Debate and Duel (D&D)

[cihset]

Originally posted by Argitoth:
Graeme Won... damn... The battle took around 8 hours to finish. I gave up by turn 66 after my pretender died from an unknown cause casting Stygian Paths. (He didn't die from the spell)

Exactly that has happened to my pretender also, I was playing C'tis, war of Orania scenario. Had a Lord of the Gates pretender, ridiculously powerful with All paths around tenish and Death at 15 (due to some wishing). I was happily moving around with stygian paths or so I thought. The second throw my Pretender went missing, just like yours. In the message it said that noone got missing in the stygian path spell, but my pretender didn't arrive at the destination and the Icon in the message list (next to the message 'Osiris has cast Stygian Path') there was a question mark, not the picture of my pretender.
Which concurs that he has somehow died that turn.

I first thought I was just terribly unlucky to have my pretender the only one vanishing in a 400+ army that moved in the spell, but now when I see that it has happened to Argitoth too, I'm beginning to suspect that something is fishy about this.
Especially since the spell says that everything went fine, noone has been lost.

The spell needs a lookover since I sure as h-ck wont use it if the casting mage has an insane increased risk of getting killed in the casting of the spell.

[Targa]

Let me see if I understand this correctly. Let's say I send my prophet to my southern borders to preach, because an enemy dominion is creeping in. My main army is "up north", fighting Nation X, so I set my prophet to "retreat" on the off chance that my southern neighbor decides to invade. That way he'll retreat into one of my provinces, and I can march him back north while turning my army south. He's preaching away, when suddenly an assassin jumps out from behind a tree. Naturally, he follows his scripted orders to retreat, which he does, and apparently escapes without a scratch. But since "retreating during an assassination attempt" is "illegal" according to the game code, he will then be summarily executed off-screen?

If that's the case, then that makes absolutely no sense. I agree that scripted retreat orders should be ignored by the game code during assassination attempts.

[Argitoth]

Originally posted by cihset:
The spell needs a lookover since I sure as h-ck wont use it if the casting mage has an insane increased risk of getting killed in the casting of the spell.

The mage should be the LEAST likely to die.

#1. He has the knowledge of the underworld
#2. He's the only one leading the army
#3. whatever...

[LordArioch]

IIRC, retreat orders should not be executed by either side during assasinations, but due to a bug, both sides can currently retreat and die.

Still, as it is I find it helps assasains. I've lost my pretender because he was scripted to retreat.

[Osium]

Arryn, I don't think you can consider retreating while on an assasination attempt a basic strategy let alone a strategy in the context it was given. It's not even in the same catergory, the retreat order he scripted was NOT intended for assasination attempts, it was to evade patrols. It is what I like to call an "undocumented game mechanic" in this case it should be called a "contradictory game mechanic". It clearly states, it is not possible to retreat in an assasination attempt when one reads the ingame tips. The only strategic significance I can see to retreating while assasinating, is if you know your opponant likes to script casters to retreat, and try to assasinate them for the free retreat kill.

To me when something says not possible it means not possible. Not "well its possible but you will die so don't have it scripted!" As has been previously pointed it, it appears it is a bug and in future patches we can hope it will be corrected so that retreat scripted orders will be ignored in such events.

Saying "go practice more noob" is such a holier than thou attitude. If something doesn't work the way it should work, as documented, the blame shouldn't be put on the player because he didn't test his strategies enough, blame may be attributed for not adapting to a failed strategy, but not attributed because it failed, especially give the circumstances. If I tested all my strategies before I played a multiplayer game i'd never play a multiplayer game. I'd be too busy seeing if it was feasible within the game engine despite ingame documentation claiming one thing or another. As I said you roll with the punches, sometimes they work sometimes they don't, no real need for you to launch into the whole "test your strats before you play stop crying" thing. To highlight the point. Unless you've actually TRIED to retreat from an assasination attempt, or had a commander/mage/priest scripted to retreat and have an assasination attempt on them, you would never know the unit does retreat and dies doing so. It would never dawn on me to say "you know I wonder if its broken, maybe I CAN retreat from assasinations attempts" /me giggles in anticipation of a major exploitation ;p

Granted, the ingame tip is vague when compared to a spell stating "casting x for y gems results in z summons" it seems to be plenty clear cut when you actually read the tip. As such no fault can be attributed to him for not experiencing that particular mechanic untill that game. This is an extremely deep game. If people with more experience in certain aspects of the game told other people with less in those aspects to go learn more before they play again... Well this wouldn't be a very enjoyable community would it?

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

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Originally posted by Argitoth:
Edit: OMG!!! I THINK I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PRETENDER!!! What if he died because the dominion was too high in the province he was attacking? THAT MIGHT BE IT!

Did he have a never healing wound? If so, then that could be it.

---

Everyone moving on stygian paths will get a small wound (an) by toxic fumes and harrowing ghosts. Unfortunately there is a bug in the text message. The caster was not added when lost soldiers were counted (thanks for making us notice).

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Osium:
Saying "go practice more noob" is such a holier than thou attitude.

To accuse me of this means you missed the intent of my posting -- completely. Sports teams do something called "practice", where they try out ideas, techniques, tactics, etc. to see how they may work, or how well they are able to achieve certain goals, before they face real competition in match against another team. Do you follow the analogy thus far? SP = practice, MP = real. My opinion, and it's just that, an opinion, which I clearly stated as such in my post, was that there is merit to practicing. Unless you happen to enjoy rude surprises. Some people do. I don't happen to be one of them, which I also pointed out in that post that seems to have offended you.

You took the post personally, which wasn't intended, solely because I happened to quote text of yours as a preface to the point I was trying to convey. I apologize for this, as the post was not intended as an attack.

Unless you've actually TRIED to retreat from an assasination attempt, or had a commander/mage/priest scripted to retreat and have an assasination attempt on them, you would never know the unit does retreat and dies doing so. It would never dawn on me to say "you know I wonder if its broken, maybe I CAN retreat from assasinations attempts"

In my case, I was routinely giving retreat orders to my lone priests preaching in PD-only defended provinces near one of the AIs. An AI got annoyed at this and decided to assassinate my priest. I learned how the mechanic actually works by watching the replay. It's what the replays are for, IMO. To learn how the game resolves your orders. Of course, they are fun to watch, too. Sometimes (often) you learn that orders you thought were okay are anything but that. Which is why I no longer script retreat orders to units that are not engaging in battle in the coming month. But I would not have known this had I not been trying various things in my SP games. In the blitz MP games I've been involved in (all two of them, so I'm no expert by far) I do not have the luxury of being able to examine, in detail, what happens each turn in battle as I run the risk of not completing a turn in time. It happened once, in my first MP game, when I spent too much time looking over a replay. Since the game does not keep a running timer on-screen of how much time you have left in your turn.

Another thing you can do in SP that you cannot in MP is to save the game and re-run a turn many times, giving different combat orders in the same battle (such as a fortress assault, which will tend to have the same AI forces each iteration), to observe the results. This is how I've been learning where best to position my units on the battlefield, and what spells tend to work better than others. By eliminating the variable of what an opponent is throwing at me, I know that a different result is less likely to be chance and more likely to be the result of a change in my tactics. It's a variation on the concept of the battle simulator that Cherry has.

To sum up, I view SP as a learning tool. You certainly don't have to use it, any more than it is necessary to read the manual before playing a game. But using the tools at your disposal, like reading a manual, will make playing easier, and perhaps more enjoyable.