Re: A hell of a waste of gems
1). You're welcome.
2). Would you have five well-equipped assassins in the right place at the right time? You may have gotten the wrong idea from me. I'm not a fan of the thug-assassin approach, but instead favor quantity over quality. A spell such as Tupilak fails as often as not, for instance, but is useful (although too pricy). As Ctis, you can manage 10 assassins at 110 gold each, unequipped.
If even a three manage to take out key targets, at the right time, you've got a potential bargain. If killing three 110 gold mages saves 70 infantry, you've made your money back.
I do not favor use of assassins as a form of attrition, however. Kill and attack, is how I use them.
3). The key to avoiding summons is using the enemy's own momentum against him. If he's expecting a minor battle, or researching away, he likely will have summon skeleton scripted. If he expects to face a dozen wights, he'll probably have wither bones or Dust to Dust scripted instead, leaving it to auto spellcasting when there are no valid targets. As well, spell AI sometimes overrides gem use when it determines an enemy isn't a big enough threat, overruling that 'Living Earth'. If he's expecting a large, pitched battle where he needs to pull out ALL the stops, the very first spell scripted by those random astral marshmasters will likely be astral communions.
Asssasins require bait, traps, and timing. Any uber-equipped assassin can be wasted by simply spamming indie commanders, though there are times that better equiped assasins are handy. (as an aside, that build I mentioned early works quite nicely). If you wait until a situation comes along where the enemy has to script for maximum potential, you avoid counters or at least make them waste gems.
It's worth noting that magical beings require magical leadership. If you can figure out a way to kill that commander before you're killed, all those summons die as well. In that situation, melee is not the way to go.
On the plus side, if the timings right, and they just wasted so many gems on a single asssasin instead of your army, that may be agod trade as well, if you can take advantage of that before they restock from a scout or what not.
4). Killing an enemy commander does not have to be the equivalent of a death sentence. Sure, if you have one thug picking away each turn at the capital, someones going to come after him. But if you present the enemy with a dilemma... If you have raiding parties going on, anything patrolling is not hunting down your raiders. If you have an army threatening them, anything patrolling the countryside is outside of the fortress, exposed to attack, rather than bolstering the defenses of a long siege.
As a side note, it really only takes about 80 militia to guarantee the death of an assassin. Less with PD. If you have an army nearby, or remote summon spells, then that militia (no Abysian PD, please, ouch) either has to expose itself, unsupported, to attack and slaughter by a small detachment or they have to take mages off of research/summoning/rituals in order to give their patrollers proper support. A win-win situation.
Worth noting is that unrest decreases the effectiveness of patrols. A Black Servant with a bane venom charm can serve for about a turn before patrols catch up (move out soon), increasing unrest. Battles such as scouts and assassins also increase unrest. Neither fast enough alone to enable survival, but combined with hit&run, spell support such as Baleful Star or Blight, it can make retaliation impossible.
One way to preserve thugged assassins is to let the enemy invade and take your lands BEFORE you retaliate. If the enemy's just encroached on your land, overtax provinces around three deep to 200%. Not only will this raise funds for the war, but the unrest generated by this and the invading army will make it much harder to detect your assassins.
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