Countering End-Game Astral

[ComTrav]

Assuming you yourself have, at best, some Astral cobbled together from neutrals, what's the best counter to the ginormous astral communions certain nations can field in the late game?

Sending in armies against Master Enslave communions seems like a waste. Even with Army of Lead, it seems like they'll get enough of your army to mess you up. You can send in an SC and hope that none of them are set to cast Soul Slay/Paralyze (even with very high MR gear, against a large communion, all it takes is a lucky roll.)

Flyers set to "attack rear" and hope for the best seems like it might be the best option.

[konming]

Rain of stone works nicely against some astral nations.

[Micah]

Konming pretty much has it, you just have to bring in some heavies and nuke the battlefield and expect some losses...a clump of rejected tartarian chassis will soak up a lot of punishment while a BE goes off or you multi-cast rain of stones on your opponents' squishy mages.

[Gregstrom]

SCs or thugs with high MR could be quite good for stopping a Master Enslave.

[Kuritza]

Dont air shield, mistform, luck and etherealness all work against rain of stones?

[K]

Kuritza said:
Dont air shield, mistform, luck and etherealness all work against rain of stones?

And they all take time to get into play, and aren't completely effective against all the ways to foil a Communion.

[Agema]

Smashing the whole battlefield with big damage spells on the first turn or two before big buffs tend to arrive is a recommended tactic.

Also, master enslave is easy resist as I recall (+4). Add in Army of Lead (Earth) and ?Antimagic (Astral) each at +4MR and you should effectively be resisting at +12. Even if your opponent adds in some penetration, you'll lose only a very small chunk of your army. A bigger problem may be your battle mages targeting enslaved troops and catching your own troops rather than the opponent's big concentrations of units.

[llamabeast]

Army of lead and antimagic don't stack. No pair of buffs which give the same effect stack, in fact (obviously casting army of lead after antimagic will still give you the protection bonus, but no further MR bonus).

[Folket]

Nuke their armies with overland rituals.

[Twan]

MR spells won't save regular troops, they are only usefull to protect people already having correct MR, as you can expect an endgame communion master to have full penetration gear (-5 MR) and one or two more penetration from his level if communion is large and ennemy use LoNS.

So just don't use regular troops, if you need chaff use mindless who can't be enslaved (at least if the opponent don't use arcane domination or undead mastery too).

Ideally only send thugs and mages with MR gear (MR gear = not just one amulet, you usually need 2 MR items in addition to an antimagic spell to start to be safe).If you can summon some, golems are of course a very good choice as they are immune to mind spells. As the communion master may cast soul slays or simple enslave with insane bonuses, you should expect your guys to have to resist against 9 or 10 penetration.

But you can exploit the way the spell AI use these one target spells, as your SC with the higher number of hp is the more likely to be targeted. So if you can give 30 MR to your toughest SC, he will protect a full team of thugs with lower hp and MR (it's not 100% sure but work usually).

Once you can have a thug/mages team surviving astral spells, it's rarely hard to win against astral nations (who rarely have as good access to thugs as their opponents, and usually don't have exceptionnal troops). In addition to mass dammage spells etc..., designing your thugs for making battle long + using some fatigue BE to kill the slaves can very well do the job (especially if the opponent use an half-reverse communion with some casting slaves).