Sermon of courage

[Tifone]

I remember KO asking some time ago if in our opinion, some spells were given a too high priority by the AI... it came to my mind today looking to one battle...

Does someone else think Sermon of Courage is too high on AI-casting-priority?
While I totally understand the importance of the Moral of my troops, it looks like my mages if left unscripted (which I sometimes have to do, i.e. when passing to another level of Evo or Ench, hoping my mages will cast the great new spell I can't script now) spend a lot of turns rallying every single square of my army, and lose very nice opportunities of highly damaging the enemy army sooner (preventing their cavalry to even get to my troops i.e.) and risk to damage my own troops casting the damage spells when the armies are already near and fighting. Wouldn't also the troops use a rally better when they've started taking some casualties?

Also, I'd like to see my mages if left free to move at will (Stay behind troops) take a bit more the initiative to go a little forward to cast that buff (i.e. Legions of Steel) they missed on the first line the first turn... If I just want my mage to stand and cast spell there's the "Cast spell" command, no?

(Here would come the final part where I say that's a little thing in a big game anyway, and I totally love the game no matter what, but I've already said this ad nauseam in all the months spent on the board so I pass this time :rolleyes:)

[JimMorrison]

Well, to be fair on one point, the +2 Morale buff lasts the entire fight, so no reason to wait, per se.

However, I've just found this even more annoying than usual, while testing out the things I was reading about MA Abysia. Seems if you script Anathement Salamanders to (Blessing)(Phoenix Power)(spells), they will happily chain cast Sermon of Courage until every single soldier in range has the boost. They seriously will cast on individuals preferentially, before switching to other spells. I thought that scripting might be kind of nice though, since in general the AI seems to adore Falling Fires and Fire Cloud, but it's nice if they can switch up to Fireball or something, on a case by case basis.

So to sum up, I also think they value Sermon far too highly. Obviously the benefit/target just has too much weight, if they'll cast Sermon on 1 man, rather than drop Falling Fires on a tight mass of enemies - and I agree that it should be changed.

[Sombre]

Yep, Sermon of Courage is definitely cast too often.

Especially on troops that have already routed. It's absolutely no fun to see your H3 ubermage wasting time casting sermon of courage on a handful of scattered, routing chaff.

[chrispedersen]

Agree.. the other thing that frosts me
is how bad bless targeting is.


I've seen blessess.. in a whole square of troops.. only get 1-2 troops...

and 3 priests casting bless on 20 troops , 3 times each.. still lmiss more than 4 units....

[thejeff]

Yeah, or watching a Jotun Jarl miss himself with bless twice then charge off and die.

Technically it's not the targeting. Bless has 100% precision. But it hits an area of 5+ squares around (and possibly not including) that target.
The obvious fix would be to make AoE spells always affect the square they hit.

[Sombre]

Another way would be to make the bless spell itself an aoe 1 100 prec spell, with next spell of 'bless aoe' which covers the other squares it might land on.

[vfb]

I added a 'Bless Self' spell quite a while back, that's just H1, range-0 aoe-0 prec-0. I had gotten tired of my Dai Onis missing :).

[Tifone]

Resurrecting the thread just to say IMHO even the Holy Avenger could use some AI-priority reduction, given its usefulness is extremely situational and the last-line-mage's AI loves to lose a turn casting it despite having much more useful spells ready.

[Lingchih]

I personally like the Sermon of Courage to be a priority cast. I've seen too many routs that could have been won if the soldiers had a bit more balls.

[Agema]

I've generally found priest mages that could cast something better than Sermon usually do.

[Soyweiser]

I would actually like to have some sort of 'cast defensive spells' 'cast offensive spells' and 'cast spells' orders. So you could order your normal priests to bless and sermon, and your wizard-priests would just start blasting their opponents to oblivion.

[Tifone]

Great idea! Totally! Pity so unlikely to happen... :o

[Soyweiser]

Great idea! Totally! Pity so unlikely to happen... :o

Yep it is quite a change. UI change, you need to add fields on all the spells to indicate the type of spell etc. So it also changes modding. More of a dom4 thing ;).

[MaxWilson]

Holy Avenger is approximately as useful as Fire Shield, which F2 mages love to cast when unscripted. (It costs fatigue and a turn of mage time, and maybe will do a few points of damage to the first unit which waltzes up and kills the mage.) The usefulness of offensively-defensive buffs is very situational, but I guess mages are just paranoid about their own skins and don't realize that Fire Shield doesn't also give an Awe +0 effect. :) The only solution I know of is to either script or have enough mages that you don't have to care about inefficiency in casting.

-Max