Design: The Sidar

[Sureshot]

just played an OCC game as the sidar following the undercouncil, and tbh it's damn powerfull, basically overpowered. Just build your 3 shadows, mask them (hidden nationality), have them kill of enemy/friendly warriors (marksman and hidden, so should be no problem) until they hit 26 exp, send them back to your capital to turn into great engineers, train additional shadows and repeat. I reached well over 100 base production at turn 250 (normal speed) using this tactic (had the guild of hammers wonder though).

thats easy to do without sidar, especially by turn 250

 

[Demus]

"well over". mod. production (without overlap) hit a top of around 250, without all tiles being worked and with only 2 specialists running. if you don't trust me, give it a try ;-).

 

[Sureshot]

ya, once you start doing endgame tactics its easy to get insane amounts. ive gotten over 1000 science in a single city, and 100 production is pretty minor compared to what is possible.

the hyborem/AV/TowerOfComplacency can get over 200 population easy, and each of those can be engineers.. so i gotta say 100 production, or over 200 production even, is nothing game breaking when you're dealing with compounded endgame tactics.

 

[pamme]

Can Drowns turn into shades? I just got a level 6 Drown but don't see any option to turn it into a shade.

 

[snarko]

7. To become Shades, Sidar units have to be alive, and can't be animals or beasts.

Drown are undead and undead are not alive.

 

[pamme]

aww..all that precious xp wasted. Thanks for the info

 

[MagisterCultuum]

You know, although Shades are useless in combat they can still cast spells if they have the promotions that allow them. I believe this means that the Sidar effectively have an unlimited number of Archmages and Summoners.

 

[Calavente]

kool news ...

 

[TravellingHat]

That's quite scary, but then, they are shades

 

[xienwolf]

Can a shade take any further promotions? If your upgrading stops at the point of turning Shade, then it means it is only really useful for your City Buff mages to be able to pick up 1 or 2 Rank 3 spells as well.

 

[DeaExMachina]

Can a shade take any further promotions? If your upgrading stops at the point of turning Shade, then it means it is only really useful for your City Buff mages to be able to pick up 1 or 2 Rank 3 spells as well.

The point of a Shade is to turn into a Specialist in your city. So a Shade (while I haven't tried to fight with them) is basically already out of combat. Its part of what makes the Sidar weak militarily that they keep handing their best units back to their cities.

 

[xienwolf]

Yes, but as Magister pointed out, you can exploit the fact that they keep their spellcasting abilities to grant yourself unlimited Archmages/Summoners.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Shades don't have a unitcombat, so even if they still gain xp (and I'm pretty sure they don't) they will be unable to learn any new spells or get any other promotions for that matter. Still, if you have another mage/conjurer able to be upgraded that you think would be more useful than one of your current Archmages/Summoners then you might as well have an older one wane, but keep him around and use him as if he hadn't changed. (I haven't actually had an Archmage or Summoner wane yet, but I do know that Mages and Conjurers work perfectly when cast by shades.) (Shades cannot attack, but they have a strength of 2 and can defend themselves. That is, unless I made that change myself and forgot about it.)



(p.s. I felt like exploiting this even more, so I gave Sandalphon the a third trait, Arcane, and made shade UNITCOMBAT_ADEPT so they keep learning new spells, and made them permanantly invisible.)

 

[TravellingHat]

IMO the true power of this is you can have shades with the top tier non-combat spells, as they'll not see action, and replace them with archmages with top-tier combat spells for maximum punch in the field.

You might even be able to get a Law 3 shade (former archmage) in every city for monsterously huge cities. In reality this is pretty unlikely, as you'd really need to focus on developing archmages, and such a narrow focus might gimp you in other ways.

 

[Calavente]

if you launch your adept swarm early, in order to get many shades,
you can expect having much archmage shades late-game.

hop : lvl 6 mage : upgrade to archmage, law III, become shade : all in 2 turns. the archmage slot is empty again.

you won't need a lot of archmages.. .

then upgrade you rangers to druid to gain free xp... then to shade that can summon nature, terraform, boost your units.. ...etc

I like this path I wanna BTS !!!! snif