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Wow, and I was wondering why a certain lvl 3 'cave' absolutely destroys my whole army. The Lords of Magic: Special Edition 3.02 Unofficial Patch. Pegasi NO LONGER spawn in level 1 encounters (should be Brownies).
I found the best way is to level them up fast by clearing the nearby dungeons, then have them train experience in the mage tower so new recruits are level 2 at least. Next, any time other faiths invade your territory, especially with lone thiefs, see if your mage can solo them so they get all the experience. This can lead to very rapid level ups. The single target damage spells do the trick, along with a few melee attacks. If they can't solo enemy champs or small armies, bring another champion of yours or a small army along.
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Do it with the smallest army possible so your mage lord gets the maximum possible xp.Then it's a difficult choice of exploring nearby areas with them, or having them stay back to research spells. I set certain goals, like I'll stay until I get the movement increasing spell, or the army healing one, or the projectile resistance spell. And while they are doing that, have the Warrior and Thief champs go around with your main army grabbing resource nodes and levelling up. Then when the key spells are finished researching, head to your neighbors area and see if you can liberate their temple or take their city. If that's too hard, go for whatever mid level resource nodes you can handle.
After you get that, you'll probably be ready to get your main city to level 2, then you can train higher experience for new mages to level 3 or 4 once you upgrade the mage tower. That's when the research really speeds up. Get a new key spell, and head out with your mage lord to another neighboring area to take over.
Upgrade city to level 3, train, research, repeat. At this point you'll probably have researched the mass damage spells which decimate enemy armies and you can take on high level dungeons.
Mage Lords are really great. Little big planet 2 theme song. When I first started playing this game way long ago, I favored warrior and thief lords, but in my 100+ hours of play on steam I mostly used mage lords.Picking a good faith for them can make them all the more effective.
Order Mages IMO are the worst (lowest mana), with chaos mages holding a close second (most spells have random chance of hurting caster, but that is combined with greater effectiveness). Earth and Death (lower mana) are the mid-low tier, water and life (best healing spells) mid-high, and air and fire mages are the best IMO. Fire mages get so many awesome damage spells and high mana. They also can become better than competent melee units as they level (same with air). They are boss.The most amount of strategy involved is choosing when to use your mage lord to explore, buff your mage tower, or research spells. I usually spend a little time early getting key spells and getting my mage tower to a point where I can at least get lvl 2 mages (to keep the research going). Then I usually take my mage lord out with a sizeable party and start securing great temples of friendly faiths, hitting dungeons, villages, statues, mines along the way.
The mages staying behind to research are used to guard my stronghold from marauding parties such that they also grow and become better researchers.In battle: You want to maximize the amount you can do with your mage before the enemy engages your units in ranged or melee combat. I usually cast spells and then pause to give me time to select the next target and cast the next spell. You can cast the next spell when you hear the casting sound effect from the previous spell (this is before your spell damages or otherwise effects the target for most spells).
The best targets for your mage are those with high armor that your regular melee or ranged units may not be able to damage easily. Choosing the appropriate target is key. Enemy champions, magic and legendary creatures are ideal targets. There is more to it though, sometimes it is better to target specific roles. For example, you may be able tp pick off all enemy ragned units, giving your group the added effectiveness of ranged damage that your enemy does not have. Keep playing with it and you'll find newer and better ways to utilize them.If you ever play custom game (select custom for a given difficulty level and spend points manually) there are great combos where you can even start with a mage that can easily solo lvl1-5 dungeons on medium difficulty. Try a water mage with the staff of drowning or a fire mage with the staff of incineration.
Note: The artifiact points are lower for the associated faith so it is not possible to start with a life mage for example that has staff of drowning as the cost would be far too high. Hmm, as far as ease of winning goes, for me personally, as mage lord, I think this is probably the right order. Note I'm using custom mages, and I mostly pick one spell and one cheap mana artifact, then dump the rest into exp (no troops, except life):Easiest:Order: just pick the spell summon spirit warrior when you start. (build note: take the cloud staff or whatever the cheapest off-faith mana item is, and just autocalc through the first dwelling to get enough mana to cast the spell. Then you're away)Chaos: Having played a few hundred hours of this in my younger years, I'm pretty good at using blades of fury to wipe out most or all of a cave, and then autocalcing to complete the win.
Minor fate and hand of fate are overpowered later in the game, blades of fury and vortex are overpowered at all levels. Reasonably skill intensive.Death: I mean, Balkoth.
This isn't so much about the magic as the thieves guild.Fire: see chaos, but replace 'blades of fury' with 'fury fire'. The mages get less mana and fury fire is weaker. In fact, all the spells are worse than chaos.Life: Like death, life mages are made much easier by their thieves guild. Superpower some elven archers by powerleveling, use bless, etc. Support mages, but support mages with extreme mana.Air: Powerful mages with good spells (especially the defensive battle spells) but hard to get started with, compared to other faiths. Once you have your temple up and running you should be good to go.Water: Take light rain on top of ice bolt for your starting mage.
It's a cheap gamble that wipes out any fire units, and from memory the rest of the custom points won't do much for you.Earth: Terrible. Not fun to play.This is unpatched, with and without pegasi in random dwellings (if you take them down in the first cave for chaos with blades of fury, you get two levels). Have not played the modded version that has been so heavily advertised by some contributors to this forum.As a general note, mages are all about knowing how to use their spells.
I'd say order, death and life are your best bet for starting off. If you keep the army you train your heroes with small, and you clear the dwellings around your stronghold at a respectable pace, you won't really be hiring level 3 and 4 heroes from your buildings. I tend to have my research on the back burner with one level 1 or 2 mage until my mage guild is producing mages of level 5-7 because I'm spending my resources upgrading my stronghold, and aside from the basic movement spell and the battle spells you start with, and minor fate as chaos, there won't be anything game-changing to research. Use a scout if you want to explore.
I started a thread awhile ago with the lofty goal of sifting through the books and uncovering all the undead that listed their creation methods. With splatbooks adding to what animate dead, create undead, create greater undead and other spells can make, it becomes difficult for an aspiring necromancer to keep track of all the neat things he can do.Thanks to my DM's allowance of series of homebrews, my necromancer has less reason to worry about such restrictions. He will be gaining the ability to create most types of undead through a ritual, however. The limitation is based on CR, so I figured I'd make myself a list.So far, I've managed to look through every non-setting-specific official 3.5 book (and the Monster Manual II).
I can't say when I might go through all the 3.0 books, the Dragon and Dungeon magazines and the setting-specific stuff, but I thought I'd share the fruits of my labor thus far.The list includes the creature's name, the book, mentions in the monster entry of how to create them, HD, CR (or modifier in case of templates), and a brief list of their abilities. I created this list for my own purposes, so not all of the abilities will be mentioned, but there's enough info that it shouldn't be too difficult to look up. I hope this proves useful to someone else. Cheers for that. I'm working on a necromancer build at the moment, so this is all pretty helpful stuff.Options for creating any of these undead are sort of limited, but of course if you're playing an undead PC, you can assume any of these forms with Alter Self. It's like Polymorph, except it's much lower level and works for almost every form (since almost every form can be turned into a Zombie, the thing that makes zombies slow is an Extraordinary ability, and Alter Self doesn't grant you Extraordinary abilities unless they're specifically mentioned).Don't look at me like that.
I'm playing an Eldritch Knight, I'm allowed to cheese it up. Cheers for that. I'm working on a necromancer build at the moment, so this is all pretty helpful stuff.Options for creating any of these undead are sort of limited, but of course if you're playing an undead PC, you can assume any of these forms with Alter Self. It's like Polymorph, except it's much lower level and works for almost every form (since almost every form can be turned into a Zombie, the thing that makes zombies slow is an Extraordinary ability, and Alter Self doesn't grant you Extraordinary abilities unless they're specifically mentioned).The method my character will be using is a feat from the. Feed the Dark Gods NecromanticPrerequisites: Any two Necromantic feats, Character level 7, 10 ranks in Knowledge(Religion)Benefit: You may create any undead creature through the art of sacrifice. For every CR of the creature you wish to create, you must sacrifice one sentient soul (Int 5 or better) and 500 gp.
You cannot control any one undead with a CR greater than two less than your Character Level.You automatically control up to your unmodified Charisma modifier in individual undead created by this feat, but no undead can have a CR greater than two less than your Character Level.@monkey3: Thanks for that list! That's the sort of thing I had been looking for in the first place!
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