chaos marauder discussion

to avoid my doing even more discussion in the bug thread,(my apologies for that) i've started a new thread to stop me cluttering it up.

i know other summons are fine, not the point.my testing, 6 of 12, 50 percent, started barb. of the other 6, 5 went barb after the first turn, and the last was an attempt to cheat and disband the bugger(i knew that was a wasted effort when i tried it, i recall them fixing that exploit a long time ago, but i was desperate) he ofcourse went barbarian on me too. but hey, 12 is hardly definitive testing. heck i played a test game at low difficulty where 7 goody huts in a row gave me a settler. and i lost 3 99.7 battles, one after the other. the RNG for this game is flaky at best. so i'll take your word that its not supposed to be this bad. still

This tactic to me seems like nothing but an exploit. you are spawning an infinite number of very powerful units to attack your enemies you don't have to pay them, and you suffer no penalties for the action.

with any hidden nationality unit in the same circumstance you would atleast be dinged the maintenance costs plus the time to build the unit, or in the case of the few hidden nat summons, the relatively low strength and limit to 3turns after summoning.

sure *maybe* they'll turn on you instead of the intended target, but you are likely ready for the circumstance, and have taken efforts to limit this chance, so worse case scenario, you use the few barbs who do attack you instead to power level a couple of gaurds to 100 xp, further exploiting the spell.

really, when are you going to use this spell in a fight where you are not exploiting it. if you are trying to take some city are you going to use a chaos marauder who may end up not only costing you the cast to summon him but another cast to pelt him with a fireball, and or a units attack to kill him? thats gonna really impede your invasion force

and too repeat a question to MagisterCultuum,

if you like it, if it really is as intended, fine. but i can't see a non explotive use for the spell. That just seems wrong to me.

as for me, i think i'm gonna try death 2, with multiple nodes for the affinity bonus and see how that fairs.

 

Don't try to nerf one of the few useful summons. XP farming and harassing enemies for free is a great benefit of the spell and one you lack control of which is why its chaotic.

Compared to other summons this is one of my favorites and doesn't seem so "I'd rather have a fireball mage".

 

I am noticing a trend here, and though I hate to say it, perhaps fireballs and meteors are a bit overpowered, especially since they both cause collateral damage. Maybe run a few test games where their strengths are reduced by 1/3 and see how many favor summons over fireballs/meteors. I do like their functionality as it is, with the ability to attack units or bombard, but the collateral damage they can deal surpasses that of any catapult or even dwarven cannons!

 

I favour dealing with two problems as mentioned in the thread of archers - make archery units immune or highly resistant to collateral damage. That will strengthen them and stop fireballs from being too powerful

On topic, I think the Chaos Marauders are ok as is. An exploit that takes a lot of organising, uses a not so powerful magic sphere and isn't particularly overpowering anyway doesn't fuss me

 

My main use for the marauders in an invasion force I feel was nor-exploit.

I was Tebryn land Ora Pangea map. Winning by a LARGE factor, but still some powerful opposition whom I wanted to kill (mainly for AC).

I began near my borders with some chaos summoners and Baron Halfmoon.kept 1 city with new Luxury resources and a nice choke-point position, then destroyed the next 3. Took a new base of operations city that I had the Baron defend and went on to the rest doing summons only.

Maybe every 10 turns one of my 5 Summons would go barbs, so I would ignore it if Iwis in a city, or summon a Djinn if not to fight it. All others typically lasted to turn 3, except those that died and possibly 1 in 5 others.

Those who went Barb usually pillaged my re-supply Cities, seldom attacked my next targets, never attacked my cities, and often "settled" the newly fog-of-war territory, forcing me to take out the Barb cities later (nicely enough with some more AC boost if I waited for population growth.)

Overall, it was a very powerful invasion, rivaling my previous summons-only war with sand-lions.

 

My semi-exploitive use of the chaos mauraders is in combination with the Calabim. Normally as i conquer into an AI's territory there are many cities far too close together to be saved. I love to feast the populations of these cities but then i'm left with crappy shell cities scattered next to the good ones. Even leaving them undefended it takes a long time for the AI or Arm counter barbs to take them. With chaos mauraders i can take every city, feast it dry then summon a maurader next to it, turn it barb. It will usually capture it the city either destroying it or keeping it. From there it is an easy kill to raze the city.

This feels exploitive to me as it fits so nicely with the Calabim. But i've long felt there should be a normal way to disband/relocate any city with low population anyway. Civ 3 (or was it Civ 2) had this by building a settler while starving it. It seems like this function could be restored and easily balanced with a happiness penalty.

- feydras

 

Agree 100% I really miss the option to disband citys or even let them starve, poison their supplys whatsoever. In civ 3 you even could settle workers to boost the city pop, this would be a nice feature for evil civs with slavery.

Very often i raze enemy citys because they are so misplaced or interfere with other citys, especially as calabim its annonying when you want your vampires to satisfy their thirst. I dont see why they cannot exterminate a conquered city through drinking anyways

 

They can (but only my computer. I edited the Feasts and Consume souls spells to let it keep working until the population was gone, at which point the city would be razed.)

 

curiousity here, what patch are you on? i don't recall reading a change, but i could have missed it or it could have been undocumented
i'm on F.

In case anyone cares, not the greatest of ideas. you never realize how many things have death immunity until you try to kill them(fortunately its broken) and whatever you do, never fight a war with the amurites using affinity summons until after they've used their world spell. Nothing like being in a world war and having your summons loose half their strength after the amurites blow up all your nodes.

 

Still on E till I find time to finish a LAN game & I am playing. But trends are from experience in .25. The only potentially relevant change since is that they go Barb if disbanded. So should still be valid.

 

Summons in general are just bad as bad gets.

 

Free units are absolutely amazing. Force yourself to play just 1 game as Tebryn, and allow yourself only summons for attack (use anything you want for defense). Aim for a Domination victory.

Play that game through (especially on marathon or epic), and by the end you should start to understand the point of summons. Or you'll lose and at least know you gave them a shot.

 

Summons without the trait that boosts them to 3 turns of life, then.
Tebryn isnt the most fair way to say summons are good. he's arc/sum, you cant get more summons focused than that.

Even for other Arc leaders summoning tends to be inferior.

 

It still has quite the niche though. Last game I played, my invasion force was ready to take a city, but a crossbowman with city defense 2 was fortified on it. I could have waded in with my attackers, but I'd likely lose 2 just weakening him. Instead I hit him with 3 sandlions, then took the city with no losses.

 

IMHO even ritualists (requires reagents) pretty much suck, and they get summon stuff WAY early, taint, etc. There's just no future in it. Unsightly huge stacks of tier 2 units only dominate for so long. Then you are looking at needing level 6 and a tech that costs almost twice as much as Strength of Will to upgrade. Nothing like a strat that dead-ends in a stack of 50 mediocre units to turn me off.

Sorcery ftw.

 

Summons are disposable, free(or at worst one or two turns of maintenance) unexhaustable(as long as you don't die) units who even if they can't dominate will weaken enemy attackers. No down time for wounded units, just keep using them till they die and summon new ones to take their place.

if they don't dominate they still impede and wound, use conventional units to mop up, with drastically better chances of survival now that the enemy is hurt. its like saying fireballs are useless cause they can't take a city, or catapults.

would you rather spend the time to get a bunch of conventional units and loose many in the attack, or a few adepts and a few conventional units and quite possibly loose nothing but replaceable summons in the attack.

like any strategy there are weakeness, and there are leaders for whom the strategy is more effective, but its hardly useless.