Chaos Paladins

[Ichthyic]

Many times with the old MoM, I used to use sorcery, life and Paladins together (or just played Merlin with Paladins). So, with the new version I decided to try out Chaos Paladins and give them wings or demon armor plus flaming blades, etc. So basically "corrupted knights".

Interestingly, this is what the game threw at me:
-first hero to offer to join: Morganna
-first enemy I have had to face and am still facing as he started on Myrror: Merlin

just totally random. Found that kinda funny.

[Narf the Mouse]

lol, Merlin is the hero of the story and you are the protagonist.

[Ichthyic]

I'm the anti-hero!

oh, and I just, for the very first time, killed a magic immune hero with web+cracks call... and it was Merlin's primary hero. muhahahahaahaha.

>:)

It was absolutely amazing how many skills that hero had for only being a level 2 hero! no less than SIX skills! so that's what happens when you put the AI on "master" difficulty in this version of the game.

[Narf the Mouse]

Can't survive if the ground eats you.

[Ichthyic]

Hungry hungry ground...

[rgp151]

Chaos is a little weird in how it has a mix of spells that affect either fantastic or normal units. But overall, unless I'm going up against someone with powerful Life magic, I typically try to build all fantastic armies and go for Warp Reality and Chaos Surge. Of course in this game its often over long before Chaos Surge comes around, and that also requires going very heavy on Red, like 8-10 books.

To me the best races for Chaos are High Elves and High Men. High Men have a long build time to get started, but you can rely on fantastic units early until your Paladins come on-line. When playing without Word of Recall I tend to rely on summoning units in newly conquered towns, typically just Hell Hounds. Once you get Flame Strike it doesn't require much to defend a town, so you can typically get by with fairly weak defenses, depending on what the enemy is fielding.

I'll typically end up, however, with at least one all non-fantastic stack that has heroes in it, maybe with Leadership or something, mixed with Paladins, etc. Of course Magic Immunity of the Paladins helps greatly if they are Chaos Channeled and you go up against a Life Wizard, so that's certainly a big upside. But loss of Flameblade and Leadership can hurt in some cases.

High Elves, also work good to support early summoning and then stacked with Fire Giants they get Pathfinding. I tend to rely on Chimeras to do most of my dirty work and to take out Towers since losing them isn't such a big deal.

[Ichthyic]

I discovered today that you can cast all your spells on a normal unit, and those spells are NOT lost when you then chaos channel the unit afterwards.

so cast holy armor, flame blade, etc. THEN cast chaos channels. All my paladins are full stacked with buffs from life, nature, and chaos... and have demon wings as well. Works on heroes too (except Torin of course). Bug or feature? Who can say. probably should take archmage retort if you plan on doing this though, as you don't want your "normal unit" spells to get dispelled. interestingly, none of the "normal unit" enchantments I have cast on my paladins have ever actually BEEN dispelled after they have been chaos channeled, even without archmage. I have chaos master, so that might explain the chaos buffs, but holy armor for example has also never been dispelled. not by enemy wizard, and not by djinn in sorc nodes. the spells that get dispelled are things I can easily cast on the channeled unit again, like stone skin, resist elements, etc.

[rgp151]

Yeah, that's true. IN Classic 1.5 that didn't get you much because any enemy Wizard would soon dispell those buffs then you couldn't put them back on. Happens in this version too. Maybe if you have Spell Lock... But anyway, the main point is, when playing Chaos I usually have one stack of all normal units with heroes and many other stack of fantastic units, including Chaos Channeled. The Chaos effects generally work either/or with Normal or Fantastic.

[Ichthyic]

Yeah, not getting holy armor dispelled was just dumb luck. have had it dispelled plenty since then. without sorcery, the best idea is just to spam cheap enchants on top of the ones you want to protect. safety in numbers game. game is going to randomly roll against your enchants, and more enchants means more chances to miss the ones you care about. But yeah, it's dicey doing that with chaos channeled heroes that have things like holy armor on them. fortunately, I had two staffs with creature binding on them, with a bunch of negative spell chance gear, so they only got ONE chance to dispel if they were say, a djinn in a dungeon. Otherwise, it was "welcome to the team bro!"z
Chaos channeling heroes meant I got to give them items other than ones that give flying, so even without the "normal unit" buffs, it still came out ahead.