Vengeance of the Dead makes me angry!

[thejeff]

He's an SC. He's geared for it.

MR gear at least, which means 4 isn't an assured kill, since most of them probably won't take.

[Loren]

Originally Posted by thejeff

It's also pretty uncommon in a normal assassination to not have one side or the other dead or fleeing long before turn 50.

It would be a pretty odd situation. You'd need to be completely invulnerable to your enemy to last long enough. And he have to be invulnerable to anything you could equip yourself with or why bother.

Knocking yourself out with your own aura probably won't work, since you'll hit 200 and start taking damage.
A berserk, blinking assassin with 2 Life Long Protections and very low movement (crippled?) might stay out of the way long enough to trigger the defender's route even if the imps couldn't scratch him. Probably wouldn't work, but it would be fun to watch.

I've been in a battle that due to a lack of adequate scripting ended up with two guys who couldn't touch each other. This was against the AI so I played around with it a bit and there's no question, it was always a stalemate.

One guy kept summoning junk, the other guy kept frying the junk before it closed. This kept up until the autorout kicked in--neither side having been hit for a single point of damage.

[Bananadine]

I RAN INTO THIS AGAIN AND IT MADE ME MAD AGAIN

Not via Vengeance of the Dead though. I've gotten used to that. But somehow the unforgettable loss of my most unkillable commander to that spell still didn't teach me that basically the same rules apply in normal battles too: If the battle is too big to be finished in time, then even the winners are liable to flee, and when trolls, fatigue-making spells, and Army of Lead are involved, there's a decent chance that it's gonna be that big.

So, even demiliches in friendly dominion will get scared and run away from the things that they are totally succeeding at killing (but not quickly enough). And then perhaps they will flee into an enemy province (maybe still in friendly dominion!) and invisibly, permanently die. I AM ANGRY ABOUT THIS okay I feel better now.

The simple solution is of course to prepare a good escape route. I kinda wish there weren't a simple solution, because these routing rules are really quite bad, and if they were truly game-breaking (instead of just one more subtle but extremely important detail one must learn the hard way and then remember forever in order to become excellent at this game) then maybe the problem would get fixed. (N.B.: My problem here, as with Vengeance of the Dead, is not that the painful lesson is painful, but that in these few cases it is ugly, nonintuitive, fiction-breaking, and seemingly easy to fix.)

Well, there's always the possibility that an eccentric billionaire will come along, purchase the source from Illwinter, and release it on SourceForge. Hey, with open-ended die rolls anything can happen.

[Slobby]

Actually I think this most recent case was a simple fear based route and not 50 turn limit.

Assuming of course you're talking about our most recent epic battle...

[Bananadine]

Fearful demiliches in friendly dominion?

[Bananadine]

I just tried to count the rounds, and got to about 70 before the heavy routing began. At any rate, I claim that a routing system that allows the thing that happened to happen is broken.

That said, I guess it is only consistently and severely broken for huge battles. So another decent solution is to play on smaller maps... which I intend to do in the future.

[WraithLord]

Routing on it's many forms is a serious pain. It can happen due to moral break or turn limit and sometimes it's just ridicoulous.

Recent example (Sharivar), Army full of SCs and ~1k undead chaff.
The usual buffs take place (AoG, WotF, fog warriors etc...). undead can't be killed fast enough for SCs to see action. turn limit comes, my army routes although it's much stronger than the lone SC it was facing.
Now, if opponent complements that by cutting off retreat route. Well, that's when things get real ugly.

[B0rsuk]

Hi,

I just wanted to say I don't really play Dominions anymore. I'm a lurker in these forums. But I really enjoyed Bananadine's ranting, especially the "several posts in a row" thing. You've made my day :-). And yes, I agree the mechanics of the spell are awkward, misleading and unintuitive. That there are other ways to kill SC's (more effective, less effective...) is not the point. The point is incorrect description.

[NTJedi]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

Cripes, a commander can have 334 hit points, 20% regeneration, 30 morale, 21 protection, ethereality, zero fatigue gain, a vine shield, and an ELIXIR OF LIFE and still die from it! After the dead ones have already "routed"!

I guess I need to use charcoal shields instead, from now on. Or some kind of berserker suit.

Many have lost dozens of SC's from the auto-kill design flaw. Many have requested an adjustable battlefield turn setting because computers are so fast and powerful while continuing to improve. There's several methods in which the developers could properly fix this issue:
1) an adjustable battlefield turn setting
* because we want to watch those battles which last 140 turns instead of auto-kill at turn_75 !

2) change the auto-kill into auto-retreat thus the battle still instantly ends on turn_75 and forces unit(s) to appear in neighboring provinces.

3) Battle ends with attacker(s) sitting on top of the province yet not owning the province and defenders underneath. Basically the same as what happens when a stealthy unit is within an enemy province yet no stealth thus forcing the battle to continue next turn.


All we can do is keep praying Illwinter can provide us one of these fixes.... until then our beloved SC's will continue to have meaningless and unfair deaths.