How to deal with Darkness?

[Aezeal]

IF the opponent has strong high level battlefield spells you will loose if you don't have any.

[Tuidjy]

Doesn't Solar Brilliance also blind your own troops?

I know that the one cast by the Forbidden Light will ruin an army in less than
ten turns. If the regular Solar Brilliance does the same, the cure is worse
than the disease.

We could REALLY use a battlefield Dispell, or a spell that makes battlefield
enchantments twice as hard to cast.

[Renojustin]

Battlefield Dispel would do something Very Bad:

It would make Astral magic even more powerful than it is. Worse, it would give an effective counter to nearly any strategy that you could develop with battlefield enchantments. It would be a lot better if there were situational counters.

If Death mages can cast Darkness, maybe Fire or Air or Astral mages should be able to cast Light, that can affect Darkvision and/or undead units, or 'dispel' darkness. Have a light/darkness level on the battlefield, the same as temperature. Maybe tied in with Death/Growth scales?

[Amhazair]

Tuidjy said:
Doesn't Solar Brilliance also blind your own troops?

I'm not 100% sure I remember correctly, but I seem to recall that darkness and solar brilliance cancel each other out, leaving no ill effects of any kind.

[Tuidjy]

Darkness and Solar Brilliance are cast, in both possible orders.

Both icons appear in the right hand corner.
Units do not experience defense/attack penalties.
Units get blinded. (There appears to be a MR check, but that may be just luck
or the effects of regeneration)

[Sombre]

Pretty sure there's an MR check.

[vfb]

You can counter Darkness by killing the caster, if he has not fled the battle. If you have an E bless, you should have access to Troll Kings for Earthquakes. The trolls have partial DV too. If you can get blood stones, then a Bean with E1 and boots and the stone can cast Rain of Stones too (Mistform first). The Darkness caster is likely to cast Darkness in any assassination attempts. So Earth Attack his army, and hope you nail whoever is the Darkness caster, since he'll likely pass out from casting Darkness in the assassination.

[Shadrach]

Bumping this to emphasize that Solar Brilliance should not be considered a general purpose counter to Darkness.

I just fought my first battle deploying Solar Brilliance against an opponent using Darkness, and about half my surviving troops were blinded, even though they were checking with an effective MR of 18 (10 base, +4 from Antimagic, +4 because it's easy to resist). If there was only one check I should expect to have about 3% blinded (6% chance of failing the MR check * 50% chance of being blinded). Solar Brilliance is a Battlefield Enchantment, but the description in the manual could easily be interpreted as saying that the blindness and damage checks are only made once. A little work with binomial probability shows that the number of blinded troops is right around what would be expected if the check is made every round. I think a lot of people have figured this out, but I think it's worth stating explicitly.

The main lesson here is that Solar Brilliance is really more about providing a counter for the large death gem income + mass undead chaff + Darkness + Rigor Mortis combo of doom than it is a general counter to Darkness - that is the niche where the cost-benefit is best. In most other cases just sucking up the combat penalties and relying on precision 100 spells is probably better than blinding so many troops.

[thunderbird]

Originally Posted by Tuidjy

Darkness and Solar Brilliance are cast, in both possible orders.

Both icons appear in the right hand corner.
Units do not experience defense/attack penalties.
Units get blinded. (There appears to be a MR check, but that may be just luck
or the effects of regeneration)

Am I correct in my reading of the description that Solar Brilliance's blindness effect only works against troops and not commanders/mages?