Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?

[Agrajag]

kasnavada said:
The fact that they don't cost upkeep anymore sounds like the exploit to me...

They cost no upkeep because they are lame undeads. Even Dusk Elders or Tartarians don't cost any upkeep. WAD.
You might say that this makes this spell too good/overpowered/unbalanced, but that's not the same as an exploit.

kasnavada said:
I mean, the MR argument is a joke. You can just buy again the same amount of mages and priests in a few turns. Even if half of your low MR resurrected units get killed, you doubled your capacity for buying new fresh mages !

1) Doubled? Upkeep is just 1/15 of unit cost, so zombifying all of your mages will increase your mage money by 6.67%. 3.33% for priests.
2) Losing half of your mages is serious business! And it is going to take some time to recruit them back, not just gold.

[kasnavada]

The fact that most summons don't cost any money or upkeep seemed dumb to me in the first place, but that's the way the game works. It's be great if that changed too, something like spending 1 gem every 15 or 30 turns to keep your summons alive would make summons more "balanced" toward regular units.

1) Doubled? Upkeep is just 1/15 of unit cost, so zombifying all of your mages will increase your mage money by 6.67%. 3.33% for priests.

Now, that's a perfect example of a strawman argument.

If you transform your mages and priest, your mage & priest for those upkeep becomes zero. That's a 100% reduction. That means for the next turns (not only one) you can buy again 1/15 of what you just killed FOR THE REST OF THE GAME. Note in capital letter the part that you missed. It seemed so obvious to me that I didn't even write it.

The rest of the game is more than one turn. I'm assuming 15 turns for the sake of putting up a number, so I said doubled. It could be 30 or 45, that means triple or more...

EDIT : the counterargument I see coming is that the upkeep for the new mages will cost money. I will already answer that argument : the combo can be done more than once.

2) Losing half of your mages is serious business! And it is going to take some time to recruit them back, not just gold.

From the thread, it would seem like I overstated this part. It would seem that only a few mages and priests don't get reanimated...

[Twan]

Level 7 mean the game is in a stage where there is probably no neutral province.

So to use this trick you need to *risk* your mages/priests in a fight where they will end with MR 5 and vulnerable to any anti-undead spell (and iirc they will also get morale 50 so you lose all if your forces have to retreat).

This alone balance this use of LAD for me. I can't see how someone can want to reduce the MR of all his mages in a late game battle against a real opponent, so the only possibility I see to use that is in an arranged battle...

But it's also very unlikely I would trust sufficiently anyone to arrange a fight to do that (and imagining someone succeed to arrange such battles, it's like the pseudo sickle exploit : if you have the diplomacy skill to convince someone to let you win battles, instead of trying to steal your artefacts / kill your mages, you just desserve the benefit after all).

Anyway, I understand that some players can consider this overpowered and bad for the game, which does not mean it's an exploit. Personally I consider instant battlewide offensive spells cast by the defender in round one far more overpowered and worse for the interest of the game, but I won't use the word "exploit" to try to convince people of my views. Like other too powerful spells, or unperfect game mechanics, LAD just work like it was designed to.

[Agrajag]

Before I start answering, let me remind you that we are discussing the strength of this strategy, which has nothing to do with it being an exploit or not.

kasnavada said:

Now, that's a perfect example of a strawman argument.

If you transform your mages and priest, your mage & priest for those upkeep becomes zero. That's a 100% reduction. That means for the next turns (not only one) you can buy again 1/15 of what you just killed FOR THE REST OF THE GAME. Note in capital letter the part that you missed. It seemed so obvious to me that I didn't even write it.

The rest of the game is more than one turn. I'm assuming 15 turns for the sake of putting up a number, so I said doubled. It could be 30 or 45, that means triple or more...

And if you look over a period of 1500000 turns, you can get 100000 times the mages :O :O :O
More seriously, it's your mage producing capacity that increases by 3.33%-6.67%.
However, if we also assume that out of 15 mages you zombify, one dies (due to accident, or the spell not working properly, or soulless being lame and dying/being banished etc.), that benefit is completely canceled. If more than 1 dies, then the spell starts losing you money.

From the thread, it would seem like I overstated this part. It would seem that only a few mages and priests don't get reanimated...

Now don't forget those that die because they are 5MR soulless.

[Digress]

I guess my only problem is with soulless, mindless priests. That isn't really unholy its just silly - they should really take a hit to their holy magic level to reflect that they have been reduced to zombies.

As for other mages - well they become pretty useless for almost everything other than research (and leading the undead). 1 hit point, poor MR, abysmal precision - and I think mindless beings should take a hit to their research ability.

[Jazzepi]

They end up as one hitpoint mages? D:

Eeeeww. Lord help you if you ever run into anyone casting a battlefield wide AOE spell.

Jazzepi

[Sombre]

Digress said:
I guess my only problem is with soulless, mindless priests. That isn't really unholy its just silly - they should really take a hit to their holy magic level to reflect that they have been reduced to zombies.

Clearly you've never seen a Pope.

[thejeff]

And if you're doing this to reduce costs on your researchers don't forget to count in the lost research time in getting them to the battlefield and the risk in exposing them to battle. Which, by the way, has to be a significant enough battle to convince the AI to spend gems...

[Twan]

It may be particularly fun if the AI overwrite Life after Death but not the spell used to kill the mages.

[PvK]

I was mostly joking. I think it might work. It was reported in Dom 2 that tainted unit blood slaves could get sacrificed (and IIRC there was a way to crash Dom 2 doing that). I don't know about commander blood slaves or what happens in Dom 3 though. I also don't know if it would set off the amulet of vengeance or not (it might bypass that), nor do I know if two amulets of vengeance both explode - the second one was sort of an explanation point on the joke.

Phoenix Pyre, however, seems like another possibility. Though I think you're right that simple cold aura would do it, given enough time - you just need to keep the artificial battle going long enough, which is the other half of the "how to make this an efficient factory" question.