I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[Arryn]

Cainehill said:
The main problem with False Horrors is that there is apparently a bug (documented by Arryn I believe), because the priests _never_ cast Sermon of Courage to counteract the fear.

The logic which IW appears to have encoded is to cast Sermon/Fanaticism if units take damage (1+ points), not if units take morale losses.

Another test that someone should make is to equip Horror Helms on non-combatants sent into the enemy ranks and see if effects similar to FHs occur (with enemy priests failing to cast Sermon/Fanaticism).

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

[Truper]

Arryn said:

There's nothing "wrong" (unbalanced) with the FH spell. The problem is in the anti-morale loss spells. If I'm correct in my observations.

I have to disagree. Compare FH to any other battlefield summon. FH has a lower path cost than anything but Animate Skeleton, Animate Dead or Will o' the Wisp. The undead summoning spells have 3 and 2 times the fatigue repectively, and I doubt we'll argue much about the relative effectiveness of a Skeleton as compared to a False Horror. Which may be fair enough, since we're comparing Enchantment 1 to Alteration 6.

Let's compare to Will o' the Wisp. Conjuration 5 vs Alteration 6. WotW gets you 2 Wisps, which share many properties with False Horrors, but costs 100 fatigue as opposed to 10 and a gem .

Now compare to Summon Lesser Air Elemental. This to me is a most interesting comparison, since our hypothetical Seraph would have his choice. 2A, 100 fatigue and a gem. Supposing our Seraph is carrying a gem. Should he spend it to summon a single Lesser Air Elemental and pass out in the process, or should he cast Quickness and spend the next 12 rounds or so summoning 2 Horrors per turn?

The fear aura on the Horrors is just complicating the argument, IMO. Remove it entirely, and they'll still rout you nearly as fast as before, through the "death of a thousand cuts" effect - the Horrors are skilled, if not strong.

Lastly, it doesn't really matter that False Horrors only have 1 Hit Point and under the right circumstances can be easily killed, since my entire argument is that it doesn't matter how many you kill since they will just keep coming throughout an entire battle.

[Boron]

Yeah we see that now in our special teamgame too .

My question now is what countermeasures do you have against false horror with the same research ? With twice as much research ?
Caelum / Pythium , the 2 nations which can run such a strat very effective are probably the 2 fastest researchers too . Pythium is not as effective here as Caelume because it lacks the flying ability and has 2S on their theurgs so Ryleh / Arco could counter that with mind duel quite a bit .

So please tell me how you can counter the false horrors in early-midgame effective with any other nation ?

Truper is very right with saying the false horror is strong . 16 att/def is really good and combined with etheralness this way he is not easy to kill by most normal troops . Then he is not targeted any longer by your mages or they kill your own troops .

But the main point is with a staff of storms you could probably take away a lot of fear from the false horrors because they would be slow then . BUT we are mainly talking about the caelum raiding strat with 1-3 seraphs + a few decoy archers . You can't have everywhere a commander with a staff of storms or a SC .

So you are reduced to 3-4 provinces and can't do much against by the time caelum can do this . Meanwhile they just need e.g. to tech to the Airqueens and finish you with them .

So give me examples with which you can defend against this earlygame . I myself don't find too many and most are extremely expensive .

[Cohen]

Well Caelum with 100 gold mages and A2W1 are damn good, and Arch Seraphs aren't capitol only.
How can you compete.
Pithium too has cheap Theurg for what they obtain (150 gold for S2 A W H3, sacred).

False Horror IMO should have more fatigue and/or be A2. (like 20 or 30 fatigue). And no fear aura.
Repel is almost useless cause of etherealness, the auras like the abysyan one doesn't burn them so quickly and your troops rout before.

They still represent a good stopping wall if you count on a wrathful skies (I'm playing with that strat in a game).

And in another game with Caelum that I choosed to play without False Horrors, Caelum did well too (Truper was in as Abysya) and all the other 3 player ganged up against Caelum in order to defeat him.

[Boron]

I think there is almost no counter for a timespan of 5-20 turns against caelum using 1-3 seraphs in a planned attack .
By the time caelum gets false horror you have your Sc pretender if you have one and perhaps 1-2 weak Scs .
Mages at that stage can't defeat them as well i think .

So you can't defend more than 2-3 provinces against that once caelum has false horrors .

It maybe that i still lack a bit of experience so if you see any counter which is not too costy then plz say .

[Mardagg]

Boron said:

It maybe that i still lack a bit of experience so if you see any counter which is not too costy then plz say .

Any mixture of flying troops,unbreakable troops and cheap Archers works well.You dont need many troops.
Some time ago I was up against Caelum ,using the False Horror strat,quite early in the game.
I played Abysia.
I had 2 Fiends of Darkness,an Apprentice and some indie archers(set on fire archers) in every important province.
he wasnt able to raid most of my lands because of this ,but I was able to raid his, using Horde from Hell.
Thats why I won the war.

[Cohen]

Hordes from Hell requires 30 Blood Slaves.
Some could trapeze costs 6-9 air gems.

And Imps are worst than False Horrors.