Drain Life

[Saber Cherry]

Bummer_Duck said:
I say that with a grain of salt, as the comparison in this test turned out to be 650 gold in troops + maint vs 5 death gems + 1 mage turn.

Plus several turns of resources in a castle (while many GRs can be sent from a single lab in a single turn).

Considering that they don't stick around, I think they're worth at least 15.


...any army big enough to defend against that sort of attack would be a great target for FFtS / MW, so using conventional armies defensively is moot at level 9 research, anyway, isn't it?

[Bummer_Duck]

Saber Cherry said:
...any army big enough to defend against that sort of attack would be a great target for FFtS / MW, so using conventional armies defensively is moot at level 9 research, anyway, isn't it?

<shrug> I dunno. I'm still new here. I still have faith that armies are good for something. Either way it's beside the point I may, or may not, be making. The point is that it is not balanced compared to those spells of the same power magnitude. In addition, having Well of Misery, Mound fiend, GR and Tartarian Gate in the same disipline seems a bit to much like a 1 stop shop.

From what I can determine, FFtS / MW are much more limiting since they cost many more gems and not all races can get unlimited, fairly cheap mages that can cast those 2 spells. In the 2 games I have played, I have seen about 4 castings total of FFtS / MW, and probably 40 GR castings. FFtS / MW only kills half of the army, GR usually gets all units... From my perspective, that means it's broke. Perhaps once I play 10 more games I'll agree with you, but not today.

[Scott Hebert]

I tend to agree with you, Duck. One of the 'issues' I have with Dominions II is the fact that everything seems to devolve to summoned commanders (especially Undead ones) doing stuff.

I could extend this to Sorcery in general, but Death in particular seems to have too many 'bennies'.

[Turin]

yeah access to mass ghostriders and flames from the sky is the eqivalent of an atomic bomb. Once you have them noone can attack you without losing tons of troops to mass castings of ghostriders.

The only counter to them are high def thughs with etherealness, lifedrain and regeneration(wraithlords, airqueens) , or large vineogre/archer/priest armys. The latter gets easily detroyed by flames from the sky, so it´s really hard to take your castles if you have access to those two spells.

[Scott Hebert]

I should think making Ghost Riders 'permanent' and raising its cost arbitrarily high would fix it.

[Boron]

Some Devil Armies are also good . If you generate Devils from Soul Contracts they are anyways extremly cheap but also by normal summoning via lvl3/lvl9 blood spell you get Devils quite cheap . They are immune to Firemagic , so no Flames . And they are extremly good and tough troops also , so the Ghost Riders can't do much harm to them .

Another good counter would be mechanical men armies with good mages like Tartarians or a Wrather .
50 Mech Men + Wrathful Skies can most likely survive even 10 Ghost Rider castings at once .

Getting 10+ Ghost Rider casters takes a while also . Most nations have to use Demilichs for that , so you need probably enchantment 8 + Conjuration 9 for mass Ghost Riders . That probably takes until turn 40-50 and by that time you will have various counters vs. Ghost Riders already . If you are realy nasty you can charm/enslave mind the Ghost Rider commanders . Especially a Nation like Ryleh could do that rather cheap , just Starspawns with rune smasher + spell focus casting enslave mind . They have good chances to succeed then .

The only thing at which Ghost Riders is really good is taking out SCs .

In a current game my enemy did 3 Ghost Riders on my ID with 40 Fiends . He killed 11 Fiends before all Ghost Riders were destroyed .
11 Fiends cost 40 Blood , a loss of 40 Blood vs. 15 Deathgems on my enemies side , i think that's fair .

Also note that Zen did only change the requirements for Ghost Riders from Death 4 to Death 6 but he changed nothing with the costs . So Zen doesn't think also that Ghost Riders are that powerful . Banelords on the other hand got a cost increase of 50% e.g.

[Tuidjy]

Ghost Riders are overrated. In my current game, I am overruning C'tis, and he
most certainly has access to Ghost Riders. He used quite a few in the first
turns of the invasion, but what he got was three attacks on one man province
defenses, one or two attacks against SCs that slaughtered the riders, and a few
attacks against mage squads that wiped out the wraith lords, and then mopped up
the riders.

In that game I am using ONE army of troops. It is made out of more than
a hundred range units, and a mass of banes, wraiths and heavy Abysian infantry.
Their commander has the Gatestone, generates fire gems, and cast 'Flame arrows'
and his 'assistant' SC wears the boots of the planes. It is a great reaction
force, because it can jump around, and be gone even before ghost riders hit.
Not that it always does, of course. It has withstood up to five simultaneous
'ghost rides' with only a few casualties.

The problem many people seems to have is that it is insane to rely on vanilla
troops by turn 40. Anything put together with a ounce of thought will wipe out
melee troops. Get rid of Ghost Riders, Wrathful skies, False Horrors and
Super combatants, and I will still be wiping out your groundpounders every time
they are outside of a castle/dome.

Those who whine about a specific aspect of the game have simply not felt the
sting of other strategies. If they get their way and see their peeve du jour
castrated, they will get slapped with something else, and they will keep
whinning until Dominions II looks and plays like a turnbased Rome: Total War.

[Bummer_Duck]

Boron said:
Also note that Zen did only change the requirements for Ghost Riders from Death 4 to Death 6 but he changed nothing with the costs . So Zen doesn't think also that Ghost Riders are that powerful .

Well, if I considered *doubling* the cost of mages that can cast GR fairly insignificant (Demilich vs Demilich + Skull Staff + Skull Face), I'd agree with that statement.

It would certainly make it tougher to gear up so you can cast large numbers of that spell. However, once you get there, the problem still exists, you didn't actually solve the problem. I'd rather see the gem cost go up on the spell side, not the caster side.