Discuss: Best Ways to Use the Spell Quickness (and other underrated spells)

[Staythecourse]

After a fun LA TC game, it strikes me that the Alt 4 W2 spell Quickness is pretty underrated, +3 ATK/DEF, doubled AP, and double actions. It's in a convenient early research spot, also opening up Windguide, and was really nasty on Ancestor Vessels, which are otherwise pretty overpriced for what they offer.

But like all other AOE 1 buffs, except maybe Body Ethereal on SCs and Elephants, it's not very obviously powerful. You need very specific factors to make the buff worthwhile.

1) Cheap and ubiquitous W2 mages
2) Elites with high offense per square, and ideally also defense plus low encumbrance
3) Additional buffs can be layered on for a multiplicative effect
4) The elites need higher hp per square than other nearby troops so the mages will buff the right targets, but also need lower hp per square than decoys so enemy casters don't go straight for your elites. Needless to say, this is often contradictory.

AVs and LA TC has everything come together remarkably well. W2 Masters of the Way are reasonably cheap and common. AVs have 6 attacks per square for 1 turn, then 4, the lances get damage boosted from the extra AP, and extra defense is great on cavalry. TC can stack on Legions of Steel, Strength of Giants, and even Wooden Warriors and Body Ethereal. And perhaps uniquely, AVs have higher hp per square than the Barbarian cav that make up much of TC's army, allowing accurate buffing, but also lower hp per square than any infantry, so TC can still set up spell decoys out of range of the W2s.

I've also used Quickness before with Vanarus, on Chud Hirdmen, though that's more just sheer offense as Vanarus can't stack on that many buffs. And it's pretty hard to draw fire away from Chuds, unless you find Ichtyds.

What other situations have people found for leveraging quickness? Feel free to theorycraft and discuss other underrated spells.

[Morsigil]

I've been meaning to reply to this for a few days now. Life. Anyway, I think AVs + Quickness is a great idea. I haven't played much LA TC, but I've played a lot of EA TC and I think the same rules apply for the most part despite radically different sacreds.

Your primary researcher in LA is going to be the master of the way, and your primary mage in EA is, IMO, going to be the master of the way as well. The master of the dead is a cheap researcher in EA but doesn't cut it as a battle mage except in select scenarios. In other words, I think you primarily recruit masters of the way and you recruit masters of the dead to hold lanterns, or when you can't afford anything else, or to bless indie led Wot5E expansion/raiding parties. Another caveat, to block with ancestor summoning or address weak undead and ritual strong undead like banes.

You'll get a number of W2 masters of the way and a number of s1 masters of the way, but not enough of either unless you're just rolling in money somehow, however the few you get will go a long way.

Quickness is amazing on Wot5E because it gives them even more attacks and stacks on the W9 bless you should already have. Other options include N9B9 (expensive but legit one of the best blesses for EA TC after W9E5; better if not for the crippled economy at this time) and D9N9 (possibly better than W9S5 but heavily dependent on RNG).

30 shield footmen and about 80 W9S5 Wot5E with body ethereal and quickness, not all units getting either or both, killed literally 900 AI trash chaff with 3 losses in one vanilla game of mine.

A demon of heavenly rivers, with quickness and once hit, has 20 prot and 14 defense. Prior to being hit they have 15 prot and 18 defense (no shield). They hit for 27 damage twice. With a nature bless they regenerate something like 3-4 HP per turn with two attacks (quickness) and B9 gives them blood vengeance and 4 more damage (8 total between the two attacks). N9 B9 gives those human buffing mages some grit to deal with things like rain of stones.

Most water 2+ mages are uniques, str, or limited to water nations without great land troops. TC is one of the few non-water nations who get to boast relatively common W2 land mages alongside some of the best buffing chasis in the game.

[jojeck]

W1 mages can be easily boosted to W2 with a water bracelet (const 6) for 5 gems and earth boots give TC access to hammers to make that even cheaper

[Staythecourse]

Construction 6 is pretty late to leverage an AOE 1 troop buff. Like everything else in this game, coming out with something year 2 is a lot different than year 4.

@Morsigil: sadly W9 does not stack with Quickness. The +4 DEF does stack, but not the bless quickness. Which is why I have experimented with F9 + minors on the TC statue god. I had some problems though getting the AI to buff the right targets, probably because of the fluctuating hp thing Wot5E have.

[jojeck]

Sure it's not a consideration for early research, but I don't see the Quickness buff as becoming obsolete particularly early. It effectively more than doubles the military value of your best melee troops and that can be good at any stage of the game. As you get more buffs and summon better units it still remains a relavent force multiplier. The 9 AoE version of the Quickness spell is Quickening but that requires Thau 8 which needs 3 times the research Const 6 does and would come a lot later in most games.

It's not as though Const 6 is a bad research target as it gives access to a huge number of useful items and it's on the way to Golems. But of course it's all about research priorities and the tempo of the game. However, Construction 6 can be a way to accelerate mid and late game research in the right circumstances. If there is a reseasonable amount of fire and death gems available then early access to Lightless Lanterns and Skull Mentors can recover the turns "lost" by researching it early. It just depends if you have better uses for those gems at that time. I'm sure you've dealt with these situations before as an experienced player and taken the decision both ways depending on the circumstance. It's impossible to make these sort of decisions without regard to the particular circumstance.

If with TC you get lucky and churn out enough W2 mages (25% chance) to support your armies then all is well, but if you get unlucky then I was suggesting a fall back plan. One advantage of the water bracelet is that any and all the Master of the Way can become W2 buffers and you can switch bracelets from war on one front to war on another by sending the items through the lab rather than moving the W2 troops. Multi front wars are common and that flexibility is valuable.

[garegoylant]

I used Quickness once as Vanarus. Basic team consisted of W2 vyedma + 7 chuds + flying carpet (yeah, I know, that's 13 A gems...). Availability of W2 vyedmas leave much to be desired, so it never became my main strategy. Instead I used them as airforce - that's the reason for carpet.
Such team was enough to chop through 30-50 enemy infantry, be it PD or standing army. With good positioning 6 chuds had quickness and protection cast on them.

[Morsigil]

Originally posted by Staythecourse:

Construction 6 is pretty late to leverage an AOE 1 troop buff. Like everything else in this game, coming out with something year 2 is a lot different than year 4.

@Morsigil: sadly W9 does not stack with Quickness. The +4 DEF does stack, but not the bless quickness. Which is why I have experimented with F9 + minors on the TC statue god. I had some problems though getting the AI to buff the right targets, probably because of the fluctuating hp thing Wot5E have.

You're right to a degree, of course, because the action point bonuses do not stack, however the defense does stack as you mentioned, you get the +3 offense from the quickness spell, and the quickness spell action bonus increase overwrites the bless. The quickness bless action point increase allows a unit to get an extra attack every turn instead of every other turn like the bless, so what I said remains true: they attack more frequently, and you gain the benefit of the defense and offense (in the case of quickness) boosts.

I think F9 is subpar for TC because they simply don't need the attack value boost on any of their sacreds. They all have elite level attack values.

Meanwhile, N9 B9 makes hitting their meaty sacreds fruitless and painful (celestial soldiers, demons of heavenly rivers, celestial servants), gives their demons of heavenly fire a range and damage increase on their armor piercing ranged attack (which you can then stack with strength of giants, which ends up just melting anything and everything), provides their human mages with a means of surviving and countering battlefield spells, and provides survivability and increased damage for their Wot5E on par with what F9 would give them. W9S5 is probably the most reasonable though because..

You need a lot of mages to leverage quickness and body ethereal. Like a lot a lot. An N9B9 Dom 6 fountain is net -1 scales, which means you're going to be struggling for funds for all those mages you need, but hoo boy is it good otherwise. An imprisoned Dom 8 W9S5 Celestial Carp nets you +3 scales and a mobile chasis eventually.

I usually set up arrow decoys and with quickness's short range I usually don't have any problems slathering my wot5e with quickness as the mages are imbeded with the troops.

Later, when you have water bracelets to toss around, you're not going to be wasting them on extra quickness casters but instead putting them on your W2s (now W3) so they can cast quickening and then wave warriors.

[Staythecourse]

I do think F9 is viable precisely because of how many W9 sacreds run around in the EA, against which 13 attack is not enough. And the statue allows it for very cheap.

Though speaking of TC, there's another odd spell that has some surprising applications, Mossbody. Finding uses of W/N Masters of the Way is always a pain. Mossbody is a very odd spell, kind of like a poor man's Body Ethereal. 75% of the time, it reduces incoming damage by some random value 10-20, but if that doesn't take damage to zero, the mossbody fails in an explosion of poison.

In Dom3, people had come up with the hilarious strat of giving a size 2 W/N mage dual life long protections, and scripting Mossbody x5. Each turn, 4 imps show up in the same square as the mage, get mossbodied, then fly into the enemy. You get basically 20 poison homing missiles. Not actually that good, since it's not a lot of poison, but fun.

I imagine you could do much the same with Wot5E, since they are poison resistant. The spell is really neat though on something with very high protection, >20. It's because Mossbody ignores the ordinary protection stacking formula, behaving more like a shield, so you could concievably get 40+ protection sometimes. With protection so high, the Mossbody is likely to never actually fail. Too bad MA Agartha doesn't get any W/Ns with its high protection statues.