Beginner's Guide to Shinuyama MA

[Shovah32]

What about those 50 gold pythian communicants that have no magic(i assumed they worked as a regular commander with a slave matrix)? Dont they share the masters fatigue?

[MaxWilson]

Communicants do not work like normal communion slaves. For one thing, they take much less fatigue damage from spells than normal slaves. I'm not sure exactly how everything works, but I think Pythium communicants divide up the spell fatigue without adjusting for path levels, because they have no paths, whereas normal communicants do the normal adjustment, e.g. x2 fatigue for being 1 path level short, or x0.5 for being 1 path level over. This means that you can do a Master Enslave with 8 communicants without all of them immediately maxing out on fatigue and dying with the next spell cast. There's some other weirdness that goes on, too, but communicants are much better than normal communion slaves in all the ways I'm aware of.

-Max

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I tried the Skull Talisman, and it was wonderfully effective, only adding five fatigue each use.

...

Any suggestions in dealing with unexpected priests?

Once they pick up your skull talisman, they're very, very tough to take down.

[MaxWilson]

You'd expect that another skull talisman-wearing assassin could take down an indy priest with a skull talisman, because the priest would do something like <animate skeleton, banish, banish, animate skeleton, banish, banish> while the assassin is doing straight-up <animate skeleton, animate skeleton, animate skeleton>...

-Max

[thejeff]

Yeah, but you can kill more than one skeleton with a banish.

[MaxWilson]

Which might include his own skeletons. All I'm saying is, if you're always summoning skeletons and he's only summoning skeletons half the time, and his banishes hurt his troops as well as yours, it's not improbable that your skeletons will eventually overwhelm his and kill him. Maybe not every time, but at least 50% of the time.

-Max

[vfb]

I think Lazy_Perfectionist was reporting on what he experienced. If a priest unexpectedly shows up in the province, kills your skellies, steals your talisman, and somehow kills your Mujina too, then the best option is probably to invade the province with a regular army to kill him and get it back.