earth grip

[Benjamin]

Am I correct in my understanding that a mage that can chain cast earth grip forever with a hundred percent accuracy can prevent any unit from performing any actions?

It seems to work on horrors anyway.

How do people deal with that vis a vis their SCs given that earth grip is so easy to cast?

And yes I know that they can break the grip, but they lose their turn doing so and then they just get gripped again immediately.

Am I missing something?

[Frozen Lama]

well for one, i guess a mage could fatiuge out, and i think you can cast spells, it has a limited range, or it could miss.

[rdonj]

Yes, you are missing several things. First, earth grip has 10 fatigue, plus spellcasting fatigue of the mage means a level 1 mage cannot cast it forever. A higher level mage with summon earthpower probably more or less could though. Also, it doesn't have 100% accuracy, it has caster's precision + 5. Which is usually about 15. That's pretty good for a spell with only 20 range anyway, but it can still miss. It will not miss on horrors though because they will tend to be very close to you.

[Benjamin]

Yeah I know it doesn't have 100 precision, but you only need 15 precision to be perfectly accurate out to 13 hexes, or 20 precision to go out to 18. So joe mage with eye of aiming and someone casting aim on him, 3 gems for for a hammer forged boost of the messenger, and 1 earth gem to cast summon earth power, and as long as hes got <4 spell casting fatigue he's happy to get a no resist paralyze on anything up to and including... well anything.

I haven't seen it mentioned much in the "literature" so I guess that tells me that in practice the earth grip effect isn't overwhelming, but that says to me people aren't using it enough, not that it isn't very strong.

That or I don't know what I'm talking about. But next guy that sends an alone SC against me when I'm not... EA mictlan without any earth or air is in trouble imo.

[Trumanator]

There's also the fact that the AI is idiotic, and is likely to decide that something else would be more beneficial.

[rdonj]

Coupled with the fact that SCs usually stay out of range for the first 5 turns... it would be pretty tough to actually AIM an earth grip at someone, you'd more or less have to just get lucky with the ai making good choices. Basically what trumanator just said, but with more words!

[Omnirizon]

We can't really make an AI that can learn how to make a tasty sandwich, so I wouldn't expect Dominion's to reason its way through the best spell to cast.

I recall having said in a thread past that an idiotic AI and lack of scripting commands is actually a 'feature' to prevent game breaking uses of even basic spells.

This might be a good example of that.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Benjamin

Yeah I know it doesn't have 100 precision, but you only need 15 precision to be perfectly accurate out to 13 hexes, or 20 precision to go out to 18. So joe mage with eye of aiming and someone casting aim on him, 3 gems for for a hammer forged boost of the messenger, and 1 earth gem to cast summon earth power, and as long as hes got <4 spell casting fatigue he's happy to get a no resist paralyze on anything up to and including... well anything.

I haven't seen it mentioned much in the "literature" so I guess that tells me that in practice the earth grip effect isn't overwhelming, but that says to me people aren't using it enough, not that it isn't very strong.

That or I don't know what I'm talking about. But next guy that sends an alone SC against me when I'm not... EA mictlan without any earth or air is in trouble imo.

Um.. no.
Don't get me wrong - earth meld (earth grips better cousin) is one of my favorite spells.

Going from memory,

Missiles etc will not deviate so long as range
so a net precision of 18 gets you a range of 10.

So, many units, but especially mictlan jag warriors with a happy feet bless are going to have a movement >> 10. Which means they will be able to go from .. out of range to... in your face before you can get the spell off.

[Benjamin]

Alright, in some testing, which was a pita, results were pretty good. An e2 earth reader with only boots of the messenger chain cast it vs a cyclops for 15 turns. Then he stopped, I think because my troops on guard commander routed due to the fear aura.

But pretty effective. Although non e2 readers had trouble, fire cast blindness, water would probably cast frozen heart, death cast decay.

Thanks for the reply chris, but you seem to be talking at best crosswise to me. I never proposed using it against jaguar warriors, specifically pointing out alone SCs as a potential target.

Precision calc was: base 10 + 5 eyeofaiming + 5 aim + 5 spell precision = 25, with +15 from doubling precision over 10 = 40, divide by 2 minus 2 = 18. Spell range is only 15 anyway.

Anyhow, I'm not making it out to be unstoppable vs all foes, just very very good for a particular job. And I suspect even if the SC is not alone, as he has high hp he will be targeted anyway. I don't feel like any more testing though.

[Quitti]

Don't bother with decay, use raise skeletons instead, or something similar. Tangle vines is also one such spell that immobilizes the target, as is false fetters should it hit the MR (which it doesn't against proper SC's). This is just one way of countering SCs easily with simple mages.