Puppets dominating Sons of Inferno

[tylor]

I played Keelyn and teched to Gibbon, and at about same time found Acheron. Then Gibbon spammed puppets, puppets spammed Dominate, and "once in a great while", namely, about one quoter tries netted me a Son of Inferno. Sometimes named sons were ready to get three promotions and start puppet-dominating themselves.
So, you can steal all of Dragon's Sons pretty soon - may be 30-50 turns. And You don't

I checked, Sons had Loyalty, but Domination somehow managed to bypass it.

Is it a bug or a a valid strategy?

 

[Emptiness]

I believe this to be unintended. Loyalty was added to the Sons, presumably to prevent them from being dominated - but then it turned out that Loyalty only prevents capture, not Domination. Unfortunately there's not much chance (imo) of this being fixed in an official patch any time soon.

The good news is that the problem is fairly easy to work around. The AI does not exploit this vulnerability, so an agreement among the human players is all that is necessary. I would suggest that the players should agree that if they gain control of any Sons by Domination that they will immediately delete the Son. (If you're playing solo then it should be fairly easy to reach a consensus... ) That still allows Domination to be used as a tool to strip away defenders from Acheron's city, but does not allow the caster to abuse the spell and exceed the intended limit on Archmages.

 

[avalonnn]

still, a very powerful strategy for the Balseraphs

 

[tylor]

Damn, knew so sweet gig can't be legal
Is it OK to dominate other stuff with puppets, at least?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Puppets were made for domination. The Balseraphs are the civ that embodies the precept of Mind, and their leader Perpentach is the most powerful Mind Mage in history, so they are supposed to be better with Mind magic than other civs.


If Loyalty prevented Domination, then that would be a very week level 3 spell indeed.

 

[tylor]

Not much actually use loyalty...

I just realised how Keelyn's archmages are. Each one can have two puppets online, and each puppet can have two elemental online, so 9 of them (woth Gibbon and liches) can have 36 fire elementals with them.

Too bad it takes too much time to get to all that stuff. And a lot of luck to have access to Reagents - sometimes they don't exist on map at all.

Yeah - and those elementals can move twice as far. So, mage can bombard cities 8 squares away with fireballs.

 

[Pickly]

Other people have done the above strategy with water elementals. If the elementals die, this can create an even more absurdly large amount of units from a small number of archmages.

 

[Emptiness]

And a lot of luck to have access to Reagents - sometimes they don't exist on map at all.

This can happen on smaller maps, or if you turn on the Blessing of Amathaon option. If you leave Blessing of Amathaon off and play on a standard (or larger) sized map then you should always have Reagents available.

 

[tylor]

Yes, it was with Blessing of Amathaon map on standard map, thanks.

 

[Goodwill]

Dont forget if you use gibbon or hemah they get twincast on top of all that, and so do their puppets. So you get two puppets per summon who can summon two elementals each.

 

[tylor]

Yes, but afaik twincast is not free for them, you have to advance to it, with combat 5 as prereq.

 

[DaveGold]

Even worse, you can dispel the loyalty with metamagic dispel so it wouldn't be much protection anyway. Metamatic and mind magic combine well generally.

 

[Tasunke]

Hmmm ... perhaps loyalty should add extra spell resistance then? seems too weak otherwise

 

[Irgy]

Seems like a legitimate, if effective, tactic to me. Puppets and dominate are a good combination is all.

The thing I thought was strange was getting the Sons from the Burning Clan worldspell.