Part 1:
23/1/08
Again, I play Heroes 5. I am now playing the expansion Tribes of the East. Again, I get to play as the Undead, also known as the Necropolis. This race really suits my style. In a long game, the Necropolis always has the advantage, simply from the fact that my armies never lose a single soul in any medium/small battle. In fact, I always GAIN units from battles.
I know the Dungeon has seriously powerful units, but some units are always lost in medium-sized battles, especially against large numbers of neutral ranged units. Well, if in every one of your battles, the enemies are bunched up together into one stack for you to pwn at your own pace, I withdraw my case. But once in a while, a Dungeon player does lose its units, especially the Assassins or the riders, which are rather important when fighting foes with obscenely large armies.
A powerful caster Hero always has a limit. Implosion can only deal 2k or so damage by the end of a CAMPAIGN. When fighting in a battle with each side having zounds of any unit, 2k damage is not enough. Even Meteor Showers of equal level cannot wipe out enough of any of these stacks.
That is the advantage an Undead player has. Sacrificing quality for quantity, Undead units are really poor at killing anything. But with the high Defense and Knowledge of Undead Heroes, they are also hard to kill, and easy to revive. What this means is that killing any Undead units doesn't affect the battle as much as you'd like to believe.
One very good example is the Specter. With a 50%(or is it 75%?) chance to avoid damage, killing it is more of a hassle than anything else. Throw in the Raise Dead spell and you have the perfect survivor. With the annoying ability to avoid attacks, the Hero doesn't even need to keep raising it. In a war of attrition, the Specter is the ultimate unit.
But I hate it because it doesn't have enough damage. It is something I use when fighting against ranged neutral units. In other situations, the Banshees can do the trick.
Both Dungeon and Necropolis Heroes need Conjuration Magic to win. Dungeon players need it to summon stuff to fight at higher levels; Necro Heroes need it to raise their dead units, and summon more units.
In ToE, the AI is much smarter. No longer do they concentrate on the summoned units, or the images, but aim at the most dangerous real units. No more cheap exploitation tactics for us players. Because of this, it is no longer feasible to summon images of everyone. In fact, only the ranged units are worth that spell, and that is if you put enough pressure at the front to prevent the enemy Hero from simply casting an Earth Spike on the image and the unit.
And with the number of images of every unit limited to ONE, this spell is no longer the Holy Grail for caster Heroes.
When I imagine a battle between 2 titanic armies between a Dungeon and a Necro player, my bet is always on the Necro. A Dungeon Hero is not meant to last for such a long time. They rely mainly on their Spellpower, not units. They need to make use of their powerful spells in early and mid game to win devastating victories against their enemies. I mean, what can a really powerful Destruction caster do to a stack of 2-3k skeleton archers?
A Necro, in the worst case scenario, can tolerate a pyhrric victory better than a Dungeon player. I'd expect the most annoying Specter to be the final stack left alive in the army.
But being a Necro is not that easy either. Each Raise Dead spell cast in battle will reduce the max HP of the raised stack by a certain fraction. Once in a long battle, my Vampire Lords had only 1HP each by the end, though I still managed to win without casualty.
In the above case, a basic Eldritch Arrow would have killed all 39 of them, but the enemy had run out of mana while my Knowledge/Defense-based Necro still had half his mana left.
While the basic strategy of all the races is to maintain zero casualties until the very last battle, only the Necro can ENLARGE his armies all the way. Together with extremely annoying Dark spells like Blindness and Puppet Master, it is hard to lose as a Necro.
Another bad day for stock markets worldwide. I hope it's not another economic crisis. Some parts of the world haven't even recovered from the last one. Me included. I'm broke. University education is costing me an arm and a leg. With that loan I'm having, I'll have to slave for DBS until I approach retirement age, that is, if they haven't extended the age again by then.
Recently noticed something really strange. I wonder if she is angry or shy. As an openly insensitive person, I cannot tell. Curious, though.
Part 2:
28/1/08
Been watching what I had recorded of the nydc outing. Until now, I had not realized my voice sounds so unlike what I have always heard. My voice had always sound so deep to me, but I find that it is not so for anyone else. It is normal, but it's something that had never occurred to me.
Watching vids of my outings is always interesting. Should remember to record more often.
Just made a long comment on someone's blog. Made it somewhat serious. Wonder what the response will be like. Probably, it will be quite negative.
I thought Cloverfield was a decent film. Not much of a plot. Reactions that I dislike. But I think I'm cool with the shaky camera. After all, I have watched my amateur vids enough times to be used to it.
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