UD/Heretic

[Inka]

Agreed the usual way for UD hybrid is to go UD/Rogue. But does heretic make more sense for an A/M?

I figure that if i went rogue i need atleast 4 tpa to be effective, taking away a good chunk of pop. Thieves are any day easy to train and cost less.

Whereas with the general downfall i presume in wpa this age, can the heretic be a good deal in say 2/3 wpa? As i get chained, i can only cast NM better and help myself and my kd grab acres.

Ofc, this assumes i can manage my econ without the ability to thieve. I did that OK enough last age.

Any comments?

[Bart of Sparta]

not a good idea. can still get AWed and cannot make use of major heretic bonus.

[s0830887]

If we're looking for war and we see undead heretics lined up against us, I'm going to smile a big smile. Wait till you send out troops, and then two side-tap massacres and you'll be finished. I would suggest ud/heretic is not a good combo. Stick with something more straightforward on UD. If you want to have a go of Heretic and want to attack with it, have a go of a Halfer/Heretic I would suggest. Elf Heretic should be alright as well but seems less useful to me than Halfer.

[Milkman]

I would not go for Undead/heretic. You can't really use half of that personality because you only have access to intel ops. as far as magic goes it will be touch. If you wish to effectively NM with an undead you should aim for 5-6 raw WPA with good science. Once you have that WPA you need to defend it against AW and Massacres. Undeads aren't particulary good at defending (no defensive bonusses) so if you run high WPA, high offense you will have **** defense and eat massacres making your wpa useless. Then after war you'd spend weeks on 60% or more guilds trying to recover your wpa to a usefull level.

If you'd want to be undead a/m i think mystic would be a better choice. Not that it does anything for the weaknesses but will half your time wizard pumping.

[LoRD_SaMPuaN]

Agreed the usual way for UD hybrid is to go UD/Rogue. But does heretic make more sense for an A/M?

I figure that if i went rogue i need atleast 4 tpa to be effective, taking away a good chunk of pop. Thieves are any day easy to train and cost less.

Whereas with the general downfall i presume in wpa this age, can the heretic be a good deal in say 2/3 wpa? As i get chained, i can only cast NM better and help myself and my kd grab acres.

Ofc, this assumes i can manage my econ without the ability to thieve. I did that OK enough last age.

Any comments?

heretic is mainly a caster personality, and ud heretic is technically a useful choice - but the downside is, you will never get the wpa required to use nm effectively.. id suggest staying away from it for either a more attacker oriented personality, or a more turtle oriented race..

[StratOcastle]

Agreed with the general consesus of the undead heretic, but I think we should be realistic in that the player isn't suggesting a full core and massacre vs a high octane counter offense can be disastrous for the sender. Additionally, this build is sub-core not t/m mains. This means to go op/AW is bypassing perhaps an even more dangerous t/m.

That said, the undead heretic like undead anything has decent mileage just because it's undead. You leverage kingdom strengths. Can the enemy spend time dealing with the undead heretic over the faery rogue?

Good players shine through, it's just that undead are played by the majority. I've seen a number of offbeat undead builds that are very effective because the player is damn good. This player is asking a question based on success with undead. I'd say ymmv with undead heretic, but it's no worse than a core player going through the motions in a super wave.

[Inka]

I want a hybrid and I am very fond of UD - Low off losses, can give plague, no food etc.

That said, some 10 ages back, I played UD/Mystic. Agreed heretic is not mystic, but i was damn successful then.

I am active and my KD is strictly mid tier and warring. We are not pros but we did a few devastating NM runs (with 2 active T/Ms) last age and I am now a NM convert.

I want N/M casters. So maybe I will put it on my halfers and Faery's with us UDs going Rogue.

[s0830887]

Fair enough man. Ultimately the correct answer is just play whatever you want to play and try to enjoy it. For me, playing a bit more competitively, winning is the main enjoyment factor of the game, and I personally feel that my kd would be sub-optimal if we ran ud/he, or ud/rogues also. Around the higher up warring kds, those two combos are easily dealt with, but maybe at the mid level you're enjoying atm they are more potent and can slip by undetected. There is some value in saying 'well, the people we're fighting are less experienced, and will just take down top offenses first' - aka, put your ud hybrids with middling offense, and then they might be left alone by the enemy. But then you come back to the 'well if they're low offense anyway why not just use more natural heretic fit like halfer or elf?' But do whatever you'll have fun with.

[tehawk]

play whichever you can build new acres with, i would play dwarf but when I saw chinpokomon level 5000 12/2 and 11/3 i had to buy it

[Bart of Sparta]

I'd like to rename the personality to HeretIF. IF IF IF I only had enough tpa/wpa to utilize my pers!

[StratOcastle]

@ Inka.Meh, don't worry about that either. I've run elf cleric which does just fine, even at ludicrous levels.
Most of this is talent in the right environment. I've seen octo run a 10k acre feary cleric when they only had a max 3 generals.
~
Sorry to cut that short; I'm at work and I realize I may've seemed I'm discounting other views. Not in the least.

What I'm saying is when you have an offset strat that the interesting part is making it work. You have to approach the game in a different way that exploits the natural tendencies of the community. What are those tendencies?

Waving: the majority of the organized kingdoms that will pose the greatest difficulty in conventional settings are organized in their wave. The weakness of most organized waves is they function like a military spearhead with no coverage at the flanks.

Build: the targets you can bash are likely core attackers. Oftentimes they're ill equipped for paripheral defenses over the first 2 waves. They are essentially set at a tipping point of t/m vulnerability. You can force a collapse by using easier spells early and staying on top of them till they grow. You then turn the crank when the new land comes in. Heretic should conserve runes without being garish.

There is a system here based in how you're perceived and where most enemy kingdoms focus their attention. Be back in a bit. - a few hours later - Most kingdoms focus on high penetration strats first because they tend to have weaknesses in their bias: elf, halfling, orcs or highest real offenses. Elf gets it because they don't have CS and can whack anybody. Halflings get it because they don't have redundant defenses like faery. Big offense gets it for safety sake.

You wont have the highest offense or be a speed killer. What you have is a shallow triad that can be used across a nw zone. Thus, you're an occupational strat that reduces the enemies overall effectiveness. One of the moves I like is transplanting an enemy attacker from their nw chain to reduce gains in subsequent waves. You'll need theft targets for a variety of reasons. I'm sure you've done such things before so just use your imagination.

Attention to detail is important. One thing I do is review the trade deficit of enemy attackers in my sector. I begin my siege with greed, riots, explosions. Drop FB or tornado on a tick by tick basis. Arson is cool to, if you can use thieves. The combination of explosions and trade balance can drain both the receiver and the sender.

[noobium]

More than the obvious problems of attaining useful wpa as an attacker or the massacre problems facing any low-defense province, are two things working against it:

- undead can't thieve, so the other part of heretic is totally wasted.
- undeads have a hard time holding on to any defense due to their bonuses, so they wind up being necessarily one-dimensional - a pile of offense that only situationally uses their wpa.

Actually getting decent wpa in the first place is easier than people think... just expensive. Getting massacred is a bit more problematic, especially late age as you won't have time to recover. What sinks it is the same thing which sinks all undead - their terrible defense and inability to thieve, and how easy it is to negate their bonus. Even the pure attacker Undeads are sunk by both.

Where Undead excels - harassing people outside of war with their plague and undying offense - Heretic isn't doing much for you.
I've never seen Undead as a great warring race, but it has a lot of uses outside of war where the drawbacks are entirely irrelevant and the benefits huge. It's decent enough in war to function but I'd still rather not bother.
In that situation the Heretic is fine - you're getting most of the peacetime utility of Undead from their racial bonuses, and other kingdoms have to target you to remove nm. Even if you wind up with bad offense, you can still survive with enough to keep exchanging forever and you always get plague. Trading warrior or tactician bonuses for nm might not be such a bad thing... you wind up less useful at breaking big defenses, but you get to assist your kingdom in opening attackers without really giving up your core function. All that matters is having enough offense to start doing your main job, not necessarily having the biggest pile of offense. Trading Tactician's speed is a lot more questionable.

There aren't so many great heretic options, mostly because heretic is a crummy t/m, and elf/heretic has weaknesses to mystics and rogues alike that can make the pick problematic. Of the attackers, I'd probably prefer Avian Heretic to Undead if my objective were to war often, don't worry about the military weakness and use it as a way to pick apart attackers... nm waves and +1 gen on the same province, pretty useful if you can keep them in the nw gutter to suppress enemy attackers.

edit 2:
if you're picking undead/rogue, it's to get around the race limitation. jamming 4+ tpa on a province that should only run 1.5-2 is a waste of effort and will just get you crushed.
of course, attacker tpa levels are a lot more fluid, especially this age due to the change in military values; but you should train your tpa to the situation you're in, with any attacker (rogue or no).
having one attacker with high tpa and rest at standard levels is a really bad thing; having most of your kingdom on high tpa with maybe a few outliers is better.

[RedPanda]

for an undead think heretic as a tact for intel and instead of att time reduction they get a mini-caster ability and access to NM

[noobium]

for an undead think heretic as a tact for intel and instead of att time reduction they get a mini-caster ability and access to NM

this exactly. (well, you also get 50% rune refund when you succeed, which is helpful for FB and - critically for an undead's survival - LL)

[StratOcastle]

We all know it's easier to take a t/m race and adapt to marching, or should. Attacker races that take on t/m personalities generally work if you're not pursuing the benefits directly. Take for instance mystic on any attacker race. They're looking at acre efficiency and resistance. Anything they can cast is cream.

I mentioned undead sage because the damn thing can just learn and explore. The learn protection is equivalent to their offensive prowess. Undead rogue offers independence to the race.

Essentially, I've learned that solid players can stray from traditional roles and do quite well. None of these offset designs are appropriate to core because we as a community know there aren't that many out-of-box thinkers. What the organized community misses are the unique skills these guys bring to the kingdom. Most are hovering in the ghetto doing well. I know a few undead war heroes that are doing just fine.