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[Sean Mirrsen]

I've had a feeling that this game reminds me of something for a while now, and now I realized what it is.

Magic: The Gathering.

Forests, swamps, mountains, plains... Oceans instead of islands. Instead of randomly drawing, putting down, and tapping lands, you have to control those lands and find randomly occurring magic sites within them. You have creatures that can be summoned and spells that can be cast, each costing a certain amount of the resource that comes from those magic lands, each with its own color. You have hero units and planeswalkers pretender gods. And all of this interacts on a variety of different levels, with different players coming up with different strategies that depend on both luck of the draw and strategic skill.

The only difference is that it doesn't cost you quite as much money.

[Frumple]

FWIW, Ghost Ship Armada got buffed in Dom4. It'll still fall to serious resistance, but Torgrin and his officers have better gear and paths, his crew is tougher, and there's more of them. You also get a moderate pile of of gold every month if they succeeded in pillaging their target.

It's not a guaranteed thing, but I've actually seen Torgrin drop a 100 PD province before

The global auto-attack/assassination stuff in general really seems to be pretty ballin' in D4, honestly. Like, D3 I'd only consider casting them on a lark, but D4 they're... well, not something I'd specifically aim for, but definitely cast if I got the access and the gems for it while aiming for something else. They're... really nice these days.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'm looking at the "Animal Horde" spell, and a hundred units seems like a pretty significant number, even if it's just animals. Seems like a good candidate for a force multiplier of some kind, but what can be used to power up a horde of animals? Growing Fury or Rage of the Cornered Rat could help with their tendency to flee, but what would actually make them powerful enough to be worthwhile?

Note: This is assuming a situation when you're sitting on gems and need a large force to counter another large force, i.e. you can't just spam something like Contact Lamias because even if the lamias are far better as fighters, 25 gems will get you at most 55 of them, and that's if you have a Nature 9 mage and 5 turns to keep casting.

I'm also not concerning myself with "practical" or "plausible" - I'm assuming a situation might come up when it might become useful. What's the most efficient way to power up a horde of a hundred/hundreds of undisciplined animals into a reasonably formidable force?

[Delta Foxtrot]

Large AOE buff spells would be what you want. Either use battlefield wide stuff or place your mages properly to buff large numbers of units.

Specific spells of course depend on what you can cast. Alteration has Battle Fortune, Fog Warriors, Army of Foo, Foo Warriors and a few debuffs you might throw at the enemy (low prot animals fare a lot better if you fight no prot enemies). On the enchantment side you'd use Strength of Giants, Mass Flight, Mass Regen etc.. You'll note that most of those spells are fairly high level, large scale buffing isn't something that happens early in the game.

Of course another way to use those animals would be to not care too much about buffing them. They're there to soak up damage while your mages/elites do the actual damage. Still, buff or two wouldn't hurt if they survive an extra combat round or three thanks to them.

And thanks for pointing me at the Wind Guide spell. Seriously, how do they (the game's creators) expect someone to keep track of all this stuff? There's like three hundred spells in there! :\

Magic seems daunting at first, but there are certain staple spells that come up time and time again that you learn to be aware of fairly soon. Just as an example, there's a ton of fire evocations in the game, but due to utility and accessibility you will be casting fireballs and falling fires 80% of the time.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Speaking of utility and accessibility.

Actually, either fire arrows don't get through armor, or that one unit I was watching was immune to fire, or it was changed in 4.14 (I still have 4.10 because... "evaluation version" >_>)

The test was rather... large-scale.
With the last enemy castle on the map, I decided to go all-in and pulled all troops from the entire continent to assault this one.

In the end, to get a Fire 4 mage I decided to just take a Jade Sorceress with a level in Death magic, and empower her. After I got her up to Fire 1 I had her make a fire skull to get her to Fire 2, and then another two empowers with the remaining gems alchemized in. Could probably just triple-empower a wizard, but eh.

Matchup was rather imbalanced, but the enemy had pretty good offensive magic.


Thankfully, with Wind Guide and Fire Arrows, so did we.


In the end the battle was won, but a lot of our forces fell to enemy fire, Blade Wind, Nether Darts, and... fire arrows.

Most of the non-longbowman casualties were caused by longbowmen.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Your links seem kinda broken so... You might want to fix that. Or something, maybe it's a problem on dropbox's end.

Also I've been fooling around with a bit of modding, and after an hour or so of jiggling values around I've decided that I have no clue how to balance things. So would you guys mind taking a look at it after I polish my mod up a bit? Some stuff seems to be working weirdly, and I think that it's because of how the tags are ordered.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Something screwy is going on with Dropbox. One moment...

...there. Put them up on Imgur while Dropbox is having seizures.

[Frumple]

Yeah, with the animals, even the better of them are mostly just chaff. Lots of chaff, and some of them pretty beefy chaff, HP wise, but... still chaff. I'd usually say about the best thing you can do to them is berserk as many as possible to nix morale issues in the bud and let 'em be the HP sponges they're meant to be.

Iirc, the biggest issues with animals in general are the morale, the attack score, and the general lack of defensive measures (outside HP). If you're going to use them as something besides a damage sponge, you're going to want to use them against low defense enemies (this is the probably the biggest concern, imo), berserk as many as possible (dealing with morale and a bit of the attack issue, iirc), and throw up something that helps with defense -- fog warriors or somethin' like that is probably ideal, since the bulk of 'em are going to actually be fairly flimsy HP wise, so getting hit is... suboptimal.

If you're up against enemies with decent defense, though, I'd probably suggest some other measure. High prot and/or HP is probably fine to send 'em against -- animals tend to hit decently hard, when they hit -- but the critters lean toward the inaccurate, so... yeah.

[Shadowlord]

If you can summon up a metric fuckton of them, they'll be pretty effective against anything that isn't heavily armored, lacks special attacks, etc. It's not like you can't just summon more to replace the ones that die.

I've never cast "Animal Horde," though, only specific animal-type summoning spells (Pride of Lions while playing EA Machaka, for example).

[Rez]

Making human(oid) pretenders viable would be very nice.  Perhaps they'll all get a -25 point cost or something.   

I think I like the colossal fetish pretender the most, because of the "mostly does what its worshippers believe it would do" flavor.  The Colossal Fetish is the will of it's nation, manifested as a god.

[ArKFallen]

Do the curses from the ability "Death Curse" stack and does anyone know if it sticks to the caster of battlefield wide evos (Earthquake, Firestorm, etc)? Lanka is fielding witches with (literal) thousands of longdeads and I'd like to know how screwed my casters will be from witch deaths.

[Kagus]

Don't believe curses stack, unlike horror marks.  I think it just doubles affliction chance or something, maybe another value.

And yeah, if I'm not mistaken it will hit anybody who kills the unit with anything.  Even in the case of, for example, seeking arrow nuking a random commander.

[Delta Foxtrot]

As per Kagus' post, curses only make your guy more likely to suffer afflictions if they take damage. And at least when my casters start taking damage my casters tend to start dying, so whether or not they're cursed is fairly irrelevant.

So unless your guy is thug/SC guy who switches between battle casting and punching, I wouldn't worry too much about death curses.

[ArKFallen]

Hinnom. Ba'als. Earthquakes.

Good to know that one death curse is the same as 100. This particular Ba'al will just have to be my designated witch hunter.

[Kagus]

Oh, you're using Ba'als?  Pffft, no worries then.  Just send them off on a blood feast if they get some injuries that actually mean anything.

...or, hell, get a couple acha to sneak alongside them and automatically heal all their afflictions for free, including the stuff like dementia or feebleminding which can make blood feasting difficult.  You have precisely zero worries.