spells like Summon Lammashtas. A level 1 death mage can only use _1_ death gems, so can't cast SL no matter how many gems it's carrying.

The thing is that this appears to only be the case for mages with only 1 skill.

[Boron]

[quote]
Graeme Dice said:

Boron said:

Your vampire horde is also a rather late game strategy, so you really should include everything else your enemies would be able to throw at you.

it depends who uses it .
but as mictlan/abysia i can bloodhunt early and start early summoning my first ones .
especially mictlan is a formidable clamhoarder too .
so their blood income will always be huge .

and there are really few better uses in the long run for 100 astral pearls than wishing for blood .
250 blood are almost 5 vampire lords who are quite formidable on their own already .

if you wish scs you need to GoR so lets say either you get 1 unequipped sc or 5 vampire lords .
you need to equip the sc normally .
so lets add about 50 gems at least to equip.

i think it is fair to say then at least 6 vampire lords vs 1 equipped + GoRed sc .
if the vampire lords only summon 10 turns vampires it is already 6 vampire lords + 60 vampires vs the 1 sc .

the more time i have the more i grow out of control with the vampire strat then.
as long as i stay in own dominion you can't kill them with anything .


so you almost can't attack me in my own territory and everytime i get positive dominion in one of your provinces which neighbors me i can conquer this one easy again .

and i can throw ghost riders / flames from the sky etc. on your provinces with effect or make raids with special forces for this purpose .