Strategy vs Luichurp's invinvible golem armies

Ok. Basically almost all games I run against my wife when she plays Luichurp ends the same way.

We play huge map, and often turn off the armageddon counter.

Suddenly comes marching a huge army of golems, twenty? fourty? sixty? Depending on the time of the attack it can be wood, iron etc. And they all shoot fireballs.

Its hopeless. Even with a -horde- of pyre zombies I can't even make a dent. My heroes dies beneath the iron feets of the merciless golem army, my mages cast their spells without effects, the golems don't even fear my restless dead. Only the elven worldspell works, and it only helps once.

I'd need some unit with Golem-slaying, some hero with +80% vs golems or some spell that is golem oriented.

Do have anyone have an strategy aside from 'rushing her the first chance you get with drowned + severius' please?

don't let her get fire mana. that means no fireballs

Kill the adepts with assassins and area spell the golems. Without healing, the golems are sitting ducks.

To protect yourself from fireballs, get a few high defense units. Being only 4s, an 8 with combat 5 should suffice to deflect them without much damage.

Of much importance: See the golems coming from far away! Use hawks hitting peaks around your civ. Golems move one, cannot be hasted and cannot get mobility. If you see them far enough away, you have plenty of time to get assassins into position to kill the adepts before they reach fireball range.

Blind is nice to keep them at bay, use a ratha (or 3) to dash in, blind them and get out of fireball range.

If you can get arcane lore before the attack, your mages will outrange his fireballs and with mobility and friendly culture, you can fireball him, move out of range, repeat (this is also possible with just mobility, or friendly culture). This is one of the most infuriating things that can happen to one's army: The enemy hits you, moves out of range, you move 1 forward, repeat. If you see them from far enough away, you should get several rounds of fireballs on them without retribution before they get into your civ. With assassins to kill the adepts, they will be sorry they pressed on despite damage.

In summary, concentrate on their 3 weaknesses. They are slow (harass them from outside range), they do not heal (kill their adepts with assassins) and they get no xp (use fodder liberally). Once their adepts are dead, just throw fodder, area spells or summons at them until they are no longer a threat (they will not get xp and heal via promotion). Then kill them at your leisure or enjoy chasing the slow and injured ones home.

Another option is fire resistance/immunity units. But I am not sure that resistance works or how.


With some luck, you might hear the cry most treasured by Luch opponents: "This sucks, my golems are useless when alone and injured!" Be sure to respond with a merciless cackle



.02

civ_king said:

don't let her get fire mana. that means no fireballs

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This is probably the best counter. Golems in their current state are quite overpowered. Everything ecofarm said was true, but assuming your playing with simultaneous turns (which from my experience is true in most mp games), the golem army will be moving and shooting at the same time your army is acting, which means whoever has the best fast move (move at the very end of a turn and immediately at the beginning of the next turn) will triumph. Statistically, you won't win all the time, which becomes a problem when your trying to move in your assassins, Ratha's, or mages because, with a large stack of fireballs, even a single mistake with your strongest unit will not end well. The problem endemic to golems is not that they can acquire a large stack of units that can each shoot fireballs, but that they can do it very quickly. They gain the techs required very early (construction and elementalism) and there is very little delay between the time they have the techs and the time they can field fire II golems because they can just build them and not wait for them to mature (as is the case of adepts and mages).

On another note, Mounted units can do fairly well against the Luchuirp. If you are playing Hippus (well it will work with anyone, but it works best with hippus), your mounted units can move 4-5 at a normal range and they have the raider promo. This implies that if you can get mounted units early (which you should) you can harass them and (with a decent quantity of high withdrawal units) take a few cities too. This actually works surprisingly well against fireball golems as well because your units could, if used properly, completely bypass the enemy players oncoming (slow) golem army and head straight for their territory and cities and wreak havoc.

And if you are Lanun, the Golems are concentrated in one or two Stacks and have enough workers + Water nearby are you can build those Golems their very personal golem-Alcatraz.

(If you do recon with hawks as Ecofarm suggested you can very well prepare that trap in advance and reduce the necessary workers to about 10 by pre building and razing coves which you have to do to broaden the channel since you can't build a new cove in 2 square-raduis around an existing one.) If you try this the first time they might never see that one coming. Just make it big enough to prevent the Golems from directly killing your Workers before they can fireball. Cultists, and ships are good for razing the coves fast. But a few drown as sacrifice might be worth it.

This might at least work once and even if it doesn't make you win a game outright it might be greath fun to pull that one off and watch those golem Army be a big heap of sitting-ducks.


Also in a tactics which might work more than once (since its very hard to counter by Golems) you could cut off your Cities via channels so the Golems cant reach you and are forced to go Naval where you are clearly in advantage. So make it impossible for the golems to reach you and you are set. That one works against any land-locked-civ, but the slower the better.

That whould be just a few ideas for Lanun.

Fireres / Immunity does work but as long as i know just for the defending unit / direct spell damage. Not the rest of the Stack via collateral. But Orcs (and other inherently fire-resistant units) + Magic-Resistant + Fire Resistant combined adds up to 90% fire Resistance (But Level 7 Whould be needed for that i guess. Or Level 6 with Agressive. Could even be one higher. But i belive Magic-Res has got a requirement of Combat 4 from top of my head.). If you can also field some first strikes or healing ability the unit might eat a lot of fireballs before getting any substantial damage. Especially if you can field some Strength anyways an Ogre or Archer with that promotions might survive even 40 or 60 Fireballs.

pillaging their metal supplies would also help

Well then the same is still possible with wood-golems so it just weakens the golems a bit...

Arctic Circle said:

Even with a -horde- of pyre zombies I can't even make a dent.

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You're playing Sheaim, then? On a duel map? The Sheiam aren't exactly strong against rushes. Personally, I'd never play them in MP unless I were teamed up with the Clan or the Doviello.

ritualists should be able to make short work of golems though, if you manage to get them in time (depending on the golem master going RoK or not).

ok , playing the sheaim in this scenario or basically any setup would be ...

rush to get KoTE
then work your way down the arcane tree
the whole time your building adepts

in the beginning you can field far far more skeles then he can hope to deal with building golems. then you will over whelm him with specters. then you have a choice of fire elems , wraiths , or pit beasts.

with way a summoned army ALWAYS wins due to sheer numbers.

start the attacks with skeles early and never let up

gl

skeles vs woodgolems is still down to numbers though, with the fireball + golem attack usually outlasting 2 skeletons. The only advantage you really have: you'll get skellies before she gets her golems. In other words: attack early, attack hard, attack continuously. Rush the rusher

Personally I wouldn't go sheaim at all. You need to be able to harrass her production and destroy her resources. I'd choose Hippus (Tasunke). Build a load of horsemen and pillage all her improvements, then quickly retreat before her golems can get a chance to fight back. If you use Tasunke all your horsemen will be able to use her roads so this should be easy.

adding to that, high withdrawal horsemen should be able to take down an advancing golem army without too much trouble. I agree, hippus are better versus golems, but the OP was playing sheiam so we were responding to that. Fire-damage spells should help aswell by the way, but they may be too far down the tech tree to be of use.

Blackmantle said:

Well then the same is still possible with wood-golems so it just weakens the golems a bit...

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True, but wood golems have a weakness that other golems don't have, and if he is using pyre zombies, it becomes easier to exploit.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you are playing as the Sheaim and you turn off the AC, you are cutting yourself off from almost all of your higher tier units.

Also, everyone keeps referring to the OP's opponent as him, even though he mentioned that his wife was the one kicking his butt.

Thread necromancy for the win? The lichuirp's fireball golems were nerfed quite a few versions ago...

They weren't overpowered anyway, slow units can't be overpowered as you can just harass them to death. The issue with sim. turns is just that, Civ was never designed for such a feature, it's a hack to make games quicker, and you can't balance for it.

Huh...doesn't blast furnaces come pretty late in the game? You could've Pyre Rushed her 300 turns ago and you would'nt be dealing with this now, dude.