Having Trouble Fighting Mages Options

[Castle]

This is my first time playing through IA; great mod! Much more challenging than the original game (perhaps too much for me, I fear), which is a nice change.

Mages, though, are a problem. Their many-layered protections were annoying enough in the original; I'm finding them impossible now. Improved Invisibility + SI: Divination makes them impossible to target with breach, and my mages are too low level for dispel magic to do anything.

Furthermore, they seem to have ridiculous ACs: Korgan (with a THAC0 of 3) is missing on a 17! Melee enemies certainly don't have armor that effective.

Any advice?

[Ymarsakar]

A player should practice and try to learn how to figure out the enemies weaknesses and abilities while fighting with the enemy normally (rather than taking the easy route and Ctrl-Q the enemy to see his character sheet).

I don't agree with you about this subject, of course.

A player testing elemental resistances in IA fights can only ever know things on a True/False binary logic result. Either the mob is immune or they aren't. There is no amount of testing that will provide them with the exact information that they will need concerning resistances. And besides, it doesn't even matter, since all that really matters is whether a mob is immune or not or they have 127% res.

Even with magic resistances, they could throw 2 -22 lower resistances spells against the mob and they would never know just how much of a percentage their spells still have a chance to fail at.

This makes tactics and battles more like Russian roulette where you're relying upon luck and random casting of spells in order to "hope" you get lucky. And if you get lucky and succeed, it's more based upon luck and the more or less random attempts rather than a tactical plan created beforehand.

If someone doesn't know the THACO or AC, then they can't make intelligent tactical choices about "do I do this or do I do that". Taking risks in battles are necessary, but one should what the potential rewards are and how high the risks are, in order to decide well.

It would be very hard to do one of your chess games in iA, Sikret, if you don't know exactly what factors are in play and where your pieces may be threatened from. Without knowing the THACO or AC or potential and exact vulnerabilities of enemies, you're just moving pieces out just to see what happens. That's chess, but not a very high level one and not a very long one either. Besides, many IA enemies are immune to spells, which are not shown on the sheet.

In order to make IA battles more thinking intensive, which I believe is a good thing in your view, you have to calculate AC, THACO percentages, and resistance checks. Deciding whether 30% resistance is "good enough" or whether you need to cast another lower resistance and waste a round, provides depth and comprehensive scale to a battle. Calculating how much damage you would do with a certain THACO against an enemy's AC, in order to figure out in the long run how many rounds it will take to kill the mob, including potions, also involves thinking and planning that would be hard to do if you only knew your enemy's characteristics fuzzily.

You can figure out an opponent's THACO and AC by looking at the To Hit Rolls, of course. Whether any player has time enough to do this for every battle and enemy he encounters, though, is questionable.

If there was a divination spell that did the same thing, Sikret, it would make divination very useful. But this is a hard coded engine limitation, I believe. The amount of work it takes to make that spell work, would be very high, since it probably involves making a creature description on an item file for every creature that is spawned into inventory once the spell is cast.

This post has been edited by Ymarsakar: May 5 2008, 04:05 PM