Why chaos magic is weak.

Anything else to do with the original Master of Magic
gejsiv
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Oct 28, 2008 9:12 pm

Re: Why chaos magic is weak.

Post by gejsiv »

I personaly love chaos and only stopped playing it because I wanted more of a challenge.

Here's how I play:
First off, don't go with 11 in chaos. As tempting as gunning straight for flame strike is, it shafts you over if you have a bad starting position.
The point to chaos is long range magic. You don't have the buffing power of anyone else and you don't have the city power of anyone else, but you can destroy them from afar and thats the important part. Play defensive until their cities are emtpy husks and then go take them with chaos channeled units.
I always take chaos with alchemy, archmage, and then normally chaos mastery and a book or two of nature. Alchemy gives you resource control and plus one to hit, archmage increases your skill and makes it tougher to dispel your stuff, and chaos mastery is just smart business. Green is for a few key spells, namely web, earth lore, and change terrain. I also always use nomads for the quick expansion and gold bonus. I use this on Impossile difficulty, four opponents, medium land mass, powerful magic. I normally leave taxes at 1.5
Expand aggressviely in your area and make lots of cities. Defend them with a spearman or a spear and swordsman. Put all of your power into skill. Okay, you can have one or two in research until you have a library, but after that all of it goes to skill. You should have enough nomad cities to make the gold you need and with alchemy that gold is also all the mana you need.
For defense in the early game, you rely on fire elemental (Concerning fire elelmental, the in-game documentation says it has weapon immunity. As you all know, this isn't true. If it were, early game would be much easier for chaos wizards). 2-3 Fire elementals can take most raiders and anything else except stacks of four or more, in which case you should better garrison those cities (you need to explore each ruin to find out if it needs to be defended from).
If you want to go on ofense, you should wait until you have rangers, horsebowmen, and hell hounds. This combo should be enough for most low-mid ruins or raiders. Alternatively, you could not bother until you have flame strike, up to you.
You took a rank in green for two reasons: You have a beter chance at diplomacy and there are a number of helpful green spells you want. Specifically, you want web, earth lore, and chnage terrain, and anything else you can get your hands on.
Once you have these, use earth lore to fill out the map and then start nuking stuff. Once you have sufficiently blown everything to high heavn, you can move in and mop up.

Notes: Caster heroes are going to be your best bet since the offensive chaos spells are so powerful. Face it, level 2 zaldron is going to do more with amped up firebolt than his ranged attack anyway. Also, once your heroes can start casting flamestrike on their own it reduces the strain on your resources.
Change terrain is so you can fix the cities you really like after you capture them. Alternatively, you can use raise volcano on tundra spaces and then change terrain after the volcano turns into a mountain (5% per turn I think). Terraforming is really nice with this combo and can help you maximise your island fortress.
You normally don't want to contact other wizards until you are ready to. Can't help it if they bump into you, but avoid them otherwise.
Chaos channel spearmen so you can have them stand guard out in the water. If you notice a threatening stack coming your way, firestorm it then dive in and flamestrike.
Blue wizards with their spell blast and disenchants are the biggest enemy you have. Nuke them without compromise.
Chaos channels makes a unti a chaos unit Among other things, it means they get bonuses rom chaos nodes, take damage from some white spells, and can't be buffed by some of your spells in combat (some work outside of combat). Also, chaos channels affects some creatures differently. Example: battleships always get +3 defense (no flying battle ships, sadly).

To whoever said eldritch weapon sucks, I disagree. Eldritch weapon's 10% defense thing includes the defense applied by weapons immunity, missile immunity, and magic immunity. Warrax is quite adept at shooting down skydrakes for that reason. Alternatively, give it to the amazon with some flameweapon and immolation and she can kill them in one hit...
gejsiv
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Oct 28, 2008 9:12 pm

Re: Why chaos magic is weak.

Post by gejsiv »

^
Sorcery played right means the other wizards can never cast a spell. Detect magic and spell blast are perfect for preventing things you don't want to happen from happening, plus suppress magic if you are careful around banished wizards in the late game. The combat summons are nice, you've a number of broken buffs (invisibility and flight, magic immunity and guardian wind, mass invisibility) and of course you have sky drakes. The only problem with sorcery is that you have to live long enough to be able to do anything, which is were aura of majesty would come in if it worked at all. Of course, somebody has to come in last, and I would agree that on impossible Sorcery is harder than Life or Chaos, but I think it ranks better with nature and death.

Granted, I don't play death. Maybe I should give it a shot and see what it has to offer so I can make accurate judgments about it.
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