Argh... communion problems

[Blitz]

Playing C'tis Miasma lately, and fiddling around with commmunion. I had one Mashmaster with a random in astral, sitting in a lab on the border of my opponent. He's happily summoning wights with his 5 researching shaman friends. It's a trap, and it worked, but it ended up costing me a lot more than it netted me.

The idea was to set up a nice juicy outpost that looked undefended. Once my unsuspecting opponent attacked, he'd find that in addition to the 20 militia, there were 5-6 wights and a hasted skeleton-generator backed by 5 communion slaves.

Well it did work, but at what cost! I had given each of the 5 slaves rejuvination boots and amulets (15 nature gems +110 for the unit) for an unbelievable fatigue recuperation rate of 40 per turn. SOMEHOW the mashmaster managed to burn through about 3000 fatigue points and kill off all five communion slaves. Granted this was a LONG battle between my communion and 3 emorian necros raising skeletons of their own.

Was the haste going a little overboard? Should I not use hasted mages in a communion? Or is a 5-slave communion not big enough? Was this an isolated incident that I shouldn't worry about?

Comments?

[Kel]

Were the slaves set to not cast spells after communing ?

Just a thought. They might have been burning their own fatigue up.

- Kel

[Blitz]

I had actually given each of them a nice bow to fire earlier, but that didn't work so I scrapped that plan.

The Shamen were set to cast communion slave, hold, hold, hold, hold

[Pocus]

it is you that can respond the more easily to your question: watch&survey the fatigue level of your shamen each rounds, and see what went wrong. Remember also that com slaves always take their enc in addition to the fatigue cost of the spell.

Slaves cant cast spells btw, except when they have no masters active.

[tinkthank]

I can only judge from Pythium, but 5 to 1 is too small for a long battle.

8 to 1 is minimum if you go past 20 turns or so. I only feel safe with 12+ slaves per master, usually without reinvig items (no time to forge all those), so 16 or more is usually the ratio I like to have.

This is with Quickness cast. Pythium gets this easily, and I always use it.

Note that Pythium's casters have 8 encumbrance, I think.

[Endoperez]

Wouldn't it have been cheaper to either have one shaman casting Relief, or an Earth mage with Crystal Matrix cast Earthpower.