Ljosalfar: Fireball or Shadowwalk?

[Idleray]

I've started a game on Deity with Amelanchier, and am at the stage where I am ready to take over the world.

As most will know, Ljos have very few options for taking down city defenses. Fireball seems to be the obvious one. The only other ones I know of are using Hill Giants from Pact of Nilhorn or using the effects of Shadowwalk, which is what I want to discuss.

If you think about it, Shadowwalk(and blur which you get along the way) affects every unit in the stack, and so you only technically need 1 mage to bypass a city's defenses, rather than the 4-5 you will need to cast fireball to slowly whittle down a city's defenses.

For collateral damage, Ljos already have a very good option in Maelstrom, which has no limit on the units it can damage. Also, getting shadow means you get blur along the way, which is a very strong spell in its own right. The more I think about it the more sense it makes to discard the accepted fireball strategy with its need for lots of mages.

The only problem I can think of is cultural defenses. I've not actually used the shadowwalk strategy yet as in my current game I'm already committed to fire. Shadowwalk says it bypasses building defense, but I don't know if it bypasses cultural ones, so would anyone care to comment if it does, and about its effectiveness compared to fireball?

 

[Horatius]

Shadowwalk only bypasses building defenses and avoids first strikes, which is not negligible at all.
Maelstrom and Shadowwalk usually works just fine when you have a good enough army to crack the city while using a low number of mages. Unless, of course you are attacking someone that has a high cultural defense.
If I have a high number of mages I would prefer fireballs since they can actually kill stuff.

What is key, I think, is the amount of collateral or area damage. If you can damage the defending stack heavily, the building defenses will not matter much in the end.

 

[bruntfca]

I just tried this strat and found it to be pretty terrible.

Units gets so many insane stacking def buffs, including the 60% cultural that merely negating a building bonus of say 30-40% was not such a big deal.

My attacks did much better with Cata and Cannon. Getting rid of big cultural and collateral was much more important than I thought.

The idea can work for medium cities though, plus its fun to build a "regenerating organic speed ninja" stack with no slow ass catas, so it can zip around the enemy rear.

 

[Horatius]

I just tried this strat and found it to be pretty terrible.

Units gets so many insane stacking def buffs, including the 60% cultural that merely negating a building bonus of say 30-40% was not such a big deal.

Like I said:

"Unless, of course you are attacking someone that has a high cultural defense"

Also:
"when you have a good enough army to crack the city while using a low number of mages"

If you have a small army then you probably need a lot of siege or magic, if you don't have any siege or magic then, obviously, you need bigger numbers because you will lose units inevitably - that doesn't mean that you can't be successful in war.

On the attack, if you don't like or can't lose units then use all the siege or magic that you can.

I always expect to lose tons of units but I still prefer the mobile army without catapults.
When I used to play Civ4 vanilla, where there is no magic stuff, I always prefered fast horses and such.
It's just a question of having the production and knowing how many units to sacrifice.
Why should I give the enemy an opportunity for reinforcements?

 

[BvBPL]

My attacks did much better with Cata and Cannon. Getting rid of big cultural and collateral was much more important than I thought.

But those aren’t an option for the Ljos.

Assuming your don’t have the Pyre or have not traded for fire mana from another civ and assuming you have two nodes available, teching Necromany instead of Elementalism might be the better strat for Ljo. That gives you Shadowwalk, Blur, and Rust. Since those spells affect whole stacks, and since two of them are level one spells, you can free up more mages for Maelstrom. If I recall correctly, Maelstrom has a better range than Fireball unless you have spell extension two, which is nice if you don’t have Haste. Just be sure to Maelstrom before you cast Rust, and watch out for friendly fire from Maelstrom.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Ljosalfar: Fireball or Shadowwalk?

Both? You can have one mage cast Shadowwalk, one adept cast Blur, and all other mages cast Fireball. Of course, if you're limited by technology speed, it's not feasible, but I start my conquering campaigns fairly late in he game.