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?
Full Version: Having Trouble Fighting Mages
First: Be sure to study the readmes.
Second: Follow Raven's and Sikret's guide to which quests should/could be done first.
Third: Use this board for further advice.
Remember Improved Anvil takes some time to learn (I'm still in the process). And it's only for fun.
Second: Follow Raven's and Sikret's guide to which quests should/could be done first.
Third: Use this board for further advice.
Remember Improved Anvil takes some time to learn (I'm still in the process). And it's only for fun.
Castle: Ruby Ray of Reversal is your friend 
Invisble characters can't be targeted with spells which normally target an individual (rather than an area). This includes Breach, Ruby Ray of Reversal and any other similar spell. But it is intentional; this is the point of invisibility after all.
Spells which affect an area (rather than an individual) can be cast and can prove useful in such battles. The player needs to think and find alternate tactics in such cases when the good old "Breach and kill" tactics doesn't work. Since Castle asked for advice, an example which may work fine in many cases is to cast "Greater Malison" accompanied with "Emotion" or "Hold Monster" in the target's vicinity. Emotion is an area affecting spell and Hold monster can be cast on a different enemy who is probably standing near the invisible mage. Chain Lightning can also be cast on one of the invisible mage's allies and it will affect the mage as well (though it can't be cast directly at the mage himself because he is invisible). Examples of effective tactics to be used in such cases are many. My main advice is to "think" and to "practice" rather than becoming frustrated.
As for mages with decent AC, yes they exist but they are not very common. You may have run into battle with one ofthose powerful mages without knowing. If a particular battle is available at early stages of the game, it doesn't mean that it is necessarily doable with a low level party. This is IA's realism: The world is a dangerous place and powerful enemies can be found any where. For example, you can go for the Twisted Rune battle right after exiting Irenicus' dungeon, but the availability of this battle early in the game doesn't indicate that you will be able to win it with a low level party.
EDIT: Also, note that Improved Invisibility grants AC bonus and makes it harder to hit the mage.
Spells which affect an area (rather than an individual) can be cast and can prove useful in such battles. The player needs to think and find alternate tactics in such cases when the good old "Breach and kill" tactics doesn't work. Since Castle asked for advice, an example which may work fine in many cases is to cast "Greater Malison" accompanied with "Emotion" or "Hold Monster" in the target's vicinity. Emotion is an area affecting spell and Hold monster can be cast on a different enemy who is probably standing near the invisible mage. Chain Lightning can also be cast on one of the invisible mage's allies and it will affect the mage as well (though it can't be cast directly at the mage himself because he is invisible). Examples of effective tactics to be used in such cases are many. My main advice is to "think" and to "practice" rather than becoming frustrated.
As for mages with decent AC, yes they exist but they are not very common. You may have run into battle with one ofthose powerful mages without knowing. If a particular battle is available at early stages of the game, it doesn't mean that it is necessarily doable with a low level party. This is IA's realism: The world is a dangerous place and powerful enemies can be found any where. For example, you can go for the Twisted Rune battle right after exiting Irenicus' dungeon, but the availability of this battle early in the game doesn't indicate that you will be able to win it with a low level party.
EDIT: Also, note that Improved Invisibility grants AC bonus and makes it harder to hit the mage.
QUOTE
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.
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.
The mages are intelligent in that they will react to the spells you have cast or have casted. This means that you can fake them out using decoys. Say, if you need to prevent them from removing your party's magic, send only one person in with spell protections and have the enemy mage remove that one person's spell protections.
The real dangers from mages are the AoE spells that disable or damage like Dragon's Breath or Horrid.
SPOILER!
They won't cast it on a person protected from magic damage, so what you do is you send in someone not protected by it with high hp, then you send in another melee guy that is protected. The mage casts Horrid and damages your first guy, so withdraw that person from battle, heal him up, while taking the mage's attention with the second character, which is hopefully meleeing the mage and getting spell disruptions.
The key items you will need are potions of protection and elemental resistance, or spells that do the same, along with + ac items and Flail of Ages +3. The elemental damage of the flail makes interruption more convenient and if you have Anomen, you have plenty of spells, protections, ac, str, and number of attacks for it.
Some mages you can cast greater malison on and emotion them. Others you can't, because they are immune or have too high spell res.
One primary you will encounter is dealing with melee enemies while dealing with mages. A single mage alone, so long as you have enough spells and hp to take his damage dealing spells without dying, is no threat to you with proper preparation and battle tactics. A mage with a bunch of summons hitting you and all kinds of other high negative AC and high negative THACO will make things much harder.
The way to deal with melee mobs that is hard to hit with 5+ rounds of attack and less than 0 THACO is to use these spells. Malison, Emotion, hold spells, slow, breach (for hardiness HLA), and simple damage dealing spells like missiles and flame arrows.
The key items you will need are potions of protection and elemental resistance, or spells that do the same, along with + ac items and Flail of Ages +3. The elemental damage of the flail makes interruption more convenient and if you have Anomen, you have plenty of spells, protections, ac, str, and number of attacks for it.
Some mages you can cast greater malison on and emotion them. Others you can't, because they are immune or have too high spell res.
One primary you will encounter is dealing with melee enemies while dealing with mages. A single mage alone, so long as you have enough spells and hp to take his damage dealing spells without dying, is no threat to you with proper preparation and battle tactics. A mage with a bunch of summons hitting you and all kinds of other high negative AC and high negative THACO will make things much harder.
The way to deal with melee mobs that is hard to hit with 5+ rounds of attack and less than 0 THACO is to use these spells. Malison, Emotion, hold spells, slow, breach (for hardiness HLA), and simple damage dealing spells like missiles and flame arrows.
Here is the suggested party composition for new people to IA, from my view.
Berserker/Mage
Fighter/mage
Fighter/cleric
Sorcerer
Auramaster
Pure Berserker, barbarian, fighter, or Ranger-Archer. Or a second mage like Nalia.
It is better to have dual classes since they can get 3 attacksperround with 5 proficiencies. Or you can use the unnerf multiclass grand mastery thing. Humans have bad saves compared to paladins and dwarfs like Korgan, so if you want a pure fighter, Korgan is probably pretty good since you don't need to obsess over his saves using improved invis or potions.
Here is the basic guide to mages and fighters.
SPOILER!
If you see a mage, CTRL+Q him into your party and take look at his resistances with and without spells pros. CTRL+R will remove his spell protections. Figure out which spells you have that can damage him given his spell protections and plan the entire battle beforehand in your head. Reload to before and fight him. Watch the spells he casts, who he casts them at, and wait until you are defeated or victorious. If defeated, use what you have learned to modify spells, tactics, and order of actions. If one spell doesn't work, meaning you see "Casts Emotion" and you don't see "Saves vs spells", then he's probably immune either naturally or through his spell pros. This means time to change tactics and spells.
For fighters, you should lower their resistances/saves and then disable them using enchantment spells or web. Have your fighter/mages cast minor globe or have anomen cast free action on F/Ms and then wade in to slaughter the fighters once they are held.
If fighters are immune to spells, then you will have to use an uber tank like a F/M or even Cernd the Auramaster to take the hits, while using other fighters like Anomen to beat them down. For fighters with high regen, you have to use "every' fighter, preferably with haste on, chant, bless, improved haste, and so forth.
For Fighter/mages like the Greater Yuanti, then you have problems, because now they are fighters plus the mage protections. Unless they are vulnerable to emotion and enchantment. you'll probably have to wait until Chapter 6 to kill em.
For fighters, you should lower their resistances/saves and then disable them using enchantment spells or web. Have your fighter/mages cast minor globe or have anomen cast free action on F/Ms and then wade in to slaughter the fighters once they are held.
If fighters are immune to spells, then you will have to use an uber tank like a F/M or even Cernd the Auramaster to take the hits, while using other fighters like Anomen to beat them down. For fighters with high regen, you have to use "every' fighter, preferably with haste on, chant, bless, improved haste, and so forth.
For Fighter/mages like the Greater Yuanti, then you have problems, because now they are fighters plus the mage protections. Unless they are vulnerable to emotion and enchantment. you'll probably have to wait until Chapter 6 to kill em.
To Sikret, I tend to think there should be more hints that there is a powerful enemy waiting around. Once you enter the troll mound, the entrance closes, and the first enemy you see is a weak spirit troll. The hints should be either in the high level mobs that guard the entrance to certain places out in the open like druid's grove or you have a high number of low level mobs defending it.
This will make battle difficulty more intuitive for new players as they don't immediately go from weaklings to the Troll Queen/King thinking they are there to be fought with the Druid grove quest.
This can't be done for all encounters, say Crypt King, but it can be done for the areas which were unusually low level in the vanilla game. The Planar Sphere warning was nice given the new difficulty.
QUOTE(Ymarsakar @ May 4 2008, 07:47 PM) 
SPOILER!
If you see a mage, CTRL+Q him into your party and take look at his resistances with and without spells pros. CTRL+R will remove his spell protections. Figure out which spells you have that can damage him given his spell protections and plan the entire battle beforehand in your head. Reload to before and fight him. .
I don't confirm or recommend this particular part of your advice. It is plain cheat (and as you probably know, I hate cheating). 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).
QUOTE
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.
Maybe thieves could have a special ability to detect things like AC, protections from items, and maybe spells since their other (trap) powers are ineffective. This ability increases by level and can be avoided by non-detection or protection from magic so that it does not get overly exploited as cheesy or overpowered. Making them more like spies for reconnaissance. That just fits more in to tactical evaluation techniques like the "Art of War."
QUOTE(Ymarsakar @ May 5 2008, 08:27 PM)
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.
Skilled players can figure out such things without requiring to cheat.
QUOTE
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.
Well, this part seems to contradict the previous lines of your own message. If it doesn't matter to know the exact resistances, what was the point of the previous paragraph.QUOTE
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.
Yes, but as mentioned before, you can figure out such things (in an acceptable degree) without cheating. This is where practice and improving skills come in. In short, nothing can justify cheating.
For example, you asked about how to estimate an enemy's MR. Cast a magic massile on him and count the number of missles which are blocked by his MR. Comparing this with the total number of missiles will give you a rough estimation of his MR. It won't give you his exact MR number, but it will you enough information to base your tactics on.
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