Drain Life

[Scott Hebert]

I should think making Ghost Riders 'permanent' and raising its cost arbitrarily high would fix it.

[Boron]

Some Devil Armies are also good . If you generate Devils from Soul Contracts they are anyways extremly cheap but also by normal summoning via lvl3/lvl9 blood spell you get Devils quite cheap . They are immune to Firemagic , so no Flames . And they are extremly good and tough troops also , so the Ghost Riders can't do much harm to them .

Another good counter would be mechanical men armies with good mages like Tartarians or a Wrather .
50 Mech Men + Wrathful Skies can most likely survive even 10 Ghost Rider castings at once .

Getting 10+ Ghost Rider casters takes a while also . Most nations have to use Demilichs for that , so you need probably enchantment 8 + Conjuration 9 for mass Ghost Riders . That probably takes until turn 40-50 and by that time you will have various counters vs. Ghost Riders already . If you are realy nasty you can charm/enslave mind the Ghost Rider commanders . Especially a Nation like Ryleh could do that rather cheap , just Starspawns with rune smasher + spell focus casting enslave mind . They have good chances to succeed then .

The only thing at which Ghost Riders is really good is taking out SCs .

In a current game my enemy did 3 Ghost Riders on my ID with 40 Fiends . He killed 11 Fiends before all Ghost Riders were destroyed .
11 Fiends cost 40 Blood , a loss of 40 Blood vs. 15 Deathgems on my enemies side , i think that's fair .

Also note that Zen did only change the requirements for Ghost Riders from Death 4 to Death 6 but he changed nothing with the costs . So Zen doesn't think also that Ghost Riders are that powerful . Banelords on the other hand got a cost increase of 50% e.g.

[Tuidjy]

Ghost Riders are overrated. In my current game, I am overruning C'tis, and he
most certainly has access to Ghost Riders. He used quite a few in the first
turns of the invasion, but what he got was three attacks on one man province
defenses, one or two attacks against SCs that slaughtered the riders, and a few
attacks against mage squads that wiped out the wraith lords, and then mopped up
the riders.

In that game I am using ONE army of troops. It is made out of more than
a hundred range units, and a mass of banes, wraiths and heavy Abysian infantry.
Their commander has the Gatestone, generates fire gems, and cast 'Flame arrows'
and his 'assistant' SC wears the boots of the planes. It is a great reaction
force, because it can jump around, and be gone even before ghost riders hit.
Not that it always does, of course. It has withstood up to five simultaneous
'ghost rides' with only a few casualties.

The problem many people seems to have is that it is insane to rely on vanilla
troops by turn 40. Anything put together with a ounce of thought will wipe out
melee troops. Get rid of Ghost Riders, Wrathful skies, False Horrors and
Super combatants, and I will still be wiping out your groundpounders every time
they are outside of a castle/dome.

Those who whine about a specific aspect of the game have simply not felt the
sting of other strategies. If they get their way and see their peeve du jour
castrated, they will get slapped with something else, and they will keep
whinning until Dominions II looks and plays like a turnbased Rome: Total War.

[Bummer_Duck]

Boron said:
Also note that Zen did only change the requirements for Ghost Riders from Death 4 to Death 6 but he changed nothing with the costs . So Zen doesn't think also that Ghost Riders are that powerful .

Well, if I considered *doubling* the cost of mages that can cast GR fairly insignificant (Demilich vs Demilich + Skull Staff + Skull Face), I'd agree with that statement.

It would certainly make it tougher to gear up so you can cast large numbers of that spell. However, once you get there, the problem still exists, you didn't actually solve the problem. I'd rather see the gem cost go up on the spell side, not the caster side.

[Scott Hebert]

I am not concerned with 'whines du jour'. I am concerned with the fact that Dominions II is a deformed environment.

"The problem many people seems to have is that it is insane to rely on vanilla
troops by turn 40. "

There is absolutely no reason this must be true. It currently is, but to act as if this is an axiom, and not merely the current state of the game, is erroneous.

For me, national troops should not overpower summoned troops. Neither should summoned troops overpower national troops. Until this is true, Dominions will not be a very fun game, for me.

[Saber Cherry]

Tuidjy said:
Ghost Riders are overrated. In my current game, I am overruning C'tis, and he
most certainly has access to Ghost Riders. He used quite a few in the first
turns of the invasion, but what he got was three attacks on one man province
defenses, one or two attacks against SCs that slaughtered the riders, and a few
attacks against mage squads that wiped out the wraith lords, and then mopped up
the riders.

That example...

In that game I am using ONE army of troops. It is made out of more than
a hundred range units, and a mass of banes, wraiths and heavy Abysian infantry.
Their commander has the Gatestone, generates fire gems, and cast 'Flame arrows'
and his 'assistant' SC wears the boots of the planes. It is a great reaction
force, because it can jump around, and be gone even before ghost riders hit.
Not that it always does, of course. It has withstood up to five simultaneous
'ghost rides' with only a few casualties.

...and that example...

...are both irrelevant. Are B-52s weak and ineffective because they didn't win the Vietnam War? No. Sniper rifles, because blind people can't use them? No. Example of devastating weapons used ineffectively do not indicate that they are ineffective or overrated. Perhaps your opponent should invest in scouts?

The problem many people seems to have is that it is insane to rely on vanilla
troops by turn 40.

Yes, I do have a problem with that. It's a fundamental game flaw, IMO, and I'm trying to reduce it, so that the game can be less "Tech Race" like Age of Empires and more "Strategy and Tactics" like real history (prior to WW2). Good fantasy novels also have limits on power. How interesting would the Lord of the Rings be if Sauron skipped the "Build up an army of Orcs" part, since he had level 9 research (and thus, relying on them was insane), and just destroyed the world with long-range magical bombing?

Anything put together with a ounce of thought will wipe out
melee troops. Get rid of Ghost Riders, Wrathful skies, False Horrors and
Super combatants, and I will still be wiping out your groundpounders every time
they are outside of a castle/dome.

If it only takes an ounce of thought to render half of the game irrelevant, even with the most overpowered and commonly-abused spells removed, that's not a good thing. That's a bad thing.

Those who whine about a specific aspect of the game have simply not felt the
sting of other strategies. If they get their way and see their peeve du jour
castrated, they will get slapped with something else, and they will keep
whinning until Dominions II looks and plays like a turnbased Rome: Total War.

Sorry I like to whine, but I prefer it to insulting people. Your last... well, it's not really an argument, just a chance to denigrate people who disagree with you. If Ghost Riders was 1 gem and needed level 1 death magic, virtually everyone would agree that it was undercosted and overpowered... yet your last paragraph would still apply, and thus it is irrelevant. Of course, nerfing something that is so powerful that it dominates gameplay will cause people to start using other strategies. That's the whole point! It makes the game better and more interesting. If the late game is dominated by 5% of the units and spells since they are vastly superior to other uses of resources, and making those 5% expensive enough that they are similar in efficiency to next-best 10% of units and spells... you end up with an end-game where people can effectively use 15% of the units and spells without people like you calling them insane. That makes the end-game three times as rich and three times as good. And, just possibly, it could force people to use more than an ounce of thought to counter experienced elite national melee units. Would that really be such a bad thing?

[Turin]

well tuidjy those are convincing examples. Now everyone just has to build a gatestone for each army and you can simply teleport away. Great counter.
The other is even better: Convince your opponent to send no scouts to your provinces, that forces him to send those riders blindly and therefore they are easily countered.


Boron: Mech men with wrathful skies is a good counter, but that has more to do with wrathfuls awesomeness, than with ghostriders weakness.
Think about the second example with fiends: your army was worth 250+ blood(fiends +ice devil + equipment) + I guess at least 20 gems in equipment. Your opponent sends an army worth 15 gems against that and roughly breaks even(15 gems vs 40 blood) . Now imagine what would have happened to those fiends if he had sent 6 castings.
Devils are only costeffective when you play with unlimited soulcontracts, but having two vastly underpriced spells/items counter each other doesn´t mean that there is balance. If you use pure devil armys from the spells, you will lose if he sends appropriate numbers of ghostriders.

enslavers/charmers can work, but massproduced they are only available to a few nations. Another problem is that they are usually fragile, which means you have to protect them from wrathers, flames from the sky and leprosy.

It´s really not hard to get mass ghostriders.
bloodnations can use vampire lords with a staff(55 blood+7 death gems, everyone else can use demiliches(25 gems) or even moundfiends with staff(35 gems) if their research is limited. c´tis and ermor get mass ghostriders without effort.

[Zen]

Brick: I love lamp.

[alexti]

Bummer_Duck said:
What is the counters to Ghost riders?

I'm aware of 4 uses of GR and the counter will depend on what your enemy is doing.

#1. Ghost Riders as raiders. Likely used together with scouts to take provinces. Against this probably the best counter is to move small el-cheapo groups (or even lone indy commanders) of nationals back and forth so that you won't be losing provinces. You'll lose some of those groups to ghost riders, but at 30-50 gold or 5 death gems it's a cheap price to pay. Meanwhile, you can use your gems to fuel offensive.
Another alternative is to use small groups of vampires. With those you won't suffer losses. This will better work for nations with cheap death mages, but with some careful scripting you can ensure that you rarely use the leading mage either.

Sub-use of #1 is carpet bombing (20-30 provinces in one turn). There is no real counter to it, but the opponent can't cast it very often due to gem cost and only few nations have sufficiently easy access to required death mages.

#2. Anti-SC squad. Used to eliminate careless SC. There's no counter except stealth and teleport-like spells. Generally, careless SC is bound to die, if not to GR then to something else.

#3. To inflict casualties to the armies. Set of several GR is cast on the enemy army. This one is the easiest to counter. Fire spells, priests, fire-shielded-SCs, variety of astral spells and many mass-damage spells - everything works. Generally, it that army is supposed to fight somebody it should be able to deal with undead, thus it should have little problem with GR. It's useful to summon a lot of weaklings in the beginning of the battle to absorb horsemen's lances.

#4. Gem drain. That's the most powerful use of GR. Just when your massive army is about to storm enemy's castle, he casts 5-6 dozen of GR and your mages can't resists and waste their gems to eliminate those GR. Of course, that means that they're likely to get slaughtered in the following real battle. There isn't any good counter to it AFAIK. Creative scripting helps a bit allowing to, at least, be able to cast cruicial spells in the main battle, but still it's a serious disadvantage for the attacker. Besides, you need to have a good variety of mages to implement such scripts. The problem is even more complicated, because your army is likely to be hit not only by GR, but also by FftS, MW and Wrathful-Skying squad. Other spells can be used instead of GR, but GR are the cheapest per unit (in most cases).

Overall, if you discount the #4 (which is rather a problem of game mechanics encouraging long and slow late games), GR don't look that impressive. However, considering how many good uses they have, I think they are underpriced. IMO 6-7 gems per casting, or maybe 6 gems and death 5 requirement would be appropriate.

[Huzurdaddi]

Scott Hebert said:
For me, national troops should not overpower summoned troops. Neither should summoned troops overpower national troops. Until this is true, Dominions will not be a very fun game, for me.

In dominions there is only one real investment: research. And research only benifits summons thus it makes sense that over time summons should beat out national troops.

Now the question in my mind is: how badly should summons beat national troops? Currently national troops get pretty spanked.

At least that is how I think of it.