Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shadowlord]

There's also the fact that assassins can't automatically climb over walls. There's a "scale walls" ability that they have to have in order to assassinate anyone inside. (It's the scalewalls tag in the inspector)

If you were going to assassinate my pretender - in most games, I would be slightly annoyed, at best (But I almost always take imprisoned pretenders). I would also probably have teleported him to another fort as soon as you assassinated the first researcher in the same fort as him. So I'm not sure how well that would work out. Especially if I started bombing the province with mind hunt the same turn I teleported him out. (Not that I always have mind hunt :V)

If assassinating enemy pretenders with your own pretender was a viable strategy, I'd wager that the Teotl of the Night would be better because (a) He's already an assassin and has stealth 70, so you don't need the black heart or the amulet of the dopppelganger, (b) He can fly, so his victims only get one round to cast before he pops over next to them, (c) He can carry a normal suite of items if you do decide to fully kit him out.

Of course, that's purely theoretical, because he doesn't have scale walls. Maybe the target will come out - if they're a combat pretender, or to site-search, or w/e. Even if you had a guaranteed plan to take them out with your assassin pretender if they came out of their castles, you're still wasting turns your pretender could have done other things, just on the chance that you might be able to waste their future turns (and they'll probably just call him back).

I wouldn't do it, personally.

If you wanted to assassinate pretenders, you'd likely do better to look for national commanders with scalewalls.

[E. Albright]

#scalewalls only matters in sieges. If you're besieged, you're immune to assassination unless the enemy assassins have #scalewalls, in which case they can assassinate as usual. Aside from besieged forts, though, #scalewalls is meaningless, as you can freely assassinate units in a fort so long as it's not besieged.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Hm...this is highly skeptical on being able to pull off because all that is required, C'tis nation, Devourer of Souls pretender, get to construction 8, make and equip the black heart (blood 2) and amulet of the doppelganger(air 3) to pretender. Run into enemy capital and instant kill the enemy pretender. I'm also thinking you have probably already wasted too much resources by the time you could pull that off, and luck plays just as big of a factor. It actually might be easier to go with a Teotl of the night and add equipment if your going that route.

Anything that requires lvl 8 research is at best theorycrafting if you ask me. That is, until you sit on a successful lategame save. But on the concept of assassin pretenders? Opportunity cost is a bit too high for my taste. Thinking about it, what's the best my assassin/pretender can do? Kill a single target per turn. And what's the worst that could happen? They die. Since you can't target anyone specifically, there's a high chance that the single target I kill per turn is a worthless indie commander or a labrat (I'm assuming MP here). It just doesn't even begin to be worth the pretender slot when I could be using it for something a lot more awesome and powerful than a dead indie commander per turn.

That said it's an amusing idea for SP, and if you ever come up with a quasi-viable MP gimmick I'd be amused to hear it as well. But for serious play it just doesn't sound viable. Too high chance of it effectively doing nothing, which is bad because most pretender designs could be used instead to at the very least do something. Assassinations are something that works if you can mass them, and pretenders by definition can't be massed.

[EnigmaticHat]

If you REALLY want to kill a pretender, give a high stealth unit a bane venom charm and send it to the province they're at, or catch them in combat and spam horror mark.  Both of those things are slow killers but absolutely nasty because when the pretender gets called back they'll die again.

Or just meet them on the open field of battle and win.  That's how most pretenders are slain.

The main thing I could see for an assassin pretender is to find someone's capital early and then be a real dick by assassinating every commander that gets hired while simultaneously domkilling them.  But that sort of thing is frowned upon in this MP community (see "let people at least play the first few turns" in the copy/pasted guidelines).  Like how it would also be a dick move to guess someone's capital location and cripple them with a first turn dragon attack.  Not that attempting that is even a good idea.

[Shadowlord]

I guess we can't be as super-paranoid with our gates as I thought we could then. I'll file that away and take a look at all the assassins later.

You could give the teotl boots of the behemoth and see if he can catch someone smaller. Maybe some 0 or 1 encumbrance armor to make up for the 3 protection he has without burdening him much. (I had other suggestions to fully kit him out, but by the time you've made them all, he'd be a stealthy army killer who happens to have 'assassin' as an ability that he probably doesn't bother to use much, and you'd have spent a great deal of time researching construction and making things for him and having him traipse around)

Spoiler: I looked over the list of units with #scalewalls before reading E. Albright's post (click to show/hide)

Which probably nobody needs to read because it's on the inspector

Anyone: Succubus (Summon, B4) flying, life drain, no prot, dream seduction
MA Machaka: Bane Spider (cap only) bane blade, bane dagger, 19 prot
LA Jomon: Ninja, poison shuriken
EA Abysia: Demonbred (cap only) flying, poison daggers
LA Pythium: Serpent Assassin (cap only), poison serpent kryss but no armor
Caelum, LA Ragha: Jahi (Summon) flying
Caelum, LA Ragha: Pairika (Summon) flying, has magic

Also one from a site (Stalker) and one from an event (Adventurer).

P.S. Bane venom charms are hilarious. Include a Miraculous Cure All Elixer on the same guy to keep him alive indefinitely, or at least until you lose the game or the enemy patrols get so big that they get past your stealth. The only downside is Gift of Health cures its diseases.

[etgfrog]

Hm...ok, yea, your right, it was a silly idea, although now I'm playing MA Xibalba and its late summer of year 2 and I've found out I'm bordering Ermor 
I've lost one expansion party when meeting a 280 undead army at a neutral territory. While I feel like I've taken more territory then average, I don't have a plan to deal with undead. Muuch mages are mostly nature and water, there is some earth, death and level 1 priests...any suggestions?

[EnigmaticHat]

Low-level banishment spam, dust to dust, and/or solar rays.  Build towards having battlefield global attack spells (earthquake, rain of stones), or purgatory.  Counter their toxic dominion with temples, if you see any of their temples destroy them.  Don't accept losses lightly, your guys are many times less expendable than theirs.  Its rare but if you have an astral priest you can use banishment communions and that's just mean.

Don't use low level attack magic against them unless the caster is cheap, which would generally mean few combat stats or extraneous paths.  The Sauromatian's spirit guides would be great for dust to dust, as would Jotunhiem's Vaetti Hags.  A Gynja, on the other hand, not so much.

[Kagus]

There's also maggots, but I don't know how effective that actually is against undead swarms...

And unless they got a love in the last update or so, MA Xibalba is...  Kinda boned anyways.  Not a particularly strong nation in any sense.


I forget, do the Zot jaguar-shamans have death magic, or is it just blood and nature?

[etgfrog]

Well, between the dust to dust and banishment spam I managed to beat back ermor. Although as I was sieging the capital, an ermor event happened that gave me an ermor commander that causes disease every turn...including the pretender, then jotenheim decides to attack me the same turn as I broke into the capital fortress which killed off 1/4th of my troops and I just barely lost the battle inside the fortress itself. At which point joten decides to go all out on attacking me which let ermor break free just a little bit, so now I need to switch mage production for the nature mages to spam curse of the frog prince and to be able to help bring troops through the now 40 population areas.
I guess MA Xibalba is more of being able to do many different things, all recruitable troops are amphibious or flying. On the magic side of things, mainly lacks fire and air, everything else is somewhat easy to get 2 in.

[Shadowlord]

I've had difficulty pulling off dust to dust in the past because of how close you have to get to cast it. Did you figure out a way to get your mages to keep distance?

I also wasn't impressed with maggots - it worked far too slowly, as compared to the speed of a long dead horseman rush.
I was probably expecting too much of it.

N9Ex sacred armies alone can demolish undead. Well, certain sacreds, anyways. I'm only vaguely familiar with xibalba, enough to know ma has completely different units from ea.

[E. Albright]

Maggots is an anti-undead-SC measure, not an anti-undead troop measure.

If you want to have BVC infiltrators that don't die from their disease, a ring of regen is cheaper than a cure-all and works just as well. Likewise, if your bless is N9 a shroud will do. For that matter, Eye Pendants aren't cheaper but are possibly easier to forge. Or just use something like a Black Servant (or a Spectral Mage with S1+, if your enemy has mindhunters, hehehe) that doesn't care about disease. My personal favorite is to lure an army into sieging a castle where I can prolong the siege and don't really care about the province, and then putting the BVCs on commanders inside the walls. With enough BVCs, even one or two turns can devastate a sieging army...

[Shadowlord]

Ring of regen prevents disease? Or cures it? That would definitely have been cheaper. I was playing ea machaka, so I used their spies and added rangers cloaks and such as well, and, yeah, deployed them to my forts where the enemy blobs were going. (That was the other game I was playing before and during 404, before I understood SCs - I probably could have done something more useful with all those gems.)

[EnigmaticHat]

Ring of regen prevents disease? Or cures it? That would definitely have been cheaper. I was playing ea machaka, so I used their spies and added rangers cloaks and such as well, and, yeah, deployed them to my forts where the enemy blobs were going. (That was the other game I was playing before and during 404, before I understood SCs - I probably could have done something more useful with all those gems.)

Il Pallazo... is that you?  (nobody tell him about this, or he'll become even more annoying to siege)

I believe that regeneration halts disease in its tracks; you won't lose 10% of your health every turn but you won't gain it back either.  Except maybe in combat, not sure how that works.

Also, SCs and thugs are overrated in Dom 4.  They can work, they absolutely can work, but you need either easy access or a really good design using your national strengths.  Ideally both.  The community loves the idea of them but not that many people know how to build good ones in Dom 4 where the protection rules have apparently changed to be more hostile to them.  I don't think Machaka is a good SC/thug nation lategame.  The best they've got is easy access to banes but banes are better in the early game when they can walk into enemy territory and start stabbing PD.  Once things get clogged up with armies they lose their appeal.  For the late game thugs that can teleport/air trapeze/sneak past the enemy frontline using their innate skills would be ideal.  Like all the mounted lords with A2.  You can put winged boots on banes but you have to be careful because that's a large investment by thug standards and any enemy that kills the thug will be able to make good use of the boots or trade them.

For reference, the "generic" thug has a vine shield and a frost brand and nothing else.  Winged boots almost double that gem investment and provide no combat utility against PD.  Winged boots + vine shield + frost brand + bane summon is 32 gems.  That's two army devastating diseased scouts per bane.  You probably did better with the charms.  Then again if the enemy territory is spread around enough you could have hopped around and maybe persuaded your foe to split up those death stacks a little chasing them down.

[Shadowlord]

I had something like 4 or 6 of them*, and my attacker had to scramble his troops back to his dominion after he crushed me to save their lives with his GoH.

* I was in a corner and both people surrounding me were something like 3-5 times as big, so I figured I'd make some WMD. :3

[etgfrog]

I've had difficulty pulling off dust to dust in the past because of how close you have to get to cast it. Did you figure out a way to get your mages to keep distance?

I stopped telling them to cast dust to dust each turn and just turned on spells, they would cast various buff spells then start casting dust to dust once enemies were in range. The AI seems to be rather efficient with it, but that may be from the lack of spells. More often then not they would cast quicken self then dust to dust. Although during the fights EVERY enemy commander had a staff of the storms, so accuracy may have been way off. I also had 100-200 or so Muuch warriors backed up by 10 priests and/or dust mages. For 10 gold and 4 resource the Muuch warrior is pretty good.