Caelum Battlefield Magic Broken

[Sheap]

Well, I agree with Ironhawk to some extent. In dom2 the high-precision, few-target spells were better because armies were smaller. Now in dom3 the low-precision, many-target spells are better. And Caelum suffers more from quickness because they had water magic on all their mages. Of course, they are not the only ones that are hurt by that, lots of nations have water mages.

I'm not sure I agree that an air mage is no longer worth his own cost, though. After all mages are supposed to live a long time and fight in many battles, especially Caelum mages which are so hard to catch if they rout. And they still kill almost as many troops as they did before since they should still be limited by fatigue rather than # of rounds, most of the time. Their magic is just less dominant and develops a little more slowly in battle.

[Cainehill]

Sheap said:
After all mages are supposed to live a long time and fight in many battles, especially Caelum mages which are so hard to catch if they rout.

Except that the new morale system is broken even worse than Dom2's, as your mages _won't_ rout when all the troops have. Instead they mostly stand there casting spells until the enemy troops get to them and start attacking.

And of course, most mages under melee attack, die before they can run.

[Endoperez]

Cainehill said:
Except that the new morale system is broken even worse than Dom2's, as your mages _won't_ rout when all the troops have. Instead they mostly stand there casting spells until the enemy troops get to them and start attacking.

And of course, most mages under melee attack, die before they can run.

If that's true, it's a bug.

Once an army has taken 50% casualties, every squad (and commander, I think) will make a morale roll every round.

Once an army has taken 75% casualties, it will automatically rout.

It MIGHT be that routed units aren't counted as casualties, and that normal Caelumians (50%) fail their roll and rout, but the mages stay in because more than a fourth managed to run away. Can anyone confirm this?

[curtadams]

I don't have or see any problems with mages failing to run away, unless they're asleep. I do see a possible bug, not restricted to mages, in that after the army routs, many units will fight on one more turn. They run afterwards.

I mentioned this in another thread but a major hit on mages comes from the morale changes. It's much harder to break squads than in Dom2. In Dom2 it wasn't particularly unusual to see an ordinary army break from just 2 or 3 rounds of not-very-lethal combat. Now I've seen armies of barbarians, who used to be unbelievably chicken, fight almost to to last man. One of the advantages of mages over missle units is that their damage is heavily concentrated in the first few rounds. Back when that frequently broke an army it was a big boost. Now armies only break that fast if you are hurting them so badly it'll be an easy win anyway. The changes are welcome IMO and breaking seems more reasonable than before but it has affected the mages.

In terms of strict bang-for-the-buck twelve shots from 10 or so bowmen will normally do more harm than a comparably priced artillery mage, barring universal heavy armor. That hasn't changed much. What's changed is that the advantages of artillery- concentration of damage early in the battle and lowered supply costs - have been reduced and largely made irrelevant, respectively. Simultaneously, since the overhead costs of research and labs doubled, mages are relatively more expensive even though their official costs weren't changed.

Incidentally, the fact that Caelum needs a big gem expenditure to make their mages fly (so to speak) just backs up that they're not up to snuff. 20 gems is an extraordinary investment in one battle. Even a well-searched large empire can't turn out a supply like that every turn in most games.

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

I've seen the whole "armies route and mages stay and get slaughtered" thing several times; and I believe it is because the mages are fatigued to unconsciousness. I checked it the first time because, like Cainehill, I was extremely upset. However, fatigue was waay over the limit, so I just accepted it.

[Meglobob]

Uh-Nu-Buh said:
I've seen the whole "armies route and mages stay and get slaughtered" thing several times; and I believe it is because the mages are fatigued to unconsciousness. I checked it the first time because, like Cainehill, I was extremely upset. However, fatigue was waay over the limit, so I just accepted it.

Yea, the only time mages hang around is due to fatigue. The best one I have seen to date is in a MP, Ermor did master/communion and took a dozen mages too 200 fatigue (death), it was very, very funny.

[Shovah32]

Just to comment on raiding, although caelum is good at raiding imo the single best raiding nation is helheim. Almost all its troops are stealthy due to glamour, it has stealthy commanders who can make great thugs AND, it has flying, sacred units with glamour along with a flying priest to bless them.