I hate horrors

[Nick_K]

Horror marking is designed to be a balance for the otherwise horribly powerful supercombatant strategy. It won't instakill an enemy, but it allows a chance that the horror will get them before the SC can overrun an empire. Horror marks are not that common; they'll sometimes show up from bad luck (ai scripting, or magic sites) but this is very rare. Mainly they're because of items (controllable by the player, items that horror mark are clearly labelled as such in the manual) or because of an anti-SC strategy from a human player.
Because horror marks are designed to counter big, expensive, powerful SCs they cannot be removed easily (plus, it's thematic that they can't) and the horrors have to be tough enough to challenge SCs.

I don't think it can be considered 'unbalanced'. Horror marks are not very dangerous unless you rely on one or two powerful units, and as I said, they are supposed to be a counter for this.

As for fighting horrors... it partly depends on what your god is. If it's a puny human mage then you can't expect to beat much in melee. As for magic, remember that you can only cast 1 spell per turn. Having lots of magic in lots of areas won't help unless you have spells scripted that will kill the horror.


Anyway, I've not had to challenge a major SC yet... The doom horrors are extraordinarily powerful and I doubt you can reliably beat them. As for normal horrors, here's my thoughts on the subject:

1: I'm not sure, but it's possible that horror attacks may be tied to scales. Does anyone know if magic/drain or luck/unluck affect this?



2: Horrors bypass most defences. Many of their attacks are AN or AP, they have many attacks with good Att so high def won't help. They have magic attacks so ethereality is useless. Equip your pretender with this in mind. If he's just an archmage though, then melee equipment won't help.

3: Horrors always attack horror-marked individuals first. Bodyguards will only stop this if they are horror marked (unlikely) or if they completely surround the pretender. I believe that horror attacks count as assasination attempts so you are limited to 5 bodyguards.

4: Sorry, wish-for-blood-slaves, but I believe that horrors have at least some attacks that are not negated by magic resistance. Life drain comes to mind. However, MR is very important against some of their tougher attacks

5: Your mage does get to cast a spell. The defender acts first. If he is not casting it means that he cannot cast whatever spell you have scripted first for him

6: Armours, weapons and so on will only work against a horror, which is designed to be able to challenge large monsters with a complete selection of items, if they are very well chosen and if your base pretender is tough enough to stand a chance. If he's a big demigod with full slots then you can probably equip him to kill horrors if you are careful, although I can't give specific advice.

[Foodstamp]

I understand why Ranger is frustrated. Even if you stick a horror marked unit in the mist of a ton of soldiers, a lot of times the horror will still "fly" into the middle of your tight stack and attack the horror marked individual.

The only times I have seen a horror not bust even the tightest stack is when your using send horror and he is just bouncing around randomly attacking people on the battlefield because no one was horror marked.

[Ranger]

Nick_K said:
5: Your mage does get to cast a spell. The defender acts first. If he is not casting it means that he cannot cast whatever spell you have scripted first for him

This is not what I'm seeing, The horror appears kills my god, end of combat! I've tried settings cast spells and cast specific spells, I didn't see a difference.

I've only seen guards work and my god cast spells at minor horrors!

My god was killed six times, after each kill the god loses one level in each area of magic, my god has de-evolved to a non magic user.

Once your god starts to lose magic levels it can never regain them because of the constant attacks. There is little point in trying to build him/her backup because they will just lose them again in the next attack.

What's the point to keep re-killing a god once they de-evolved to a non-magic user?

I see little point to this and why I think it's unbalanced.
Maybe the horror needs to be rebalanced to some level of the god/magic user that's being attacked.

[Aleph]

If you need your god to be effective in the current game, then stop playing - you've lost. If you can go on without him, don't bother calling him back anymore. He's done, either way. If it's really driving you insane, try playing an imprisoned pretender with a powerful bless - you are 100% safe from horrors while imprisoned.

There are ways to avoid horrors (Returning, for example, should work unless you're hit at home), but the best advice is that which you already got - don't get marked in the first place. Horrors are supposed to be the nastiest things in the game. Insisting they need to be weakened because a spellcasting pretender is getting repeatedly obliterated by them misses the point - they are a counter to the nastiest things in the game (SCs, and especially immortal SCs), and if they were weakened so a moderate pretender could deal with them they couldn't fulfill their main role.

[Wish]

I thought MR negated lifedrain. guess not, well anyway it is armor piercing, but thats only half the armor off, so a high protection will still help. (a lot of HP will help more.)

but a lot of the other attacks are MR negates.

[Edi]

Life drain isn't negtaed by MR. You can find all the weapons MR protects against by looking at the Weapons DB and filtering out everything that doesn't have a value of TRUE in the mres column.

As for how to avoid horrors with a rainbow mage: Make sure you have astral magic and some astral gems and script the spell Returning. That'll get him out of the combat and leave only the possible bodyguards to be slaughtered.

Edi

[NTJedi]

Ranger said:
In my current game my pretener God got a horror mark, and has now been killed six times! This god had level 5 magic in 5 areas, 6 gems each for each area, 140 guards, magic items, armor, nothing seems to work. My god is now a complete weakling.

What's truly terrible about the horror marks is that every time the pretender or mage is attacked by a horror then most horrors have an attack which add additional horror_mark levels!! Its those astral claws.
There's no chance of hope or healing those horror marks... even the spell of WISH will not work. There's also nothing special about winning a battle against the horrors. There is no light at the end of the tunnel with horror marks... these things are just black holes of death.

Ranger said:
Watching the horror attacks
The horror teleports right pass the guards, attacks and kills my god outright on the first turn, my god never casts spells, guards are useless. I've only see guards protect against minor horrors.

I agree this is a huge annoyance... and there's not a single creature which can be summoned which arrive with horror marks. If gamers could summon creatures which had horror marks then they would be excellent guards for a pretender!
If the developers add a few ritual summonings which provide creatures with high horror marks then at least the gamer could try protecting its pretender. Hopefully we're given these creatures within a patch to at least have something.

Ranger said:
What will counter Horror Attacks?

Shouldn't the horror mark go away after my god is resurrected?

Unfortunately death doesn't remove horror marks... in fact many horrors have those astral claws which INCREASE the number of horror marks! As I mentioned earlier your pretender, SC or mage enters this black hole of death which has no hope.
As far as countering horror marks... the first step is to avoid being horror marked. Pretenders of large size will be more likely to receive a horror mark on a battlefield..... the same as when casting curse usually the largest creatures are targeted. Countering means either killing the horror very quickly or quickly retreating using a spell like Returning. If you want to try quickly killing these horrors then use weapons which do extra or special damage to magic beings like the moon blade because Horrors are considered magic beings.

Ranger said:
This seems to unbalace the game, once your god gets a horror mark, your god is useless.

Basically it means your pretender has entered this black hole of death... sure precautions and commands can be set to help him stay alive, but his/her overall effectiveness will never return to normal.


We can only hope the developers create a few summoning creatures which arrive with high horror marks to help protect those pretenders or mages with the horror marks.

[Endoperez]

It's true that if your pretender somehow gets a very high horror mark, he could die any turn, including the one in which he is recalled. However, getting a high horror mark is very, very hard. It can happen, of course, e.g. if your pretender has very good regeneration and lots of hitpoints, and can survive dozens of turns against one of the Doom Horrors, while still being hit by the Astral Hook attackss during most of those turns. However, it's a very rare occurence. AFAIK, players can't intentionally cause horror mark that would be strong enough to cause this. As it is, this is one of the few "bad luck, you're screwed" events that have always existed in Dominions.

I agree in that some kind of a counter would be nice, similar to taking Luck and/or Growth to protect you from early plagues. However, personally I don't think this is an important issue.

[Teraswaerto]

Well, a lone pretender against a group of mages (and some chaff probably) hitting him with multiple Astral Geysirs might do it.

[Meglobob]

Astral Geysers deliver 2 levels of horror marking apparently and can be cast by a lvl 2 astral mage, so I should imagine its very easy to give a pretender high level horror marking making a potential god useless.

A potential god should have someway to counter horrors but it should be very difficult to do, carry out.