Re; 1) I largely agree. In an unreleased mod I spent a lot of time and effort on, I gave Terracotta Soldiers a small gold cost in exchange for this. Like other low-tier Enchanter units, they're highly efficient in terms of regular resources, having a high Action Point cost in exchange for this.

3) I think Gargoyles are fine as they are. They're quite cheap for what you get. They fly and are pretty sturdy, and in particular they are resistant to a lot of really nasty effects. They also use more gold than iron, which is uncommon among the Enchanter's units.

4 & 6) destroying terrain tiles in exchange for higher-tier units is probably too iconic a feature of the Enchanter to get rid of it. I feel like a more elegant solution to the class' shortcomings would be to add a method of actively repairing the golems, possibly using a ritual.

Enchanter is already plenty strong enough. (But I probably think so because my play-style doesn't use any of the features you mentioned.)

See this thread, post #33 for the basic (brilliant) idea: Pwnyboy-Curtis's Enchanter creep

I've adapted this into what I call Guardian-creep Enchanter, and I play it whenever I feel like beating Huge 8 Emperor. Warning: this game requires great patience because every AI turn takes 2-4 minutes of clock time, just to compute its moves. You almost need to multi-task and play in spurts. It's a very grindy win, but it wins. It's even pretty reliable, which means about 2 out of 5 game starts are wins.

Single-player only. In multiplayer, you'd know to sprint-kill every Enchanter opponent ASAP, at any cost, before they ever get this going.

1. don't care
I never make Terracotta Soldiers. More urgent things pend. Since we're not trying to win combats early, nor defend against equal fights, we don't need weak fodder.

2. disagree
Dancing Swords already have one very good use: they're an enemy line-stopper. As you know, enemy melee will advance until something stops them. Enchanter's strength is massed ranged fire, but your Animated Ballistae will always set up ahead of your archers (and Living Bows). You absolutely don't want enemy melee to just stroll up to your Ballista line. Enchanter also lacks good meatwalls. You can't ever buy enough human Swordsmen for that role. So fill space with 20-30 Dancing Swords (per fight), and that will stop the enemy line for long enough.

Dancing Swords aren't survivable, so you expect to throw them away in large numbers. They're a midgame strength, not meant to be good early on. I regularly add 20 to my (singleton) main group just for the next fight, and fully expect to lose 15 of 20 in 1 fight. Build more, they're cheaper than any other troop you can buy.

With Dancing Tools on every gold site doubling your gold, you can buy every Apprentice you get. By turn 300, you can have 12 or so. So the time cost of dedicating 2-3 of them to non-stop sword production goes away. Let's be pessimistic and add in the cost of the Apprentice (~70 gold or so) + training 1-3 L1 rituals (+30 gold). So your first 100 swords per Apprentice cost an amortized 1+1 = 2 resources each.

A Swordsman costs 10+1 = 11 resources. So 11 swords = 2 swordsmen. Then all of the Swords attrition from 1 big fight is about the same as 3 swordsmen. Would I pay 3 swordsmen for my main group to squish a 90-man Senator army? Yes, I would, repeatedly. That's acceptable losses, and I'll win that exchange rate.

3. mildly disagree -- Enchanter doesn't need any more help.
4. disagree
5. disagree

Pwnyboy-Curtis lauds gargoyles, but I haven't ever relied on them much. They do tend to die rapidly (in 1-3 big fights), and I'm not convinced they're cost-effective at that rate. Sword production is easier to manage, because you don't tie up your precious promoted L2 Enchanters, who are too busy making Guardians.

My perspective is that Enchanter's current units (and spells) already win, so they're evidently good enough as-is. You'll never go toe-to-toe vs. some of the nastier L3 doomstacks, but even an Emperor AI has only about 3 such, and the rest of its armies are 80-human chaff or such. Dodge the doomstacks, squish or ignore the chaff, go straight for the citadels and raze them with 40+ Animated Ballistas. You never really need to fight a doomstack, which means you don't need high-level offensive units.

6. disagree
Yes, heavy golems are a finite resource. Thus, we win without ever relying on them.
So they become situational. Build them anyways:

+ to deny enemy resources that you can't defend, esp. deep in enemy territory.
(But eventually I consider the whole map to be mine, and so there are no "enemy" resources.)
+ for a big temporary boost in killing power. If you get 3 early iron mines, you could keep 2 and create 1 early Iron Golem as a gambit. Flank him with the usual 2-4 Clay, 20+ Flesh + Dancing Swords, and 3-6 ranks of ranged, and he'll last a few dozen fights.
+ if you see the 1 copy of Bloodstone Amulet in play (usually on an AI group), and you know you can take it within 100 turns or so
+ for fun
+ endgame, when you're only ~20 citadels from winning. Then you don't care about finite hp.

++ 3-4 Crystal Golems are insane fun when you need to storm a Hoburg or Markgraf city guarded by 450+ Hoburg slingers. Prep your Crystals with every damage-reducing ring you have (by then, you probably have 50+ to choose from), and they'll survive with most of their hp left, create about 60 free Shards as an automatic garrison, win, and have fun doing it while you set combat speed to 6 and sip coffee.

++ 1 (or more) of any metal golem + Infuse Library gives you a spellcasting golem commander, which instantly admits the all-golem group for rapid travel across 2-cost terrain. Also, all heavy golems are Amphibious, so they can grab Pearls and kill fish, although you probably don't need more gold by then.

++ Silver and Gold golems have Battle Fast, which you must see in the open field to fully appreciate. (Do not attack a Fungus in a woods and get surprised by a hidden Death Fungus that breathes decay. It's very annoying to watch 500 hp drain away like that.)

~~~~~~~~

I suspect you're playing Combat Enchanter, which tries to outfight every AI head-on. That works at low difficulty levels (= low AI production bonus) some of the time, but it doesn't scale up, which may give the impression that Enchanter's units/rituals/spells are weak(er), and "need" some changes. Guardian-creep Enchanter scales up, which sidesteps almost all such problems. Play that once (and grind out the win, all the way to the end), and you'll gain a new appreciation for Enchanter's strengths.

So perhaps we should discuss how Enchanter's rituals are OP, and need to be nerfed a bit

~~~~~~~~

Case in point: I was wearied from another game (ST:F), came back here for a refresher.
Enchanter, Huge 8 Emperor.

Game 1: swarmed from the start, conceded around turn 80.

Game 2: Frozen north (ugh), cut all of my gold income in 1/2. Senator to the south, swarming me. I judge this game as a win. In year 25, I think I'm past the tipping point. It'll be my first Emperor win from a snow start.

+ 1L3, 2L2, 4L1 Enchanters
+ 12-Guardian stacks on 2 citadels, 3 iron, 3 village, smaller stacks on ~6 other resources
+ Portals on the 2 citadels, 3rd Portal in the warm mid-south
+ 1 combat group, and that's it. I literally have 1 army of 100, plus a bunch of naked commanders who steal things. No 2nd group at all
+ 4 AIs died already (I never saw them), only 4 live
- Gold income in the snow has never exceeded +40 per turn. I'm far behind schedule, usually it goes 2-4x faster than this

That first daring scamper by your only L3 to venture far afield and open the 3rd Portal is the start of your transition to offense. The purpose of the 3rd Portal is to kill Senator AI. That may take the next ~200 turns and several more portals.

Then after you've killed one AI, repeat that, only with more gold + magic items. Enchanter is actually a match-up nightmare for my neighbor AIs: Senator (no ranged), Pale Ones (no ranged), and Troll King (no ranged). It's hard for the AIs when the human player swarms them late.

Yeah, you can play the long game with the enchanter, but that essentially means you can't use it in multiplayer where you need to be able to do things in the first couple of years other than wait. Of course you can beat the ai by playing conservatively and then stacking the odds to the 9th degree, nobody is arguing that.


I think that gargoyles are fine, the only thing I would change is the amount of AP it costs to craft them, and make it costs 3 like everything else.

ballistas are pretty good as an intermediate units since they're siege units that aren't slow or terribly inaccurate, and only for 25 iron, where as gargoyles and suits of armor are pretty good intermediate units once you actually have the resources. The only problem is there isn't anything between 1-10 iron costs, and regardless of what you're making you can only make one at a time. Some sort of batch ability is kind of needed due to the enchanter action economy bottleneck.

I think I agree with most other points outright- enchanter can't really compete with like a Witch or something else as it is now because the nature of the class gimps their abilities to cast spells, so they honestly might as well not even have them- it costs a stupid amount of gold to have master level enchanters, and their tier one spells aren't very useful with one caster.

It's arguable whether even their tier 3 spells are worth anything. I mean invulnerability is fine, but basically worthless against any army with elemental damage, especially with the low range of the spell, while the rest of their spells are just small buffs applied to a large area. I think the lack of access to any kind of high quality magic is one of their biggest weaknesses. I don't mind the idea of them extracting features from the map, but they need some kind of high level mage or at least strong combatant that doesn't depend on that system. Either that or they need some way to double down on their iron-based mass production; maybe by generating new mines or something.

Originally posted by Yhyzys:

1 - yeah I agree, Teracotta aren't even that great, and your spending a whole turn to make just one, and it's kind of absurd that you exhaust an entire swamp of mud.
2- I think swords and bows are fine for what they are for their costs- the only problem is that there isn't any way to increase the costs to save more time. Later in the game, it's kind of absurd that your choice is either make bow or ballista with there being no middle ground between the two. Gargoyles and Enchanted suits of armor are kind of upgrades from swords, but even still the enchanter kind of needs something else for quantity other than fleshy generic humans
3 -I think the only change that gargoyles really need right now is changeing their action point cost from 4 to 3. They're pretty descent front liners, lots of resistances, they can fly, and do descent damage. The only really downside is that they never heal, and I think the enchanter would wholescale better if they could heal in fortresses and stuff, or maybe when things other than swords and bows die, they leave behind "wreckage" units that can be "repaired" for gold at a fortress
Maybe allow the enchanters to construct lesser versions of the regular golems, with the "regular" constructs being immensly powerful things made out of desperation rather than the baseline.

I'd be nice if enchanter could build libraries for stupid amounts of gold, thus giving them the ability to reliably recruit wizards, and allowing them to use their super expensive library golem spells
The golems enchanted by a library, to borrow from the balance mod, should be able to have some form of self heal, but the other golems should only be salvagable- or change how golems are made all together in that they are upgraded in stages, refreshing their health or something, allowing for some way to extended their life.

I kind've like the idea of enchanters as the ultimate "builder" class. Build libraries, maybe mines, etc as long as they have the gold available. Then, when they need high level units they strip some of their homemade infrastructure to create them

You already can't use Enchanter in MP, because every other player in that game knows to dogpile all Enchanter opponents before they can do this. Speeding up Enchanter at all is now kind of a design nightmare because it would make it stronger at both ends of the time spectrum.

Not many other classes can grind out wins like this (vs. multiple Emperor AIs), because they don't have a strong immobile summons. Warlock's Air Elemental is a bit stronger, but it costs much more, which means it's probably too slow.

[_] Illusionist can't (quite). It really can outfight Emperor AIs head-on for about 200 turns, since a minimal army of 1 commander, 3 Golden Mirrors with L3 Capture Phantasms, and ~10 humans can slaughter the average 60-human army. But its phantasms are hard-countered by magical damage. Barbarian eventually counters Illusionist with Ancestral Hordes, which are spectral with high MR and massed magical ranged. I think Illusionist could win that by going fully asymmetric and racing to kill citadels, but -- insufficient data. Illusionist has no defense at all, so it cannot hold any resources, hence it kind of relies on head-on offense as its defense.

[_] I haven't seriously tried with any other class. But when I play against them, they don't have a strong, cheap summons (which almost implies immobile).

Anyways, I never considered all classes to be equally strong in MP. Some are simply stronger than others. Balancing them all is likely not possible, because they're so asymmetric. So it's fine with me that Enchanter is "too weak" for MP now. Most of the OP's list aren't early-game issues, either, so I didn't consider it to be an MP-specific request.

I think it would be neat if the enchanter class split up the spell casters from the enchanters. Enchanting magic isn't really a game changer due to the bottleneck on your turn economy with enchanters- so you rarely want to put them all together in one place to actually cast spells on the battlefield.
You're also better off outsourcing it to wizards you maybe recruit from having libraries, or seeking out libraries.

I don't think enchanters should have any way of making new mines, they can already double the iron output of existing ones with dancing tools. I think the crux of their problem is the only way to have enough of anything middle of the game is to get more enchanters, and there's this weird place where you're inbetween being able to make ballistas and not having enough enchanters to make enough bows, and being able to make a few ballisitas but not really having anything else to pad out your extremely fragile back line.

Originally posted by Yhyzys:

I think it would be neat if the enchanter class split up the spell casters from the enchanters. Enchanting magic isn't really a game changer due to the bottleneck on your turn economy with enchanters- so you rarely want to put them all together in one place to actually cast spells on the battlefield.
You're also better off outsourcing it to wizards you maybe recruit from having libraries, or seeking out libraries.

I don't think enchanters should have any way of making new mines, they can already double the iron output of existing ones with dancing tools. I think the crux of their problem is the only way to have enough of anything middle of the game is to get more enchanters, and there's this weird place where you're inbetween being able to make ballistas and not having enough enchanters to make enough bows, and being able to make a few ballisitas but not really having anything else to pad out your extremely fragile back line.

Yes, you can double your output with tools, but then someone walks by a few turns later, and kills them unless it's a walled city. That's also taking into account the massive resource/time cost vs the benefit they provide. They have to survive for more than 10 turns in order to pay off for just the iron cost, twice that if they only give gold; not counting the mage turn cost. So in order to protect them you have to build several statues, which cost even more resources, and won't generally save the tools unless it's a handful of deer or something. So ultimately you can only really use them in a cost-effective manner in walled cities or territory that you have a very good handle on. Which is generally questionable once the AI gets to the doomstack phase, since the enchanter doomstacks are worthless against stacks with actual worthwhile mages, unless you're sitting on 10-20 statues.

All of that is true. I still aim to stack max. Dancing Tools on every gold source, and 12 Guardians. It's a deterrent vs. armies of 40-60 humans. 90+ humans can kill 12 Guardians, but they'll take some serious attrition, which basically neuters that 1 enemy army. Enemy doomstacks can obviously crush anything they want, but they usually spend most of the game worrying about the other AIs' doomstacks, so they're not very focused at stealing your mines.

Animated Tools are crazy profit. I expect the game to last 500+ more turns, so I pay -10 iron to earn +500 gold (and +500 iron if the site provides both). At that rate, I want to do that on every site I can hold, which is all of them. Even if you're in fighting mode, your first 10 iron should always pump your starting Coal Mine, because you'll almost certainly hold it for >5 turns before something randomly steals it.

Alas, several Guardians won't even save your Tools from deer :) :( Animated and Dancing Tools fly, and will happily fly-charge every enemy ASAP, which gets them killed very soon. I sigh and rebuild them. You're not wrong that they're intrinsically fragile, but the math still favors them.

I do prioritize sites to defend with Guardian stacks, roughly like this:
1. first 2 citadels (and I add Enchanted Gate)
2. mines up to their iron limit
3. all gold-only sources
4. all non-gold interesting sites: Crystal Globe (I love them), graveyards, guard towers, etc.
And every gold site ultimately gets that many Tools.

I consider 12 Guardians to be a minimal deterrent vs. about 50 humans. I'll go to 18 Guardians to deter up to about 100, but even that is beatable if the AI is willing to trade 1 army for it.

For citadels, once you set up your Portal network, every portal within it is vulnerable to Portal-to-Portal counterattacks, so I pump each one to 18 Guardians, Enchanted Gate, and enough ranged to fully cover the walls, just to push all of my spellcasters off the walls. If you "accidentally" lose any 1 Portal site, that AI can freely teleport anywhere within your network -- but then they're sieging your fortified site, and you should always win that, even against a doomstack. You can even sandbag an AI by opening a naked Portal deep in its interior, and letting it capture it, just to lure its armies into teleporting blindly into your prepared defenses. Very rarely (exactly once in 3 wins), an AI doomstack can beat even that, so you just wait a few dozen turns and then teleport back in, and it's long gone with only a token defense left behind. Then rebuild that one citadel all over again.

Yes, Enchanter will never outslug the crazier enemy doomstacks. Hence I just go around them, and never fight them head-on. Meanwhile, AI doomstacks don't compute shortest-path tours to steal your resources in minimal time. From the AI's perspective, that's the least-efficient usage of a doomstack, especially when some other AI's doomstack just stole some of its resources on the other side of its empire. Patiently ignore a doomstack, and it will inevitably feel the urge to rush back to defend against another threat. Enemy citadels are much less defended, usually just with some siege weapons to ensure casualties, but Enchanter wins any siege-phase duel.

I seriously recommend that every CoE4-lover play Illusionist vs. Bakemono and set up a tier-3 showdown battle with 12-15 Golden Phantasm Mirrors vs. 250 Bakemonos with the bazooka guys, set speed to 6, and watch in wonder for about 4 minutes. It's like ... tennis with lightning graphics, back and forth, back and forth. Utterly majestic carnage. Expect to refill some mirrors, but that's a cheap price for so much beauty. Illusionist might be the only class that can seek out such tier-3 fights and win without going broke.

Yeah, enchanter is one of the weakest classes for MP. Weak starting army, spells are rather mediocre for the short vs indies fights, and he is veeeery sloooow. So slow in fact so winning 1v1 with enchanter isn't usually even possible. The only place he can do at least something is 2v2 and bigger games so his allies can basicly feed him with resources to have a few big golems for the final battle, and maybe some ballistas as well (ballistas in my opinion is the best enchanter unit), but even in this role... i would much rather have a Warlock or at least a Pale One

Or dwarves. Just saying, dwarves. Ballistas.

Mm. I wouldn't say that being able to cheese the game with very patiently exploiting the AI's flaws is a sign of a class being strong, even in SP. If a strategy is just completely, obviously nonviable and flawed in MP, that just shows that the AI happens to not be good at countering that particular weak strategy.

In MP, it's not even a matter of dogpiling the Enchanter. On their own they just aren't a threat at all unless the map gen RNG massively favours them.

Nah, dwarven ballistas are slow, and not being slowed down in the whose point. Enchnter's ballistas are the only siege equipment with 3 AP so you can attach it to main army without losing mobility. And if you have a gem of flying or simular items for your commander you can even compose an entirely flying highly mobile army of swords+gargoyles+bows+ballistas

Originally posted by FatDragon:

Nah, dwarven ballistas are slow, and not being slowed down in the whose point. Enchnter's ballistas are the only siege equipment with 3 AP so you can attach it to main army without losing mobility. And if you have a gem of flying or simular items for your commander you can even compose an entirely flying highly mobile army of swords+gargoyles+bows+ballistas

I don't deny it. Still there's something satisfying about watching entire armies get smashed by a barrage of enchanted dwarven ballistas

Its way more fun then you facing dwarfs while having some doppels in your army. In this case dwarfs smash thier own clumsly trying to kill your doppel spawns blended with thier units, while spawns regenerate after every turn.