Quote:
Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao
In general, magic is used to create combos that national troops cannot handle, and to counter combos that your national troops cannot handle. In your question you describe the first case, where at research level 7 you start to see battle winning spells (Mass Protection, Fog Warriors, Darkness, etc.) that will let you massacre unsupported national troops. And so long as your opponents just use human-level troops against you, you can get away with not using magic, or in waiting until you've invested enough to start using the high level, battle winning spells.
However, if you are facing the second case where your opponent has something your national troops cannot handle (elephants, combat pretender, blessed sacreds, etc), magic is needed to counter their advantage. You see this primarily in MP, since in SP the isn't smart enough to put together vicious combos.
For the particular case you gave with EA C'tis, I'd recommend that old stand by of skelespam. While your casters are initially expensive, they do not take any casualties so long as they win the battle. With a normal army, you lose a portion of your troops after each battle, but the casters can keep fighting indefinitely without losses. And once you reach Evo 7, you can combine the skeletons with Cloud of Death, and then things become really fun.
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Right, I can see at high level research there's a mess of battlefield spells that look effective, provided you can cast them against the enemy's army and not his PD. I seem to have a hard time intersecting his armies with mine... only thing that works reliably is to park my army on his capital and make his armies come to me
And yeah, the AI rarely throws anything at me that my national troops can't handle other than "too much" which is what I was hoping mid level magic could help with. It seems like to vaporize his 300-soldier hordes, I have to have those L7+ spells. Skelspam really isn't going to stop an army of that size... nor is falling fires or thunderstrike or any other mid-level spell cast by a similar gold-worth of mages.
I guess the trouble is trying to figure out how to balance the game right in AI. Any AI that is weak enough for me to survive against while spending lots of gold to research high-level spells is also weak enough for me to skip the research and just crush with troops, it seems.