Orcs on the March thread

[ckdamascus]

Yeah, paladins end up sitting around a LOT for me. That's why they are probably truly the number one "love/hate" unit in my other thread.

Zhug, it totally depends on your army setup and damage capabilities.

IF you can clearly reach the goblin shaman in round one with a lot of units before he can act, and IF you can do SERIOUS damage to them, I highly suggest casting level 3 Pygmy as your first move.

It is probably the BEST debuff spell for warrior / paladin types in the game, and it is still pretty solid for mages too.

You will do ~66.7% more damage (better than criticals which does 50%) and if they retaliate in physical form, they take a 40% reduction in their attack rating (which doesn't really mean -40% total dmg, more like 33% but it does help a fair amount).

If you CANNOT do serious damage to them, I suggest magic shackles assuming you have enough leadership. It is also another reason why as a mage I was rolling with two marshal batons, etc. Because leadership is truly a king statistics in Impossible mode, unless you are doing something tedious and/or cheesy.

Another possibility is Phantom a high target unit, like Rune Mages. They LOVED aiming for my rune mages, especially the phantomed ones. The danger here is, you might end up "feeding" the orcs with an entire round of adrenaline, and trust me, that is NOT good if you can't do serious damage to them in the next round.

If you have engineers, you can disable them using the blind splash thing, but then you will find why I have them on the love/hate relationship thread too.

Blind works, but if you do any damage to them (including pre-burning them or poisoning them) they will awaken from it and it only affects one unit. It is a poor man's "magic shackles/fear" in a way and horribly mana inefficient, but it might save you since goblins are very fast and you might need a round to get into position.

Consider the heavy offensive route as sometimes it is the best defense. Remember, as deadly as astral attack is, if you can cut his army down in half before he gets the first move, you just "resisted" 50% extra damage right there.

Disabling just buys you time to setup to smash them into oblivion, or you can keep perma-casting it (eeek, shackles and the like are very expensive for that purpose, but again, it might be all the time you need). They can still attack with shackles on, but it is far far less painful than the astral.