I give up, you finally won me over

[RonnyRoy]

As a regular lurker in c.s.i.p.s, i have for many years now seen the constant praises of Dom1 and now Dom2. Well, I never gave it a chance before now... and damn i wish i had some sooner!

Its a great game, but i got a problem with a recent battle. After i added the hydra to my pretenders stack, the battle was very very costly. Clearly my own tropps die from those noxious fumes the hydra generates. Isnt there an easy way to protect my troops from this effect? It makes the hydra pretty useless otherwise...

From a newbies perspective anyway

Well the Hydra's aura is Poison.

So if you get anything that helps with Poison it will help.

Try forging "Snake Rings" and a spell called Poison Ward (Enchantment 4) or Serpent's Blessing (Enchantment 7) will help ward your entire army.

The best bet with Hydra's is to keep units that can stand up to a little poisoning in the same battle and try to keep your normal human units in a different army

[Norfleet]

Well, there's no really easy way to accomplish this: You can try Poison Ward, which will cost you a nature gem, and requires a nature-2 mage...but just watch: you give him the gem, and he refuses to cast the damn thing, even when you explicitly told him to do so.

Or you can position your units so that the hydras go elsewhere and not near your other troops, but just watch: They'll all end up in a big clump in the center when the fighting starts, and everyone dies anyway.

Sometimes, I think that them hydras, they just aren't meant to be used with anything other than missile troops. And just watch, they'll get mowed down by friendly fire because your air mage, like the nature mage, refused to cast Arrow Fend despite being given the gem to use. Bah.

It's like the saying goes, "Some days you eat the sandwich, some days the sandwich eats you.". And in Soviet Russia, the sandwich eats you.

Basically, you can keep trying to use hydras with your normal troops, and watch in horror as it manages to go horribly, horribly wrong, no matter what you try, or you can try using just hydras, and units that are innately poison-immune. Unfortunately, Pythium lacks these, so you'll be stuck with whatever you might be able to scrounge from Indies, or summoning your own.

[ February 07, 2004, 04:46: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[Targa]

I once had an "army" consisting of 2 hydras and a commander. I left the hydras in the center of the green box and put the commander in the back corner. Gave the commander orders to retreat, and the hydras "hold and attack>closest" + "retreat". They never actually got close enough to attack due to the starting position, but retreated just ahead of the enemy army and left them in a cloud of poison gas. I used this tactic to whittle down independent armies. It was common to see 20-30 deaths due to poisoning.

In all reality, if you have ~7 Hydras on a flank with charge orders on them and you keep your main force farther back than you normally do and on the opposite flank, you can do fairly decently on the friendly fire deaths. But in general the armies are incompatible unless you count on taking high losses.

One way to make sure your army casts Poison Ward/Serpent's Blessing is by only sending in your Hydra combined armies against large armies, then the trigger fires for gem usage.

[RonnyRoy]

Wow, a very helpful community! That is golden when trying to figure a game out

Well, i guess I will just post the hydra as a lone defender of a border province. And in the next game i wont buy a hydra before im sure i can keep its fellow soldiers alive

Meanwhile i got a new problem... With my astral pretender, I tried my first ritual spell: Astral projection. Well that certainly wasnt worth it... as he was discovered and is now feebleminded No more magic from that guy.
A pretty big hit to take so early in the game.

How do i remove it?

Seems like a pretty useless spell if the risk is so great? I could easily have sent a scout instead, but i did it to try out a ritual spell.