[BUG] Fights with "invisible" units freeze reproducably Got another more serious bug: In my Drac game, I have a series of fights that keep freezing completely. I cannot get out with Autoresolve when that happens, the only thing that works is quitting to Main Menu. Just sent you my savegames, let me know if they got through, please. Steps to reproduce: 1) Load the savegame "AIArmyBugged". 2) Go to town "Tuiatua" in the NE corner of my territory. Note the 4 enemy armies around it. 3) Either complete the turn to get attacked, or attack them manually. 4) Winning the fights is easy, just summon Shambling Mounds and Flycloud away. 5) One of the fights always hangs before the last enemy unit dies. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. Sometimes it's the first fight, sometimes the 2nd or 3rd. 6) Important: There are "invisible" units in those armies, but they never decloak to attack. I am quite certain it's a bug - the Enchantment list does not show this Sorcerer (Tangaroa) having an Invis Enchant going. 7) To find one, fight the army on the left with the 2 Weavers, Arachnomancer and Zealot. There's an invis 2x2 unit (the Zealot) in front of the Arachnomancer. 8) Win the battle, and you'll see that the Zealot is still there, and still down to 1HP or so. The latter might actually explain why they don't decloak - they'd die to the first hit. 9) Either continue fighting, or end the turn to get attacked. One of the battles should freeze, and I can reproduce it everytime from that save. UPDATE: Just found this on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/app/449300/discussions/1/358415738185500458/ The part about Blazing Martyr causing freezes is what I see quite frequently too. I think in the above savegame/battles the AI casts that regularly. I just ran a test battle: AI didn't cast B.M., no freeze. P.S.: If you have the time, I'd like to hear your assessment of my games, compared to what others must have sent you and what you know/expect people to fare like around the various turn counts. I want to know how good/bad I am doing
[Play Report] Unhallowed Nina's Housing Strategy Nina wrote that she uses a strategy where she only has one Undead Archer and a Palisade to defend her Unhallowed towns, and puts them on Housing to generate more population and Negative Energy income. Since I never tried that, I got curious and started a new game to use it. My starting setup: - The usual 2 Planes with 70% land, Death and Prime this time. - Archmage difficulty, Fast Movement, Game Speed x4. Resources, Features, Neutrals all on lowest. - Traits: Death 9, Death Mastery, 1 Life, Archmage, Cartographer, Lucky, Mystic, Channeler. Butcher, Tyrant, Opulent, Ascetic. - Notable starting Spells: Bless Weapon, Bone Aura, Life Ward. - My Capital: Max pop 21, N.E. Bonus 35%, Prod Bonus 35%. Not too good, but I was too lazy to roll up another game and just went with it. On the plus side, I have 3 Coals (+2 Prod each) as resources, which is pretty good for Resources set to lowest. First steps: - Dismiss the Ghouls. Not worth it, and saves me 1 N.E. upkeep. - Destroy the Corrupted Sanctum. Not needed early on, and saves another 2 N.E. in upkeep. - Check map. 2 Neutral towns nearby, each reachable within a few turns. - To conquer those asap, I summon some Skeletons and build a few Archers. Army leaves the Capital at turn 2 or 3. After the initial actions, I cast Bless Weapon and Bone Aura on my Reaper. Waste of Mana in hindsight, that guy didn't last long enough to earn it back. What happened so far: I didn't make detailed notes, so just some highlights. - Conquered the two closest Neutral towns before turn 10. Started with the Housing strategy, more on that in a separate post. - In my Capital, I bought the expensive buildings to build Lancers. I got the first one out before turn 15 (hint: you can do it in 9 turns). - I cast a few Magic Spirits to grab chests, but they didn't last long. By turn 20 or so I was down to a single one. - I think it was turn 16 when I found Wraithform in a Ruin. 10 more Mundane Resistance, very nice. The "Ignore Armor" is just icing on the cake. I start casting it on my Lancers. - Also around turn 15 I founded a new town to make use of a nearby Mithril mine at a spot with good town boni and max. population. - Turn 30 or so I get lucky again. My blinged-out Lancer made mincemeat out of 2 Slimes, 5 Owlbears, a Hillgiant, 3 Shambling Mounds, and a Basilisk - without breaking a sweat. The rest of the Army was mostly window-dressing at this point. The Huecuva's Darkness is a good power-up, and the Archers shot down 2 Mounds. But none of that was needed to win. Reward was a second Lancer and a Deathguard, excellent. - ~Turn 35 I got lucky with a Teleporter. One of my "Bling Lancers" ends up right next to a Neutral Undead town in the map's SW. Taking it over was easy, and I razed another Sorc's small town on the way. - And I have another Teleporter within one turn of my Capital that leads to the center West map part, where I took over an enemy Sorcerer Capital at turn 39, and killed the Sorc. - Turn 40 I get a Biomancy point from a Ruin. - Turn 41 gives me an Earth point from another Ruin. Should have some pretty nice stuff to research now. - Turn 43 I find out that my Bling Lancer is strong enough to murder a Doomdrake plus entourage (3 Elementalists, some Galeriders). As reward, I get 1 Life circle, and Summon Dracolich. The latter takes a tad too long to cast this early on, 13 turns and 720 Mana. First, I want to fully bling out my Lancers and Deathguard. When I'm done with that, I should have enough Spellcraft to summon a Dracolich in under 10 turns. Mana cost isn't a problem, I'm sitting on 2600 Mana and another 1000 in items. - Turn 45, I conquered another town in the central South. Notes: - Even a blinged-out Lancer is not strong enough to kill a Vampire. - Bone Aura isn't a cure all vs. Piercing. I expected a Magic Spirit with it to win vs. a Drac Tracker. Nope, Spirit gets butchered. - In general, "Bling Lancers" are good enough to take on a lot on their own. E.g. winning against 3 Darkelf Zealots and their support went without trouble, only losing a handful of HP. That's pretty much a mini version of Jenman's "Superhero Strategy" (see guide). Notes on Traits: You can really load up with the Unhallowed. Tyrant doesn't have any effect on you. Same goes for Ascetic, since the only Gold you'll get is from Ruins. Opulent's only relevant penalty is the -10% Production, but I can live with that for 2 extra points. And Butcher is bog-standard for me, I almost always take it. Only 1 point, granted. But that gives a nice extra boost early on. Getting 1 Life is a great addition. Specifically for Bless Weapon and Disrupt Undead. Lucky, Mystic, Channeler I took partly for trying them out; especially Mystic with the +Mana per population, to see how well it works for the Undead on Housing. Normally I don't pay attention to popgrowth at all, so I tend to skip Mystic. If I plan to use more Heroes, I'd change Lucky and Channeler for Warlord. Even better: Change them for Pious. Buying all the religious buildings early on should boost your Mana income through the roof with it. More on that later.
Numbercrunch: Undead Housing & buying buildings, Speedbuild Lancers I was too tired to write this all up yesterday, but here we go now. Full credits to Nina_cooks, our resident grognard and old-school wargamer who even bravely fought at the side of Napoleon She first mentioned that she follows a strategy with the Unhallowed to only use a minimal garrison and then just put them on Housing and forget the town. Thanks to her I finally paid attention to the fact that Unhallowed pay for purchasing buildings in Population, and not Gold. So, let's crunch some numbers. Two parts here: What it costs to speedbuild a Lancer, and how much Population we need to sacrifice to get those nice religious buildings in a newly conquered town (those do not cost Upkeep for the Unhallowed, *very* convenient). I also copied it over to the Guide thread for easier reference. Preliminaries Even if you don't take the "Speed Lancer" route, I strongly recommend to dismiss the starting Ghoul and Reaper right away. And to destroy the Corrupted Sanctum starting building. We don't need those early on, and it saves us 4 Negative Energy (NE) in Upkeep. 1 Production equals 8 Population for buying a building. So something that costs 10 Prod needs 80 Pop sacrificed, 50 Prod = 400 Pop, and 100 Prod is a whopping 800 Pop. I recommend to micromanage population for those first 10 or so turns: only put what you need on Production, overflow goes to NE farming to increase the buffer. E.g. when you buy the Guild and Tourney, that's 2 turns where you can put all pop on NE. Your Capital starts out with 6000 Population, and +80 Population per turn. A typical town conquered early on has ~3000-4000 Population, and 100+ popgrowth/turn. Speedbuilding Lancers To build Lancers, we need the following buildings. Format is "Name - turns to build - population to buy it". Stable - 2 - 160 Armory - 2 - 160 Sage Guild - 2 - 120 | Note: with the Stable, you should be able to build the Sageguild in 1 turn Fighter Guild - 4 - 400 Tourney of the Damned - 6 - 500 Optional: Armorer Guild - 11 - 800. Skip this early on. It only gives 1 AC for too much population sacrifice. As we can see, for the first 3 required buildings, buying them with population only gives us a total of 3 turns advantage for 440 population. Not really worth it in my opinion. We'll just build those regularly, bringing our turn count up to 7. The Fighterguild and Tourney take longer, so we'll buy those and sacrifice 900 population for it. Depending on your Capital, a Lancer should then take 2-3 turns. With 2 turns I recommend to wait it out, with 3 I'd buy at least the first one to get them going. They costs 200 population to insta-build. Assuming we buy the first Lancer, we need: 9 turns and 1100 population. But in 9 turns we also earn 9x80=720 pop back, so the net loss is only 1100-720=380 pop. And we'll have those back in 380/80=4.75 -> another 5 turns. Excellent bang for the buck, having a highend unit with high movement out at turn 10. Pretty hard to beat that for other races. Those 10 turns give us just enough time to cast a Magic Spirit or three, and some nice buffs for the Lancer. E.g. if we went with Death Mastery and Life 1, we pre-cast Bless Weapon, Bone Aura, Life Ward to instantly bling it out when it comes off the assembly line. New town upgrading As mentioned, a typical town conquered early on has ~3000-4000 Population, and 100+ popgrowth/turn. Note that 100 popgrowth is the lower limit. The towns in my test play have 120-140 without Housing. If it has any buildings you don't need, sell them. Now, numbers, same format as before "Name - turns to build - population to buy it": Palisade - 4 - 304 Shrine - 2 - 160 Temple - 5 - 400 Parthenon - 10 - 800 Sage Guild - 2 - 120 Library - 4 - 304 Alchemist Guild - 6 - 496 University - 6 - 496 Wizard Guild - 10 - 1200 If we limit ourselves to a Palisade and the +Mana buildings, we need: Shrine isn't worth buying, build it normally, rest gets bought. That's 1504 population and 5 turns. With 100 popgrowth, we earn back 500 pop, reducing the cost to 1000. Again, excellent bang for the buck. If we go all out, we add to the above: Sage Guild we build, the rest we buy. For an added 2496 population and 6 turns. With 600 pop earned back, we lost 1900. Our new total is 2900 population lost and 11 turns to have a town with full +Mana and +Research built. Add 2 more turns to build 2 Archers after the Palisade, and we arrive at 13 turns and -2700 pop. Depending on starting population we might have to do some Housing in between, or we'll end up with zero pop. Now we should have one free population left that we can put on Production. Switch the town to Housing and forget about it
No rush And a happy new year to everyone! Reminds me: Take any of my Drac savegames with 100+ turns, and you should have a crash in 30 minutes tops on an Air1.
I think the difference in rate population growth between 1 population in production when building undead housing and having zero population in production is statistically insignificant unless the game is going last for hundreds of turns.
It depends on how much Production you have in that town, and I think (max.pop-current pop) also plays a role. For towns with low growth (typically 80), I only get 5-10 extra per Production pop. For ones with 100+ growth I mostly get 20-30 extra, and for those it's usually worth it when there's nothing else you have to do. Don't feel like putting the mathhammer to that mechanic, I'll leave it to someone else
IXI bug Unable to equip IXI, who according to manual is rogue with either bow or crossbow. I think I was able before the last update. Will send a save game as well.
Ixi is a melee Rogue, so I'm pretty sure she got hit by the "melee heroes can no longer use (cross)bows" change. @doomtrader: Ixi is the most fragile of the melee heroes, she should get an exception.
[Play Report] Unhallowed Nina's Housing Strategy - Turn 75 Actually nothing too special to report back, so I'll just do a short writeup on what happened till turn 75. - I just conquered my first town on Prime Plane, giving me a nice beachhead near the center of the map. - Leveled Skeleton Archers are actually pretty tough, with 60+ HP. - I summoned my first Dracolich. Not that I really need it, but it's fun - I got enough Life Circles from Ruins that I just researched Heroism. I have a few Lancers that still aren't max level, so they'll get it thrown on them too. Again, not strictly needed, but fun. - Economy is running extremely strong. I have ~700 NE stockpiled, and get 30+/turn more. Mana? Oh boy... Despite burning through 300+ almost every turn, I have 4200 piled up on turn 75, and another 2k at least in magic items I found. My whole Power of ~180 goes into Spellcraft, I'm close to hitting 100 there already - fastest I ever increased it. - Only one Archer for defense isn't enough anymore, even with Palisades. I upgraded my towns to 3 Archers and 1 Huecuva each, and just replace any losses. - I pretty much control the Death Plane already, with only a few towns left I didn't get around to yet - since I prefer to clean out Ruins first and foremost, and only take enemy towns when they are placed conveniently along my army's path. - I only have 1 Hero - Darren Burnett, whom I got at t47. I had a decent amount of stuff in store, so I could dress him up quite nicely. Not healing on Death Plane isn't an issue, since he almost never takes damage anyways; and the little bit he eats, I can heal easily with Healing Familiar (another great reason for Unhallowed to take at least 1 point in Life magic). Not that I need him, the Lancers are doing all the work - I'm considering to throw in a Summon Champion, again just for fun. Nehanash and Amu-Hah Shekala would be a fun addition to my army. A note on Death Spells: Most of them could be scratched from the menu, and I wouldn't miss them at all. I only use a handful, and those are so important/powerful that I never cast most other spells even once: Black Prayer, Bone Aura, Darkness, Dark Energies (healing spell), Death Spell, Wraithform. Especially Wraithform. Try to get it as soon as you can. Everything else is "nice to have, but not strictly needed" - e.g. Vampirism. Or outright "useless, why bother?" - like Cruel Unminding, Dementia, Lycanthrophy, Pestilence, or the various Summons (with the possible exceptions of the Skeletons, Banshees, Dracolich - but even those are optional). A note on Traits: Next time, I'll definitely go with Warlord again. Blinged-out Lancers are so powerful, giving them another 2 levels sure doesn't hurt. Not to mention that I still only have 3 armies (and one of those is 2 Lancers only), so my original thought "I'll have so many fresh armies (as usual) that Warlord isn't worth it" does not hold anymore. I think I can call it a day here, since I am effectively in mop-up mode since before turn 50 Don't think I'll have anything truly exciting to report till the game ends.
[Play Report] Unhallowed Nina's Housing Strategy - Turn 100 NOTE: Taking requests again for the next playthrough. So if there's something you want to see, just holler. Since last time, I conquered a bunch of towns on the Prime Plane, and almost completely cleared the Ruins on the Shadow Plane. - I am one town away from hitting the 20 town limit, so I'll just have to raze everything from now on. - The summoned Dracolich was a great investment: with some enchantments, it can clean difficult dungeons all on its own. - The only other Summon I did was a Summon Champion, and I got Shekala right on first try. - I got the Ancient Master from a Ruin, but dismissed him again right away. As much as I love their Illithid looks, when you get them late in the game they don't have enough HP to survive the stronger Ruins you are clearing out by then. And fully enhancing him to the point of good survivability would have cost me at least 10 turns in casting Enchantments and crafting items. Just wasn't worth it, as I was casting Summon Champion already (got Shekala, very nice). - I then split my main army into two: the fast-moving Lancers in one, and everything that's slower (Heroes, Arcane Wraiths, Knight) into another. - 8 Lancers blinged out with Heroism (where needed), Wraithform, Bless Weapon, Bless, Bone Aura are strong enough to kill almost everything easily. - The only Ruin that caused me real problems was a bunch of Archangels with a Demon. Righteous Might plus that "throws back damage" Fire spell is a brutal combination. Ah well, that's what we have the Death spell for - On Prime, I am churning out Skeleton Archers to conquer enemy towns. One enemy Sorcerer is playing Darkelves, and likes to use Weavers. No need to feed stronger units to their Doombolts. Archers, a few Huecuvas and Death spell are enough to deal with them. - The investment into the Mithril town didn't pay off. Remember, I founded that town before turn 25 or so. Only now it's geared up to finally produce Lancers, and I don't really need them anymore. - I got so many Life Circles from Ruins, I could research Crusade and Charm of Life; took a break from enhancing my units to cast those two. Game should be finished within another 50 turns or so. The longest part will be trecking all across the Prime map to raze the remaining enemy towns. Might just send my Lancers through the nearest Portal to speed things up.
Disjunction help Hello, I was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some help on how to cast Disjunction on the iPhone. I have a number of nasty effects crippling my towns on the Prime plane and would like to try to dispel them. I can cast disjunction, but all that happens is a brief swirly effect. There seems to be no way to point it at the effects I am trying to dispel, nor any failure message. I have tried casting it at max boost 10 or so times with no effect... Is this the way it should behave or is there something I am missing? Thanks in advance
Trying your strategy Nullzone. 4 blacklancers. Very effective with "bone Aura", Life Ward and bless on till I found Wraith Form. With wraith and vampirism, they kick butt. Then I got General Krull as reward. He is speed 10/5 so not much slower. It is killer stack now with a fifth black Lancer killing everything. I like long games (I am a Grognard) so I tend to use all planes and seven opponents.
Hi Sithrandil. Saw your post only now, slipped under my radar somehow Dispelling enemy magic effects is a bit tricky: First, you need to check which of the Dispels you actually need: Disjunction is for Global Enchantments, e.g. "Crusade" or "Evil Omens". "Disenchant Area"(DA) is for dispelling an Enchantment on a town, and what you seem to need here. Next, you need to figure out how much Mana to put into the spell to make sure the Dispel actually works. Let's take Fire's "Sow Discord" as example. It costs around 30 Mana to cast, so you need at least 30 to dispel it. I think the enemy Sorcerer's Spellcasting skill also adds to raising the difficulty, but I'm not sure about that. What I also don't know is if it's an automatic success when you invested enough Mana, or if it only gives you a chance to dispel. So, DA comes with a 1.5x multiplier in your favor. This means that to dispel Sow Discord, you need to cast DA with at least 20 Mana put into it. As DA costs a minimum of 50, no biggie. Should work on the lowest casting level, without any Boost. Death's Famine costs 80 Mana (with Death Mastery and Channeler, the base cost is higher) . To be on the safe side with dispelling, let's aim for ~60 Mana casting cost for DA. With the 1.5x bonus, that's 90 Mana counting towards the dispel. One Boost level brings the casting cost to 70 Mana, giving 70*1.5=105 for dispelling. That should blow the Famine Enchantment right out of the water. Let us know how things go
Purposedly ignoring the latter half of the sentence , how are your feelings on the game after the rework? Apparently it's still good enough to warrant quite a lot of play time But has the experience suffered significantly for the changes? (I've yet to find the time to invest enough into Planar Conquest to tell the practical implications of the pre- and post-rework mechanics apart.)
@Ayjona: I didn't have time (or inclination) to check every single change. Some are annoying (like Alchemy costing 3 now), some I don't notice at all (Merchant giving less Gold now), some suck like a Dyson 9000 (higher cost for Heroism). Some are great (better Healer effect). A few don't do anything because the base thing is useless (who cares that Sage now gives you 50% bonus when you never put Power into Research). @doomtrader: Are you listening? Next part is important: By now I am convinced that the RNG is broken. The change I was most concerned about was the -3 tohit for ranged units. But I do not see any significant difference to pre-update. Rangeds still tear through early opposition like a hot knife through butter. Example: With a tohit chance of 15%, statistically at least 10 of 16 ranged units should miss. But what I see is that regularly ~15 units hit and only 3 or 4 miss. And even stranger, the Elf Archers pull this stunt the most, as if they use a different RNG. While other Rangeds are even more useless now, with the Drac Javelineers being the worst - they can't hit the broadside of a barn now. On top of it, I still see insane damage from ranged attacks: 20+ and even 40+ is still very common. My suggestion, again: IF you want to make ranged units less dominating in early/midgame - note I am still not convinced this is needed(!): Revert that change, and reduce the damage they do. I'd start with lowering it by at least 1/3, maybe even 50%, and then playtest the living hell out of it. Verdict: Overall, things changed much less than I feared, nothing there that outright broke things. Still a great game
On another note: Still taking requests for playthroughs. Started a no-magic Drac game (a lot easier than I thought ), and want to complete that hard Bug game at some point. But no problem putting those on the backburner if I can entertain you folks with something you want to see played
It's probably like in MOM where chance of dispell = 1- ( cost of spell dispelled / (cost of spell dispelled + cost of dispelling effort)) So your example above is 1- (80 / (80+105) ) = 57℅
