Mages in Battles

[Sheldon666]

I often read that Mages in some Army compositions are important for healing etc.
Unfortunately I hate it when it gets too "micro" *g*
Right now I don´t have any Mages, but if I recruit some: do they heal / cast spells on their own or do I have to click every action manually?
Also if I do "auto-resolve" - do mages heal in this case?

[Edifier]

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

I often read that Mages in some Army compositions are important for healing etc.
Unfortunately I hate it when it gets too "micro" *g*
Right now I don´t have any Mages, but if I recruit some: do they heal / cast spells on their own or do I have to click every action manually?
Also if I do "auto-resolve" - do mages heal in this case?

They won't cast any spells by themselves. So it has to be manually used.

Mages can get a lot of kills and often more than most other units in the game if you have the right spells and the AI comes with a lot of infantry.

[Zane87]

To add up on the other answers, all mages use winds of magic for spells and those are shared by all your spellcasters in battle. This resource only allows a certain amount of spells and thus it's not too useful to have more than 2 mages usually.

However, consequently that also means that if you have 0 mages in your army, you effectively waste a battle resource each time as you don't use it.

Since magic can be supremely powerful and it's not a spamfest but rather wait and choose for the right timing with most spells, you really should get one mage at least and see for yourself. The initial spells when he is lvl1 are usually lackluster the better ones can be devastating (look at the spell browser to get an overview)

[NOOBz]

Depend on race and the build.

VCourt need magic as they lack any mean to deal with archer and arty. And they also can heal.

If you are going for SEM/monstrous cavalry army, lore of life is good as it preserve the unit hp and allow you to attack 2nd time with the same army after battle.

Fire/death/heaven/shadow are good for damaging blot.

[funkmonster7]

There is an exception when you have tons of mages in the army. If you have a main caster and the others are power reserve batteries, then yes... But those mages better can do something else in the meantime because it's like fighting with half an army stack otherwise.

Also, if you have two main casters, that's possible too. One for healing, one for damage. Or one for debuffs, one for damage. Or one for debuffs, one for healing. Etc.

If you opt for the healer route(s), aim to have a monster doomstack as healing is best used on single-model units like monster units. Only Vampire Counts can resurrect dead models but can't resurrect dead units. (Technically, the passive skill of Lore of Nehekhara can resurrect too but it's very finicky.)

Pro tip: when you first start using magic spells, pause the game. Press P for shortcut. Carefully aim that spell, and press P again to resume. You more than likely need to do this until you get used to casting spells in this game, as there are a lot of things that happen all at the same time while you're busy figuring out where to place a spell, what it does etc.

Also one other thing is debuffs are incredibly powerful in this game, it can change the battle flow. For example, I cast an aoe MA debuff, gives all units -24 MA. The unit that has 36 MA and can hit my units with 30 MD now has 12 MA for the next 28 seconds... While my unit with 36 MA can hit their unit with 30 MD. 28 seconds is a long time.

Or, you buff your army with +24 MA and +25% base weapon damage.

Or, you buff your army with +25% base weapon damage and flaming attack, but at the same time your skill has a passive that adds +22% weakness to fire to all hostiles on the whole map for the next 11 seconds every time you cast something. Once that map-wide debuff runs out, your fire mage casts a cheap fireball - refreshes that debuff again.

One of the best flaming attack strategies at the moment is have the HE Archer (Light Armor) RoR unit fire at a unit and its special ability is to make enemies hit by their arrows receive something like +25% weakness to fire. Then you use Handmaiden hero to use her skill to pin said unit down for something like 11 seconds - the skill also gives +22% weakness to fire. Then you have a fire mage cast a spell which adds another +22% weakness to fire. Lastly, all of your Sisters of Avelorn have flaming attacks by default, not to mention magical attack and armor-piercing missiles. GG... Those 11 seconds will melt whatever just got pinned down there.

Teclis can do something like this as well, just by himself and maybe another mage. He casts a Net which pins enemies down, and he comes with a slew of casting passives that kick off whenever he casts something. I believe Kindleflame is one of them (+22% weakness to fire). Then all he has to do is cast Fiery Invocation or something, and I think his Arcane Phoenix mount also comes with a fire aoe skill... Melts everything in the Net. The radius is huge, btw. One lone lord melt an entire blob, honestly you need to see it to realize how good magic is in this game.

You can decimate armies if you know how to time those buffs/debuffs right.

[funkmonster7]

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

I often read that Mages in some Army compositions are important for healing etc.
Unfortunately I hate it when it gets too "micro" *g*
Right now I don´t have any Mages, but if I recruit some: do they heal / cast spells on their own or do I have to click every action manually?
Also if I do "auto-resolve" - do mages heal in this case?

Btw no AR does not take into account the spells and their usage. So if you run armies with mages, they tend to be counted by their raw stats which is usually decent as they don't have bad stats. But AR might kill them sometimes. It's a bit finicky, in some patches in the past, mage heroes just instantly died whenever you AR it because their armor and MD values are close to nil.

[Sheldon666]

Okay thanks.
I´m playing high elves right now.
In another forum I heard that you should better use Mages as Entrepreneurs / Administrators in order to optimize province income. OR is this advice obsolete because of some patch?

[Ardariel]

Originally posted by funkmonster7:

There is an exception when you have tons of mages in the army. If you have a main caster and the others are power reserve batteries, then yes... But those mages better can do something else in the meantime because it's like fighting with half an army stack otherwise.

lizardmen with ballista stegadon mounts. Oh yeah.

[Ardariel]

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

Okay thanks.
I´m playing high elves right now.
In another forum I heard that you should better use Mages as Entrepreneurs / Administrators in order to optimize province income. OR is this advice obsolete because of some patch?

No it is still there. It is not like it is "better" to use them.

Point is - tthat is huge exploit. You have so insane money income, so you can afford almost anything. So you can easily waste 3-4 mage slots on battle mages.

[funkmonster7]

Originally posted by Ardariel:

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

Okay thanks.
I´m playing high elves right now.
In another forum I heard that you should better use Mages as Entrepreneurs / Administrators in order to optimize province income. OR is this advice obsolete because of some patch?

No it is still there. It is not like it is "better" to use them.

Point is - tthat is huge exploit. You have so insane money income, so you can afford almost anything. So you can easily waste 3-4 mage slots on battle mages.

It is a huge exploit that recently was slightly nerfed I think. I'm not sure. I think lords used to have the same +3% factionwide tax increase. And when you disband that lord, the bonus stays. So effectively, you can have unlimited tax increase. Now the lords only have +15% income in province, and they have to be hired out on the field for it to be active.

At the moment, the fire mage on a sun dragon is nice, she is the only mage that can have a sun dragon mount, and if she has the Incendiary trait, she will have over 1k weapon damage. That's just straight up BS, I don't know what CA was thinking about that... They probably thought it was a fun little troll-ish thing to do. But I don't really send that fire mage into battle, she gets chewed up really quickly.

Administrator trait lets you build provinces faster, but beyond that they're kinda useless. What I do is I hire the lord that has the trait, build everything I want in that city, disband the lord, wait 5 turns, repeat... Except when I rehire the lord, I pay nothing because I hired him/her already. I don't pay upkeep either because I hire and fire in the same turn. Call it an exploit if you like but yeah... It's not like I can hire 5 lords with Administrator trait in a single turn, you can only hire 1 lord per turn. On Normal difficulty (which I play at), I can plan ahead for sure. But on Legendary difficulty for example, you surely don't want to pay that extra upkeep because it's like +60% to all armies...

The best thing about HE right now is they have almost all the standard lores of magic, that gives them a lot of mages to go through. So, as you scroll through something like 7 lores of magic, you effectively have 14 high-influence mages and one of them is bound to have a good trait like Entrepreneur.

[Zane87]

^
That's why I completely modded out both incendiary and entrepreneur in my games (together with lightning strike ability). I like CA's quality overall but in those cases I agree, what were they thinking?
Those traits are so OP it's not even funny anymore and takes out the whole fun for me.

[Ardariel]

Originally posted by funkmonster7:

Originally posted by Ardariel:

No it is still there. It is not like it is "better" to use them.

Point is - tthat is huge exploit. You have so insane money income, so you can afford almost anything. So you can easily waste 3-4 mage slots on battle mages.

It is a huge exploit that recently was slightly nerfed I think. I'm not sure. I think lords used to have the same +3% factionwide tax increase. And when you disband that lord, the bonus stays. So effectively, you can have unlimited tax increase. Now the lords only have +15% income in province, and they have to be hired out on the field for it to be active.

We talk about mages here, not lords. And their bonus only works when they are hired, for sure. But i dont see any cnahge in there for a looooooong time. You still pack them up in one province and enjoy that 36% tax increase per mage.

[Sheldon666]

Ok thanks a lot. I don´t want to "cheat" myself to victory. But maybe I use some of this strategy. As I never really used Lords / Heroes / Mages, maybe you can answer me this question: What is the distinction between the three?
And: can a Hero (or Lord or Mage ...) be in an army AND boost provinces at the same time or do I have to chose?

[Ardariel]

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

Ok thanks a lot. I don´t want to "cheat" myself to victory. But maybe I use some of this strategy. As I never really used Lords / Heroes / Mages, maybe you can answer me this question: What is the distinction between the three?
And: can a Hero (or Lord or Mage ...) be in an army AND boost provinces at the same time or do I have to chose?

Lords are entities, that leads armies. WEll, they ARE army in fact. They have special skills to boost it and to boost themselves. THey can carry items. There is only one lord in army.

Heroes are special type of units. They can be used as regular unit in army, but can also operate outside of army (but cant lead one) they are also able to levelup and use items. But also they can use special actions on enemy lords, heroes, settlements or allied armies.
All heroes have some passive presence buff for local province. In case of high elves noble boost amount of tradable resources produced. DOes not matter if hero is in army or outside of it. All that matters if he is in province itself. There can be multiple heroes in army. In some cases you can have incredibly powerful army that way. Like mage army for lizardmen, that would ride stegadons with ballista.

Mage is type of hero (some lords are mages too, but we are talking about economy boosting for HE, so it is not our case). Entrepeneur is passive perk they can have. It would boost taxes and income in province they are present in. You cant level it up (it is not skill). So you just pack them in province territory and they stay idle.

I did not used it, cause HE have strong eceonomy regardless. But i made sure that mage in every army, that spend most time on friendly terriotory, have this perk. For mages, that are used on battlefield i prefer either battlefield perks or "knowledgable" (increase your winds of magic reserve factionwide, which is neet)

[carlc]

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

Ok thanks a lot. I don´t want to "cheat" myself to victory. But maybe I use some of this strategy. As I never really used Lords / Heroes / Mages, maybe you can answer me this question: What is the distinction between the three?
And: can a Hero (or Lord or Mage ...) be in an army AND boost provinces at the same time or do I have to chose?

I would offer that its not really a cheat to use the skills or talents of a unit. A society might indeed have someone in the higher ranks of the leadership who, through their skills, can increase the income or help handle civic infrastructure faster. That society might have two or three of those. In my experience with the game, I was never able to get "many" of either type of mage, but when I did see one, I hired them. Over the course of 150-some-odd turns, I ended up with 3-4 of both...and for a society covering that length of time (of course I am just making up what I think the time length is, but at least several decades in 150 turns...at least in my little mind), having 7-8 skilled people isn't extreme. Obviously the fun of this game is that one can do and build how they see fit, and then enjoy that process. :)

[Ardariel]

Originally posted by carlc:

Originally posted by Sheldon666:

Ok thanks a lot. I don´t want to "cheat" myself to victory. But maybe I use some of this strategy. As I never really used Lords / Heroes / Mages, maybe you can answer me this question: What is the distinction between the three?
And: can a Hero (or Lord or Mage ...) be in an army AND boost provinces at the same time or do I have to chose?

I would offer that its not really a cheat to use the skills or talents of a unit. A society might indeed have someone in the higher ranks of the leadership who, through their skills, can increase the income or help handle civic infrastructure faster. That society might have two or three of those. In my experience with the game, I was never able to get "many" of either type of mage, but when I did see one, I hired them. Over the course of 150-some-odd turns, I ended up with 3-4 of both...and for a society covering that length of time (of course I am just making up what I think the time length is, but at least several decades in 150 turns...at least in my little mind), having 7-8 skilled people isn't extreme. Obviously the fun of this game is that one can do and build how they see fit, and then enjoy that process. :)

Emm.. you dont play as HE then.

AS HE you have almost all lores of magic. It make you have entrepeneur.. each turn if you want to. Each. Only thing that limits you is buildings. But if you build that building that grant you slots in each settlement you can.. there are tons of them. Really.

And it is only HE can do that. Exactly cause of their acces to that wide arrange of lores of magic.