On the effective early use of Pretenders in combat

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Firebreath:
Forgive me for asking. But is it really likely that someone would bother building lots of astral mages and telling them all to mind duel....when most of the time that your fighting the enemy won't have any astral mages in their army, or if they do - you can't be sure of it beforehand ,so you'd be wasting your time (unless you're at war with an astral nation, but there arn't many of those...)

If I knew my enemy had an astral 5 Wyrm, you can damn well believe that I would attack the army where the Wyrm was with an astral squad of death. Killing off the enemy pretender god is nearly always an exceptionally good idea and worth a lot of casualties, even more so when it means knocking magic points off a unit with decent magic skills.

And if I do not know the stats of an enemy combat pretender god before it comes to serious battles between our forces, that should be reckoned a serious failure of information gathering on my part. Forewarned is forearmed.

I am not advocating having all your low-astral mages constantly on mind-duel as action #1 (though that does make sense at times), but certainly as a viable strategy when defending a province the medium-skill astral unit is moving through or when attacking the province it is stationed in. Worst case, there are no astral opposition in the province you attack, and your astral mages will use other magic than mind duel sinse there is no legal target for the spell.

Astral 5 (against human opposition) is just too little to feel safe unless you are an immortal for whom dying is just a way of life... Or death, as it may be.

Now, if the astral 5 Wyrm is equipped with a Starshine Skullcap and a Crystal Coin (taking up two out of its four precious equipment slots, but needs must when the enemy can field astral mages), and casts Power of the Spheres and Light of the Northern Star, THEN it can probably mind duel just about anything (except for a high communion) to death and a low-level astral death squad would get a nasty surprise.