Newbish question

[thejeff]

Just a note about dominion 9-10 Awe on the pretender: It doesn't work best with a pretender who already has awe, though the stacking helps. It works best with a pretender who has Fear, since Fear reduces the morale of everyone around him. It really can be impressive.

But don't take our word for it. Try it out. It's hard to get the effectiveness of SCs until you've played with them. Take an awake Dom10 Wyrm with no magic, put him in the back of the field scripted "hold,hold,hold,attack" and send him out solo on the first turn. You can still have good scales, but now you'll be expanding faster the gold comes pouring in faster, you'll have full resources in your capital sooner, etc, etc.

[Loren]

thejeff said:
Just a note about dominion 9-10 Awe on the pretender: It doesn't work best with a pretender who already has awe, though the stacking helps. It works best with a pretender who has Fear, since Fear reduces the morale of everyone around him. It really can be impressive.

But don't take our word for it. Try it out. It's hard to get the effectiveness of SCs until you've played with them. Take an awake Dom10 Wyrm with no magic, put him in the back of the field scripted "hold,hold,hold,attack" and send him out solo on the first turn. You can still have good scales, but now you'll be expanding faster the gold comes pouring in faster, you'll have full resources in your capital sooner, etc, etc.

Why hold, hold, hold? What does that accomplish?

[Amhazair]

Loren said:

Why hold, hold, hold? What does that accomplish?

Often it's not really crucial, but it means that if your (indy) opponent has troops of two different speeds (like knights and infantry) they will become strung out and fail to attack you at the same time. It might also mean that enemy archers are farther away from you when you get into melle, and thus have less chance to damage you.

Of course, this applies against independents (and PD). Human players tend to try and coördinate their armies.

[JimMorrison]

thejeff said:
Just a note about dominion 9-10 Awe on the pretender: It doesn't work best with a pretender who already has awe, though the stacking helps. It works best with a pretender who has Fear, since Fear reduces the morale of everyone around him. It really can be impressive.

According to the manual, your results are not due to the mechanics working as you state.

A Fear effect does not reduce the morale of nearby enemies. It forces a morale check each round, with a penalty equal to the Fear bonus, causing a rout if the check is failed.

Ergo it has no directly synergistic effect with Awe, it just happens that if you have a high enough fear effect to easily rout PD within the first few combat rounds, any awe at all will give you a good shot at surviving with minimal damage.


If the manual is totally full of it, then I will consent, but the description seems to very much differentiate it from other morale checks.

And anyway, in my experience, the potential of Awe+7 with Virtue, is an incredibly powerful tool. It gives you a strong effect even up to elite infantry with 15 morale. This essentially makes her nearly invincible against all normal troops, which is an advantage that continues to be leveragable through the entire game (though she's a poor raider against say R'lyeh, with their lobo guard PD).

[thejeff]

Haven't dug into that part of the manual in awhile, but check the morale displayed on units in the Fear area of effect. It definitely drops.

[Endoperez]

Morale definitely lowers defence. It is pretty powerful even without Awe, so it could well force morale checks in addition to that.

[Agrajag]

Endoperez said:
Morale definitely lowers defence.

Huh?

Anyway, the synergy between awe and fear is indeed because it routs PD, not because of morale issues. Even if we assume each 1 fear decreases morale of everyone around by 1 (which it definitely does not), then it's effect on awe is identical to 1 awe, since lowering enemy morale by 1 is equivalent to raising awe by 1.

[JimMorrison]

Okay, I just did some testing. Fear auras have absolutely -ZERO- effect on a unit's morale. Enemy morale gradually went down over the course of the fight, due to losses etc, however there was no direct correlation to the Fear effect whatsoever.

In fact, providence allowed me to take 40 militia against an Onyx Amazon + Nightmares province, and the militia actually held for 3 full rounds against the Nightmares, even with like 20 overlapping Fear effects against them, their morale only dropped from getting cut down like wheat.

Bear in mind, it's possible to gear Fear over 20+ with a D9/10 pretender and items, if they start with Fear. That would basically mean that anything not divine or mindless would pretty much auto route if it got within sight of you, and even 30 morale troops would have trouble attacking through your Awe.

[MaxWilson]

Endoperez just misspoke/mistyped. "Fear definitely lowers morale" is what he meant.

Horror Helmet/Shield of Gleaming Gold is effective against normal troops for basically the same reason. Awe +0 and Fear+0 is easier to get than Awe +4, and to a first approximation they do the same thing.

-Max

P.S. Hmmm, how much fear could you get? I think the PoD is Fear +5 or something normally, before counting Death magic. Give him D10 and he'll be Fear +15. With Horror Helmet, Aegis, and Stymphalian Wings he'll be somewhere north of Fear +30. Am I forgetting anything? Other than the obvious Horror Harmonica, but that's a Fear attack on everyone on the battlefield, which is totally separate and different.

If you're going to rout the enemy army make sure you cast Wind of Death first so they actually DIE too.

P.P.S. Oh yes, you could give him a Lantern Shield in his other hand. Fear +35 at least, unless some of those items are more powerful than I remember. I guess you could give him a Ring of Sorcery and a Ring of Wizardry to boost him to D12, so that's Fear +37. Can't think of anything else.

[MaxWilson]

Jim,

I'm not sure what was going on with your tests. Battle losses don't drop Morale, they affect the bonus that units get for being mostly intact (which doesn't show up on the screen). I don't know why you didn't see a correlation between Fear strength and the morale drop, but it's possible that you don't realize that Fear +X refers to the AREA of fear. The strength of the Fear effect is 1/5 of that, according to KO. Try testing Fear+50 vs. Fear+0 and you'll see it drop quickly, but if you tried Fear+0 vs. Fear+4 you wouldn't see any difference except that 9 squares would be affected instead of 5 (which you probably wouldn't notice).

Multiple overlapping fear effects are indeed fearsome. Frequently troops will rout even against enemies they could easily beat, if the enemies didn't have Fear. That's precisely why Onyx Amazons are so annoying, but it didn't show up in your test because the militia were ALSO getting cut down like wheat (and probably the ones who were within the Fear aura were mostly dead as well as Fear'ed, and thus irrelevant--although you said you did some a morale drop on some of them, and that was from Fear).

-Max