Conquest of Elysium 3 is an old school fantasy strategy game. You explore your surroundings conquer locations that provides the resources you need. Resources needed vary much depending on what character you are, e.g. the high priestess need places where she can gather human sacrifices, the baron needs places where tax can be collected and where iron can be mined. These resources can then be used for magic rituals and troop recruitments. The main differentiator for this game is the amount of features and special abilities that can be used. The game can be played on Windows, Linux (x86 and raspberry pi) and Mac OSX (intel and powerpc).

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Witch at a glance (Games : Conquest of Elysium 3 : Forum : Tutorials : Witch at a glance) Locked
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Apr 2 2012 Anchor

It seems I had this written up a long time ago but didn't post it. Anyway I hope it's still applicable given the recent patch (haven't played since the patch).

Rather then a full guide, I'll just do an introductory summary split into 4 sections: The bad, The good, Tips, summon analysis.

We have a top tiered class and a favorite of many this time around:

Witch at a glance

The bad

- Your basic troop set lacks heavies and siege engine. You do have a cavalry and a nice archer unit.

- Your L3 summon value is average to below average, as it is very inconsistent and contain many duds.

- Your main resource square can be burned down (forest). In pvp this can be a problem especially if the war drags out. Pay particular attention to races with native burn abilities or enchanters. While for enchanters it cost 20/20 to raze a forest thus might not be able to really go at it, constructs and necrotods match up well against your forces.

- Your national power is heavily focused on witch. Witch is one of those class whose mage AP is at a premium since your fungus income is so large that it uses up a large chunk of your mage time.

- Much of your damage comes from poison, which work slow. Your spells and poison tend to work very well vs organics but not so well vs inorganic / undead / mindless. Your general melee and poison focus also means you have a lowish and slow damage output. Opponents usually have quite a bit of time to work with in battle (nasty casters can ruin your day).

- Your summon pool is very weak in ranged attack. Luckily this means it's mostly meat, and you can supplement that with your archers.

The good

- Fungus, along with herbs, are one of the most abundant resource. Your fungus income will grow explosively. Most nodes that generate fungus are undefended, it's thus very easy to get dozens of fungus nodes pretty early on without much fighting. From there you tend to snowball into an unstoppable force. Prime forest resource class tend to be pretty high tier for this reason.

- For such an abundant resource, you'd expect a crap summon pool (akin to baalites), but alas, your summon pool is pretty nice!

- Witch path has an unusual spell pool for L1-L2 and an amazing L3 spell pool, including one of the most OP spells in the game "curse of pigs" and gems like "Mass charm". The path losses a lot of power on mindless and/or inorganic enemies though. Still, the pig curse is so broken that I deselect the spell when playing vs AI.

- Your L1 summon pool includes an immobile summons with out of this world value, best outcomes of this sort are 8-9 fungus or 3-4 slime molds. A couple turns of cheap L1 casting in a node will fortify it against 50+ human armies for a pittance. Keep in mind that it's useless on poison immune units though.

- You can use hands of glories, not well mine you, but it's an additional recruit pool (albeit small).

- You use little iron. You make good partner with iron, gem, non-forest races.

- Creeping doom summon (whose sprite should be replaced by a trollface). Against AI you can abuse the **** out of their invulnerability. Certain match up is heavily skewed, such as vs baron.

- You start with 2 witches. (don't get them killed solo grabbing...)

Tips

- summons are your mainstay, they will take care of your garrison and provide all the meat you need. There shouldn't be any front rank meat shortage like a lot of other class. You should rarely if ever need to buy melee infantries.

- Your gold should be spent on 2 things besides leaders: Archers for main armies/garrison, or cavalry team (3-9 units) for sneak cleaning, nodes grabbing, skirmishing, troop transport and playing hide n' seek with AI.

- In particular, archers will add a lot of damage to your armies, as your summons tend to be melee heavy and of unexceptional damage. Battles can often take a long time attacking armored and/or fortified position.

- In general, I find it most efficient to have witches focus on expanding for 3 non-winter seasons straight, and stop in winter to do some major summoning. When mid-fall comes around start looking for good places for your witches to hole up for the winter and summon non-stop, as they will very likely summon some immobile units or slow units you'll leave to defend. Towns, cities, swamps, ancient forest, silver mine, gold stream...etc are all good place to hole up in winter for a season of summoning. Wish your opponents a Happy Halloween and a Happy new year while you're at it!

- When doing a round of winter summoning, try to work out casting schedule and mixture of L1 and L2 summon so that all your witches are summoning for the whole winter, and right when winter ends you've used up all your fungus. Of course, you can leave a witch or two out of the winter summon schedule to do other task and up the L2 summon mixture of the rest of your witches. Be as flexible as you want. For witches who are low on forces, don't feel that you must wait for winter, find a good spot and charge the army back up.

- The most efficent strategy for me is to have witches focus on expanding into defended nodes and engage in battles with AI with the goal of destroying their armies, while small cavalry team engage in sneak cleaning, forest tagging and raiding lightly defended nodes. Midgame with witch usually sees me with 4-5 witch armies spreading out in a front fighting the AI while half a dozen cavalry teams work on internal sneaks, border raids, and fungus node expansions. Also save up marsh wyrms and transfer them to your cavalry teams whenever possible (they have 4 moves).

- An alternative is to keep some or all witches back to summon non-stop and use your cavalry leaders to either transport them to frontlines or lead the army himself. Manflayer or event mages would be a perfect candidate for alternative leaders armies, as your cavalry leaders are front ranked... I personally hold only 1-2 witches back at most solely on the basis of laziness, I hate the logistic of doing otherwise what can I say? Though I tend to keep a backup leader with each witch army (manflayer or event mages), when attacking stacks that can threaten your back rank (artillery, assassins) I tend to hold the witch back unless her spells are required (*cough* pig curse abuse).

- Always leave 100+ gold in reserve, earmarked for witch recruit. You need as many as possible, each witch is a future army. Each witch can start off spending a couple seasons or so holed up in a nice node to summon up a backbone army, then roll out for the 3 season expansion / winter summoning pattern.

- Considering how important witches are for you, libraries have uses. Cities are as always good for anyone, anytime, anywhere, with a library on top.

- Manflayers can accompany witches as support caster and tactical leader (eg. splitting off for a quick tasks).

- L1 summon will be your mainstay for bulking up your ranks and adding chaff to spread the hits, whereas L2 summon can provide quality and punch (and a way to burn up fungus at the end of winter). Again, a single frontline of melee summons (even if a decent portion of it being L2) don't quite cut it on the damage front, throw in archers to up the army damage output. If a given melee stack gets too big, split it off to a manflayer or have cavalry team transfer it to a new witch, a dozen rank of meat won't do you much good when most of them will rot in the back.

- I would mostly ignore L3 summoning in general, other then for entertainment purposes (or if you plan to abuse save/load). While there's good stuff in it, it's diluted by quite a few duds, to the point where for the fungus you're paying it's not worth it.

Summons
I refer you to this useful witch summon mechanic thread: Witch summon mechanic
Here's some of my analysis seperated into categories of use.

L1 summons
Slow - Crocodiles and swamp things. Basically slow meat. They make good garrison complement with immobiles, providing non-poison damage. You can also gather them to use in a slow army or local reinforcement.

Immobiles - Fungus and molds. They have AoE poison, are tough and may come in huge numbers. Your premier defenders, useless vs poison immune units though. Against enemies susceptible to poison these things are insane.

Meat - Swamp monster, hydra hatchling, swamp ghost, bog beast. These are the main meat for your army.

Cavalry - Swamp wyrm. Your only 4 move summon. They complement your cavalry team very well and will save you a lot of gold in outfitting cav teams. Otherwise they can used normally in main armie.

chaff - Frogs and familiars. Use frogs like rabbits. Familiars are only good for diverting back rank attacks (assassination)

L2 summons
The thing - Doppler and doppler captain. Really nice units, good hits, regen, kills raises dopple spawn. Enough of these can raise you whole armies. I prefer the normal doppler variety in the front line over captains (mid rank).

Charm - Will'O the wisp. Basically a flying necrotod, with a better charm ranged attack that works more of the time. Nice, a couple of these help cut attrition by a lot.

Meat - Hydra, root monster, monster toad. Big meaty beast. Hydra in particular hits many times for low damage but with poison, and regenerates, really nice tank.

Slow - Big crocodiles, slime cube. Worst L2 summons, basically scaled up version of L1 slow units, same manner of usage.

Trollface - Creeping Doom. Can be extraordinarily powerful vs armies without magical damage. Against certain class such as baron this unit alone can win you the war. In single player, due to the flaws of AI you can really abuse creeping doom.

L3 summons
Ancient hydra - Tons of hits, armored, regenerates, Tons of attacks (9x) with poison. Premier L3 tank. A great L3 summon

Swamp god - Lots of hits, no armor, and something like 10x 1d10 attack. Nothing special, hits harder then anc hydra but lacking poison and worst in every other respect. Average L3 summon. It's be a good summon if it had regenerate (which I assumed at first)

Mother of monster (Echidna)- basically gives you 15-20 fungus worth of monster every turn, where's my instant gratification? Average L3 summon

Ancient presense - 2x solo target incorporate attack. Think of them as a weaker abomination. I'd say they are a slightly below average L3 summon.

Catoplebas - really nice up in front (useless like all melee otherwise...), but can be difficult to move to the front rank due to no army reordering... The death gaze hits enemy front rank for nice damage when you do manage to set it up. Nice L3 summon

Dracolion - Big, giant meat with a front rank breath attack if I remember correctly. Average summon

Wyrm - Big, giant meat. I don't remember what attack it uses, thus I conclude that it wasn't very memorable. Below average L3 summon

medusa - Petrify, fragile. With no armor and lowish hp they'll die pretty fast. Suffice to say for the fungus you paid this is a waste. Total PoS

Gorgon - immortal version of medusa (or is it the other way around?). Infinitely better due to immortality but still... but not a leader which killed a big chunk of her utility. Compared to phoenix, gorgon makes panda sad. Below average summon

Erinyes - Poop, absolute poop. You get an item on them but it's usually a pain flail (the first Erinyes might alway bring a flail). PoS summon

Edited by: finalgenesis

jsv
jsv
Apr 2 2012 Anchor

Most of L3 summons have fear, so having one of them in the front line never hurts. I tend to keep one L3 per army when I have resources to summon them.

Wyrm has a pretty decent acid attack (AoE 3 enemies, IIRC). Not the worst you can get from L3.

Apr 2 2012 Anchor

Great guide. Thanks very much.

The androphag archers are one of the best recruitable archers one-on-one, but they cost 60 gold for 4 compared to normal archers that many other factions get at 50 for 5. The poison's only useful against enemies that aren't immune, and that are tough enough that you're not killing them on the first turn. Definitely better than the druid's slingers, but there are many situations where you'd prefer 3 normal human archers over 2 androphags.

Apr 2 2012 Anchor

What are the percentages for using the different amounts of fungi? Also, I assume that has nothing to do with the amount or type of summons you get, rather just the chance to control them?

Apr 2 2012 Anchor

Right, fungus used only affects the chance of success.

In general I'd roughly guess the following rate of success (TOMA* warning):

L1 L2 L3
sparing use- 70% 50% 25%
Normal use- 99% 90% 50%
Generous use- 99% 99% 80%

* - Talking outta my *** (another way of saying rough guess.)

Apr 3 2012 Anchor

I think normal fungus use lesser summoning is a 100% success rate. Certainly, I've never seen it fail or heard of it failing for anyone. The same goes for the demonologist

Apr 3 2012 Anchor

That seems about right for sparing use. I don't really use the upper levels. Anyway, I tend to sparingly use fungi ( auto killed myself in the start not too few times :) so far ) and I've never failed to control frogs and the damn black cat familiar. Another thing I noticed is that multiple summons tend to fail on me quite often. Though I wouldn't rule out my good fortune for that.

Apr 3 2012 Anchor

I also noticed that summoned quality affects success =3 whenever I get a 7-9 fungus summon I always pray for a second or two while waiting for it

Apr 3 2012 Anchor

not necessarily about witches but summoning in general - does anyone know definitively whether the level of the summoner has an impact on either the chances for different types of summons or the chances for success?

Apr 3 2012 Anchor

Pretty sure level of summoner doesn't affect rate of success, though that's just based on unreliable play observation. I think the only case where summoner level affects anything at all regarding summon (besides unlocking higher tier summon) are warlocks, who get cost reduction of 20% at L3 upgrade.

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