Freeze and Tremor?

Turn up your difficulty! They are amazing spells, but if the AI cannot reach your cities you are probably not facing enough of a challenge, rather than the spells being overpowered.

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1: Both spells have a 3 turn cooldown, so you cannot cast them every turn, unless you have multiple heroes who can cast those spells.

2: The AI should not stack armies. It's one of the stupid AI moves that hopefully gets fixed someday...

The AI sure can cast them every round. I got 12 in a row on the same stack. A bit much mayhaps, but it happened to me. Two problems here. The first is that it should not be possible by the rules of the game, second that there is no point in casting on a stack already frozen (bad AI).

I thought Tremor had a one turn cooldown? I don't have the game to hand to check, though. Freeze definitely has a three turn cooldown.

I have previously raised it that the AI can cast multiple times on your stack. Not had a response.

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Well, one out of two ain't bad! Obviously I was wrong about the Freeze cooldown though.

I'm not sure but I think that if you have multiple champions with Freeze then the each champion has their own cooldown timer. Maybe wishful thinking on my part, I didn't test this very thoroughly yet.

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Yeah, this is the only sensible use for a Familiar I've found. Familiars are far too fragile to risk in any combat with ranged troops, and in any case although they can cast all the spells your sovereign can, they don't get the tactical mana reductions (e.g. -25% from Path of the Mage) that your sovereign does, and they don't have the spell mastery or level your sovereign does. However, strategic spells don't get cost reductions and can't be resisted. So I summoned a Familiar, put it in my capital, and was then able to cast Freeze and Wither twice as often as before.

I used to disregard AI being able to cast tremor every single turn on my caravan and they brag about how they're awesome for doing it.... until I send an army and noticed that it's hit with tremor every turn so when I tried to do the same to AI's army. I wasn't allowed to do it. Immersion broke right there.

I got my army permatrapped via eternal tremoring of Earth from overly emotional Vergas telling me how much of a badass he is for breaking tons of rules like 1upt and permalocking my Sovereign army that Yolo'd into yithril territory for funneth. I was like whatever then put Vergas on ignore for like 20+ turns coz i was busy clearing out monsters until I saw a Storm Dragon come into the field of vision.

And then Storm Dragon began it's slow and ponderous advance of one tile a turn.

I start to sweat nervously.

And storm dragon kept on advancing and it's eye was upon my sovereign, not the city next to it.

And then 5 tiles away....

I crap my pants and spam my units into Yithril border.

Vergas wasn't deceived by my panic and spams tremor on Sovereign again.

Storm Dragon advances and licks its chops in anticipation. 4 tiles away now.

I have nothing left and so i tell every soldier i have to make every single rude gesture they can think of towards Vergas.

One of my Footmen succeeded in pissing off Vergas by saying something about his mother and drew the tremor spam onto it's unit which is faraway from where my Sovereign and it got hit with tremor repeatedly for next three turns.

Sovereign army breaks free of Tremor spam just when Storm Dragon was just right next to it, had the tremor spam lasted one turn longer, it would've been dragon food. Sovereign army flees into friendly border and safety.

Storm Dragon ragequited and returned to it's lair without killing any of Various yithril units running around it. This is even more proof of monsters preferring human's units over AI's units because they can hit human units while they can't hit AI's units due to simultaneous movement.

Great story Eric

Anyway, since nobody has said it so far, let me be the one to play Captain Obvious:

You can only cast Freeze and Tremor in friendly territory. That's the reason why...

- I would never consider these spells too powerful. They are only useful for defense.

- You should always try to avoid hanging out in enemy territory. Conquer cities and outposts the same turn you enter enemy territory.

Yeah, I try to have my main stack movement four or five. The AI rarely has zone of control big enough to stop me, except maybe if the terrain is bad. In the worst case where you can't take a city in one turn, there are usually still options:

1) spam small armies for the AI to waste its strategic spells on

2) Cast Call of the Titans next to the AI's city

3) Attack from another direction/ go for a different target.

but, because of these two spells, I never feel as if an AI invasion can ever pose a threat to my cities (even if I have to spend lots of mana). and if an AI invasion can't succeed, it removes part of the immersive drama of the game; not to mention the incredible waste of resources for the AI by building up large armies that will never reach their intended destination and have a chance to attack.

In my current campaign, several enemy AI armies have entered my borders, yet not a single one has had a chance to attack any of my cities. I'm a new player, so I don't know if this case is typical; but it seems unusual that I can prevent so many armies from even having a chance to even unsuccessfully attack a city.

Having said this, I must admit that I'm thoroughly enjoying this game. I've really liked many titles over the years, but I can't say that I remember enjoying any of them more than this -and I've only just begun. I saw a post on the Steam forums from someone who was complaining that they had just bought Brave New World, but because of FE:LH they hadn't had a chance to even try it once; even though they had been eagerly anticipating it's release. That's my situation exactly. I'm really looking forward to the future of FE:LH

For a competent player who understands how to use strategic spells, this is typical- but only up to the point where you increase the difficulty to "hard for you". At the point where the AI turns up with four Strong stacks and you can only cast one Freeze and one Tremor, then AI attacks become perfectly capable of doing some damage.

Of course plenty of people prefer to play the game where they feel they're in a fight but they're consistently winning, so if you don't want to increase the difficulty that high, then fine. But how effective strategic spells are (and how effective AI attacks are) is largely a function of the difficulty level you're playing at.