attempt for a mid-lategame strategic protection guide(domes). info needed :)

[Boron]

thnx sheap and archaeolept .

only a few questions now left :

i myself forgot that murdering winter . given the casting cost of 30 water gems murdering winter is probably even stronger than flames from the sky (only 20 fire gems) .

i want to figure out how to protect my researchers/forgers best .

the spell description of murdering winter / flames from the sky says it targets 50% of the enemy army in the province .
if you have in lategame 30 researchers/forgers in a province in a castle does this mean that 15 of them are attacked ?

i couldn't test that out unfortunately and sandboxing that will take too much time
but i think at least norfleet has tried this out in praxis already :
if you cast 4-5 murdering winters or flames from the sky in one turn on the main forging province of the enemy with no domes there :
because damage only heals once per turn and each of the spells targets about 50% of the units in the target province i think if you have 80 researchers / forgers in your capitol and they get hit by my suggested 4-5 murdering winters or flames from the sky at least 75 of the 80 will be dead .

can anyone please share their praxis expierience on that ?
lategame with either 200 astral income via clams or especially as machaka 50-100 firegem income via fever fetishes 4-5 flames from the sky / murdering winters should be an easy task .


other main question :
can every dome be cast everywhere ? above and underwater ?

then some domes according to the description only Last for a short while .
e.g. the dome of arcane warding .
it says if you put more gems in it the longer it will Last .
what is the exact effect of each extra astral pearl invested in it ?

finally is there a way to figure out how many domes are currently protecting your own province ? you get a pentagrammsymbol for provinces with domes in it but any further info ?

is there a earth/death dome spell ?

what happens if you want to teleport into an enemy province which is protected via dome(s) ?
do you lose the gems for teleport or even lose the sc you wanted to teleport in ?


finally i put up a small model for discuss :
lets assume you cast :
1.a dome of solid air (80%)
2.a dome of arcane warding (50%)
3.a frost dome (30%)
then repeat.

so now only 7% of the spells should come through that wall .
furthermore if .e.g the dome of solid air gets destroyed because you have repeated the process then the next spell will again have to come through the above listed 3 domes or `? just which dome is first can change .

you could further decrease the success probability by casting a forest dome to 4,9% .

the problem though :
a seeking arrow needs 3 air gems the cheapest spell overland spell which comes to my mind at the moment. the only domes with good values are the blood + air dome . the blood dome results according to the description in horror attacks so a most likely too heavy price paid .
so in average i think a dome of air only Lasts 3-4 turns before penetrated .

this makes things difficult . do you get info by spies if a dome is protecting a province ?

if you only cast 10 arcane domes every 3-4th spell will come through . so you are still vulnerable to flames from the sky fire .
if you cast in addition my above mentioned pattern you will reduce the total penetration odds to 7% or 4,9% but pay not 20 air gems but about 50-60 gems in total.

so while you made yourself quite save from flames from the sky / murdering winter only bombing the clever attacker should be able to destroy your domes much cheaper with seeking arrows and other cheap similiar spells .
he still can include 2-3 flames from the sky / murdering winter in the end of his penetration strat .

your answers are crucial

especially when my dome model is quite correct AND 4-5 murdering winters kill surely 90-95% of e.g. 80 researching/forging mages e.g. gathered in your ryleh underwater capitol with castle (and 90-95% of normal hp troops with 10-30 hps ) then i will come to the conclusion that you can't protect yourself by stocking 90% your mages for forging/researching/summoning in one underwater province with several domes lategame .

[Boron]

small addenda :

caelum is 100% cold immune .

so if caelum would stock all their researchers/forgers underwater in one province what would then be ?

cold immune means immune to any spell from the water school . because murdering winter seems to be the only mass unit kill spell which can be cast underwater should the caelum mages then suffer no damage by murdering winter because they are 100% cold immune ?

[Sheap]

I think what happens (based on reading forums not experience) is that all the spells which target "half the army" will all hit the same half of the army. So you can lose at most half your mages per turn.

[Boron]

Originally posted by Sheap:
I think what happens (based on reading forums not experience) is that all the spells which target "half the army" will all hit the same half of the army. So you can lose at most half your mages per turn.

hm that would be very simple . i thought every of these spells targets randomly about 50% of the units present in the province .

still if you are correct this would still be disasterous :
when unprotected by domes : if you have 50 mages in your capitol 1-2 flames from the sky will probably kill almost 25 mages .
even if you spread your mages that you have only 10 mages / province :
20 gems for a simple flames from the sky will probably still kill 2-3 mages .
now guess they hit your summoner enchanced with several path increasing items .

5 fire needed for flames from the sky is not very high . i think lategame you can expect from everyone with natural firemages with whom you are at war at least an attack on either 4-5 provinces with 1 flames from the sky each or 4-5 on 1 province .
especially machaka is there fearful : probably high base fire income by fiever fetishes + not hard to get some F5 casters for them .


how do you protect against that ?

and can e.g. abysian demonbred be damaged by flames from the sky because of their 100% fire resistence ?

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by Sheap:
I think what happens (based on reading forums not experience) is that all the spells which target "half the army" will all hit the same half of the army. So you can lose at most half your mages per turn.

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This is very much untrue, because I've lobbed multiple flames from the sky at an enemy army and achieved kill rates in excess of merely half the army. Whoever is spinning that yarn is making stuff up. ALL WAS LAID TO BURNINATION!

[ August 01, 2004, 02:50: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[lonewolf]

I've tried Flames on enemy armies with a view to experimenting and I have got results like 43 killed, 37 killed, 23 killed in succession, out of about 150 enemy units.

There are two possibilities I'm thinking about. 1) it is 50% of surviving units which is the target space, as Norfleet seems to imply; 2) in between my Flames, the enemy summoned more troops, thus increasing the size of the original target space in a different way (50% of original, whether dead or not, plus 50% of summoned units). Which it is, I don't know. But I try to aim for a kill rate of about 40 units per strike.

[ August 01, 2004, 04:06: Message edited by: autolycus ]

[Kristoffer O]

I think it is a 50 % chance that a unit is not hit at all.

Edit: Fires from afar has a set number of effects, but will never target more than a percentage of the army.

[ August 01, 2004, 09:25: Message edited by: Kristoffer O ]