AOE/Collateral problems on Deity

[gogis]

Recently i started to play Deity on usual basis and Houston, we've a problem.

So, my game settings are:
Pangea, Standard size, High sea level, Quick, Domination, all slots randomly distributed.

I'ts usually dwarves I am playing, so I never had much AOE problems in late game, because dwarven druids always do their job. I'ts even not matter if i had mithril or not, damage is such a great.

But i've started now to try other races on and gosh, i can't handle it! Fireballs means nothing, because it's damage is meaningless on 10+ strength units, fire elementals comes very late and do very little to that pesky Basium units.

I already lost several times and last one with amurites was total nightmare. I slowly and steadily built up my forces and when I went warring(in other words this means "I now able to fend of their hordes without losses and it's time to try to get that closest city if i am lucky") I had at my disposal:
1 Pillar of fire
4 Crowns of Brilliance
6 Fire Elementals
9235246363426 Fireballs

And voila. Thessa & Basium & bunch of their vassals just put huge stack nearby my border city and on top of this was several Repentant angels and other endgame stuff with 18 str. Guess what - i can't damage it past having 13% odds on attack. I tried once to save/load and proceed with attack and it's was suicidal.

So to my point. I always had cheesy solutions as dwarves at any stage of a game for both attacking/defence with bare losses (don't advice me to suicide some axemen/swordsmen to soft "it"). Trebuchets for early, DD for late on. Easy victories with zero casualties.

No i am broken. I dont know what to do with elves before archmages. Yeah, fawn rushes works great. At monarch. Now we've got 4 archmages and if lucky, 4 liches.
So what to pick? Fireballs works till iron and useless at mithril. I hate fire elementals because they to strong and kill of units. I tried maelstorm - it's seems weak. Ritualists is capped at same level as maelstorm, i think. Only Chalid have analogue of crush, but heck - he is alone!

I am really not familiar to arcane warring, so i need advice on it, what spellist i must to pursue. Right now i am hopeless, i suck at any stage of game and it's finale when they beat me to mithril or even iron (they always do!).

And please, no advices for early rushes/bring more suicidal deeds - on deity AI outmuscle you in every "who have more" contest.

What spells on arcane/divine line i am missing? I need at least 3 analogues to crush.

 

[Senethro]

Realise that Deity is a broken difficulty level which offers opponents that break the rules rather than opponents that work intelligently within the rules.

Win.

The best solution I can offer you is to turn up for some of the weekend MP games. If you do, then make it clear what kind of game experience you're looking for, as some people play these huge formalised 10 player games with lots of courtesy rules with arranged times every week, whereas I prefer smaller four player Free-for-Alls that should take a maximum of 5 hours and can be completed in two play sessions.

 

[EverNoob]

Your army is probably too focused on casters. Even with alot of magic you still need decent melee units to actually kill stuff, defend, etc...

Since you're Amurites, I'd say drop Chalid and Crowns, and invest in more melee combat capable units. For the Amurites, Arquebus or Marksmen are good options but other T4 units are fine too.

Also once you have stronger melee units, spell like Ring of Flame and Maelstrom become much more powerful and allows your units to level up as well. In the late game, Fireballs are only useful for lowering city defenses.

Variety in spells is also good. You'll want spells to immobilize enemy stacks to give you time to respond and destroy the stack. There's Blinding Light, Entagle (Druid), Charm Person (living units only). There's also Rust, possibly the most useful adept spell in the late game. For archmages I'd diversify their spells, since summon spells are weak vs large stacks. For example Wither and Domination are more useful vs powerful units than summons.

 

[Earthling]

Tsunami is way overpowered and a guaranteed win on the right maps - simply send your units out to sea and take every coastal city with impunity. Ice mana is also powerful but it's very rare and you probably wouldn't get it if not Illians, who have their own problems. But that's not the type of strategy to really get a feel for the game, so some better recommendations:

First one question: Do you only have Domination Victory on? Like, other victories are turned off, or do you just try to win Dom a lot? If it's the former, turn the other victories on and win one of them when the game calls for it, you won't always be able to beat Deity AI that easily in war. Else the only strategy would probably be to pick a better civ for domination and play a rush game from the start, sorry if you don't like it but that's how it goes.

So you can't just win based on warfare, is the first thing. Pick a side diplomatically, the same as in regular civ. You're the Amurites and Empyrean, yet you're attacking elves/Basium? Shouldn't happen. Stay peaceful with them and you could likely take out anyone else, win an easy altar victory for instance. If you're the Amurites and go evil then you'll need allies/help as well; Ritualists + high strength demons hold up quite decently, and you should be able to spam supporting mages for Death summons as well.

 

[cabbagemeister]

Remember that Crown is useless against angels because they're immune to Holy damage, so that's four of your AOE spells that aren't helping anything. Angels are also resistant to fire, so it will take using most of your fire-based attackers to do much--and since you're probably throwing them at ridiculously high-level angels, the top unit is likely to be unscathed anyway because collateral doesn't hurt the defending unit. The solution, as others have posted, is to diversify. Rust is a no-brainer against mithril units. Promoting half your mages to AirII instead of FireII will give you Maelstrom, which angels are not resistant to. WaterIII gives you water elementals, which are great against high-strength units because you get 3 attacks instead of one.

Finally, always make sure you use your AOE/collateral spells IN ORDER OF THEIR DAMAGE CAP (highest cap last). This means Pillar must be cast last because it has the best damage cap in the game. Why? Well, if you cast Pillar first, you do maybe 15% damage to their top units. Then throw a bajillion fireballs at them and you get them down to 50% best case, because that's the collateral cap (I think). Alternately, if you use the fire attacks first, you can still maybe get them down to 50% if you have enough attacks, but then Pillar can take them down even farther (all the way to 20%!). And Pillar is even more effective in that case because spell damage is modified by a unit's strength, and you're Pillar-ing weaker units.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Yeah, crown was the biggest heavy lifter in your arsenal of attack magic and you drew the one opponent that it doesn't work on. Sucks. I'll say, though, that against any other civ it's a great attack spell to rely on, so feel free to go for that path if your opponent isn't Basium.

As for what to do now, do the following order against the mercurian stacks: Rust, maelstrom, pillar, attack with a couple strong conventional units, attack with elementals/fireballs.

 

[Emptiness]

Doesn't Fireball do collateral damage? Even if the main defender is unscathed by your trillions of fireballs the rest of the stack will be trashed. Build Assassins and obliterate his wounded stack from the bottom. If you can't kill that one main defender but destroy all the other units then it's still a victory.

If fireballs won't cut it then use Catapults. You will lose some, but the ones that survive can be promoted to do extra collateral damage. Your assassins should have easy wins, so the production lost in catapult casualties can be thought of as being spent to purchase promotions for your assassins.

Repentant Angels get weaker each time they kill living units. Build warriors (or whatever is the cheapest living unit you have available) and suicide them into the RAs to weaken them. If the RAs are the main defenders of the stack then be sure to do that before you send in the fireballs &/or catapults, to increase their chance of damaging the main defender. Just make sure that the warriors you suicide don't have a good religion, because those will be reborn for Basium as Angels. Build your warriors in a city that doesn't have a good religion in it (if possible), even purging those religions from a city if that is practical.

If your opponent doesn't have Mithril yet then Rust is an effective way to lower the strength of his melee units. The disadvantage is the diplomacy penalty of using entropy mana, but if you have access to Dispell Magic then you can dispell the node after you've promoted several Adepts to Entropy I. They will retain access to Rust and you will have no penalty. (Just noticed while previewing my post that Evernoob and others had already suggested Rust.)

Maelstrom isn't weak. You want to hit the enemy with it about four times to ensure all the units in the stack are badly damaged. This should be your opening attack. The disadvantage is that because it affects a large area it can be difficult to avoid damaging other units you control (especially if you are using it on the defensive) and also it is easy for a neutral/friendly unit to be in the area and thus make it diplomatically unwise to use. Just be prepared for the possibility that you may not be able to rely upon it in some circumstances. If you are using all of my other suggestions then Maelstrom shouldn't be absolutely necessary, but of course it can reduce your catapult losses and so should be used whenever possible.

 

[gogis]

Gosh, i am a sissy girl and should relearn FFH in arcane way better. Of course CoB and fire elementals do so little to angels, so it's wasn't really fault of a tactic but just one particular case.
Also i couldnt diversify army really, i owned locked peninsula (~20% of land) with ridiculous lack of resources (no iron even and one node which i used already).
Also i didn't care about rest of stack nor i wanted to rumble through it - they wasnt a threat, problem is that angels just locked me in city, not moving nor attacking for probably 30 or so turns

2EverNoob
Sorry, it's impossible to outnumber AI in melee units on deity settings. They outpace you in every single area of "mass something". And i rarely have more than a dozen of melee units per stack of doom. I always go for quality over quantity.

2Earhtling
Yes i always play only for domination, probably it's because i sooo hated that stupid space races in previous civ's.
And actually i didn't DoW'ed Thessa/Basium, it's them attacked me. I am not sure if it's game settings(Dom only) or deity level, but that peacehuggers actually really like to stab and go warring. This LOLjasfars dominate and crush everything in probably third of my games

2Emptiness
Wait. I thought Maelstrom is 30% capped, while CoB 60% and even RoFlames is 40%. I think 30% just wont cut it so i felt it's weak.

I actually feel that i am stupid and never realised how Rust is imba in the late game. It's always metal superiority i fail to beat and the answer was so simple. Thanks for advice definitely. It's seems i don't even need anything more than 30% cap to be able to crush stacks with my usual setup.

Also Basium is always in my games and always was major pain in arse, so with your advices i can actually mow them down quite easily now. I never realised angels immune/resistant to so many stuff because never paid attention to particular civ.

P.S. I cringe in pain trying to write something lengthy/smart - my language is not english, sorry if something is not clear.

 

[EverNoob]

Sorry, it's impossible to outnumber AI in melee units on deity settings. They outpace you in every single area of "mass something". And i rarely have more than a dozen of melee units per stack of doom. I always go for quality over quantity.

It wasn't my intention to imply outnumbering. You said you had tons of Fireballs so my suggestion was to replace Fireball casters with other things, like melee units.

Btw the Amurites only need one magic node to gain access to every mana type, just convert the node.

dw about your language, we understand your posts just fine

 

[slowcar]

i recently had a discussion about fireballs in the german forums. this is exactly what i was saying there: in endgame your fireballs are way too weak.

you need three types of magic:
support magic, like enchanted blade, haste, regeneration, shadowwalk
aoe magic, like maelstrom
control magic, like charm, blinding light etc

in addition you need units. strong units. a certain disadvantage can be leveled by magic, and it is possible to win certain wars using blinding and domination alone (given time) but most of the time you need some units to finish the enemy off.
you can calculate it:
maelstrom reduces by 30% (?), the enemy won't counter. but you have to defeat it first. given a str 18 enemy you have around 12 str remaining after you cast -> you need units above this to take them out. sometimes it is sufficient to have 1-2 hard-hitters, heroes for example, and some weaker units (chariots) to take out the cannonfodder.

 

[xalien]

I'd also suggest adding a couple of body mages. Regeneration, especially with a presence of a priest in your stack can allow your even badly damaged units to become completely healed the next turn, courage would add another 10% to healing rate. It works very well combined with blinding light and alikes.

 

[Supr49er]

... Btw the Amurites only need one magic node to gain access to every mana type, just convert the node. ...

I'm going to play as the Amurites next. What do you mean by converting a node?

 

[xalien]

I assume he means that Amurite palace gives metamagic mana. But since you'd still need a sorcery to be able to dispel magic, it doesn't make it that much different from other civs. Unless Govanon can do something about it.

 

[Emptiness]

Govannon isn't available until Arcane Lore, so he doesn't really factor into it. Anyone with one node and Sorcery (except the Khazad) can use it to access all the mana types (one at a time) as long as they are patient enough to leave the node empty until they can build a Metamagic node.

 

[Tasunke]

in my opinion fireballs are never outdated when you are the Luichurp, of course ... that is the Luichurp. On high to low I had a massive bannor empire with 4 immortals, and then I am able to defeat said empire with mass produced Chirping woodgolems o.O