Strategies to fight Inferno?

[Erlkönig]

As Senator those devils kicked my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ass, I had an army with 8 level 2 mages and they all died to a single Greater Devil who melted my ~80 strong army with a bunch of chaff.

My experience with fighting the few demons I encountered before I managed to close the gate taught me the following things:
-Human mages do jack and ♥♥♥♥ against demons and are very unreliable unless you have at least six rows of chaff in front of them (I wish I was kidding). Otherwise you are liable to die to some range 8 burst 25 nuke from any of the several lvl 3 / multi-level 2 demonic casters, not to mention the 'strikes anywhere' demonic locusts or the numerous fire breaths.
-HIgh HP units are mandatory, any unit with less than 7 or 8 hp will die instantly to the AOE spam that demons are notorious for.
-Fire resistance helps a lot.

If anyone else has got tips to share, they are welcome.

[titanopteryx]

Well one of the wizards is called a White Wizard and he has banishing spells. If you go to the elemental plane and capture a citadel in the flame element section, you can mass recruit units and lords both that are immune to fire. Another option is getting some of those casters that the senator can hire that do a bunch of poison burst damage and then fill the army with cloud folk which are both ethereal and immune to poison. And if the gate is near the coast, and you can get ships, you might be able to go around the demons on the water and get to the gate by landing on the nearby shore and approaching the gate from the opposite direction. If you've acquired an item that grants a wearer the Fly ability, you can put that on a lord, make him go solo along the clouds until he's above the gate, then descend and try to sneak to the gate that way. Also astrologers can have a strong charm ability, actually it's an enslave ability, that potentially might enslave that Greater Devil. I'm not sure it would work though.

[[Mi.Sa]Skullduggery]

Very specific but amazingly good at making inferno your ♥♥♥♥♥ and making invading them viable. However this only really applies to warlock and the pale ones with some tweaks.

With Warlock you want to try and secure as many rubies as possible and get a fire warlock I know fire vs fire I must be some kind of mad man but hear me out. You want to get your hands on a fire giant commander then upgrade him to a titan which opens up making a fire giant army. Why fire giants you ask when they have fire brand swords? Well the majority of the damage is actually slashing they are completely immune to fire and are walk brick walls.

Now the next step or you can do it simultaneous alongside the 1st step is to burrow into agartha near the sea then make a tunnel 8 or 9 tiles long justto play things safe. Then here is the expensive part which will be painful without rings of water breathing or something similar equipped onto your worms. then you need to dig deeper into hell and also break out into the deep sea so as to flood your tunnel. When in hell if you in the walls tunnel into the main part so the demons can come at you through the lovely tunnel into elysium you made. Why do this you ask? Well the forces of inferno don't think oh ♥♥♥♥ i can't actually swim to get through they go full leeroy jenkins to try and get out and murder stuff but since the tunnel is too long to pass through even with a fast flying army they drown. Now you play the waiting game.

Now with hells population at an all time low even if portals open up they are limited in there capabilities of messing stuff up and you should have some fire giant forces to take them on. At this stage if you feel secure in your ability to keep a foothold on the surface make another tunnel and push in with forces of giants and you should be able to start securing settlements and mines down there to help your war effort upstairs.

With senator however your best bets are ballista's, Leo's and Princep Solari the last two because they are resistant to fire and ballista's because they are ballista's

[Primagen]

I took over Inferno with beholders. If you have stong casters with High hp Inferno is much easier to deal with. Fire Proof spells and Monsters would probably do okay as well.

[Chameon]

If your goal is to crack through the gate and take over inferno, it's a lot harder to guarantee by any stretch. But if your goal is just to stop them coming out....depending on the race it can be a lot easier.

Voice of El can banish demons back to inferno, scattering them to the seven winds, potentially throwing ice devils into lava lakes and slaughtering them incidentally, but it's not something you should lean on, and it doesn't really resolve the heart of the issue, the Demonic Lieutenants such as Helophages, Greater Devils, etc that are using the demonic 'chaff' (Term used loosely) to buy time for them to get out their 2 big spells a turn to slice through your army.

Any race with flying commanders can get over the demons and pop down to crack the gate with relatively little opportunity for devils to swarm them. It's a risk, definitely, but depending on the race, it might well be a worthy risk.

Agartha and Warlocks, along with anyone who finds a shovel of the mole king, can technically set up a 'slaughter hallway' for the demons, if they just create a very long snaking path leading from the edge of an ocean wall on one side, to the edge of an ocean wall on the other, cracking open a hole to the inferno before sprinting back, running from the devils with a separate leader, and tunneling through the ocean wall as inferno pushes through, drowning much of the devils coming through, blunting any assault from hellgates before it happens, although also closing their primary route into hell. This does depend on you starting this project very early on however, and finishing before the hell gate opens up.

Because of how Inferno's AI works, it's technically possible, if you're playing Demonologist, to open a demon gate on the other side of the map, then, waiting a few dozen turns for the devils to swarm out and fight the AI, opening a demonic gate on your own side of the map. There's no real 'benefit' to this in terms of actual gain for taking over hell as demonologist, but it's a cute trick that gets you a bunch of relatively free gold gain and trade, as well as a few chunks of iron, with relatively minimal guards to punch through due to the greater devils, heliophagii, etc just being too busy wandering through Elysium.

If you're going to try to fight the demonic hordes wholesale, your'e going to want to avoid fire and ice damage, as many devils are immune to fire, and there are a good chunk immune to ice. Ironically, physical damage tends to work very well against them, as does pure magic, and acid damage is almost always the perfect flavor for the current situation.

Make sure to not linger in line of sight of multiple demon armies, as they will unify to kill you if one's insufficient (Or if they just feel like unifying to kill you).

Scouting information is worth its' weight in gold to know what's coming and what's there, and they don't have detect stealthed, so scouts like Ravens and such will help for heavy weight.

If you MUST invade hell, try not to do it through an infernal gateway, scrolls and maps are generally safer. You -can-, and you MAY succeed, but you need to make distance between you and the gateway as quickly as possible. Once you're beyond a certain distance from the gateway, the devils are less likely to chase you down and slaughter you like a sheep, although they may catch you coming back for their slaves, or may catch you on their own way out of hell, it's really a gamble if you go through the gateway that you can't really control.

Pick off smaller groups of devils when, where, and as you can. If you do so, there's DEFINITELY a risk to attract the attention of the rest of the horde, but it stops demons from unifying together and becoming utterly undefeatable due to raw numbers. If there's ever a devil force that you can take with no risk to your own, it's worth taking the AP loss to kill it.

If you're playing Senate, this is one of the occasions where Augurs are worth their weight as gold as field commanders. It's rare, but this is DEFINITELY an instance of that, due to their +1 vision range letting you understand more of what's going on at a distance and letting you plan out your assaults more.

[Shien]

Depending on the faction you can just get a really strong army and push them all the way back to the gateway, seal it and be done with it. If you want to invade inferno, that'd be a whole lot different and requires a lot more preparation, especially if you are playing with a faction like senator that wont be able to field the strongest of armies unless you hire units from other planes like the elemental planes etc.