Sphinx Killin Tips

[Taqwus]

Sending somebody in with a Black Bow of Botulf + Eye of Aiming + Wind Guide/Aim should help, as would sending a flyer to thwap the Sphinx with the Staff of Kurgi. Both cause Feeblemind, which neutralizes the spellcasting and if memory serves gives a penalty to MR.

[Yossar]

How about mandragoras? They'd get him to 200 fatigue in a round or two and they should be immune to paralyze. 200 fatigue gives a great chance to pierce armor. I'm not sure they'd be able to do enough damage by themselves (but maybe they can) so you might want to back them with some mages amd archers.

Mandragoras are one of my favorite units in the game. Those sleep vines are great.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Cheezeninja:
Ok, here's the rundown, after downloading the absolutely wonderful middle-earth map from www.ascenciongames.com i couldnt resist the urge to do a little roleplaying as Sauron, dark lord of middle earth So after starting a game as Soul Gate Ermor (yes, yes, you all hate me) i have proceeded to carve myself a dark empire out of the eastern portion of the map with no great difficulty, but much dark laughter, pillaging, and fun. No great difficulty until i ran into pithium's hometown in angmar and the sphinx sitting inside of it. on 3 seperate occasions i have not managed to take their castle simply because the sphinx casts astral shield and im not able to kill it before time elapses (or so i assume... with the 500 odd units in the armies i send and multitudes of str 2 unholy priests it would take forever for me to actually watch it that far) This has resulted in the loss of some choice commanders due to inability to run away when time elapses because they are paralyzed. How do i kill that damn sphinx?

Yes, the middle earth map is pretty cool. The impassable mountain ranges make things interesting, with some good bottlenecks. The downside I found was that some of the home castle provinces were butted up to assorted impassable mountains, which reduces the number of effective neighboring provinces, thus making for less gold and resources than typical in those home provinces.

Also: are you aware that it's possible as of the latest patch to speed up the battle viewing? 'f' makes things move faster, and 'n' skips to the next round. Between those two, you should be able to get to viewing the late battle rounds without too much delay.

[Cheezeninja]

you can speed up replay now? Exceeelleeent.....

Mandragora's huh... sounds good.
On a sleep vinte note, i recently started a game with a carrion dragon pretender because he looked pretty nifty. What i failed to note was that despite his giant wings he CANNOT fly. Strange.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Cheezeninja:
What i failed to note was that despite his giant wings he CANNOT fly.

I imagine that's because he's actually a rotting corpse covered with moss.

[Wendigo]

When it comes to Sphinx killing, a personal favourite is the quickened Son of Niefel equipped with 2 dusk daggers: aprox 120 protection negating damage per combat round.

edit-maths

[ April 23, 2004, 16:14: Message edited by: Wendigo ]

[HotNifeThruButr]

I once took down a Personal Luck'ed, Ethereal (forgot how he got it) Sphinx inside a castle. I ended up losing about 2/3 of my forces, but since tower fire can berserk some einheres, they didn't route when everyone else did. They were so tired they ended up attacking once every two turns.

So, to recap, dual weapon soldiers are good if you have no alternatives. I'm talking Falchioneers, Einheres, and Centaur cataphracts, to a lesser extent. When it's inside a fort of some sort, berserkers are almost essential.