Annoying death magic

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
If your "strategy" is to count on the AI fatiguing itself, or other such stupid behaviors, you're only cheating yourself by using what is basically an exploit. Against a human you'll be waxed and polished.

No, his strategy is to rely on his own mages casting spells as often as possible, such as the very useful raise skeletons/drain life/ raise skeletons/drain life combo that the AI is very good at doing.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
None of *my* troops. It was a SC pretender, solo. There were plenty of enemies in range.

As you've pointed out though, this wa in 2.06, so it doesn't really apply.

quote:

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Which patch were you using when you saw this behaviour?

2.06

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Have you seen the same behaviour after the verson 2.08 changes to the spell selection heuristic? You really can't use the old examples when the AI _is_ being changed with every patch.

[Arryn]

Graeme, other people have reported that it's not been fully fixed in 2.08, despite the devs trying to.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Graeme, other people have reported that it's not been fully fixed in 2.08, despite the devs trying to.

That's just it. Where are these reports of such behaviour? I haven't seen any reports that weren't explainable through the already known game mechanics, and I read virtually every post that comes through here.

Like I said, the only one I've seen in 2.08 of double protection is air sheild/air blessing.

[PvK]

As for the original topic, I've been seeing the AI making use of Nether Bolts and Ghost Grope (sic), and non-death spells from death mages.

PvK

[Arryn]

Originally posted by PvK:
As for the original topic, I've been seeing the AI making use of Nether Bolts

This was common in castle defense, even in 2.06

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Arryn:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
As for the original topic, I've been seeing the AI making use of Nether Bolts

This was common in castle defense, even in 2.06

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Well, it was common in Doms I Nether Darts is the most overpowered evocation, ergo, it gets cast.

Hard to say about spell AI. In 2.08, I have not seen Druids berserking other nearby mages anymore. But I did see an enemy pretender kill himself with Shock Wave. Ouch! I sent a turbo-assassin (assassin w/Lifelong Protection) against him, with orders to hold, and the hyper-powered AI commander (Freak Lord with Air 7, Earth 6, Nature 9, and 1 in all other paths, I think) cast Flame Shield, Astral Shield, a few Blade Winds (on nearby imps), and finally Shock Wave, twice. It was, in fact, brilliant - the choices were very good. Well, except that imps are immune to fire, but oh well=) The Shock Waves cleared away my imps quite well... but alas, the second one killed the pretender too. I've never seen a unit damage itself with Shock Wave before... In this case, there was not much choice, because it was surrounded by imps, so it might have seemed like a good idea (no time to cast resistance, I better push the button now!).

2.08 has some nice battle formation and strategic improvements. As Marignon, I got a random Friar / Flagellant uprising against Spectral Ermor. Meaning, 4 friars - quite a few! When they counter-attacked, they used... ONLY STANDARD TROOPS! No undeads at all. Well, possibly they lost all their undead leaders. But it turned out brilliantly:

2 Heavy Cavalry on the far-forward, top-and-bottom flanks, set to "Attack Rear". These guys went straight to the back and killed my 4 friars, skipping all my province defense and flagellants.

2 Groups of maybe 8 Tribal Archers in the middle, which rained arrows on my flags and killed them without a fight. By the time my province defense pikeneers arrived, the HC had killed all my leaders and they routed.

Wow! My army was worthless! There was nothing for my Friars to banish, and my normal troops didn't even get a chance to fight.

[SurvivalistMerc]

Originally posted by Arryn:

They can still use their own words in existing threads. And using existing threads avoids much confusion.

Arryn, would you tell me what confusion this thread has created? I see no confusion here...merely intelligent discussion of what some see as an issue. And discussion from a somewhat different perspective that would likely have occurred if an old thread were for some reason resurrected.

I agree with graeme dice on the "body ethereal" issue. Especially if you have your core commanders and other potentially non-astral magi back with your astral mage, such as a shaman. It's wonderful that your shaman is etherealizing your other magi and commanders to prevent them from being slain by stray crossbow bolts. In fact, I will often script shamen with this.

I actually wouldn't mind mages moving up a bit to target the scripted spells if they're not moving into enemy melee troops and have some sort of missile protection. Most of my problems with what I consider inappropriate spells occur when the mages are at the back (where I put them--my fault) and the enemy's troops are at the back of their line firing missiles.

It would also be nice to know what range 100 means...can it affect the entire battlefield? Because I often script stellar cascades with Ry'leh (?sp) and find that the spell AI disagrees with my choice and casts something else even though there is a group of massed defenders nearby. (I'm not thinking mind burn is a better decision for a group of astral 4 and astral 3 magi (base) in the setting where a commander is holding a banner of the northern star.)

I agree that it would be a bad idea to have the magi rush into melee. But what do you need to check for to prevent that? Just check...on turn 3 or subsequently due to hold and attack orders...to see whether there is a group of melee units rushing forward. I have no idea how hard that would be to code.

I have not used 2.08 yet (using 2.06) due to the fact that it creates bugs (utgard) and supposedly increases the disparity between battle reports and battle replays in SP. (I find that particular bug more annoying that I reasonably should because I still watch most of the battle replays.)

I have seen the AI use ghost grip, too. And seeing that is very pleasant because it's such an awesome spell.

[Arryn]

Range 100 can reach anywhere on battlefield. But do not confuse range (distance) with area of effect.

Spells that affect the entire battlefield say so, under Area of Effect.

[ March 02, 2004, 14:40: Message edited by: Arryn ]

[Wendigo]

To the original poster:

You will likely do not know this as a new player, but back in Dom I the battle summons were considered to be overpowered (it was pretty simple to destroy big armies with just a force of summoners, while suffering _no_ loses), thus most of those battle summons were downed to require gems, with 2 exceptions: phantasmal critters, and raise the dead/skeletons spells.

Rejoice that you can still use battle summons as a Death magic user!

If you really do not want to get those you should deploy your mages forward in the battlefield, so that they are in range for their evocations (*) or not deploy them at all and keep them at your labs. Obviously, you should also get some research in alternate battle magics (Evocation, Thaumaturgy, Alteration...) so that you know other spells.

Do not dismiss Decay as a useless spell. The AI switches to it when faced with a high HP critter, and it's a spell that can potentially kill a Pretender. Back in a DomI MP game, a single dusk elder of mine killed 3(!) Iron Dragons on his own using this spell. That's 75 gems worth of Const9 critters killed with a thau1 spell. This spell shines vs big boys with low MR (like Crushers, Spiders, Krakens...)

I generally concur with Graeme regarding the ret of the thread, 90% of the complaints about the spell AI from new players are due to bad battlefield placement or lack of research. There are indeed previous threads about this.

(*) range of spells/missiles is meassured in squares (you can turn on the grid with a key command to see it), the battlefield is around 54 squares long IIRC, so a mage in the back will barely be able to hit the middle with a 30some range spell.