I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[Truper]

Your Kung-Fu is weak! The numbers above aren't taking casting either quickness or summon storm power into account, and a horror-spammer would prefer *not* to have a storm in place, since horrors fly. Then somebody has to either cast the storm, or be holding a Staff of Storms, either of which is going to increase the cost of the strategy significantly, and require more research before it can be implemented.

And the true terror of the Caelum Horror-spam is not that it can be used to win large battles, but that single Seraphs, or sometimes pairs, can fan out over an entire empire in a matter of just a few turns, taking every province not defended by a major army. They require no gems or items to do it, and Seraphs are notoriously cheap. All they require is a handful of flying troops - just enough to distract the defenders until the spam gets started.

[Kel]

That seems more like a problem with seraphs, though. Seraphs are pretty good at making normal troops rout. Horrors might be the best way but not the only way.

Not that I am taking a side against seraphs, I am just pointing out that seraphs would still be able to fan out and raid many provinces at once, even without horrors.

- Kel

[Stormbinder]

Truper said:
Heh - a guy needs a chance to rave once in a while I think I may have mentioned 100 fatigue, but the A6 is an exaggeration

The problem as it stands now is that quickened Seraphs can cast 2 False Horrors per round until they pass out - and they can do it for somewhere around 12 rounds (exact calculations are hard, since I don't have a formula for the fatigue reduction of magic dominions, which are common - and also because after the scripts run out, the Seraph will mix in the occasional Phantasmal Warrior or a spell like Charge Body). Then when they *do* finally exhaust themselves, they wake after a one or two rounds, and spam another 2 horrors. It wouldn't be that great a problem, if one had any way to get things to attack mages, but in my experience, no matter what you have on attack rear, those things will prefer to attack anything *but* mages, no matter how relatively harmless the things they're attacking.

There are things which will defeat a horror-spam, but those things are much more expensive than a Seraph and his 5 archers scattered about the field, in one way or another.

Adding insult to injury is the way a Caelum Horrifying Horrors strategy hangs together. To get horrors, you need to research alteration. Alteration is the primary path requirement for the all-too-common Quickness/Mistform/Mirror-Image/Invulnerability SC pretender - which Caelum can afford better than most nations.

My considered suggestion, as opposed to my bitter, raving, pulling-my-hair-out I've-been-spammed-again sarcastic suggestion, is that the path should be left at A1, so that False Horrors would still be available to say Vanherses or mages with a random in air, but that the fatigue should be raised to 30.

Truper is absolutely right.

I did some experiments with False Horrors and posted results in the thread about a month ago. Single quickned serpah with no troops can reliably rout 20 Jotuns PD, not to mention other weaker PD.


Same goes for most average morale soldiers. What worse, Sermon of Courage doesn't seem to help. Or it helps so little it's virtually impossible to notice. In another experiment I've added level 3 prist chain casting Sermon of courage. The large PD troops routed exactly the same due to fear aura of FHs from the single seraph.


Comaparing Summon Lesser Horror with other battle summons is not really valid without taking into account the Fear Aura. Unlike other summons, false horrors hardly kill or even wound anyone. Yet they rout 10x their number of regular morale soldiers with ease. Combining with cheap caleum mages and ability to fly and strike anywhere, it is a bit too much IMHO.

(an yes, there are countertactics of course, but the ammount of efforts and resourses needed to balance single seraph with easely reseached spell is very disproportional)


So I agree with Truper and others and I think something need to be done about it. Either Sermon of Courage need to be able to cope better with Fear Auras, or Fear aura of LH need to be reduced, or price of the spell increase. I would not want to see it nerfed into obvliion by any means, it is cool spell, but as it is now it is a bit too uch, especially for Caelum, who are already great riders and one of the strongest nation.


Just my two cents.

[Cainehill]

Stormbinder said:
So I agree with Truper and others and I think something need to be done about it. Either Sermon of Courage need to be able to cope better with Fear Auras, or Fear aura of LH need to be reduced, or price of the spell increase. I would not want to see it nerfed into obvliion by any means, it is cool spell, but as it is now it is a bit too uch, especially for Caelum, who are already great riders and one of the strongest nation.

The main problem with False Horrors is that there is apparently a bug (documented by Arryn I believe), because the priests _never_ cast Sermon of Courage to counteract the fear.

[The_Tauren13]

Cainehill said:
The main problem with False Horrors is that there is apparently a bug (documented by Arryn I believe), because the priests _never_ cast Sermon of Courage to counteract the fear.

Hmm... I suppose fixing that would balance the spell considerably. Much better idea than randomly nerfing it, IMO.

[Arryn]

Cainehill said:
The main problem with False Horrors is that there is apparently a bug (documented by Arryn I believe), because the priests _never_ cast Sermon of Courage to counteract the fear.

The logic which IW appears to have encoded is to cast Sermon/Fanaticism if units take damage (1+ points), not if units take morale losses.

Another test that someone should make is to equip Horror Helms on non-combatants sent into the enemy ranks and see if effects similar to FHs occur (with enemy priests failing to cast Sermon/Fanaticism).

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

[Truper]

Arryn said:

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

I have to disagree. Compare FH to any other battlefield summon. FH has a lower path cost than anything but Animate Skeleton, Animate Dead or Will o' the Wisp. The undead summoning spells have 3 and 2 times the fatigue repectively, and I doubt we'll argue much about the relative effectiveness of a Skeleton as compared to a False Horror. Which may be fair enough, since we're comparing Enchantment 1 to Alteration 6.

Let's compare to Will o' the Wisp. Conjuration 5 vs Alteration 6. WotW gets you 2 Wisps, which share many properties with False Horrors, but costs 100 fatigue as opposed to 10 and a gem .

Now compare to Summon Lesser Air Elemental. This to me is a most interesting comparison, since our hypothetical Seraph would have his choice. 2A, 100 fatigue and a gem. Supposing our Seraph is carrying a gem. Should he spend it to summon a single Lesser Air Elemental and pass out in the process, or should he cast Quickness and spend the next 12 rounds or so summoning 2 Horrors per turn?

The fear aura on the Horrors is just complicating the argument, IMO. Remove it entirely, and they'll still rout you nearly as fast as before, through the "death of a thousand cuts" effect - the Horrors are skilled, if not strong.

Lastly, it doesn't really matter that False Horrors only have 1 Hit Point and under the right circumstances can be easily killed, since my entire argument is that it doesn't matter how many you kill since they will just keep coming throughout an entire battle.

[Boron]

Yeah we see that now in our special teamgame too .

My question now is what countermeasures do you have against false horror with the same research ? With twice as much research ?
Caelum / Pythium , the 2 nations which can run such a strat very effective are probably the 2 fastest researchers too . Pythium is not as effective here as Caelume because it lacks the flying ability and has 2S on their theurgs so Ryleh / Arco could counter that with mind duel quite a bit .

So please tell me how you can counter the false horrors in early-midgame effective with any other nation ?

Truper is very right with saying the false horror is strong . 16 att/def is really good and combined with etheralness this way he is not easy to kill by most normal troops . Then he is not targeted any longer by your mages or they kill your own troops .

But the main point is with a staff of storms you could probably take away a lot of fear from the false horrors because they would be slow then . BUT we are mainly talking about the caelum raiding strat with 1-3 seraphs + a few decoy archers . You can't have everywhere a commander with a staff of storms or a SC .

So you are reduced to 3-4 provinces and can't do much against by the time caelum can do this . Meanwhile they just need e.g. to tech to the Airqueens and finish you with them .

So give me examples with which you can defend against this earlygame . I myself don't find too many and most are extremely expensive .

[Cohen]

Well Caelum with 100 gold mages and A2W1 are damn good, and Arch Seraphs aren't capitol only.
How can you compete.
Pithium too has cheap Theurg for what they obtain (150 gold for S2 A W H3, sacred).

False Horror IMO should have more fatigue and/or be A2. (like 20 or 30 fatigue). And no fear aura.
Repel is almost useless cause of etherealness, the auras like the abysyan one doesn't burn them so quickly and your troops rout before.

They still represent a good stopping wall if you count on a wrathful skies (I'm playing with that strat in a game).

And in another game with Caelum that I choosed to play without False Horrors, Caelum did well too (Truper was in as Abysya) and all the other 3 player ganged up against Caelum in order to defeat him.

[Boron]

I think there is almost no counter for a timespan of 5-20 turns against caelum using 1-3 seraphs in a planned attack .
By the time caelum gets false horror you have your Sc pretender if you have one and perhaps 1-2 weak Scs .
Mages at that stage can't defeat them as well i think .

So you can't defend more than 2-3 provinces against that once caelum has false horrors .

It maybe that i still lack a bit of experience so if you see any counter which is not too costy then plz say .