Troops vs magic, what am I doing wrong?

[krpeters]

OK, this has been bugging me for a while, and I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I typically play SP against several Difficult AI opponents. No matter what I do, it seems like troop strength seems to matter way more than magic, at least up to level-6 research. At what research level is magic really relevant?

For example, I was recently trying EA C'tis. I thought a good easy strategy to use magic would be to hand a few Reborn some death gems and let them cast Shadow Blast. But when I do the math, it doesn't add up:

Reborn: 100 gold
Death gem: equivalent to 25 gold
Shadow Blast: hits 7 squares, I estimate smacks a net 15 gold worth of enemy troops per square (between misses, hitting my troops, and similar effects)
7 * 15 = 105, < 125 gold.

For 125 gold I can field 9 Elite Warriors which are going to do a lot more damage.

Only other thing I can see to do is hand the Reborn three gems, to get a fatigue reduction on the first casting so they can cast it a second time. But that's equivalent to 175gold cost, which is still not that efficient against 210 damage.

Seems like I should skip recruiting mages altogether, take the extra cash and build castles, and just build a swarm of Elite Warriors. I've tried this, and it works really well. What am I missing in my attempts to use magic effectively?

Karl

[chrispedersen]

well, your math is fine, its your strategy thats wrong.
with ctis try spamming skeletons, avoiding the gem cost.

even so, you do have a high opportunity cost - those mages could be site searching etc. Research is the way to increase the effective value of a mage, ie, as you research more and more
the value of mages increases vis-a-vis normal troops.

[WingedDog]

Magic matters more then anything else in this game, you just need to learn choosing right spells. Evocation school isn't just the best choice if you are using death mages. Try researching some Enchantment instead for a start, and make your mages cast Rise Skeletons five times - you'll see they are much more effective this way.

[Stavis_L]

If, for whatever reason, you really *do* want to have Reborn cast shadow blast (vs. just recruiting more Sauromancers instead), you might want to invest in some Skull Staves. At 7D w/hammer, you're going to come out ahead vs. using gems to cast very shortly. I'd recommend just going with the Sauromancers, though, and, as recommended above, doing skellispam.

[AdmiralZhao]

In general, magic is used to create combos that national troops cannot handle and to counter combos that your national troops cannot handle. In your question you describe the first case, where at research level 7 you start to see battle winning spells (Mass Protection, Fog Warriors, Darkness, etc.) that let you massacre unsupported national troops. And so long as your opponents just use human-level troops against you, you can get away with not using magic, or in waiting until you've invested enough use the high level spells.
However, if you are facing the second case where your opponent has something your national troops cannot handle (elephants, combat pretender, blessed sacreds, etc), magic is needed to counter their advantage. You see this primarily in MP, since in SP the AI isn't smart enough to put together vicious combos.


For the particular case you gave with EA C'tis, I'd recommend that old stand by of skelespam. While your casters are initially expensive, they do not take any casualties so long as they win the battle. With a normal army, you lose a portion of your troops after each battle, but the casters can keep fighting indefinitely without losses. And once you reach Evo 7, you can combine the skeletons with Cloud of Death, and then things become really fun.

[krpeters]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

In general, magic is used to create combos that national troops cannot handle, and to counter combos that your national troops cannot handle. In your question you describe the first case, where at research level 7 you start to see battle winning spells (Mass Protection, Fog Warriors, Darkness, etc.) that will let you massacre unsupported national troops. And so long as your opponents just use human-level troops against you, you can get away with not using magic, or in waiting until you've invested enough to start using the high level, battle winning spells.
However, if you are facing the second case where your opponent has something your national troops cannot handle (elephants, combat pretender, blessed sacreds, etc), magic is needed to counter their advantage. You see this primarily in MP, since in SP the isn't smart enough to put together vicious combos.


For the particular case you gave with EA C'tis, I'd recommend that old stand by of skelespam. While your casters are initially expensive, they do not take any casualties so long as they win the battle. With a normal army, you lose a portion of your troops after each battle, but the casters can keep fighting indefinitely without losses. And once you reach Evo 7, you can combine the skeletons with Cloud of Death, and then things become really fun.

Right, I can see at high level research there's a mess of battlefield spells that look effective, provided you can cast them against the enemy's army and not his PD. I seem to have a hard time intersecting his armies with mine... only thing that works reliably is to park my army on his capital and make his armies come to me And yeah, the AI rarely throws anything at me that my national troops can't handle other than "too much" which is what I was hoping mid level magic could help with. It seems like to vaporize his 300-soldier hordes, I have to have those L7+ spells. Skelspam really isn't going to stop an army of that size... nor is falling fires or thunderstrike or any other mid-level spell cast by a similar gold-worth of mages.

I guess the trouble is trying to figure out how to balance the game right in AI. Any AI that is weak enough for me to survive against while spending lots of gold to research high-level spells is also weak enough for me to skip the research and just crush with troops, it seems.

[sector24]

Skellispam is definitely the most cost efficient move for C'tis. You're going to get much more than 5 casts of Raise Dead per Sauromancer because as you flood the battlefield with skeletons, your mages have time for their fatigue to dip below 100 and cast it again. Also, your opponent's fatigue starts to build and as the battle drags on they start taking more hits.

Shadow Blast is much more useful for removing difficult units from the battlefield than it is for just general destruction. For instance fighting double blessed troops that could kill 10+ Elite Warriors before going down would be a good time to use Shadow Blast. But the computer obviously doesn't do that so I don't think there's ever really a need for that spell against the AI.

To take your argument to extremes, it's much more cost effective to put 125 PD into every province than it is to recruit Elite Warriors. For a one time investment of 8,000 gold your province becomes impregnable for the rest of the game. The AI almost never builds the right troops in the right numbers to defeat a free army like that.

The problem with Elite Warriors and PD is that they aren't time efficient. It's going to take years and years to conquer the enemy a few provinces at a time. With magic, once you get the spells you need you can teleport in raiders, wipe out huge armies with just a couple spells, basically redraw the map in a couple turns. It's not cost effective for a long time, but it is efficient.

PD: Cost Effective, not efficient
Elite Warriors: Somewhat cost effective, somewhat efficient
Mages: Not cost effective, very efficient (becomes moreso at higher research levels)

[krpeters]

Originally Posted by sector24

To take your argument to extremes, it's much more cost effective to put 125 PD into every province than it is to recruit Elite Warriors. For a one time investment of 8,000 gold your province becomes impregnable for the rest of the game. The AI almost never builds the right troops in the right numbers to defeat a free army like that.

LOL!!! You know, now I'm going to have to try this and see what happens!!! This may be the ultimate AI opponent killer strategy! ;->

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by sector24

To take your argument to extremes, it's much more cost effective to put 125 PD into every province than it is to recruit Elite Warriors. For a one time investment of 8,000 gold your province becomes impregnable for the rest of the game.

As a further example... it is relatively easy to take out 8000 gp worth of pd. It can be done with as little as 100 gp worth of troops....

[sector24]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

As a further example... it is relatively easy to take out 8000 gp worth of pd. It can be done with as little as 100 gp worth of troops....

I can't think of a 100gp troop that the AI uses that will kill 125 PD. But feel free to prove me wrong.

Also, I'm not sure that the game's difficulty level affects this much. They get more gold and resources but they aren't any smarter. Most of the time the PD is such a deterrent that they will not even attack you. Even if they do have a huge army on your border, they rarely attack with the full stack and/or they use poor orders. The difference between 50 PD and 125 PD is unbelievable, just make a SP game and try it out.