But do you really like SC in dominions2 ?

[BigDaddy]

I've never tried this on well developed SC's before, but don't magical SC's (like air queens) suck against ether warriors, and demon SC's suck against a couple groups of angels of the host?

[Taqwus]

If they can do more damage than is restored per turn, perhaps. A well-equipped air queen with mirror image might be hard to hit.

There's always Pan CW for being hell on enemy SCs; defense goes down with many attacks on the same turn, and sleep vines get 3 per with each hit delivering armor-negating unresistable fatigue damage... and there's no attack vs. defense roll on those already unconscious. Anybody unconscious and facing more sleep vines is therefore likely to never wake up.

In the more general case, the aforementioned elf banes, solar lances, moon blades, even bane blades and banefire archers (decay, and potentially many MR checks per salvo) and banefire (massive unresistable damage with a chance of decay) should help. Curse should help versus those relying on life draining instead of regeneration or recuperation, as a blind SC won't fight very well.

In extremis, I wonder how many Crystal Mages it would take to reliably slap one with Gifts from Heaven. 150 points of pure physical damage is not to be laughed at.

[Saber Cherry]

BigDaddy said:
I've never tried this on well developed SC's before, but don't magical SC's (like air queens) suck against ether warriors, and demon SC's suck against a couple groups of angels of the host?

If so, that's nice for high astral nations. Since they all need a boost=)

If "Smite Demon" was very high damage, pure physical, long range (40+), no MR roll, high precision (100) all rolled into a single spell... or if it was as it is now, but holy-2... it would be useful.

[alexti]

I like the way things are balanced now. SC can kill some plain mundane armies easily, anti-SC SC can kill anti-army SC, special anti-SC squads can kill any kind of SC, anti-anti-SC squads or SCs can demolish anti-SC squads in retaliation etc. This makes it a challenge to create a strong army that can deal with various opposition. Typically, such army would include few SC, few strong mages, some weak mages (part protected, part not), few anti-SC squads, some damage dealing squads, some squads to disrupt and slow down opposition etc. Removing SCs out of equation would simplify those issues and I don't like it. SCs are already dying easy enough now. (Damn those tritons that hit Tartarian for 200 of damage!)

I disagree that rush to SC is a must, I played few very successful games using no SCs and mostly national armies until quite late in the game. Some nations are good, some are not, so the strategy varies depending on the nation. One of the problems SC have is that they're usually less numerous than national armies. So when one side is attacking with couple of dozen of national armies, what the other side (which has let's say 5-10 SC) is supposed to do? National armies are cheap and easily replaceable and putting SC in the open alone often mean losing it. So how SC-side can defend? They can choose which battle they win, but they lose majority of battles. So to me the balance seems fine.

Looking at it from thematic point of view, it would look strange if few thousands infantrymen could defeat some fully equipped Tartarian Titan (hey, he was a god after all). But on another hand I can imaging that Tartarian may get bored killing all those annoying infantrymen. So maybe, there should be a new parameter - boredom, which increases if the unit is fighting somethign easy and decreases when it defeats something challening (for example, another SC)

[PvK]

I think it's neat that it is possible for SC to exist. I think they are a bit too easy to create, though. I'd like to see at least options (and mods - I've been working on one) to make them more expensive so they are still possible, but much more difficult.

I think the Life Drain weapons are a bit part of it, but not all.

PvK