Can you have more than one skin?

[earcaraxe]

Originally Posted by ano

IIRC, the vulnerabilities of all skins stay in effect while only the highest protection bonus applies.
Try casting barkskin, stoneskin, ironskin, invulnerability. What will be the results?

check what i wrote.

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by ano

IIRC, the vulnerabilities of all skins stay in effect while only the highest protection bonus applies.
Try casting barkskin, stoneskin, ironskin, invulnerability. What will be the results?

My response was also on the basis of live tests, although I wasn't quite clear enough. With Xskin spells, only the malus of the highest prot spell in effect on you counts. If you have a skin and then get invul, you get the invul malus in addition to the Xskin malus currently in effect. I didn't test whether anything happens if you have invul and then an Xskin effect is cast upon you.

[Bananadine]

Y'all are talking about order of casting between Invulnerability and skin spells, but I don't think the game cares about that, except when it's running the spell-casting AI. My testing suggests that it all works in this simple fashion:

You can have one of four kinds of "skin" (where ordinary, non-magical skin is one kind). You can have one of two "invulnerability" states. Skin state is independent of invulnerability state. Since only one skin can be present, only one skin-related elemental vulnerability can be present. When tougher skin is applied, it replaces weaker skin completely. When weaker skin is applied to tougher skin, nothing happens. Again, this paragraph is about spell effects, not about the spell-casting AI.

The spell-casting AI seems to assume that if a "skin" or Invulnerability spell won't increase protection, then it shouldn't be cast. But if Wooden Warriors hits somebody with no magical skin and also somebody with ironskin, the ironskin, as stated above, will not change.

Invulnerability's protection-increasing effect seems to override the protection provided by a skin.

Strength of Gaia causes a barksin effect and some other effects. The barkskin seems to be independent of the other effects.

I know some of this has been said, but I think not quite all of it... and surely you understand the impulse to pedantically explain things, fellow wargame forum reader.

[thejeff]

This is actually fairly useful. Particularly when worrying about dropping Marble Warriors or Mass Protection and hitting the previously 100% resistant thugs.

It's a shame there seems to be no way to overwrite Ironskin, since 100% SR is the one I'd be most worried about and AoG/AoL are the buffs you'll really want in the late game.

[Bananadine]

Ah, I forgot about gold and lead. These initially appeared to break my model, since it's possible to gain all the benefits of both kinds of skin at the same time, suggesting that a unit can after all have more than one skin at a time.

But I tested it just now, and learned that lead skin may not exist! I told a caster to cast Army of Gold and then Army of Lead, and he did. But then I added an astral mage, and told it to cast Antimagic first. After that, my earth mage would only cast Army of Gold! So maybe Army of Lead gives everybody ironskin and "antimagic", which I think is the state provided by Antimagic, Resist Magic, and the amulet of antimagic. That is, Army of Lead may be a combination of Army of Iron (which of course doesn't exist) and Antimagic!

I wonder... maybe Army of Gold is a combination of Army of Iron and Warriors of Muspelheim. Then there'd be no goldskin state either!

I think Elemental Fortitude and Gaia's Blessing work this way too--as what amounts to combinations of anti-fire, anti-ice, and anti-shock spells. I know that the anti-fire part of Elemental Fortitude doesn't stack with the anti-fire part of Army of Gold, for instance.

[thejeff]

Yeah, that seems right to me.

Though I'd describe it in simpler terms. The AoL/AoG spells aren't combinations of other (possibly non-existant) mass spells, they just grant to everyone Ironskin + Resist Magic/50%FR.


I do think the Amulet of Antimagic stacks with Resist Magic spells.