Air vs Nature

[Saber Cherry]

The other advantage is that Air Shield protects your troops against friendly fire... while staff of storms renders friendly archers useless, AFAICT.

[HJ]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
The other advantage is that Air Shield protects your troops against friendly fire... while staff of storms renders friendly archers useless, AFAICT.

And that's how I've been using it so far mostly. Crossbows, longbows and arbalests can hurt your sacred knights while they are pursuing the routers pretty badly. Even a little bit of air shield helps with that, as they are already far away, and the missiles are not targeting them, but stray ones fall all over the place and cause damage. I might not want to go all the way with air, but 4 air is useful for your pretender as well in combat, in addition to it not really being that common on summoned mages. It's not as expensive as earth 9, yet it helps the survivability of already superior and expensive sacred troops, as well as protecting your priests/casters from stray arrows. Besides, prot 4 is not all that great against AP missiles anyway. Low % air shield might not be noticeable at close range, but in firing all the way across the field it's decent enough, as it even further reduces the chance that the odd missile that hits the square kills someone.

[ November 28, 2003, 02:24: Message edited by: HJ ]

[Keir Maxwell]

Just finished trying Van using the All Father with Air9 Death4. Can't say it worked well. I seemed to suffer from as many missile hits on the Van as previously (probably because my Axe/Jav were on "fire") and I missed the extra defense and offence of water9.

On the plus side when I went to war with Pythium all their archers were on target mounted (very sensible) and the air shield helped there. I found the poison cloud of the fleeing hydra hatcheling the worst part of facing Pythium.

I didn't keep playing long enough to make use of the shock resistance and my worry with it is the Van still get hit and lose their mirror image.

I'm still interested in trying both fire9 and blood4 with Van to see how this increases their offence. Might go test it out and see if I can get a blood4/water9 or Blood4/fire9 pretender.

cheers

Keir

[Saber Cherry]

I still want a Water-9 Fire-9. That would be insane, but only Dead Ermor can have one, since there are no water/fire pretenders.

[HJ]

I don't quite grasp the benefits or high Ratings of death blessing effect. To me, unless playing a nation with undead sacred troops, death blessing is probably the worst one. At death 4, your troops get lesser fear -4, which means that they influence one square out of 8 that surround them, and force morale check with +1 bonus for the opponent. Now, unless the sacred unit is completely surrounded, the chance of fear actually influencing the square that contains an enemy unit is pretty slim. And if you're surrounded, it won't matter anyway. Even if there are three sacred units in the square, their chance of actually scaring someone wouldn't be too good. The only thing that might help is that in prolonged battles the fear effect might begin to build up on the enemy units that Last long. Either that or you have to be really lucky with where the aura influence falls every turn.
To add to that, many other paths have much better combat spells than death if you're planning on using your pretender for combat. Summoning a couple of skeletons and dropping from exhaustion doesn't really compare with other things like blade winds and mistform. The only thing I can think of is adding it to the existing fear aura on a pretender, such as LoD or cyclops.
In short, unless your sacred units are already fearful, such as wailing ladies, or you go very high with death so as to get a significant size fear aura, which is hard, I don't see what would the benefit of fear 4 be. But, of course, I'm always open to learn something new.

[ November 28, 2003, 06:18: Message edited by: HJ ]

Try using Eagle Warriors, Valkyries and anything that has a chance of standing up to a fight. A wave of units with fear will break initial units and force back everything but the largest squads, and if you have fliers; then it usually affects commanders, if you pick the right Category that has the reserve pile.

Fear is a good effect to use in mass, for non-undead; but not really any other circumstances.

[HJ]

Again, in theory and without doing extensive tests:
The chance of fear effect aura falling in any of the squares surrounding the unit is 1/8. If you're using masses of troops, this means that a lot of the squares around the unit will be occupied by friendlies, meaning that the fear aura influencing those will be worthless. Of course, if they have an aura spanning 3 or 4 squares, that will start to count for something, but the aura of only one square for death 4 is not worth it, IMHO. Probability of seeing significant effects are not very good, especially when you compare it to the fact that boosting other stats with some other blessing would possibly result in more kills, and hence in at least the same effect, only more certain.

[ November 28, 2003, 07:13: Message edited by: HJ ]