Defenses against Assassins?

[nealhunt]

I hadn't played in a long time, so I loaded patch g a few days ago and fired up a game.

At one point I had a stack with several assassins squared off against an opponent. In the enemy stack were 2 heroes and a ton of damaged units. However, for some reason my 5 or 6 assassins would only target the full-health rangers.

Were the marksman targeting factors changed? I looked in the patch descriptions and didn't see any changes.

If not, any clues as to why that was happening? Is there now an ability that completely negates marksman?

 

[JonathanStrange]

Guardsman promotion has the effect of negating Marksman and the Assassin doesn't necessarily attack the weakest enemy units; the guardsman promotion also has the effect of the attack more likely to be made against the Guardsman.

 

[Emptiness]

It's unlikely those rangers had the Guardsman promotion, so you were probably experiencing an unfortunate situation that can arise from the current implementation of the Guardsman-Marksman interaction. Normally, units with Guardsman will defend against Marksman before other units, thus protecting valuable units from Assassins and the like. If a Guardsman is sufficiently injured, however, it will stop defending the other units in the stack. Marksmen attacking that stack won't be able to kill it, and will have to fight the other units in the stack instead. The problem is that they also won't be able to target the vulnerable units in the stack either, but instead will attack the strongest defender in the stack, as if they didn't have the Marksman promotion at all.

If a unit with Guardsman is heavily injured and cannot heal (because is is Diseased and/or Withered) then it can be used to protect a stack of units from Marksmen without being at risk of being killed in combat. The only solution when faced with that situation is to kill the entire stack or knock out the wounded Guardsman with uncapped AoE damage.

 

[Hansebenger]

A good strategy against Marksman:
Guardsman doubles the strenght calculated when choosing a stack defender. So if u have a Guardsman warrior (Strenght IV + Guardsman) 4x1.8x2=14.4, your Mithril champions need Strenght III (10x1.6=16) to defend before the warrior. That would be a perfect Marksman protection.

Luck based strategy:
It`s also possible that you have a strong Guardsman protecting your stack (Let`s say a Mithril champion 10x1,8x2=36) who gets injured down to 2 strenght after the first Marksman. His new defending strenght is now 2x1,8x2=7,2. He will probably not defend before he is healed or the stack is destroyed. But this "I want my Guardsman to become heavy injured" tactic is based on luck, so it`s not the best.

€: Off-topic question: Where can I change my forum "classification" ("Chieftain")

 

[Bad Player]

my account?


emptiness does the ffh team know about that bug??

 

[Emptiness]

Yes, they know about it. If I understand correctly it isn't considered a bug.

 

[arcticnightwolf]

Off-topic question: Where can I change my forum "classification" ("Chieftain")

well ... until 30 posts / 30 days from acc creation you can't change it, after then you may change it to whatever you want (( and you may also upload your own avatar )), however if you don't change it, it will "increase" your "classification" according to number of your posts ...

on topic:
to counter n assassins, bring at least (n+n/3 (( depends on your/his promotion ratio ))) assasins

edit:
(( ok, ok, bad joke ... i'm taking it back ))

 

[Onionsoilder]

to counter n assassins, bring at least (n+n/3 (( depends on your/his promotion ratio ))) assasins

How is that related to the topic? He was asking how his opponent's rangers were ignoring his marksman promotion.

 

[arcticnightwolf]

How is that related to the topic? He was asking how his opponent's rangers were ignoring his marksman promotion.

kill them before they kill you ...

(( ok, ok, bad joke ... i'm taking it back ))

 

[Tasunke]

my solution you ask? Bring MOAR CATAPULTS!!!!

catapults work super awesome with Assasins, Guardsmen or not.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

uh, don't assassins work equally well and in fact better against catapults though?