Brainstorming : LA Man, Vs LA Utgard

Saxon · #1 February 9th, 2007, 06:39 AM

Sorry, I have misled you. I fired up a game last night and Man does not have spies, just stealth units. Ignore what I said about spies for this nation. However, I stand by what I said about thinking strategically, not just tactically.

You could consider a stealth army to sneak in and raid his rich lowland provinces. Take the province, push the taxes up very high and leave. If he pushes his provincial defense up high, it costs a lot. One point of defense from 20 to 21 costs 20 gold. It is just not good value at the higher levels, but if he wants to spend the money, encourage him. Keep stealing his provinces, then running away. You will cut his gold income and probably his gem income. He also has to divert troops to try and catch you, easing the pressure on your home front.

Consider cheap troops out front, to slow the giants down while you shoot and spell blast them. Then your good infantry, for the real fight. The arrows keep falling while the infantry hold up the giants.. Try to maximize the power of your good longbow units by letting them fire as long as possible before giants reach them.

JulienLeo · #2 February 9th, 2007, 07:03 AM

Quote:

Saxon said:
Sorry, I have misled you. I fired up a game last night and Man does not have spies, just stealth units. Ignore what I said about spies for this nation. However, I stand by what I said about thinking strategically, not just tactically.

Actually, you were right, Man Tower of Chelm got spies : the Magister (nice unit btw). I conducted a small test game yesterday were I was playing both side to see how some formations and units were standing against waves of giants.

However ... Your opponent will get a nice little message when one of your spies is at work in his province, so it can't really be a kind of stealth operation

. He will notice, and if he does, he will start patrolling ...
But well, that may be an option gotta think about it ... too bad the magister are kinda useless magic wise.

Micah · #3 February 9th, 2007, 07:22 AM

Patrik, getting a storm going doesn't work well if you're relying on crossbows, it hoses their precision and causes half the shots to just get lost outright. Similarly, it sounds like the unit of choice is woodsmen, which are lightly armored and have no shields, and thus longbows (especially with flaming arrows) would be the ranged attack of choice.

I'd go tower guard to resource max and then fill out the rest of your gold with longbows, make sure to get flaming arrows...phoenix power burning a gem to cast and then another 2 gems to get off flaming arrows should work

What bless is he using? If he's not using fire bless you might want to try to find some high defense units to hold the line, if he is just suck it up and try to kill him first. Your guys will get hit, and they will die, don't worry about prot. If he's using E9 (or even if he's not) toss some destructions at him to pop his armor, it'll help a lot. Abuse PD if you know he's going to attack somewhere, fodder is good (especially if he has no earth bless for reinvig). Water bless will help, but you get multiple attacks on him which will bring the defense score back down, and it's not stellar to start with, you just have to out-swarm him.

Destruction works wonders though, try that out, plus longbows and the obligatory wind guide. If you're going tower guard make sure to get sermon of courage off so they'll pass their repel morale rolls as well...the one damage won't matter, so as long as they're not losing attacks to it they hit harder than long spears and have the defense to survive the occasional swing, especially if the giants aren't high fire bless.

st.patrik · #4 February 9th, 2007, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Micah said:
Patrik, getting a storm going doesn't work well if you're relying on crossbows, it hoses their precision and causes half the shots to just get lost outright. Similarly, it sounds like the unit of choice is woodsmen, which are lightly armored and have no shields, and thus longbows (especially with flaming arrows) would be the ranged attack of choice.

I'd go tower guard to resource max and then fill out the rest of your gold with longbows, make sure to get flaming arrows...phoenix power burning a gem to cast and then another 2 gems to get off flaming arrows should work

You're absolutely right about Storm - I was not clear in saying that what I was proposing was not one big strategy but several ideas. If you can summon storm and have lots of magisters you can just pound him from the back of the field with thunder strikes, with a meatshield protecting your mages when they get close. But you'd need a lot of Magisters to make this work.

Woodsmen IIRC have a prot of 11, which is not super high. With longbows you're definitely going to do some damage - just not as much as with crossbows. However, Flaming Arrows changes this (as you rightly point out) because then quantity of projectiles matters more.

However I still stand by my suggestion that if you can tweak your economy to be churning out significant numbers of crossbows (resource-intensive) and magisters (gold-intensive) this is better than longbows. Of course, the catch is you need a lot of castles to make this work. Best of all is Magisters with Bags of Wind (as someone suggested) combined with crossbows.