Animists are overpowered fun!

[Telos]

I hate to admit it because I love the unit, but animists are incredibly overpowered.

I just cleared an early game gold wonder containing a lost wizard, 3 bone dragons, and a couple T3 astral guys. All I had were 4 animists, my level-8 leader, and a T1 shield guy who stood by and watched. The animists were boosted by unicorn mounts, staves of mending and mysterious tonic, and I cast two instances of summon primal animal. I left the battle with hardly a scratch. There's no way that it's balanced to have 4 T2 units with barely any research completely wipe the floor with mythic T4-5 units.

In case it helps anyone else to abuse this for fun and profit, here's what I've learned so far.

I've been using mammoths since I liked their freeze, production boost, and their displacing trample attack gives you lots of fun options for rearranging the battlefield. But other primal animals could probably work similarly well, especially the crocodiles and wolves. A drawback of mammoths is that icy starts seem to be a bit low-resourced.

Between unicorn mounts (+5 HP and phasing), Hardy (+8 HP), Elusive (reduced damage from opportunity attacks as you strategically retreat), and eventually fey mist evasion, the animists are quite survivable, and if they ever do get in trouble, they have plenty of free heals available, including the alchemy one that can strip negative effects (saved my bacon from freezes and stuns a few times!).

In a prolonged battle, animists should usually get in a "bump, set, spike" cycle: "bump" up close to the enemy to get a shot off (for +2 fury) and risk getting whacked in return, "set" your broken bones by backing away to a safe place (using unicorn phase when needed) to use your big heal on yourself (for +20HP, and +3 fury), and then "spike" a mammoth to bowl forward and keep the enemy occupied. Along the way, you have free heals (from tomes of faith, alchemy and eventually fey mists) that you can distribute onto whomever might have taken a bigger bruising. By the time this mammoths expires, the cycle has repeated and you can spike in its replacement. So each T2 animist is effectively an unkillable Mammoth with T2.5 stats.

It can be a bit tricky getting into that regular cycle because you usually don't have good "bump" options on the first turn, so it often makes sense to start the battle with "set". I've tentatively decided that in many battles it makes sense to have pairs of animists "double-set" one of them on the first turn, so that one can spike out a mammoth on the second turn to run interference as they each then try to establish their own "bump, set, spike" cycle. If you don't rush out some early mammoths this way, fast enemies may corner you early and cause some "hull damage" on your units -- usually not a big deal since you have plenty of healing, but still better not to take hull damage if you don't have to.

It's always an option to take an animist who has already bumped for +2 fury, and have another animist "set" them so they "spike" out a mammoth immediately.

Animists can't "spike" mammoths when someone is standing in their face, so it's often fun to use one mammoth to shove a looming enemy out of the way so that another animist will be free to "spike" out another mammoth. You can "spike" a mammoth next to a nearby enemy if you want to immediately use its AoE freezing stomp. Otherwise, it's often better to summon it where it'll have a 3-hex-long path to build up a great charge.

The trickiest challenge I encountered (aside from bump-set-spike choreography) was water battles where mammoths aren't allowed. For these, it helps to bring a handful of your T1 shields, who conveniently also get unicorn mounts. Instead of "spiking" mammoths, you can instead use your animists to ensure that your shields stay well-healed and well-charged with fury to either boost their damage (with chance of freezing) or give them the chance to further heal themselves with their fury-burning ability.

Both on land and on sea, the key is patience: you should almost always be dancing/phasing away, drawing the battle out so that your healers/summoners can put in overtime and eventually win a war of attrition.

A drawback of using mammoths is that they're so beefy the AI often wants to bypass them to hit softer targets. To avoid that, it often makes sense to intentionally "badly" position mammoths, with their flank exposed so that the enemy will be inclined to hit your summon rather than the units you care about. Mammoths are beefy enough that they usually don't even get killed, and they're single-figure units so damage doesn't even slow them down. One fun way to "badly" position mammoths is to have one or a few mammoths run past an enemy unit and herd it back closer to your own lines where you can kill it safely.

I considered doing this with eagle mounts, which would be great for mobility especially amphibiously. However, you lose significant HP, lose the ability to use trees for cover, and therefore (I think?) lose the ability to take full advantage of Fey Mists, which I wanted to do. Unicorn phasing seemed like a pretty good compromise.

All in all this is great fun. Enjoy it while it lasts, as I'm sure it's bound to be nerfed.

[Azunai]

I guess they might change the summon skill to start on a 3 turn cooldown or something, so you can't just cast 2 heals on one animist and summon a mammoth right away.

The mammoth itself might also get start with cooldown on the AoE freeze skill.

Don't know what else they could change without ruining the culture. The animist is clearly the star of their unit roster. The other units are unremarkable.

[Telos]

A fairly reasonable nerf to consider would be making the Animist's summon a once-per-battle thing. Animists would still compare well to Wildspeakers: the primal summon is a *lot* better (though delayed), and the heal+fury is often better than the Wildspeaker's buff to animals. Even with that severe nerf, I still wouldn't mind including a few Animists in a well-rounded lineup -- they work especially well with T1 shields -- but you probably wouldn't want to go mono-animists for your land army and wonder-clearing the way you currently can.

[Anarchy Burger]

Man I picked the wrong animal aspect with the storm crow

[~ Fabulous ~]

Originally posted by Anarchy Burger:

Man I picked the wrong animal aspect with the storm crow

haven't try crow yet, is crow weak?

[Anarchy Burger]

Im not impressed. Its just a much weaker thubderbird

[Eldrin]

I think the real problem is that the mammoth is op for its tier and being summoned like that. I tried the storm crow and the sand snake, both are pretty vanilla next to that.

[Beytran70]

Originally posted by Eldrin:

I think the real problem is that the mammoth is op for its tier and being summoned like that. I tried the storm crow and the sand snake, both are pretty vanilla next to that.

Sand snake still can delete a unit if it's summoned behind it, and guaranteed blind is very useful.

[ChaosKhan]

Originally posted by Eldrin:

I think the real problem is that the mammoth is op for its tier and being summoned like that. I tried the storm crow and the sand snake, both are pretty vanilla next to that.

I second that. There are just huge power gaps between the summons and this is the main issue. The Mammoth is by far the strongest summon, while the Crow is the weakest one.

That said, he also kind of broke the unit with having a build revolve completely around it. So while his Animists are now a force of nature (pun intended) when fighting neutrals, they should be in serious trouble when encountering other factions. They can't replace higher tier troops after all, especially when eating 2 chain lightnings a turn.

[Cindeerella]

Originally posted by Azunai:

I guess they might change the summon skill to start on a 3 turn cooldown or something, so you can't just cast 2 heals on one animist and summon a mammoth right away.

The mammoth itself might also get start with cooldown on the AoE freeze skill.

Don't know what else they could change without ruining the culture. The animist is clearly the star of their unit roster. The other units are unremarkable.

If animist summon would start on 3 turns cooldown it would be just worthless unit. Because majority of battles already half resolved on turn 3 (especially because you summon animals at turn 2). Without this summon you could only use 1 animist to boost your hero and that’s all.

However yeah I also dislike animal balancing. Mammoth great, Mire Crocodile great, Sabertooth good, Wolf kinda okay, Serpent weak(Why physical damage? Enemy has so much defence that physical damage becomes obsolete very fast) and Crow is just bad.

[Balekai]

The problems for the Primal Crow are:

- It's an unofficial Battlemage type unit right off the bat, so it doesn't work well with full Animist stacks Primal Summon spamming, due to its attack being ranged only. All other summons have melee attacks so they can get up front and personal and still do damage and with proper tanky AI.

- Again they can't really tank for the Animists because of the above and and they have the lowest HP at 70 with 3 Armour and 1 Resistance only. Mammoth has 90, but second lowest defence at 3 Armour/2 Resist (but makes up for it with HP/CC Freeze). Everything else is 80 HP, 4 Armour and 2 Resist.

- The Primal Crow arguable has the least damage potential out of all of them. It's damage like others doesn't really scale over time with your faction/enchantments( just buffs), and it starts with the lowest base damage out of all of them at 8 Lightning x3 (so 4 AoE damage x3 attacks). It also has no base chance to apply Electrified. The Mammoth does massive damage, and AoE damage on cooldown, AND has a chance to freeze/slow the best CC elemental condition in the game. :p :P

They need to buff crow damage at the very least. Probably base 12-16 lightning damage, 50% as AoE rather than 8 base, 50% damage as AoE AoE. Or make it it like 20-24ish damage, single attack with 50% of damage as AoE.

All that said, the playstyle of a Crow faction is usually super heavy Mana draining builds with lots of summons due to the mana bonus per province. You're usually able to easily sustain very high mana upkeep/units with massive damage output. So the Animist summon spam isn't as viable or needed compared to other things you could be doing even at early turns. For example in my Mistling build it was basically game over once I started pumping those out by the third tome unlocked. Once I had amplified arrows it was really game over with 6 Fey Trick hits per turn doing like 80-100+ damage + AoEs from Primal boon + Random negatvie effects mid game. The crows did work ok for finishing off the crumbs left by Mistlings though and were great for midline damage sponges in between teleporting Mistlings and my Animists.

Mammoth is definitely the MVP of Primal summons for protecting your Animist line with high HP, high damage and freezes. I like animists summon spam for Croc on my Naga build (haven't tried Mammoth yet). In the latter case I found myself making armies of 1 support Leader with Spiritual Healing and 5 Animists to start combat with 2-6 spirit crocs depending on army stacks. For Astral Nagas this worked pretty well because my animists were pretty good damage dealers with the Amplification Tome. They just needed "filler" while buffing/healing that filler (crocs) to high heaven exploiting Staves of Mending, Fey, Warding.

[Sharpnessism]

For animists themselves the only thing I would change is making them lose 1 stack of primal fury if hit (max lost 1/turn). I don't think anything else needs to change, they are more powerful than the average T2 support but I would argue having strong unique T1/T2 units is healthy for the game (since they don't scale very well compared to T3/T4 units).

For the primal culture itself, I think there should be a balance pass to make them a bit more equal to one another. Maybe wait another month to see how players use them.

But I think most would agree Mammoth is the best because it provides an AoE freezing stomp, and snowy provinces work extremely well with the cryomancy special province improvement.

The stormcrow is the weakest summon but mana is a very valuable resource and allows you to play summon heavy builds more easily.

[Fendelphi]

Crow might be the weakest of the primal summons(I think it depends on how you use them though), but the boon that grants AoE attacks for your entire army is pretty good, lightning damage is great vs Astrals and many sea-based monsters, and the grasslands+mana focus is awesome with the tome of Paradise.
Edit: Also when going Materium. Tome of Transmutation has a city spell that lets you convert a city's mana income(let us say 200) into 75% Food, Gold and Production(so +150 in each in this case). That is pretty insane.


Ancestral Wardens are a fantastic frontline, and I actually rarely use my Animists as summoners, but rather as your typical support(meaning I rarely cast the heal on the Animist). If I then think I need more bodies on the field, getting a ranged summon on turn 3 or 4 that almost always has Frenzy is not such a bad deal(great for clean up), plus the AI loves to engage such a target.

[Telos]

It may be that some of this is due to the mammoths being overpowered, though I think the crocodiles would work similarly well -- better at outright killing things, but less good at freezing or displacing them. But anyway, I agree that one potential solution would be to nerf the more powerful animals enough that it'd be fine to still let animists recruit multiples. This could also help with the fact that the primal tactical summon spell is pretty overpowered in its own right -- much cheaper than other spells with comparable effect.

It may also be that a lot of this is just due to the AI being dumb. E.g., a human would recognize that the real threat is the animists, so usually wouldn't waste firepower on mammoths that would expire soon anyway. Even after stacking survivability tricks (phasing, extra HP from mount + hardy, elusive getaways, some boosts from tomes), I'm not sure animists could survive a sustained attempt to really hunt them down, especially if it is backed with spell-casting. So it may be that this is just an "issue" for single-player, and there's no real reason to nerf away the opportunity for some single-players to have fun roflstomping an oblivious AI.

Assuming this isn't a terrible problem for multi-player balance, I can see a good argument for leaving it as is. This gives players another fun way to replay the game, one that's totally different from more "standard" approaches. Opening up a greater diversity of possible approaches is surely a good thing for the game's longevity.

[Midas]

Originally posted by Eldrin:

I think the real problem is that the mammoth is op for its tier and being summoned like that. I tried the storm crow and the sand snake, both are pretty vanilla next to that.

The mammoth is the driving reason why the summons need to come in with just 1ap. Maybe make the summon spell 1ap as well to balance it out a bit so at least it's easier on the caster, like the Wildspeaker's summon.

Actually, it's kinda sad how bad the animist makes the Wildspeaker look.

[ChaosKhan]

Originally posted by Midas:

Originally posted by Eldrin:

I think the real problem is that the mammoth is op for its tier and being summoned like that. I tried the storm crow and the sand snake, both are pretty vanilla next to that.

The mammoth is the driving reason why the summons need to come in with just 1ap. Maybe make the summon spell 1ap as well to balance it out a bit so at least it's easier on the caster, like the Wildspeaker's summon.

Actually, it's kinda sad how bad the animist makes the Wildspeaker look.

Except that he does not. The Wildspeaker summon costs only 1 AP, making it an extremely flexible summon that you can do on demand wherever you need. It also doesn't need any "set up" whatsoever.

Maybe the Animist scales better if you build your race and army around massing him, but out of the gate, the Wildspeaker is better, since he is mounted by default, has a flat upkeep reduction for animals in the entire stack and can conveniently also buff animals. Killing momentum and 20% more dmg on a charger is simply brutal. And he has this package without any extra input needed in the race creation screen. The gap widens even more, if you get them as supports through rally or random drops/events while playing other cultures. While the Animist is nearly disband tier bad, the Wildspeaker still has a lot of value and remains a good addition as long as you have at least one animal in the stack.