Mages and scripted spells

Yrkoon · #1 October 2nd, 2007, 08:42 AM

Same happened to me with MA Caelum.

I had a high seraph scripted to cast fog warriors and then stay behind troops. He had enough gems to cast the spell, but he chose to cast wind guide instead. My mammoths got chopped by a vanheim army instead of trampling them all to death in mist form.

Since fog warriors has no range (battlefield wide), I really didn't expect the AI to go wrong there. And other high seraphs did the same thing. So my game is pretty much good for the bin - I really need fog warriors and the AI keeps overruling the script.

Is there any way to force the AI to do what it is told ? It really kills the game at times otherwise.

llamabeast · #2 October 2nd, 2007, 10:04 AM

Yrkoon - your mage was A4 with 4 air gems, right?

I have never had a mage fail to cast Fog Warriors in a sufficiently large battle. But I used to miscalculate that you could cast it with an A3 mage - which you can't.

Yrkoon · #3 October 2nd, 2007, 10:39 AM

Llama, he was A3 with 5 air gems.

Why couldn't he cast fog warriors ? It's an A5 spell costing 3 gems, so A3 + 2 gems = A5. With 5 gems, he should have had enough. What am I missing ?

thejeff · #4 October 2nd, 2007, 10:54 AM

You can only use as many gems as your path level.

And only one more than the spell costs to boost your level.

So an A4 mage can use 4 gems, 3 for the cost and one to boost his level to 5 to cast it.

An A3 mage can only use 3 gems, which is enough for the cost but not to boost his level, and could only boost his level by one to A4 anyway.

llamabeast · #5 October 2nd, 2007, 11:10 AM

Yep, the key point is that you can never boost your level by more than 1 by using gems. This caught me _countless_ times before I realised what was going on.

Yrkoon · #6 October 2nd, 2007, 12:34 PM

Oh right, that explains a lot.

For some reason I thought a mage could use as many gems as he had levels in a paths (so double his level at most), and then on top of that spend the gems necessary for the spell itself.

Thank you for the clarification thejeff

llamabeast · #7 October 2nd, 2007, 12:38 PM

Yes, I thought the same. I have a feeling the manual is wrong on this point, hence the widespread confusion. I can't remember any more, but I did read the manual carefully when I first got the game.

A side-effect of the same point is that you can't use more than one gem to reduce fatigue either (as fatigue is reduced by gaining a temporary level). Therefore the maximum number of gems a spell can use is (gem cost of spell) + 1. I'm almost certain the manual is confused on this point.