MOM - How to tackle neutral slinger city?

[MattyBoy]

What do I do about this sticky situation?

I am on a nice quite-big island with my 3 strongest cities (high men, producing pikemen in main city) and I have 4 other cities elsewhere (high men, klackon, gnolls close to halberdiers).

Playing green, about to discover ice bolt and have 2 weak heroes, a few pikemen and four magic spirits.

Now here's my problem. I have a big neutral city of halflings with 6 slingers on my main island. I have left them alone for long enough that many of them are quite experienced. I did not want to let things get to this stage, but I never had enough firepower to deal with them earlier.

I have tried saving and sending in my best force, but I don't even manage to take out one of their units.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Yes, well-established halfling slingers can be a pain.

What spells have you got? Sorcery is good for this, with spells like Guardian Wind and (especially) Invisibility to stop your forces being shot to pieces immediately. Alternatively, Flame Strike is good. Invulnerability and Wraithform can be useful.

Without using your magic, I think you'll have to use attrition with several armies of missile troops (bowmen or magicians) in succession. You will lose, but if you concentrate your fire and take out at least one slinger unit per strike, and can send in a new wave before the halflings can replace their losses, you can wear them down. But the cost of building several armies of nine missile units each (and the food they'll need) will be crippling.

You might just have to wait until better units (e.g. heavily-armored heroes or powerful monsters) or protective spells are available to you. You'll have to fight off waves of halfling raiders, but at least you can do it from behind your city wall (which provides partial protection from missiles) rather than having to shoot them behind their city wall.

Also, because a city can only hold nine units at a time, they will be relatively vulnerable just after they've sent out a raiding force.

[Ecthy]

All claptrap

If you play High Men, you can build wizards or mages or whatever they're called again... not the priests, but the funny little guys available with wizards guild

they're immune to missile weapons and are pretty strong in firepower

with chaos magic you can use the flame strike for taking out such fortresses

otherwise, a strong hero or 2 can be useful, with that wind of protection thing cast on them

no need for a detailed strategy here

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
no need for a detailed strategy here

There's really no need to detailed strategy anywhere in MoM, just get some big ass unit, put some enchantments on it, and stomp around killing everything.

[Jack the Bodiless]

The detailed strategy is needed if you're faced with urgent problems when you don't yet have the big ass unit or the enchantments to put on it. Otherwise, yes, neutral cities are no problem.

...Yeah, I forgot about the missile immunity of magicians. But you need a well-developed city to make those, and it looks like MattyBoy isn't there yet.

[Rex Little]

MattyBoy's problem, as I understand his situation, is that he doesn't have Guardian Wind, or Flame Strike, or Invulnerability, or Wraithform. He's "playing green", which I assume means he has only Nature spells. I can't think of any Nature spell that will either protect a unit from missiles or take out a whole group of slingers at once. Web will delay one unit at a time, but that's not much help when the enemy starts with a bunch.

The best hope is probably to build the gnolls to produce wolf riders, and the klackons to make stag beetles. A stack of 9 wolf riders and/or beetles is fast and tough enough to reach the slingers while taking only a couple of losses, and will chew up the slingers pretty well once they get there. If you've got enough resources to put together two such stacks at once, the second one should be able to take the city after the first one weakens it.

[MattyBoy]

Very helpful replies, thankyou.

Two of my high men cities are becoming productive, so I will head for Wizards in one and perhaps Paladins in the other. Until then, I think I should be able to cope with 4 slingers at a time using some of Jack and Osweld's tactics.

Yes, Osweld, "playing green" meant playing Freya with all green books.

[Ecthy]

Paladins die to slingers!!

[MattyBoy]

Thanks, Ecthelion.
I have a lot to learn.
The slingers (& tauron) did enough damage to me that I ended up starting a new game.

Every game I'm getting better and better, though.

[Ecthy]

yup, you tend to learn quickly in that game