Suicide Casters...

[Chazar]

Well, I thought everybody knew that "Rain of Stones" is a powerful tool against Caelian Mages. Everyone, but a single of my own high seraphs, who thus killed all his fellow friends to claim the victory of his battle alone! Why? What are the criteria for earth mages do cast Rain of Stones?

That reckless seraph started out with A4W3E4 (Staff of elemental mastery, earth boots, Random Pick = Earth, +1 Earth empowerment), he also carried quite a few earth gems and a crystal matrix (with 4 communion slaves present). The script was something like "Quickness", "Summon Earthpower", "Invulnerability", "Living Earth" and "Petrify".

The enemy consisted of a couple of sages and abysian warlocks, having a boatload of slaves (the enemy was staling for some turns).

I guess that Rain of Storms made some sense, since there were more unprotected enemies (blood slaves) than friends on the battlefield (some expensively equipped high seraphs who were not bothered to cast mistform by their script and a few caelian archers), while the caster itself (and the communion slaves) were protected by Invulnerability...

What can be done to prevent these sad scenes?
Rigidly counting earth gems? Would bringing more weakly protected friendly troops help as well? Would mistform help? Or is it just plain stupid to mix earth casters?

[alexti]

Mistform would help. Bringing more weakly protected troops may help too. I had an opposite problem - my tartarians refused to cast rain of stones, presumably because I had many hawks and cheap undead to absorb enemies first strike. Everybody important was well protected (or had hundred or 2 HP and regeneration, at least). Another possible reason may be that the enemy was not considered strong enough to spend earth gems, but they were spending gems on much weaker armies. I wonder if it's the absolute strength of enemy or relative to your armies is taken into account.

[Arralen]

I wonder if the spell choice after the scripted turns depends on the paths of the spells which where scripted.

So with "Summon Earthpower", "Invulnerability", "Living Earth" and "Petrify" you obviously set the preference on earth spells .. and "Rain of Stonest" was a perfect choice of an earth spell to kill of the enemies.

"Friendly fire" is something the AI doesn't care about. Guess it simply doesn't know the concept.

[Turms]

I had the plasure to see the battle by using a scout. Very nice as I just declared war on you

It seems to me that mages do not follow the script when the scripted spell has no valid/useful target. Here the problem was probably petrify which is a short range spell.

It happens quite a lot, sometimes the enemies are not there or are all protected - and anything can happen. An archdevil of my enemy summoned one huge elemental which put his fatigue way above 100 and effectively killed himself. All my troops were fire immune and he had some fire attack spell scripted.

I guess there is very little one can do. However, most very nasty spells need gems, so keeping the gems at only what is really needed might help.

Of course, then there is the problem with breath of winter, which seems to be the favorite of all water mages...

Turms

[deccan]

alexti said:
Mistform would help.

Would mistform really help? Wouldn't RoS do magical damage? Even so, given the low hp of Caelian mages, wouldn't the damage of RoS break the mistform?

alexti said:
I wonder if it's the absolute strength of enemy or relative to your armies is taken into account.

Yeah, I wonder that too. I hate it that the system only decides whether to spend gems in battle only on an absolute yes-or-no basis, instead of evaluating on a scripted-spell case-by-case basis, i.e. this spell costs 5 gems to cast, don't cast it because the enemy is too weak, this spell only costs 1 gem, so let's cast it anyway etc.

In a recent game playing AE Ermor, I was badly mauled in some battles because the massed priests of my enemy weren't enough to trigger the gem-use-allowed trigger. If my mages had spent the gems on Mass Flight / Darkness the way they were meant to, I would have won the battle with no losses, but instead lost several hundred undead.

[Taqwus]

AE Ermor with Mass Flight? Ouch, that sounds like a good excuse for a Staff of Storms...

Protection/Barkskin and Breath of Winter are both nasty in their potential for own-goaling, the lack of a gem requirement, and the relative ease of casting. Never bring a druid with an Abysian army... Soul Vortex might also be dangerous, but for whatever reason (perhaps rarely mixing decent death casters with the living?) I haven't had as much of a problem with that one.

/me idly wonders if the Abysian AI would use "gifts" of barkskin amulets...

[alexti]

deccan said:

Would mistform really help? Wouldn't RoS do magical damage? Even so, given the low hp of Caelian mages, wouldn't the damage of RoS break the mistform?

It works decently, you may lose few mages, but most of them will survive. RoS occacionally breaks mistform, but not too often.

[Chazar]

Hmm, I wish the Combat AI would just simulate the spell to evaluate its usefulness and then cast it with different random numbers or try another spell depending on the simulation...

I will give Mistform a try, for I have nothing else at hand right now, except for a lack of gems, for the non-stealthy gem carrier died in a rain of stones...


@Turms: I am not sure whether that Last scripted spell made all that difference. It might have casted RoS just the next turn. Anyway, it has been my pleasure to amuse you ,but I am not sure I can put up much resistance to you anymore, for the losses where quite bad. We will soon see...