How do you counter the Ljosalfar stack of doom?

[Hishan]

Greeting forum,
new(ish) player to FFH here, and i come to you with a gameplay query concerning the Ljosalfar AI.

It seems that in every game I have played against them they always amass an enormous stack of priests of leave/tigers, with a spattering of other units.

I normally play on warlord difficulty, yet whatever counters I have tried have been unsuccessful, the stack makes its unstoppable march towards my capital destroying my army as it goes.

The final straw came today, when playing as the Amurites, and destroying 3 other minor civs, I turned to the Ljosalfar who responded with a stack containing more than 58 tigers, and 58 priests.

I must have thrown about 100 fireballs and fire elementals at it, but the stack remains, and although my mages are still backpedalling the outcome seems inevitable.
What do I do?

tl:dr version: How do I stop giant tiger/priest of leaves stacks from the Ljosalfar AI

 

[Vulki]

AoE Damage (Air II, for example)
Melee Units (Men-a-Arms are nice, Swordsmen might be fine)
Wait and wear them out with Fire Elementals
Boost the mages with the Tower of Elements (+1 Strength Fireballs and Elementals)
Chanters (Perfect for hit-and-run)
Best of all: MOAR Mages

So, when you put in all your AoE and summons and you can't kill them off, use your chanters. Once you can, just crush the softened stack with your melees.

 

[A Moon]

Blinding Light, the Sun II spell, will also stop some priests from summoning tigers for a few turns. And it might slow down your losses a bit if you used some recon units with subdue animal.

 

[Hishan]

From the wiki

Maelstrom:"Damage units about +15% to a limit of +30% damage.Range: +2"

Sounds like my best option at the minute is to cast my world spell, change one of my mana nodes to air, (I had greedily turned all my nodes to fire for extra fireball strength).

Then use the free exp to get my mages to air II ASAP, whilst trying to whittle down the stack using fireballs/elementals. The end goal being to have about 4-5 mages with air II to weaken the stack, then the rest to clean up with fireballs.

I realise that a decently upgraded and entrenched melee force would probably be able to withstand it due to the low strength of tigers and priests, (even moreso if supported by air mages), and I have been attacking them with chanters but it feels like a drop in the ocean.

Thank you for your help.

 

[TheLazyHase]

tl:dr version: How do I stop giant tiger/priest of leaves stacks from the Ljosalfar AI

This can't be stressed enough : like any other stack of doom. AoE, catapult, hunters, assassins to kill the wounded, magic ... Also, never forget that usually uou should also have 30+ unit if they have 120 units. And a tiger will have an hell of a time to simply scratch a longbowman.

 

[BobCW]

The FFH AI cannot handle being hit by collateral spells very well. My favorite option is Ring of Fire, found on Ritualists (the T3 Veil priest unit). A few casts next to the enemy SOD will not only weaken each individual unit enough that you should be able to pick them off with Iron units or Horse Archers, but the AI will very often pause in place for a few turns or retreat, in order to heal. It's fairly easy to exploit this behavior to kill off enemy stacks of hundreds of units with only a few dozen of your own men. Blitz comes in very handy.

 

[SergiuSS]

The best way is to play whit FoL 4 a sort time and make some satyrs, 5 are enough, and mesmerize the tigers as for the priest they are not that scary

 

[doktarr]

I had greedily turned all my nodes to fire for extra fireball strength.

Your fireballs are the same strength if you have one, ten, or even zero fire mana. The only effect of fire mana, after the first one (which the Amurites get from their palace), is whether you need to spend promotions to get the spells.

0 fire mana = arcane figures with channeling 1 can't spend promotions on fire 1
1 fire mana = arcane figures with channeling 1 can spend promotions on fire 1
2 fire mana = arcane figures with channeling 1 automatically gain fire 1 (free promotion)
3 fire mana = arcane figures with channeling 1 and 2 automatically gain fire 2
4 fire mana = arcane figures with channeling 1, 2, and 3 automatically gain fire 3
5+ fire mana = no additional effect

 

[Hishan]

Your fireballs are the same strength if you have one, ten, or even zero fire mana.

Ah yes I see that now, I must have mistakenly read it as fire affinity. Although the autoupgrade to fire 2 is always nice

 

[Goodwill]

Aoe damage plus assassins is really great, as is blitz and so on. Things like blind and root can be used to stall them until a larger force arrive.

An addition I like is to use hunters/rangers/beastmasters to defend, capturing free tigers as I go. I can use them as either tiger cages or as backup units for attack, and one or two, even at low health, can sometimes go up for defense instead of a valuable weakened unit, so you lose the free tiger instead. If I'm lucky enough to have a gorilla, I can get even their eakest units to attack.

Once highly promoted and in good terrain, a couple scout type units can hold off unlimited numbers without taking damage, racking up tons of free exp. If I feel patient, I just let them do it for awhile as an exp farm for expensive, advanced promotions.

Many times though, I may be more interested in survival when this isnt the case. I usually try to keep a mind two mage in my army when I can (adepts with mind 1 in cities is a favorite anyway). One shot of charm from a mage and I'm only defending against a quarter of a stack at a time, instead of the whole thing. I usually prefer this to neutralizing the whole army entirely via blind, because it gets my units exp and gets them up to speed.

Most importantly, hunters/planeshifters with subdue animal are very powerful here, and when used well can really hold their own. If you keep the stack damaged with maelstrom/ring of fire/tsunami or something (fireballs are way too inefficient against large stacks to be a primary damage dealer imo) then you can attack with a few units each turn for exp, making sure to have a couple good defensive units fully healed. And chanters/assassins are still awesome, and become really powerful later, so bring those too!

 

[TheLazyHase]

(fireballs are way too inefficient against large stacks to be a primary damage dealer imo)

To be precise, 1 fireball < 1 maelstrom usually ; but 20 fireball >>> 20 maelstrom.

 

[Goodwill]

They're really just totally different attacks, like apples and oranges. Maelstrom is pretty much guaranteed to hit everyone, fireball hits a limited number of targets. Maelstrom has a damage limit, so two mages is usually plenty to cripple everyone's strength. On he plus side of fireball, it has no damage limit and can finish kills. Against high strength units, maelstrom scales very well in damage, while with fireball, it won't be uncommon to see the defenders emerge completely unscathed from a horde of fireball attacks (though not in this case with priests and tigers).

But more to the point, 20 fireballs needs 20 mages to cast them, making it horribly inefficient, and you'll still probably need other units to defend them. Personally I still prefer 4-5 mages only, if that. 2 or so for me before putting other units as a higher priority. 1-2 for maelstrom, optionally 1 for mind 2 charm depending on how many units you can reasonably defend against, and any leftover mages to cast fireballs and maybe dance of blades or regen. But these fireball mages are extra/backup imo. And since it's amurite, any firebow who can cast it the more the merrier.

That's only a couple mages instead of 20. If I had 20 units to pick I would definitely not load up on just mages. At least a couple archer units dedicated to defense, a priest or disciple unit for healing, and the rest in this case would be hunters or planeshifters and chanters (assassins). Way more versatile than 20 fireballs, way more powerful for both defense and attack, and instead of making it a nuisance encounter, it becomes a tremendous opportunity to promote living units in your army for a strong counter attack.

We may just agree to disagree, but the only reason I could see using mages and fireballs as your primary defense against this stack is if you're already heavily invested in the arcane line and they are the bulk of your army and you don't have much choice (earth 2 stoneskin works well in that case too.) Even then though, a disciple, a couple archers and some recon units are still a good investment to fortify and defend the tile, even if that means like 25-30 units altogether.

I look at hammer cost, because by the time I am usually attacked by a stack like this, I usually don't have a huge army yet, so my goal is to be as efficient as possible with a lesser number of troops. By the time I have like 20 mages, tigers and priests aren't even an effort.

 

[Del Valle]

A useful strategy I used in a similar game as the Khazad was to use siege weapons for collateral damage, then storm in with mass champions. The first two stacks of like two dozen each were overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but I was able to counter with a third stack pretty quickly which finally turned the tide (Dwarven production for the win!).

 

[plasmacannon]

A bit of a necro here, but this could be more complete for the rest of us.

AOE Spells
1) Maelstrom: "Damages units about +15% to a limit of +30%, Damage range: +2" Damages All units including your not in your stack. Requires Air2.
2) Crown of Brilliance: "Damages units about +30% to a limit of +60%, Damage range: +1", Damages 1 hostile stack. Requires Empyrean Religion.
3) Snowfall: "Damages units about +40% to a limit of +80%, Damage range: +1" Requires Illian Civ. When I used this, there were no units outside of the city, but probably effects them too, since it blankets all tiles in 1 radius of the casting archmage.

Maelstrom allows you to damage a stack in a city usually without being counter attacked. Especially, if you move back 1 tile afterwards, but as you can see, it does the least amount of damage too.

 

[Qgqqqqq]

Snowfall and CoB are both very niche and late game, if you go into those you need to mention crush (dwarves) illusion summons (a high str tier 3 summon can be devastating), taunt, entangle etc. I think its better to list realistic options like tsunami and blinding light - if you reach tier 3 you've basically won versus the ai.