My Wraith Lord just wiped out 39 commanders. MINE!

[Professor_Chaos]

So I'm in the "sit in one place while LA Ermor throws 500-strong undead armies at you" phase of a game.

I summon a Wraith Lord, equip him to D8, give him 7 death gems. For the upcoming turn, I will reach Thau 9.

Perhaps he might care to cast Undead Mastery?

No...

Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding

killing off 39/48 commanders I had in the province, plus essentially all my army.

You can imagine some amusing role-playing reasons (Pardon me, are you not ethereal too?), but really this is the thing that makes D3 not so much fun for me. You can spend an hour micromanaging your formation for a battle then it all gets wiped out because your mage casts something like that.

I guess my mistake was to let him have any death gems until the turn after I reached Thau 9, when I could script him to cast Undead Mastery.

[Zylithan]

yeah, this sort of gets to a point for me though... I think you should be able to script spells you havent researched yet. Because I feel like this happens a lot to me, in general, where next turn I will have a spell ready to cast, but I can't script it, then the mage goes all whack-job.

[Velusion]

Professor_Chaos said:
So I'm in the "sit in one place while LA Ermor throws 50--strong undead armies at you" phase of a game.

I summon a Wraith Lord, equip him to D8, give him 7 death gems. For the upcoming turn, I will reach Thau 9.

Perhaps he might care to cast Undead Mastery?

No...

Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding
Bone Grinding

killing off 39/48 commanders I had in the province, plus essentially all my army.

You can imagine some amusing role-playing reasons, but rally this is the thing that makes D3 not so much fun for me. You can spend an hour micromanaging your formation for a battle then it all gets wiped out because your mage casts something like that.

I guess my mistake was to let him have any death gems until the turn after I reached Thau 9, when I could script him to cast Undead Mastery.

Ouch... that was particularity harsh. Your assumption is correct though... with high level spells its always best to wait to manually script the castings. The AI is too stupid to know what to do.

[sector24]

Bone Grinding in particular gets scripted a lot more than it should in my opinion. But generally, when the AI has like 50 spells to choose from it's never going to pick the one that you were thinking, so when you get to that point you just have to script them. As for letting you script spells you don't know, that's a good idea in theory but it probably involves a lot programming.

[Zeldor]

I once gave Ark to my attacking army by mistake. And it was really huge and painful mistake.

[konming]

It really does not involve much programming. It is just like casting the spells you do not have the path for. If it is avaiable, then you cast it, if not, AI chooses something else.

[Sombre]

A 'do not cast unless scripted' checklist would solve this and many other problems. I know we'll probably never see it, but imagine how cool it would be. If you checked the majority of spells on there, you could have unscripted mages choosing from a limited and useful selection - just leave them all the buffs for instance, or the long range spells.

I'm not saying give each mage their own list, just one global list for your nation which you can mess around with each turn would be fine.

[HJFudge]

I would LOVE something like that. I mean I like Raise Dead, but I dont want it to be the only thing my mages default to ALL THE TIME.

[Evil Dave]

Yup, we've been trying to get the Devs to add a checklist feature for battle spells since Dom2. This may be a good time to try again, as it's hard to say that what happened to Professor_Chaos is just "working as designed".

[Beorne]

I remember many other waves of spell blacklist request (that seems the simplest way), but it appears devs enjoy these "My stupid mage ..." threads.