How to not die

[Baalz]

Well, sure you have to use the right tool for the job, and part of being the right tool is cost effectiveness. I'll counter your rather exaggerated example with some specific example of when deploying tactics as I suggest would be a very effective deployment.

Lets say you're Atlantis fighting against EA Oceana using dual blessed (W/S) knights of the deep. This is not an extremely contrived scenario, I think this would be a common situation facing Atlantis in the earlish game with light research. It will also clearly show that you don't have to have similar troops to benefit from these types of tactics, we'll use normal atlantis line troops - not even their sacreds. Under a "line them up and let them fight" strategy you're going to be smeared across the ocean floor.

Knights of the deep 85 gold a pop - 20 of them come to the party along with a bishop fish to bless them. Cost: 1820 gold

Atlantis: 180 deep one spearmen: 1800 gold

The knights have an encumbrance of 4, with an attack of 12 and a (blessed) defense of 21 and a protection of 17. The deep ones have an encumbrance of 3, attack of 10, defense of 6 a protection of 4 and 14 hitpoints. They also have 2 attacks, so each block of deep ones is attacking twice as much as a block of knights.

(Ignore lance strikes...it simplifies the math and would only make this more lopsided) So, before any modifiers knights will hit the deep ones 82% of the time, and usually take 2 hits to kill one. This means the knights will kill about 16 deep ones per turn, routing them in...oh, about 5-6 turns. The deep ones will hit 3%-5% of the time depending on how many times each knight is attacked, and will have to hit each knight several times (particularly with that astral blessing)...so lets roughly wave our hands and say a knight goes down every few turns. Clearly the deep ones have no chance.

Lets see how a little bit of the tactics I suggest would modify this scenario.

Scenario 2: 3 mages of the deep & 120 deep one spearmen: 1800 gold. You are fighting in a cold-3 environment, and drop friendly currents (the underwater version of quagmire), a couple schools of sharks then spam numbness (all very modest research goals).

Now, the sharks will soak up most of the lance strikes so we're more justified in ignoring them. The cold (which your deep ones ignore) and friendly currents push the knights up to an 8 encumbrance, and your deep ones down to a 1. Your numbness spammers can each hit 2 knights per turn, so after tearing through the sharks we'll assume most of them are numb. Lets see how the numbers look now.

The knights have -3 to their attack because of the numbness. Between the numbness directly fatiguing them and their big fat 8 encumbrance lets say they're pushing a 30+ fatigue on average by the time they make it through the sharks to the deep ones. That 82% hit rate has just dropped to a 54% hit rate meaning they're only killing about 10 deep ones round one (probably a bit more than that as there are probably a couple knights not numb). This drops further each round as there's a difference of 7 in the encumbrance of your troops. Even if you totally ignore fatigue damage from the numbness the knights can only keep this up for 6-7 rounds before they pass out - which has a good shot of not routing the deep ones even if they weren't hitting back at all.

But the difference on the other side offense is even more stark. The first round of fighting the deep ones have gone from a 3-5% hit rate to an 8-14% hit rate - roughly tripling their kill rate. When you consider how much higher that kill rate is as the critical hits start triggering and the difference slides even more as the fatigue mounts up you start having several knights goign down each round. They won't have to worry about passing out before they can kill all the deep ones.

You don't have to look too hard to see lots of scenarios where you can apply this type of strategy to pick up an extra +2 attack here, +1 defense there - and those can add up to drastic differences even when one side or the other has much more elite units!

[rdonj]

The real cost of using a mage isn't the gold cost. You were going to recruit that guy anyway. The real cost is the research you don't get to do with them and any gems you spend casting spells/forging gear for them.

Sacreds are pretty much the ideal targets to use such spells on because they're expensive, usually very limited in number and can be pretty tough to kill conventionally if you don't have a good bless also.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by rdonj

The real cost of using a mage isn't the gold cost. You were going to recruit that guy anyway. The real cost is the research you don't get to do with them and any gems you spend casting spells/forging gear for them.

Sacreds are pretty much the ideal targets to use such spells on because they're expensive, usually very limited in number and can be pretty tough to kill conventionally if you don't have a good bless also.

Hmmm, I guess you're talking about numbness, which is certainly true. Any spell with a small (or no) AOE doesn't work well unless there are high value targets. If you were to reverse the scenario though and say you have the elite (sacred?) units vs a larger mass of less powerful opponents then you would look to using some of the other strategies I suggest. Curse of the desert, for example would be a good substitute for what I just did with numbness if you were facing...say...a mass of stout Abysian/Pythium/Ulmish/Ermorian/etc. infantry instead of sacred cavalry. 3 guys spamming curse of the desert can affect a hell of a lot of MR 10-12 guys in the time it takes to close to melee, particularly if you invest in a couple cheap void eyes. Stack this on with grip of winter, quagmire, or whatever is appropriate and you can often be pleasantly surprised at the relatively modest stuff that suddenly becomes elite heavy lifters. If you think you might be using a strategy like this it may even make sense to look to a magic-2 scale. Remember, all those little +1s and +2s can really add up.

[rdonj]

I'm with you on this, I was just responding to illuminated one . The clarification was useful though anyway.

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Well, sure you have to use the right tool for the job, and part of being the right tool is cost effectiveness. I'll counter your rather exaggerated example with some specific example of when deploying tactics as I suggest would be a very effective deployment.

Lets say you're Atlantis fighting against EA Oceana using dual blessed (W/S) knights of the deep. This is not an extremely contrived scenario, I think this would be a common situation facing Atlantis in the earlish game with light research. It will also clearly show that you don't have to have similar troops to benefit from these types of tactics, we'll use normal atlantis line troops - not even their sacreds. Under a "line them up and let them fight" strategy you're going to be smeared across the ocean floor.

...

I don't say that will not work, but you are completely missing my point.
You're limiting yourself to a position where a good number of spells don't work and your enemy is fixed. Let's consider this from a realistic game start position - you are a land nation and your enemy could be anyone. Well, for the sake of argument let's assume you know at turn 1 who your enemy is.
Then you are still not using early magic by my definition. With that research you could get Basalt Kings with const6-gear for example. Your enemy could already have chaff clearing spells or SCs as well (ok, underwater that's not so easy, but uw is a niche).
Now, if you get into your 1st war at turn 12 you might have the numbness, but not the sharks and the friendly currents. If you are using it then you're worse of according to my tests in many equal matchup situations. Troop density certainly plays a role as does movement and placement, I assume there are situations in which naked numbness is useful. But then your enemy could have a bunch of slingers in front (fire + retreat) that take the numbness and don't care. And as long as I can somehow do a better or even slightly worse job with a bunch of extra troops than with a mage, I'd recruit the troops and focus my research on something that makes a big difference (assuming I'm not desperate for a counter to something my troops can't beat or need the biggest force I can muster).