How many troops form a "large enough" force?

[Twan]

I think there is an AI bug against stealthy mages discovered in patrol phase. I've seen 40+ mages with hundreds or troops follow their full round one script to kill a lone bard.

[ano]

Maybe, condition is: "if there's a mage in the enemy force"...
Does LA Pythium has mages in defense, Amhazair?

[capnq]

kasnavada said: I just lost over 300 maenads (half of my troops) in a game against an army of about 80 demons because the script was ignored. [...] The script was : cast phantasmal armies (in order to reduce my loss)

That right there was part of the problem. The spellcasting AI prefers to buff something on the first round. Scripting a non-buff spell first is much more likely to be ignored.

[ano]

Just checked it. Pythium gets Leo at defense 20.
Seems like mages in enemy force cause executing of gem-demanding scripts.

[kasnavada]

capnq, you're probably right, even if that doesn't apply to this battle. And you're probably right for another reason, if I buffed first then casted this spell, the spell would probably have been ignored. And you're also right about casting this spell : it was a mistake I won't ever do again in such a situation.

The problem I had was that the spell was casted as I scripted. If the script was ignored, it would have cast one of the cheap buff spell that cost 20 fatigue and not caused a problem at all... but the script wasn't ignored, the caster just decided not to use the gems for some reason, resulting in 200 fatigue. At least, if it doesn't want to use gems, it should at least ignore the script altogether.

But this example was just another example, maybe after enough examples we will be able to find out why the script ignores or not the scripts or gems...

[Amhazair]

ano said:
Just checked it. Pythium gets Leo at defense 20.
Seems like mages in enemy force cause executing of gem-demanding scripts.

Good catch, and this might very well have something to do with it. It's definitely not the only consideration though.

I have on a couple of occasions used a couple of castings of ghost riders against large opposition armies for the sole purpose of having them use up their gems. Two castings is definitely enough to force gem usage, I haven't yet tried it with only one. Ghost riders don't have any mages, but they do come with a rather scary thug leader.

[Aezeal]

Can you use gems with spells if you can already cast the spell?

[thejeff]

You can use one gem to boost your level to either cast the spell or reduce fatigue.

No more gems in total than your level.