Nagas and other "lost" pretenders

[Nerfix]

Well, Dragons do have huge physical stats, but they have only misc slots and they can't use magic in their Dragon form.

[PvK]

Ya, the poor little thing. (burp)

[Pocus]

Originally posted by PvK:
Perhaps a human player would have a trick I don't know to take out a dragon?

PvK

pretenders which are physically strong but have few slots (misc) wont stand against super-combattants, like an equipped golem, arch devil, ice devil, gifted gargoyle, etc. When you encounters beasts which have defence 35 amongst other stats, I can assure you'd better be prepared with specifics counter measures.

[Psitticine]

In a game I finished recently, the final battle was (suitingly) a clash between my pretender and the enemy. I was playing as a Bog Mummy and the enemy was a Blue Dragon.

My Bog Mummy ended up alone on the field. Everybody else on my side had either fled or fallen. He marched up to the Dragon and cast Leeching Touch on him. The Dragon lost something like 96 HP, I believe, and my Bog Mummy was suddenly at full health and 0 fatigue. The Dragon whomped on him pretty good in return, but another casting of Leeching Touch patched up ol' Dry & Crunchy, plus it brought the Dragon down to single digit HP. This was repeated once more, and then there was only one pretender on the field. My Bog Mummy did some little something that took out the remaining enemy troops (can't remember what he cast, but it worked well!) and that was that.

(On a side note, it should be kept in mind that my mummy had a power of 10+ in Blood Magic at that point; Leeching Touch isn't always that powerful, but I'm sure y'all knew that. )

Soooooo . . . I think the moral here is that Dragons will eat combat types for breakfast but powerful mages armed with the right spells can still go toe-to-toe with them. If the Dragons haven't transformed yet, then they are often powerful spell-casters in their own way (along one path only, usually) and that can certainly change things, but that Blue Dragon was not a challenge for my Bog Mummy.

Also, before they clashed directly, he ate down my best troops like they were popcorn and those he couldn't reach routed in droves. This post should not be seen as contradictory to my earlier pro-Dragon one!!

[Pocus]

How often do you script your mages by the way? Occasionally to get a combo going, or more often than that?

[Psitticine]

Me? I usually don't script them to any great degree. They do an excellent job of selecting their own spells in most cases. I will often give them orders to start off with a communion and/or use power-boosting spells if I know they are going into something nasty, but then I more often than not just leave it up to the AI's judgement.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Psitticine:
Me? I usually don't script them to any great degree. They do an excellent job of selecting their own spells in most cases. I will often give them orders to start off with a communion and/or use power-boosting spells if I know they are going into something nasty, but then I more often than not just leave it up to the AI's judgement.

Thank you Psitticine, this is what I wanted you to say
The following 'critics' are not directed toward you, and, I hope, will be felt constructives. I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody with them :

I dont want to feel accusative, but I think this is part of the 'problem' we have, us pbem'er of dominions, and you, the Illwinter team and associated beta testers.

Perhaps the dominions players on the NG are perceived as a small grognard community, but the fact is that most if not all of these players, when playing in pbem, script very often their mages.
Why :
1) tac-AI in doms I is not that good in his spell choice.
2) Competitive play *ASK* you to extract the best of your units. Often we are not playing to win at all cost, we play to have fun, but we dont play either to loose. So we script, even simple tactic like casting Aim them 4 astral fires.
On the contrary, I believe that it is extremely rare that you (the IW team and beta testers) script to the extent we do (that is 50 mages in a row).

This appeal some comments :

1) the problem : Most of dominions I players expected a major, or at least big, focus of IW toward easying scripting tediousness. On the contrary, IW didnt saw a problem there, and didnt focus on how to improve the work of scripting spells. We asked for scripting templates, saving and reloading scripts, scripting several mages at once with the same list, etc.

2) The arguments of IW against the 'problem' are that :
a) there is no problem.
b) few players engage themselves in scripting too much, we dont make modifications for an handful of customers.
c) the game is our, we head it in the direction we want.

Personally I'm pretty sure that many doms I players see there is problem. I posted a poll on what players wanted to see in doms II. True, 50 or so people is a bit too few to get an idea, but still, most of players wanted less micromanagements, including in scripting.
Lastly, IW is selling a product. This mean they want people to buy it. This mean they will increase there selling figures if they try to alleviate the problems many customers have.

Speaking of the (small) french community as an example, 8/10 friends of mine bought the licence of doms I. 2 and perhaps 3 wont buy doms II, before playing the demo, to see if scripting micromanagement is more easy. I know this is a small population, but I think it shows well the trend.

To end on a positive note, perhaps the domsII AI is so good that we wont have to script anything, bare special combos. I pray and hope for that, this would solve everything

ok flames away, and votes for one star now