MA Abysia: The Burninator Flies Again

[Baalz]

Yes, storm is a big pain for devils (and vamps) but if you expect and prepare for the storm, devils can still be quite effective. Even trailing in research you should be able to bring some spells of your own at the point storm is in 'every battle'. The nice thing about having groups of devils spawning every turn (and immortal vamps of course) is it's unlikely you can manage to loose so many in one surprise to set you back too much.

Option 1: Kill the guy with the storm staff/A gems. Disease demons, earth attacks, mind hunts, manifestations, slayers. You can also stick black hearts on vamp lords for heavier duty assassins - raise skeletons, hellbind heart, life for life...

Option 2: Darkness. Under darkness & storm you won't be taking any significant archer fire and it takes a hell of a lot of mages to do much damage. Then, of course, you've got devils fighting under darkness once they close to melee, which is pretty terrifying.

Option 3: Horrors fly in storms. Use your devils to cut off the retreat rather than fighting the guys dropping the storm, then use the tactics I outlined above. Bonus: enemy mages will have a harder time targeting the horrors!

Option 4: If you've managed to get some storm demons they do quite well in storms - and it doesn't take many. A dozen can lay down some serious hurt against armies that don't bring a bunch of chaff. They've got storm flight as well if you see an opportunity to jump back and kill guys who thought they were protected from fliers, or just bask in the fact that you've brought the only effective ranged weapons to the fight and let the enemy run across the field to your devils/heavy infantry getting pounded by AN lightning. Hey, who thought they needed lighting resistance to fight Abysia?

Option 5: Precision 100 spells. Leech, enslave mind, soul slay, life for life, incinerate, bloodletting, fire storm, drain life, prison of fire, hydrophobia, heat from hell, inner furnace, curse of stones, etc. etc.

Option 6: Use all of the above together.

You can't really expect to take out multifaceted armies supported by battlefield enchantments with just flying one unit type in and attacking. If your opponent is doing things to counter what you're fielding....you need to do the same thing!

[Sombre]

Where would you get storm demons from? Ritual of the five gates?

[Baalz]

You'll start getting a handful from ritual of the five gates relatively early. As I mention, this gets you both storm demons and more demon knights, both of which are effective in small enough numbers to make this worthwhile (The frost demons, fiends and devils are also not useless, just not in the same league as those two IMO). If you run into a situation where storm demons would be very useful you can focus more on ritual of the five gates and you shouldn't have too much trouble putting together 15-20 for big fights while also making good use of the other stuff you get. Towards late game there's a good chance you've managed to scrape up the A gems to empower a vamp lord as I suggested, and just one guy casting infernal tempest sporadically can get you a lot of lightning power.

For anybody who hasn't seen storm demons in action, they're dropping AN lightning bolts with a good precision. Against most enemy troops this means you're doing a largish fraction of your storm demon numbers in kills each turn. It's not hard to figure out that killing 12-15 guys per turn is devastating against the type of super elite troops that will be giving you the most trouble.

[SlipperyJim]

Originally Posted by Baalz

For anybody who hasn't seen storm demons in action, they're dropping AN lightning bolts with a good precision. Against most enemy troops this means you're doing a largish fraction of your storm demon numbers in kills each turn. It's not hard to figure out that killing 12-15 guys per turn is devastating against the type of super elite troops that will be giving you the most trouble.

QFT. I played an SP game on Faerun as Lanka, who is nearly ideal for summoning Storm Demons. By the end game, I had a massive stack of Storm Demons flying around the map, and they disintegrated every army they met. Thirty Storm Demons firing a barrage is an impressive site to be sure....

Bonus: Give the Storm Demons' commander a Staff of Storms. Really, how many people would expect Abysia to use a Staff of Storms?

Anyway, back on topic ... Nice guide, Baalz!

[chrispedersen]

Darkness is *not* an effective counter to mass archer fire *at all*.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Darkness is *not* an effective counter to mass archer fire *at all*.

This is *not* an effective counter argument *at all*.

[OmikronWarrior]

Darkness quarters base precision. I suppose if the enemy has a lot of archers and you have a lot of troops the arrows missing by 10 or more squares will still land on some troops doing damage. Or using Wind Guide to bring Precision back up to sane levels. Ditto with evocations. Mostly, I suspect Darkness does a fine job in reducing enemy archers' effectiveness.

[chrispedersen]

MAximum distance to miss by never exceeds actual distance.
The amount missed by will also be a bell curve - so the amount missed by is actually fairly small.

When an archer mass targets a large mass of enemy troops, the vast majority of missiles target the middle of the enemy lines (especially if there is the prospect of causing friendly casualties).

This tendency *increases* as the distance decreases.

Do a straightline comparison between combats (for example by introducing a unit that autocasts darkness) and you will see that for many combats darkness makes essentially no difference in combat results.

[Baalz]

Seems pretty effective to me. Just ran a test with 300 archers vs 50 devils under darkness & storm. 0 devil casualties, 127 archers killed before they ran away.

Archer precision 10. -7 for darkness. -2 (it was at 3) for storm. Current precision: 1. Half the arrows are negated by the storm.

Out of 300 archers I count maybe 6 arrow hits turn one (at roughly max range for shortbows). Probably twice that turn two as the devils get close. Turn three the devils are in melee range, and take about 20 hits...but friendly fire damage is even higher and of course the devils cut through the 2 defense low protection archers like...well, I was gonna say soft butter but it was more like melted butter.

Sure you could keep the devils off the archers longer with some blockers but the archers really didn't hit any significant number of devils until they were literally nose to nose. Darkness + storm is extremely effective vs archers and mages.

[chrispedersen]

I said *nothing* about storm.

Storm is effective - it eliminates half of the missiles automatically.



The point was *darkness*. And as I specifically said, compare archers with blockers, to archers with blockers with darkness.