Any counter to Fires from Afar?

[Meglobob]

Fires from afar costs 10F gems which means its not really a fantastically good use of resources, its probably abit overpriced, especially in MP. Personally I would be very happy to see a opponent 'wasting' 10F gems a turn or more casting fires from afar.

[Agrajag]

Indeed a nice point to remember is that each fire gem is worth atleast 15 gold (more with stone, and even more since gems are usually more useful than gold), so if someone casts a 10F gems spell, he just blew 150 gold on it, so if he did less than 150 gold worth of damage, he was wasting his money.

[Ironhawk]

Meglobob said:
Fires from afar costs 10F gems which means its not really a fantastically good use of resources, its probably abit overpriced, especially in MP. Personally I would be very happy to see a opponent 'wasting' 10F gems a turn or more casting fires from afar.

Fires from afar is only overpriced if you are using it to try and kill troops. The much better use is to kill commanders, particularly weak commanders - aka researchers. If an enemy player finds your research center and starts blowing up your researchers with this spell you will think its a bargain at 10gems.

[KissBlade]

Ironhawk said:

Fires from afar is only overpriced if you are using it to try and kill troops. The much better use is to kill commanders, particularly weak commanders - aka researchers. If an enemy player finds your research center and starts blowing up your researchers with this spell you will think its a bargain at 10gems.

*points*

[Meglobob]

Ironhawk said:

Fires from afar is only overpriced if you are using it to try and kill troops. The much better use is to kill commanders, particularly weak commanders - aka researchers. If an enemy player finds your research center and starts blowing up your researchers with this spell you will think its a bargain at 10gems.

Oh yea...this had not occurred to me, I normally use seeking arrow, cheers now I will use both.

Any other artillary spells like this you could chuck at a research centre?

[Valandil]

lets leaf through my grimoire here...

Wind ride: chance of commander being teleported to the caster, unequaled obesity negates (and other stuff).
Leprosy: diseases stuff
Flames from the sky: kills armies.
Murdering winter: see above
Mind hunt: mind burn or soul slay attack, if enemy has an astral mage you'll probably be feebleminded.
Dreams of Ry'leh- dreamlands national: the caster fights a duel with the target in the void-- half combat values, mr.
Flying monkeys: attack of monkeys (!!!)
Earth Attack: a commander is attacked by an elemental
Manifestation: chance of an ashen angel assasination
Send Tupilak- Frozen Sea national: commander attacked by a tupilak.
Ghost riders (duh), phantasmal attack, send horror/lesserhorror, call of the winds, call of the wilds, all attack province directly.
probably others too.

[Tyrant]

Fires from afar is indeed a bad deal. I chucked at you only because my scouting report said "23 units, mostly ubas" and i thought maybe i could knock off a few 9 hp researchers. But- 2 shots no kills. The easiest counter to it is some crud troops for padding.

[Teraswaerto]

I don't think crud troops help. Decoy commmanders help against assassination spells but not against spells that target all troops, and having more troops just means that more will be hit, right?

[Edi]

Teraswaerto said:
I don't think crud troops help. Decoy commmanders help against assassination spells but not against spells that target all troops, and having more troops just means that more will be hit, right?

That depends on what you're padding against. Against Fires from Afar, it's very effective, because that spell has a limited number of effects. Against Murdering Winter or FftS it's just more meat for the barbecue because they target a percentage of units in target province rather than a fixed number.

I have some fond memories of one of my two Dom2 MP games when I found Thufir's main research/hoarding center and dropped 4xFFTS and 10xFires from Afar plus some seeking arrows and a few earth attacks on it. He was not amused. As to how I got the gems, having Eternal Pyre cast at base fire gem income 40 and going for 30 turns gave me more than enough to go around...

Edi

[NTJedi]

Meglobob said:
Fires from afar costs 10F gems which means its not really a fantastically good use of resources, its probably abit overpriced, especially in MP. Personally I would be very happy to see a opponent 'wasting' 10F gems a turn or more casting fires from afar.

I completely agree, but if the original poster is experiencing this issue my suggestions should help.