skelliespam

[llamabeast]

Skellie spam is powerful, but I don't think it's "messed up". It can be beaten.

A couple of castings of Wolven Winter would definitely be good against C'tis if you can cast it. Their mages will fall asleep *very* quickly in a cold-3 province.

[Kobal2]

As Fantomen says, a sneaky way to mess with a skellispammer who's only using a bunch of mages and little to no supporting army is to script spells that won't affect mindless or undead units. Cold spells would work too, since undead are immune to them and the mage casting them would be forced to target the spammers, although they probably won't have the range or precision required for the job. But things like Mind Hunt, the Northern Star/Magic Duel combo, Harm, Sailor's Death, Stream of Life... could all become your Sauromancer sniper rifles. Heck, even lowly Sleep could shut them down quick.

I've had great success with Air elementals, too - they fly, so they get to the spammers very fast even in a siege. Usually they'll target the undead first (more's the pity) but occasionally you'll get lucky and they'll roll over a sauromancer or two.

[13lackGu4rd]

it greatly depends at the stage of the game you're encountering the skelli spam. early on he won't have the mage numbers for massive skelli spam without destroying his research, so a few thugs with fire brands instead of frost brands should do the trick, the lower enc the better, so undead thugs like Banes are the best. later on when he can afford the numbers you should have adequate research to deal with it. Solar Brilliance is 1 battlefield enchantment you should try to have against undead happy nations, and it also overrides darkness which combines perfectly with skelli spamming tactics. reverse communioned stellar cascades and other anti undead astral spells can work wonders as well. just use the first few turns for soul slays or something than start with the stellar cascades(when the skelli spammers got a mass of undeads spawned already). and of course killing the mages themselves, as others have already said.

[llamabeast]

I don't think you mean Stellar Cascades, but I can't remember what the spell you do mean is called. Star Fires?

[13lackGu4rd]

yeah, I actually meant Solar Rays. Star Fires is the lesser version of Solar Rays, though AN instead of AP, but skelli spam doesn't produce high prot undeads so Solar Rays is better.

[Kobal2]

You've got them twisted : Solar Rays is the small one, Astral Fires is the big one. However Astral Fires is S3/F1 rather than just S2, so it's quite harder to mass for a communion if you're not Marignon or EA Ermor.

[DeadlyShoe]

Star Fires is actually a seperate, far ****tier spell than Astral Fires.

[13lackGu4rd]

Originally Posted by Kobal2

You've got them twisted : Solar Rays is the small one, Astral Fires is the big one. However Astral Fires is S3/F1 rather than just S2, so it's quite harder to mass for a communion if you're not Marignon or EA Ermor.

star fires not astral fires, there's a difference. and no, I wasn't referring to astral fires for the exact reason you mentioned.

[krpeters]

Are you sure you're not making this problem more difficult than it needs to be? In my (admittedly limited) experience, skelespamming is a high fatigue process. After raising a horde of undead, the death mages should stop for a rest. What you need is to have enough damage-dealing ability to mop up his horde and kill his mages before they start up again.

Thugging is exactly the wrong way to go. You want a horde of cheap expendable troops, that, or effective anti-undead spells. Troops with multiple attacks are ideal.

Also, like someone else pointed out, a pile of 40 gold indy preachers are highly effective. Plop temples and recruit them, you don't need to worry about losing mages to make them.

[rdonj]

krpeters - assume you have 10 d2 mages spamming skeletons. That's 50 skeletons for the first three turns, a short break, and then another 50. So assume you have a minimum of 200 skeletons to kill. Probably more, due to the sheer amount of time it takes to hack through that many undead. Fielding cheap troops to kill that isn't really ideal, because you'll suffer a lot of attrition. Anti undead spells help a lot, of course.

But you really need to come up with a method of killing the casters, or you'll be throwing troops into a meat grinder that doesn't really cost the spammer anything they didn't already have.