Is the REAL problem with VQs...Norfleet?

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by mivayan:
fire9 + astral9 flaggelants: they win without the resist fire but with it the vq clean house.

Yes, and flagellants are cheap. Losing an army here and there isn't even a crippling loss, if you can strike him in more than one place at a time...trivial for a flagellant swarm strategy. Plus you stand a very good chance of killing your target anyway! No VQ would DARE try this outside of her dominion, so you're not at real risk here. And you really don't explain why this wouldn't be the problem when you're using crappy, disposable troops against any kind of tweaked SC.

50 crossbows set to attack flyers with flaming arrows: instant death without fire resist. with fire resist they still hurt since the flaming arrows bypass etherealness. need to return a few times to kill all, or bring fodder.

I think this sounds like fairly decisive ownage here: You have the right tool for the right job, and it shows. Having to "return a few times" is not of very much use if you're not in your dominion, and if you can't drive them off in one pass, you've just lost a castle. Returning won't help you, as you'll find the crossbowmen camping out in your castle, and dismantling your dominion.

50 crossbows withough flaming arrows: vq cleans them out

Surprise. Missile weapons are not terribly useful against normal targets. Crossbowmans are cheap anyway.

50 guardians - clean house
26 air9 blessed black templars - dead horses

Okay, you're throwing ordinary units at an SC with no attempt to negate its strengths. Big surprise. You'd lose the same army to any standard SC as well: Bane Lords, Ice Devils, all of them would hand you your *** there. An Air-9 blessing is a useful defense against an SC, it's a field-support blessing that allows you to combine sacred tankers with crossbows (such as FLAMING crossbows) with impunity.

air9 titan on aim-Thunderstrike-Thunderstrike-lightning bolt-lightning bolt. VQ is unconcious after the second big boom.

See? That's using your strengths against their weaknesses. Plus he's not even a battle chassis: He's a blesser. And he still wins! The primary function of an A9 Titan is to dole out an air bless....not to go whailing on people. Admittedly, he does this rather well as a secondary function, but this is still SECONDARY.

air9 titan on attack closest- dead titan.

Well, yeah, if the Titan fights *STUPID* and uses none of the things you paid for, what did you expect?

The combination of
1) kills almost any conventional army.
2) immortal

You yourself have demonstrated that it fails to kill many "conventional" armies. Flaming crossbows, F9/S9 blessed flagellants, all are fairly conventional armies. Fire-9 valkyries would work very well, too, but you didn't mention these. Fire-9 ANYTHINGs, really, work fairly well. How about fire-9 temple guards? Can't even freeze them out with BoW, they're cold immune. Fire-9 woodsmen? Ouchie. Hell, a VQ can't even take down Nature-9 woodsmen reliably, because she just can't kill fast enough to wipe them out by the time the battle expires.

I think an allfather, wyrm or carrion dragon would have a decent risk of getting a few afflictions or deaths during these tests.

Sure, maybe. But the ability to throw yourself at a stupid risk and merely be annoyed by getting killed is still a loss. And the Wyrm isn't even a true battle chassis. If he's a no-magic Wyrm, he loses nothing by dying. It's not really fair to compare a no-magic expendable chassis with a tweaked SC of any class.

The Allfather is not as inherently susceptible to flying dogpiles due to his instant mirror image distraction. You also won't be facing any flaming valkyries anytime soon.

Carrion Dragon? I've had to actually face this before: The Carrion Dragon ate all the flagellants for lunch without even blinking. They couldn't even touch him. He was, admittedly, finally brought down by point-blank crossbowing, but only because the crossbowmen had been clever enough to actually walk up point-blank to it....and this would have been entirely negated by a simple air shield and/or mirror images. Carrion Dragons are nasty, nasty cookies. And a tweaked CD will eat a VQ for lunch. Your arguments here have not exactly demonstrated the compelling omnipotence of a VQ against conventional armies. You haven't even really demonstrated how this is doing something other SCs can't do.

[NTJedi]

The VQ is just a tool used...
Ermor is obviously a huge reason as well being in the top_3 strongest... if not the strongest. Ermor is so strong none of the fellow gamers I play with use Ermor. The second reason being it's one of the few opponents the AI can play during a multiplayer game for providing a great challenge.

Also the other players should make better alliances during multiplayer games against Norfleet . Diplomacy is huge during multiplayer games and can easily tip the scales between even the most expert player.

In my multiplayer games if one person begins taking the lead other players join together to bring him down.

[Slygar]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
It SHOULD look more like this:
Name.........Nation........Kills........Exp
Hooshang.....Caelum..........781.........65
Kavay....... Caelum..........699.........45
Frenay.......Caelum..........678.........46
Kavata.......Caelum..........521.........42
Lady Dark....Ermor...........150.........89
Buffy........Man.............102.........40

This is off topic, but has anyone ever tried Vengeance of the Dead on people that have kill Ratings like that? I try to spam it on any pretenders I see in the hall of fame, and its gotten me a few VQs as well.. MR might block it, though, since it doesnt always work, but I'm not sure if it just says "they managed to resist it" if MR stopped it, or if they won the battle - which is obviously not likely after 700 or so

This is one reason I would love to see Hall of Fame heroes appear in scout reports like pretenders do

[ May 08, 2004, 05:53: Message edited by: Slygar ]

[AhhhFresh]

Originally posted by Slygar:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Norfleet:
It SHOULD look more like this:
Name.........Nation........Kills........Exp
Hooshang.....Caelum..........781.........65
Kavay....... Caelum..........699.........45
Frenay.......Caelum..........678.........46
Kavata.......Caelum..........521.........42
Lady Dark....Ermor...........150.........89
Buffy........Man.............102.........40

This is off topic, but has anyone ever tried Vengeance of the Dead on people that have kill Ratings like that? I try to spam it on any pretenders I see in the hall of fame, and its gotten me a few VQs as well.. MR might block it, though, since it doesnt always work, but I'm not sure if it just says "they managed to resist it" if MR stopped it, or if they won the battle - which is obviously not likely after 700 or so

This is one reason I would love to see Hall of Fame heroes appear in scout reports like pretenders do

---

IIRC Vengeance of the Dead does not work on undead beings.

[Norfleet]

Vengeance of the Dead doesn't work on undead beings, and tends to bounce off of anything that qualifies as an SC pretender chassis, due to the combination of god-class MR and magic-resistance items.

This is probably why the potentially game-crashing nature of Vengeance of the Dead isn't mentioned much: According to my measurements, the game battlefield isn't really physically capable of holding more than about 3000 units, as the dimensions of the battlefield, if jampacked, wouldn't support more than that for any given side....

[Tris]

What you list there is pretty standard for any magic powered SC... ie researching Alteration 3 and Enchantment 1. And that can be achieved in 5-7 turns depending on whether your SC needs anything forged, so I wouldn't call it "mid game".

My reasoning was that if the alternative starts winning provinces on turn 1, and you wait till turn 5 (your earliest estimate) your alternative would have 5 more provinces than you by then, and
1+2+3+4+5 = 15 turns more province income ASSUMING that he doesn't reinvest that income to capture more provinces. So if there is such an alternative, the VQ suggested can hardly be considered a good "early expansion" pretender.

[Chris Byler]

One of the problems with VQs, and equipped SCs in general, is that it's too easy to become invulnerable to all elements (counting poison as an "element" because it's a form of attack that you can easily become immune to). All but the most powerful items (artifacts and maybe the dragon scale armors) should give no more than 50-75% reduction, and anything that gives multiple resistances should give no more than 25%, or 50% if that's ALL it does.

It's ok to make it possible for someone to become immune to *one* element. But becoming immune to *all* elements makes you immune to the vast majority of attack spells, all at once, and that's what leads to the unkillable monsters we have now.

Of course, the fact that a lot of SCs are undead and thus naturally immune to cold and poison and fatigue doesn't help. Lesser undead counterbalance this by being vulnerable to banishment, but it's pretty trivial to make an SC essentially immune to banishment. A Greater Banishment with high precision, AOE 1 square, and a high magic penetration bonus (or no MR save) would help here.

IMO, most corporeal undead should have no more than 50% cold and 75% poison resistance inherently. Maybe 100% poison for things with no flesh at all (longdeads). But hardly anything with a body should be completely immune to cold. Although it may not affect them as much as it would a living being, it still can damage them.

I think this would help Water Magic, too - currently it's hampered partly by the fact that a lot of things are immune to most of its battlefield spells, in addition to its other weaknesses.