How to deal with Darkness?

[Shadrach]

Bumping this to emphasize that Solar Brilliance should not be considered a general purpose counter to Darkness.

I just fought my first battle deploying Solar Brilliance against an opponent using Darkness, and about half my surviving troops were blinded, even though they were checking with an effective MR of 18 (10 base, +4 from Antimagic, +4 because it's easy to resist). If there was only one check I should expect to have about 3% blinded (6% chance of failing the MR check * 50% chance of being blinded). Solar Brilliance is a Battlefield Enchantment, but the description in the manual could easily be interpreted as saying that the blindness and damage checks are only made once. A little work with binomial probability shows that the number of blinded troops is right around what would be expected if the check is made every round. I think a lot of people have figured this out, but I think it's worth stating explicitly.

The main lesson here is that Solar Brilliance is really more about providing a counter for the large death gem income + mass undead chaff + Darkness + Rigor Mortis combo of doom than it is a general counter to Darkness - that is the niche where the cost-benefit is best. In most other cases just sucking up the combat penalties and relying on precision 100 spells is probably better than blinding so many troops.

[Sombre]

I think basically every nation gets access to units which work fine in darkness, one way or another. Constructs, undead, blind units, plant units, those with aoe attacks etc. Then there are the spells and items.

Now in a lot of cases the counters are way more costly than the darkness + associated troops being used against you. But then no-one said darkness isn't an awesome spell.

[Meglobob]

Solar Brilliance is an excellent counter to darkness for any nations with good healing abilities, recuperation, the chalice or gift of health.

Any of your troops that are blind, just withdraw to a fort until they are good to go again.

In such circumstances you can deploy solar brilliance just for its blindness effect, in big battles even when facing living troops and not just undead.

[thunderbird]

Originally Posted by Tuidjy

Darkness and Solar Brilliance are cast, in both possible orders.

Both icons appear in the right hand corner.
Units do not experience defense/attack penalties.
Units get blinded. (There appears to be a MR check, but that may be just luck
or the effects of regeneration)

Am I correct in my reading of the description that Solar Brilliance's blindness effect only works against troops and not commanders/mages?

[vfb]

No. It will blind commanders/mages too (though they usually have higher MR than troops).

[Ink]

they probably wouldn't try to cast Darkness during an assassination attempt.

not that I've ever seen that particular scenario, but I have had mages scripted to cast BF spells (like Storm or something) and seen them not cast it during assassination attempts

[vfb]

I've assassinated a PoD who was scripted to cast Darkness. He cast it, for immediate 200 fatigue. So my Disease Demon flew over and chopped up the PoD while he was passed out.

[thejeff]

It's probably not Assassination, but the standard trigger on whether the battle is worth spending gems on.

Regular assassins aren't. Disease Demons apparently are.

[Tollund]

Absyian slayers are also considered worthwhile as gem targets.