Please Help Me Tune My Man

[apoger]

>But Man is special as it lacks good shock infantry bar Wardens,

If I need shock value from Man I go with Knights.


>in Doms 1 Wardens died in droves to crossbow fire, luckily your Crones could negate this weakness easily with Storm or the staff of the same name. An air-9 Virtue is as close as you can get to what you had then, with the added benefit that you can now play Wardens and LBs in the same army


I have never had trouble with missiles and my wardens or tower guard. I always have my own longbow firing at enemy archers. It's enough to get me through without missile protection.

Storms was used to protect MAGES, not troops. When storms was up it would keep flyers from jumping the mages, and would prevent archers from picking them off. In dom2 storms has the same flyer stopping effect and we can no longer target mages with archers... so the use of storms really hasn't changed. Plus the staff o' storms is back to cons-4. I'm going to be holding one in every battle I can.


>in Doms 1 Wardens where "naturally" immune to lightning once you had Enchantment 4, thanks to Crones again. Thunder Ward is nerfed now, but again an air-9 Virtue is as close as what you had then.

I never had a problem using orb lightning around my wardens, and I would never use wrathful skies unless I had 100% protection, so nothings changed.


>You can't always rely on LBs with a thin screen of Tower Guards to do the job, or soon someone will pick a Staff of Storms and use Mist to make the life of your bowmen miserable.

I don't use a thin screen. They are the bulk of my army with the exception of the first few turns.

>Also, what about sneaking Wardens in enemy territory,

I don't.
They are too expensive to use for such work, plus they get caught sometimes (unacceptable).

When I "sneak attack" as Man is is by:

1- Call of the Wild
2- Call of the Wind
3- Faery Trod (in dom2)
4- Crones (Cloud Trapeze, then summoning air elementals)
5- A flying or teleporting pretender

My infantry is back with the army... where it belongs.


>I think we'll agree that the nerfed Storm (and to a lesser extent the nerfed Thunder Ward) makes HI a bit less attractive than they were in Doms 1.

Both HI and Storms... still good.


>Gee, forget it, I guess you'll tell me you aren't using EGs anymore because of their cost and the lack of D1-like Storm, and the new legionaries are better?

I have actually started to like the "Principe" troops that Pythum now has. But it has nothing to do with Storms.


>Early you're likely to meet lots of independents with missile backup, including LI with javelins. Just the kind of indeps a small army of air-shielded Wardens adn LBs would shred to bits. OTOH with a fire-9 dragon you'll have to rely on Tower Guards with much larger numbers of LBs to do the same job, or accept Warden losses. With 3/turn only (because of the dragon's low dominion) you could as well forget building Wardens for some time.


You should pratice with a fire-9 dragon. They need no support at all. It speeds up the province grabbing tremendously. Just learn what provinces to avoid.


>or is Arrow Fend good enough to more than negate Wind Guide?

Arrow Fend is great, and replaces much of the bless efffect you are pushing for (air shield 80).

[Raen]

Stand by your Man!

(Sorry, sorry, move along please)

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by apoger:
Storms was used to protect MAGES, not troops.

Mages AND troops, especially the ones like Wardens. I once used the Call of the Wind trick to have a Storm casting Crone waste her gems, and followed with a crossbow army backed by Wind Guide and Fire Arrows. The result was ugly for those 80 poor Wardens, not a single one was given a chance to land a blow.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by apoger:
You should pratice with a fire-9 dragon. They need no support at all. It speeds up the province grabbing tremendously. Just learn what provinces to avoid.

I perfectly know what a fire dragon can do (or an astral manticore for that matter). My point was however powerful they may be they still can't grab more than 1 province/turn (or else tell me how). You need your regular troops to conquer more provinces, and a few air-shielded Wardens + a few longbows should do the job as well as a lot of Tower Guards and longbows can. Smaller armies = more armies = faster expansion.

Jebus

Just play each other and you can test your styles and see which one is 'better'. Or it could be that you play them both very well and each have their own advantages.

I prefer early super-combatants to orb-specialists, so I use some of Alex's ideas, though I think NGF's are completely viable as well; depending on how and what you are playing.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
I know you are mourning the old Lava Warriors Alex but the new ones can be spectacular with earth9 and Abyssian mages love it to.

Um... have you used Abyssian mages in combat? . . . Or is this just theoretical?

---

Ooff - brutal.

I have been using Abyssian combat mages since I first began playing dom1 and Abyssia is historically my favourite race. While they do suffer they have their value. My standard first turn is to build an Anathement Dragon to command my first army and use all my resources on HI and/or Lava warriors while cashing in all my gems. The anthement Dragon can cast Flare in between Fantacism/Divine Blessing and gets onto the hall of fame. Fanaticism makes all the difference to early expansion and allows the use of the early small units approach which increases the reliability of early expansion with Abyssia.

You'll notice the Cyclops mentioned had Air3. For . . . Eyes of Aiming. Anathement Salmanders are far from hopeless combat mages with Phoenix Power and Fire Ball. In the first MP game I played of Dom1 I ended up with a bunch of mages dominating the Hall of fame until my Ice Devils got going. I would choose wether or not I liked their heroic ability to decide wether or not to keep them as army mages or send them searching.
With increased precison (Eyes of Aiming etc) Fire Balls etc become deadly and Falling Skies is a nice new addition.

So yes I am speaking from experiance not just blowing smoke. Sure I want the precision of Abyssian mages improved but thats not because I don't use them - its because I use them and know how hard you have to work to make them effective. Sure I could give up on them because they score low on efficiency but if I approach themes/races like that they will all end up looking somewhat similar. Like Nagot I find Pythium et al somewhat unappealing and I'm more interested in trying to make less mainstream approaches work. You can find some hidden beauties (or monstrosities) with this approach.

Cheers

Keir

ps If I was going to use Pythium I'd put together a mixed force of the 2 strat move legionaries and the emerald guard can go sit on their plumes.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
I have been using Abyssian combat mages since I first began playing dom1 and Abyssia is historically my favourite race.

Well... that's the same with me. I build a Demonbred first, though, as I like to have a strong prophet that won't get killed easily, and flight is nice too.

However... I don't use eyes of aiming, ever, because I don't like to wound my commanders. And without them, Dom II Abyssian mages are about 1/10th as good as Dom I Abyssian mages in combat.

Though flare seems to be working better than Fire Flies/Darts... hmmmm. Must be the prophet precision bonus, plus the 1 extra precision of Dragon versus Demonbred. And now that I look, the Dragon prophet gets 12 precision instead of 10 like it should. Hmmm...

Well, that's an odd bug, or something. You got lucky=)

P.S. Does Chest Wound or Eye Loss from a magic eye or heart heal, say from the Heal command or in an immortal, while the item is still in the commander?