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[USEC_OFFICER]

Asphodel surprised me. Usually freespawn and D magic beats crossbows and MR-Negates weapons and spells put the hurt on the Ulmish, but they just folded. I'd have loved their cap, and my high MR lizards could likely have taken it, but geography failed me.

It turns out that freespawn and MR-Negates spells aren't all that effective when you throw enough men at them. Who knew? :u Also flails. Flails everywhere. Can't recommend them enough against freespawn. It's like a hot knife going through butter.

FAKEEDIT: Honestly, looking at the stats of the manikins they're much less amazing than I thought they were. Your basic manikin would have a good chance at being one-shotted by a dude with a spear if it wasn't for the piercing resistance (~37.8% if my math is right), due to a lack of defence and no protection. To top it off their HP isn't all that amazing, except for the rarer kinds of freespawn (who suffer from the fact that they're rarer). If it wasn't for their rock-steady morale and the fact that they're 'free' (beyond the pop-kill aspect) they'd be pretty garbage. Obviously that's why you buff them with magic and use a fuckton of them but... Attrition will still be quite horrible.

I'm honestly not sure why I expected things to be different.

[Shadowlord]

Stun vines?

[USEC_OFFICER]

What about them? Manikins have 5~8 attack and vines have a -1 modifier on top of that. Not to mention the fact that the attack is MR-Negate. Unless there's some kind of dickery where the stun activates even if they fail the attack roll (which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest), they're still looking at a less than 35% chance to hit and affect an Ulmish flail-dude. Of course the chance will be better than that thanks to defense reductions, but we're talking about a soldier who has 5 Defense and 9 MR here (along with two attacks that have at least a 50% chance to splatter the manikin). If that is not an optimal target for sleep vines to work their magic on then I don't know what is.

...

Though looking into even more, the high armour of Ulm means that once a soldier is knocked unconscious the average manikin is going to have a hard time actually doing damage. Most of them have claw and bite attacks that have a less than 20% chance to beat their protection value and actually do anything. I wouldn't be surprised if getting stunlocked and pushed over 200 fatigue is what would eventually kill those soldiers.

Yeah. What you should take away from this all is that manikins are bad and they should feel bad. I'm not sure if the average longdead is better than the average manikin but longdead have average attack/defence and actual weapons, which indicates to me that they should be at least deadlier. At least manikins can be safe in the knowledge that they're generally better than soulless, which isn't saying much. Soulless are just 15 HP of sadness and disappointment, except for the ones with armour and weapons. Those guys are just 15 HP of apathy and mild disappointment.

[Hatman]

Asphodel surprised me. Usually freespawn and D magic beats crossbows and MR-Negates weapons and spells put the hurt on the Ulmish, but they just folded. I'd have loved their cap, and my high MR lizards could likely have taken it, but geography failed me.

It turns out that freespawn and MR-Negates spells aren't all that effective when you throw enough men at them. Who knew? :u Also flails. Flails everywhere. Can't recommend them enough against freespawn. It's like a hot knife going through butter.

Flails would do it, I suppose, but a wall of freespawn typically isn't there to not die and win - expecting it to may have been their problem - it's there to fatigue your troops while the mages summon the next horde of skeletons, and the next, until your quarrels and arrows are spent, your troops are exhausted and your mages are sleeping and off script. Then troops that cost money/mage turns come in fresh and mop up.

The particular spell I was thinking of that I'd worry about with aspho's paths and ulm's MR is shadow blast, and they might not have had any evo research.

Edit: useless bags of HP like soulless are great in the right places, because guess what spells like to target? A pity, as far as ruthlessly exploiting the AI goes, that there are no soulless archers.

[USEC_OFFICER]

I'll give you one guess as to what Asphodel was trying to do. Or what they weren't trying to do. _{Also keep in mind that they had only one fort and thus were extremely limited in the amount of mages and research that they had.}

[AlStar]

I think that the lesson that should be learned here is - try not to ever have just one fort. Going broke because your only castle is under siege is bad. Being able to only recruit a single fort mage per turn is bad. Avoid these things - especially if you can make palisades, because they're both cheap and build quickly - there's no excuse.

[chaoticag]

Honestly, yeah. And if Asphodel is anything like Ermor, their rarest freespawn would likely be at forts. I also did a bit of research and apparently temples in forests also gets you better quality freespawn and more freespawn, according to Kristoffer (hope I spelled that right). But yeah, It's better to have a little bit of land and some forts than a lot of land and one. Kinda wish I did have faster forts, but better forts are good. More admin means more effective forts.

[ThtblovesDF]

Learning a lot already this game.

So is piercing/blunt/whatever resistance a single ability that allways applys 30% ish reduction or does it scale in anyway depending on who has it?

[USEC_OFFICER]

Blunt/Piercing/Slash Resistance is a 50% reduction in damage... I want to say before the attack hits. If it's not that then it's after. Either way they are pretty damn great, assuming that the enemy army has a lot of attacks with only a single type of damage. Like, say, an Marigon army of crossbows and pike.

[chaoticag]

Pierce says taking half damage, so I'm assuming how it works is protection is first subtracted from damage and the result is halved. Oh, right, I also think USEC pointed out a while back that manikins only do fatigue damage, so it makes it hard to damage units, so it's worth pointing out that the higher fatigue is, the more likely a critical hit will be scored. Critical hits treat protection as half of what it is, so even Ulm's armies are susceptible to it.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Some Manikins have only Sleep Vines which do fatigue damage. Most of them additionally have claws/teeth to inflict actual damage, though with their average strength it still won't be much since claws/teeth are terrible weapons. Admittedly I didn't know that critical hits were a thing in Dom 4 so... Yeah. Manikins not completely useless against flaildudes then. Just mostly useless. After all, their chances of actually hitting someone and beating their MR score are still not that great. Plus Full Plate of Ulm is pretty ridiculous and can shrug off crossbow fire half of the time. If I were actually using them then critical hits would be much less fearsome.

[chaoticag]

Yeah, the exact mechanics check for a critical every hit. Normally this is a DRN check trying to beat a 2, so about 2.7% ish of attacks end up as criticals. Every 15 fatigue subtracts one from the DRN, so the chances at 15 fatigue are 8~%, then at 30 it's 17~%. Basically, this is part of the reason that cold provinces are hell on C'tis, as more and more attacks are effectively turning into armor piercing attacks faster than it's happening on the opposing side. So yeah, I wouldn't count on fatigue alone to take care of troops, but at the same time it can do some particularly nasty things when coupled with hard hitters.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Definitely. And no, that sound you just heard is totally not the sound of me researching Curse of Stones. Definitely not. Whatever made you think that?

[ThtblovesDF]

Marignon didn't do a double turn, so we're waiting for him again - as for Asphodel, I'm not sure he/she is still playing activly?

Whats the best size2 unit one can get with water/air/nature/earth paths?

[jking47]

Marignon didn't do a double turn, so we're waiting for him again - as for Asphodel, I'm not sure he/she is still playing activly?

Well I was not the last person to put my turn in so that would have been hard for me to do ^^ And I think asphodel will still put in a turn, I'll ask. Will submit in next few hours