Protection and Defense

[Redeyes]

The cat charm gives extra protection if you have an earth bless though, but you are better served with two bracers of protection. The bracers used as a pair is pretty much the only item that's worth more than the sum of the pair.

[Gregstrom]

Well, that shows what happens if you don't know all the information. I knew Cat Charm counted as armour for the E9 bless, but didn't know you could get the benefits from wearing 2 Bracers. Ho hum.

[Redeyes]

Well, you can also get the benefit if you wear three bracers

Thinking of Ashdod, who have an extremely easy time hitting the protection cap with an earth bless...

[Quitti]

Yeah, I think Adons had three misc slots - so e9n6 bless or something similar with 3 bracers and some extra reinvig and it can't really die to normal armies without meaningful mage support.

[chrispedersen]

Well, its tough but it can be done.

Fatigue crits would still get through. So if I had to do it without mages, I would look to net troops to entangle them, and delay them to get the fatigue up.

And then either lances or mauls etc. You could win by timing out as well.

Of course sauromatia would just androphag em to death.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Of course sauromatia would just androphag em to death.

They'd have to jump to MA first to do that though

[Graeme Dice]

You'd have a lot of trouble getting their fatigue to shoot up as they have a base 5 encumbrance, and an E9 bless gets rid of all but one of that.

[Redeyes]

Originally Posted by Quitti

Yeah, I think Adons had three misc slots - so e9n6 bless or something similar with 3 bracers and some extra reinvig and it can't really die to normal armies without meaningful mage support.

I had someone try that strategy against me when I played Pythium.
Between astral, hydras, independent minotaurs and Ferrus the Iron Mage the Adons were rather trivial to deal with, even when the best of them (on turn 25) had 25 magic resistance, 26 points of regen and 34 protection.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by Agema

I would expect here again over 30 Def is vanishingly unlikely. That will partly be because there are much better ways to equip an SC rather than Def boosters: 30Def is made useless by all sorts of spells like earth meld, tangle vines, paralyze, and so on, and due to -2Def per attack, it quickly degrades if the SC is swarmed by many attackers.

Err, no, or rather yes to the last postulate and no to the earlier "vanishingly unlikely" one.

There are several SC chassis that start out with extremely high defense and routinely sport well over 30 defense, the most obvious one being our friend, the Djinn, who starts with a defense of 20, hits 30 with ease with one shield and possibly a bit of experience, and is often seen dualwielding shields, but more generally any SC type unit devoted to anti-SC duties where not being hit at all by an opponent's weapon of doom takes on increased importance over being able to survive the weapon hitting you. (Fragile SCs like the queens of elemental air are other obvious candidates for stacking defense rather than protection). Shields like Shield of the Accursed are in their element here, as are Shield of Valor and Shield of Gleaming Gold.

There are lots of defense 15-16 chassis in the game, many good for a pair of boots of speed as part of their thug/SC duties, that will hit 30+ defense with a bit of experience under their belt should you be willing to invest in them and while it may not happen in your MP games, it certainly happens a lot in mine.

It certainly isn't the most common way to see thugs and SCs kitted out, but it has its place and isn't vanishingly rare.


As an example, here's my favourite anti-SC SC from an ongoing game (where his job is obviously to jump anybody using an SC or the like in my dominion). Everything is easily and cheaply replacable (except for the Mage Bane, which is in no way essential to making him exceedingly nasty - it just makes him even nastier versus his intended prey), and his high defense means that most SCs and even armies of normal units are likely to miss.

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/1889/antisc.jpg (picture is with an E4D4B4 minor blessing as prophet in dom 10 and with heroic toughness 56)

Any attacks that does go through his does not have to deal with much protection but does have to deal with 81 hp regeneration/round. Other armours used to counter whatever the opponents are fielding (resistances, even more defense, reinvigoration+even more MR - the hydra skin is just the basic fallback for the last ~24 hp/round). This one is definitely a "nuke with Gift from the Heavens" type of SC, for overwhelming him in melee with thugs/SCs (probably armed with morningstars if they want to hit) is likely to end up with the surviving winners horrormarked very feriously.

Which non-artefact shield would be a better choice for him in general than the Shield of the Accursed he is using? Some other shield might be better for specific niché uses, but that's what swapping equipment to better face known threats is for.

[Quitti]

Shields of accursed are excellent. But if you don't have access to astral+blood (or astral and empower blood) there are a few other candidates - weightless kite shield is a good one on any non-enc0 chassis, and so is black steel tower shields if you can get some reinvig. I remember using EA Vanheim Vanjarl thug/sc's to great effect against niefelheim - equipped them with flame brand, weightless kite, sacred shroud (had d9e6n4w4 bless or something in similar lines) and ring of frost - accompanied with mistform they were quite a match against any giants he threw at me. Might have had girdles of strength on a few for some added damage, but I'm not certain. It was a game with high amount of sites, I think I had somewhere around 50+ air gem income with gale gate and 40+ earth gem income with earth well at the peak so gems weren't really an issue there.