Is there Life After Death? (And how to make the most of the Death 9 blessing...)

[Ragnarok-X]

i think commanders are immune to the poison effect of the hydras.

[Norfleet]

Meh. This almost seems too complicated and risky, considering that what you're doing must surely be subjecting mages to a great deal of risk. In order to perform such a conVersion en-masse, because converting one or two mages wouldn't have a really significant effect on your income, you'd have to round them up and get them killed on the battlefield, which is a rather unreliable proposition as it is. Plus it only works on sacred mages, which already only demand half upkeep anyway!

So you'd have to carefully orchestrate a mass mage suicide, in the heat of battle against an enemy which certainly DOES want to kill you....you're going to lose all the research from those mages while you're trying to get them killed, AND probably lose at least a small fraction of those mages simply because you're trying this stunt in a combat where you don't have direct real-time control, and things can potentially go seriously pearshaped and you risk losing the entire bundle.

I somehow don't think that this is the best use of the Death-9 blessing.

[Norfleet]

It's also worth noting that having your weak Soulless mages disintegrated in a drive-by priesting sucks.

[geo981010]

Ragnarok-X :
Some commanders are poison immune, but not many. So hydra bodyguards is not a good idea under normal circumstances!

Norfleet:
yup, banishment will kill them again quickly, so you do not want to be near the front line. Banishment has a range of 25, so you want to keep them in the back line with some screen to prevent priests from sneaking in. Need to try some tests on this and see if having other undead closer can soak up determined banishment attempts - only tried versus AI yet, so need to try versus someone trying with a real battle plan.

For cost saving, upkeep is 1/30 of unit cost, so the Arch Theurgs cost a little under 13 gold per turn per unit, and the Theurgs an even 5 each per turn per unit. So if your goal is by turn 15 to have 3 battleGroups of 3 or 4 mages each, couple arches out site searching, and a stable of 5-10 researching, you are now talking about saving enough gold each turn to buy a new Theurg.

If you play around with it, you can get the conVersions consistenly with little hassle with the Hydra once you get used to it.

I think I will need to try this against a real person later this week and so how it goes...

[geo981010]

One more thing -
the 0 encumberance is huge. An Arch Theurg has a bas encumberance of 8, going up to 10 for temperature reason.

So looking at orders like Quickness, Mind Burn(4x), we have;

Arch Theurg (3 astral):
(20/1+8) + (20/2 + 8) x4 = 100 fatigue, 18 per MB

Soulless Version (3 astral):
(20/1+0) + (20/2 + 0) x4 = 60 fatigue, 10 per MB

4 Astral theurg is even worse - it can cast Mind burn twice and get less fatigue than the living one does for once. And with heat effects the live Versions get even worse - 20 fatigue per MB, soulless stays at 10. Net effect is the Soulless Version can cast almost twice as many low fatigue spells before getting fatigued, which really helps out a lot.

also, a passed out Theurg who gets converted comes back with no fatigue, so if he passes out on turn 5 and then dies on turn 6, he comes back fresh on 7 and ready to start casting spells all over again

And communicants who get overused come back as soulless too - they can now lead undead and are good candidates for unlimited Skull talisman summoning.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
disintegrated in a drive-by priesting

What a charming turn of phrase! This is precious. Thanks!

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by geo981010:
Looking for area effect spells that the undead would be immune to but the live unit wouldn't - like Soul Vortex and Breath of Winter (or similar chill). Have a mage cast it and the others positioned in the same square will die from the effect, but the Soulless Versions are immune to same effect so they are ok.

It's worth noting that the spell AI will cast Breath of Winter whenever possible, regardless of scripting Therefore, Death 9 becomes a very good idea when playing Tien Chi in Version 2.06.

And why are communicants sacred? Really, like Pythium is too weak already...

[ February 09, 2004, 00:35: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]